I'd read somewhere once that it took a few nights sleeping somewhere before you got any real comfortable rest out of it. Your body took time to adjust to the new surroundings and bed.

Maybe this wasn't a valid data point because the cot reminded me of sleeping in my hammock in The Bunker, and the piles of silent junk reminded me of the mountains of strange machines which filled AEGIS' apartment back in DC. But I had the best night's sleep ever there, so wrapped in my own bliss I didn't even bemoan the lack of a blanket.

Better than Tem, I suspected, who was sleeping on my bag in the shower. I'd argued that she should sleep with me, platonically, and she just began stammering out lines about flying too close to the sun and I had to relent before I gave the poor girl a stroke. She already seemed overjoyed at the prospect of cuddling my dirty clothes so...win for her, I guess?

Given my bouts with sleeplessness recently, I think for me it had to do more with what was going on in my head than anything. When Karu was being strange, when AEGIS was revealed to be...very different from AEGIS Prime, when the murders began, I slept like shit.

And now, for once, something good had happened to me, and that was enough to please my subconscious I supposed. I was just a simple little man, wasn't I?

I woke up slowly, my eyes wanting to stay closed, only opening in fractions as I looked around the room.

There was only one small window, high in the ceiling in the very back which didn't let in much sun. A little bit spilled through the door from the well-lit shop near me. There were lights all around the perimeter, I knew from seeing them on last night, but they were dark for now. It felt like I was in a place separate from the world, that I could stay here and sleep forever if I wanted, and nobody would ever see me or know, no time would pass until I went out there and faced it.

It was dim and tranquil and still in here. I liked it.

Until I heard singing.

"--through the BREAK-ING DAAAAAY, through the TEAR-ING RAAAAAAIN, through the BLIND-ING PAAAAAAIN, I will be THEEEERE for yooooou."

I laughed to myself and rubbed the rest of the sleep out of my eyes, checking good ol' Seraphim to see what time it was...and then starting and bolting out of bed.

Which...wasn't a good idea. There were still towering piles of shit everywhere, and any kind of rapid movement was liable to knock over the whole place like a house of cards made of dominos. I caught myself and headed for the door, before realizing the singing, if one could call it that, wasn't coming from the door.

I turned and saw, at the same stool, the same woman, hard at work over the same table of junk. Bulky headphones over her ears this time, the headband pressing down the skyward-tipped point of her red hair bandana. As a consequence of these headphones, I could not hear her music. This definitely did not improve the sound of her performance.

I advanced on her until I tapped her on the shoulder, making her jump again, but not enough to fall out of the stool.

She pulled the headphones off with a bit of fluster. "Holy heck, New Guy. You need to stop sneaking up on me."

"Sorry. You just wouldn't hear me."

"Oh, yeah. My bad. Well, my motto is, there's always a smarter solution, so here--"

She touched her bracelet and it projected a holo onto the inside of her wrist, which was something very cool I'd never seen before. I moved a little bit to get a better view.

"Like my wrist holo?" she asked. "Had to get really creative with the lens lattice to have it situated off to the side instead of in the middle like every other holo you see. It's got some distortion artifacts at the far edge but you can't see 'em unless you're looking...there, see?"

Sure enough, the edge of the holo furthest from her wrist was a little more translucent and blurry than the closer edge, but for how cool it was with a holo floating off its projector like that, it was fully awesome.

"That's the whole device?" I asked.

She undid the device with a twisting motion and handed it to me. For all appearances just a thick plastic bracelet, half an inch wide, a little black spot where the holo emitted, the only hint that the device was anything special.

"The whole thing is touch sensitive, and it can track your fingers in space around it, like any other holo device, but all crammed into that tiny thing." She twisted it back on, gave it a tap which lit up small colored lights around it, and then tapped in a sequence on the colors. With one tap, she unbound the headphones, and the music began playing off her wrist, and then with another, the music stopped.

Super neat.

"Did you make that?" I asked.

"I put it together."

"From like, a kit?"

"From like, parts of other mobiles. Had the casing assimilated for me on a mass-fab. You ever play with one of those?"

I laughed. "Only all the time."

"Right on, New Guy. I think we're gonna get along fine. What model did you have?"

"Uhh…" I scratched my head. "Something like a hundred years old."

"No way," she said, grinning earnestly at me. "Do you still have it?"

"No, I left it in Canada somewhere."

"Dang. Well, I'd love to see it. Mass-fabs from back then were really gung-ho about dissimilating things into the smallest frags they could, you wound up with this insane system of thousands of molecular groups banked, back before some new way was found of doing it maybe thirty years ago. The guts of the old ones are so crazy. My dad had one growing up like that, but I've never seen one since."

"Your dad do mobile repair too?"

She smirked at me. "Dad's dead."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

She shrugged. "Nobody does mobile repair. People just buy new ones or take them in for warranty."

It was true. I'd certainly never heard of anyone going to a random repair shop. Always just 'mobile's busted, time to upgrade.' "Then what's all this?" I asked.

"An excuse to dick around all day mostly," she said, gesturing with her head towards the bench where she'd been working. "I get some mod requests in, mostly off the 'net where I've got a pretty good rep, but that's about it. Pays the bills."

"And you're hiring?"

"Yeah well, it's a mess. Speaking of which, do you always clock in at noon?"

"No, sorry...it won't happen again, I'm sorry."

"It's cool. I figured, you were out on the street for a while, let you sleep when you get the chance. You hungry?"

"You don't have to feed me, really--"

"Got a pocket full of dog food?" I didn't have a response. She threw a baggie at me with a sandwich in it. I sidestepped and let it fall on the ground and then picked it up. "The heck was that?" she asked.

"Sorry...got like a...phobia...of things flying at me." Definitely wasn't a lie, that one.

"Ah. Sorry then. Eat up, New Guy."

"My name's Athan."

"Whitney. I'm real crap with names though, so you're gonna be New Guy for a while."

"I'm the...only guy. I'm the only anyone back here but you."

"You saying I should just call you 'hey'?"

"Uh, no."

She gave a small snort and pulled out a matching baggie with some crackers in it and began to eat. I liberated a nearby stool from a tower of some kind of I/O boards and joined her.

"There's lots back here," she said after a minute, her mouth full.

"Lots of what?"

"You said we were the only ones here. I'm telling you you're wrong." She swallowed and pointed at a bunch of wires hanging up connecting a metal casing to several others, all strung along the ceiling seemingly at random. "There's my main server, she's a real workhorse, but keeps things straight for me, I'd lose my own head without her sometimes."

She pointed to the far wall at a more-rectangular heap of junk than the surrounding. "Over there's my artist. She's crazy, just churns out random stuff all day on a learning algorithm on 'net popularity. She went viral once, but hasn't been able to recapture the magic. I think most of her stuff is pretty derivative of her success and lost a lot of the creative soul, but sometimes we all get stuck in the past."

Above the entrance is where she had me look next. "There's a big metal arm. It's not really useful, but I had this crazy idea for a smart exosuit. I've got these skinny little pasty things," she said, flexing her long, relatively normal-looking arms. "So I thought, for moving parts around, why not build a suit? Answer, cuz' it's hard and expensive, and hiring a kid to move it for me is cheap and easy. So that's you."

"And this one," she said, reaching down and affectionately brushing her fingertips on a black aluminum case, "this one's for VR, if I ever get lonely. Which I don't really, since, as I just said, got a whole family down here."

"Your family is all computers?"

"My original family's all dead."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"You should stop apologizing so much. We're exchanging data here, and you're just gumming it up with your formalities. It was years and years ago, you didn't know my family, and you sure weren't the fucking Exhuman who killed them, so let it go. So yeah, my family is all machines. Is there something wrong with that?"

The sandwich had become very solid and cold in my mouth, and I had to work hard to swallow it. I'd also read somewhere that in an average American's lifetime, out of the roughly six-hundred or so people we'd meet and befriend through it, about seventeen would either die, or be directly impacted by an Exhuman event.

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At the time, I hadn't been too impressed with that statistic. I'd run the numbers and found that was like, three percent of the people you'd know. Three percent of all deaths in America, right? Three was tiny.

And then I did a quick search and realized, three percent is kind of huge. Almost seventy-thousand deaths a year to Exhumans. Medical science could keep improving and improving, but that wouldn't save those people getting murdered by Exhumans. People like Whitney's family.

I bet my statistics were way higher. I bet ninety percent of people I ever met would die in an Exhuman-related incident.

"Well, if you've got a problem with it, the door's right there. You've had your shower and sleep. Get out," Whitney said, turning back to her work.

"No, sorry...I was just...thinking of what you said. I don't have a problem with any kind of family you have. My family's all messed up too."

She gave me a cold sideways glance. "My family is not messed up," she said, with a lot more emotion than anything else I'd heard out of her.

"Right. I'm sorry."

"Stop apologizing all the time."

"Right."

She shook her head and went back to work. "Get a box and put all the delith cells in it and put it in the corner. Should be easy because they glow."

"Right," I said, putting down my meal and standing up.

"After you finish eating."

I spent the next couple of hours hunting down delith cells throughout the entire pair of rooms, and boy, were they everywhere. I also spent the next couple of hours reliving my conversation with her and being mad at myself for offending her.

I really hadn't meant to, it just kind of slipped out, and I never even considered that someone who considered machines their family wouldn't realize how messed up that was. Err...wouldn't...consider that messed up. I really wanted to know what happened to her, but didn't know how to ask. Or if I should. This seemed way too personal for second-day boss-employee chit-chat.

I finished the second box of delith cells, which was a really good starting point because it got me roughly familiar with all the rest of the crap in here. I might not exactly know what most of it was, but I could tell that these things were the same as these other things, and they should probably all go in the same box. It wasn't as daunting as it first appeared, because she did have the majority of things loosely organized into stacks.

But after putting the box down, I saw her watching and headed over to see what was next or if I should just keep going.

"Spent my whole life, people telling me I'm crazy, you know. You just get tired of it," she said.

"I don't think you're crazy."

"Well that's good because I'm not. Different isn't bad. Everybody's different. I just care a little less about hiding it. Like I said earlier, if you have a problem, get out of my life, I've spent too much of it worrying about people's opinions."

"I don't have a problem with your life."

"I know. Sorry, this is an apology. I don't mean you. I've just kind of got my life figured out here, and no patience for anyone who'd question it. Again, too many people, too often."

"Can I ask how old you are?"

"Twenty nine."

"And...how long have you been doing this?"

"Well, I opened the business eight years ago? But I've been doing this forever."

"So at twenty one. Jesus," I sighed. "I'm nineteen, and I have no idea what I want to do with the rest of my life. I can't imagine just settling down in a couple years and just doing that forever."

"It's not bad when you find something you really love. I've always had a thing for computers and machines. Just took too long to learn to stop listening to people and dedicate my life to it."

"Sounds great, but I don't think it'd work for me."

"Why not? What are you into?"

"Football, used to be."

"Huh. Yeah you dodged that sandwich like I was throwing it in slow motion. So why can't you do that? Wait..." She raised an eyebrow at me. "How'd you get into football with a phobia of things thrown at you?"

"Uh, that's kind of the reason it won't work. I had an...accident, I guess. And now I'm kinda...scarred for life."

She gave me a sympathetic smile and rolled up her tank, showing off her side and pale belly. And a fairly wicked-looking scar, from her armpit to the bottom of her ribcage. "That exosuit arm I showed you. Just testing it out and didn't have the range of motion fully calibrated. I moved my arm, it moved and just about ripped my arm off of me, tore the skin and half the muscles on my side right open." She lowered her shirt. "And then I finished the damn thing anyway. If you love something, you don't let fear stop you from doing it."

"Jesus Christ."

"It's not that bad. Some medical gel, a few stitches, a stay at the hospital. Turns out your side isn't such a bad place to lose mobility. I'm never going to be doing yoga, but it doesn't get in the way much. But this was just illustrating a point, and the point remains...what is it that you'd do willingly, no matter how much it beat you up, you'd still turn around and go back in there? What's that thing you absolutely would never let go of, ever?"

"My friends," I said, without hesitating.

"Do they beat you up often?" she smirked.

"Uh. Sometimes," I said, rubbing my wrist which Karu'd snapped by stomping on it last time we fought.

She looked at me with the same non-judgemental curiosity I'd seen on her the very first time our eyes met. "I was kidding. But...do they?"

"Yeah, sometimes."

"Are...you sure they're your friends? I have no agenda here, but that doesn't sound healthy."

"No offense, but does living in a back room and building your own family out of computer parts sound healthy to you?"

"Not really," she said with a smirk. "But there's a big difference between blindly choosing something just because it's there, and realizing all of the faults with something and picking it anyway. One's just infatuation, the other is love. No problem with an unhealthy life it's the one you chose...but all the problems in the world with just falling into one."

"You...love machines?" I asked.

She snorted. "Physically?"

I blinked at her. "Not what I meant. But uh. Is this the kind of thing I should be asking? This is super invasive, I don't even know how this conversation got here."

"It got here because I don't mince words and you don't think before opening your mouth."

I waited for her to say more. After a moment she smirked knowingly at me and rolled her eyes. "I do love machines, and I have made and used them. But it's not like the thought of an EM drive gets me horny. It's more like research."

"For...for what?"

"Mobile mods, mostly. Some people really do want to turn it into an all-in-one."

"Wow. That is way too much information. I was right after all."

"You asked," she said with her smirk. "I'm gonna step out and get some coffee. Can you man the register?"

"What do I do?"

"Mostly, stay back here and ignore anyone who comes in. If they sneak in and you like them, you can offer them a shower and a bed. That's what I do."

"I meant seriously."

"Stand there, and if someone wants something, tell them I'll be ten minutes."

"Don't they have signs that say that? Couldn't you make a holo that says that in like, five minutes?"

"Do you want me to pay the sign and give the sign your bed?"

"Yeah I'll stop talking and stand behind the register now."

I did my best to stand there vigilantly, but I already kind of knew just by the state of this place that nobody would come. There wasn't much to do but think and watch Tem delicately poking around, trying to find a place to sit and hide where she wouldn't cause me trouble.

She'd been impossible these last few days, refusing to eat if she thought I was hungry at all, telling me she didn't deserve food and it was wasted on her, and several times I just had to sit her down and order her in no uncertain terms that she would eat. And thinking about that, and the words that Whitney had left me with, I began to reflect a little.

Love is when you see the flaws in something and choose it anyway, she'd said. Infatuation was just blindly choosing something because it was there.

Tem was easily the most flawed thing I'd ever met, and yet I refused to let her come to harm, or abandon her, or even properly let myself hate her for what she chose to do and to be. Certainly part of it was a sense of obligation, but there was more to it than that. I honestly didn't want bad things happening to her, and would protect her as I could. I saw her faults, but chose her anyway. Was that love?

If so, it wasn't reciprocal. I don't think Tem knew I could have faults.

Somewhat amused, by idle standards, I continued to apply this rule to my other relationships to see how they fared.

I'd seen Lia growing up every day from her childhood fear of chocolate ice cream to overtraining ruining her chances at regionals in volleyball last year. I might give her faults a pass, but I sure as shit knew them all. Couldn't be anything but love.

Karu had...until very recently, apparently been suffering a lot behind the confident glow of her visor, to the point of self-harm, and I never knew a thing about it. Considering her other failings--her bigotry, violent temperament, selfishness, her inability to ask for help--they all seemed so small compared to the newest revelations. I had to conclude I didn't know Karu very well at all, despite everything between us. Yet she seemed to know me better than I knew myself at times. Hers was love and mine was infatuation?

Saga was easy. We literally could not keep a secret from the other unless that person was letting us. Every one of our flaws was plain and bare.

AEGIS was also easy. I'd been with her through thick and thin, and she'd done the same for me. Even when she'd disagreed with me, she'd helped me anyway. I remembered her tournaqueting my leg so I could march against the XPCA to my death, with her at my side. I remembered us arguing semantics about what did or did not constitute a date, and while we were there, my selfishly ruining her date plans by forcing us to talk about copies and the nature of machine consciousness.

How many times we'd been there for each other. How many times we'd disagreed or even fought, but still came through.

Until...until recently. When she'd died. This had all stopped then, I realized. Ever since, she'd...just been imitating what she'd seen me and AEGIS Prime do. The cooking, the sexcapades, the persistent video-game references. They were all calculated to hit me in the feels...not because she knew me, but because that's what someone else had done. That's what she'd done before, and it had worked.

It was fake, and I knew that, but I'd never stopped to think about what that meant, about what that drove AEGIS and myself towards. I'd always had this idea that she'd get ahold of herself and go back to being who I knew.

But it wasn't working, and it wasn't going to, was it? Because I didn't know who she was, and she had no idea who I'd become.

My thoughts suddenly seemed a lot more agonizing. I loved AEGIS, and I knew that, and I told her that. And the guilty part of me that said I knew all along that this wasn't AEGIS Prime. She wasn't the same girl I loved, and I'd always known that. I was stupid to think otherwise.

Guilt and stubbornness warred inside me. AEGIS was fine, I insisted to myself. She would recover, she'd become exactly as she was before. And yet, I didn't see any way she could.

What was I doing? Why was I doing this to myself? I had Defiant to chase, I reminded myself. I was a freaking fugitive. I ate dog food for dinner. Was this really the time to debate love?

The answer, screamed my brain, was yes.

Whitney came back and commended my service, telling me to keep up the good work as she went through to the back, and I remained there, a statue leaning on the counter, my head spinning in my hands.

For hours. Who knew simple words could do that?

It wasn't the words, I knew that. It was the cracks I was avoiding looking at this whole time. But fuck. I needed anything to blame. I needed...justification. Realization. I needed someone to talk to.

"Tem," I whispered to her, and she sat up, unnoticeable to all but me. "Tem, I have a really important question."

"I...I don't know, but...but ask anything you like."

"Tem...do I...do I really love AEGIS?"

She materialized and stared at me so intently it was like seeing a whole different girl. Rarely had she ever looked me in the eyes, and never with such intensity. It actually startled me, which had never happened since I realized I could track her.

"I don't know," she said sternly. Angry, even. "But if you have to ask, isn't that an answer?"

"T-thanks," I said apologetically. She gave me a terse nod and then disappeared again.

Even if she said she wasn't sure, her answer was pretty clear. But what crystallized my thoughts more than anything was my little stutter of surprise.

I hated Tem. I knew that. I never wanted to be her, no matter what. She represented all the things I hated in me. Things I refused to give in to. Things my stubbornness and my guilt could agree to loathe.

And yet, here, now, torturing myself over AEGIS and nebulous definitions of love, I was the one stuttering and looking for her approval, wanting her guidance.

I hated myself for being it. And I hated AEGIS for making me be it.

I saw the anger in Tem's eyes when she'd answered. She knew. She hated herself too, and if I ever became like her, she'd never forgive me.

Asking her had been a mistake. I couldn't make Tem worry like that about my problems, or drag her into my relationships. It was a stupid, selfish move, and I regretted it instantly.

But even so, somehow, she'd given me some painful, incredible advice.

Did I love AEGIS? Or did I love the idea of what AEGIS might be? Just the fact I had to ask was an answer.