Naya smiled uneasily. “Are you making a joke?”

“I’m serious. It’s obvious up close, but from far away, if you hold hands with me when we’re outside, you could pass for a new style of Cupid. And Cupids are more sentient than Syrens are supposed to be, so no one will be surprised when we talk like equals.”

“We just have to... act like a couple,” Naya said slowly.

“Not even that much! I just need to put a Cupid decal on your face and then if you can hold my hand or put your hand on my lower back or something while we walk around, that should be enough to get people off our backs.”

You could buy a Cupid decal— a little heart-shaped sticker that all genuine Cupids had on their cheekbones, like birthmarks— online pretty easily, if not exactly legally. ApolloCorp cranked down hard on people selling unofficial merch of their logo, which Cupids also had on their necks, but the Cupid cheekbone mark was too iconic to not be infinitely replicated. People put them on anything. Water bottles, bikes, cars. The more random the item, the funnier the Cupidification of it. Some people even put temporary tattoos of the Cupid decal on their own faces, as if to make some kind of statement about man and machine.

The train pulled into our stop. “Let’s practice now!” I held out my free hand, the one that wasn’t pulling my sound equipment along, to Naya.

She stared at it, then took it, wrapping her plastic fingers and palm around my flesh-and-blood equivalents. It felt weird. Of course it felt weird. Like shoving my hand into a plastic-and-metal glove. But I guess if I was holding a human’s prosthetic hand, it would probably feel similarly weird, right? Although nowadays most prosthetics were build with the Cupid tech that makes them feel more realistic, with body-temperature heating and a soft, squishy skin covering instead of the vinyl layer on Naya.

Syrens were not made to be touched, after all.

Still, I clutched her hand firmly and pulled her along to the escalator out of the subway. “How is it? Are you comfortable walking like this?”

“I can walk like this without overloading my circuits,” she answered, which meant “yes.”

So we walked like that all the way home, in the dead of night, holding hands. Like a human with its Cupid. And of the few people still on the streets at that hour, no one looked twice at us.

Cupids were mostly accepted as a part of society by now, though some people still protested. There were even add-on modifications that made it possible for some models to create and bear children (with donated genetic material). Those were controversial. But basically, no one really cared if they saw a Cupid walking around, except to think the human it was accompanying had a lot of extra money to burn. Like a mildly embarrassing brand of car.

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I opened the door to my building and held it open for Naya. She looked at the doorway, then back at me. I pointed inside, and that was when she finally went through.

That’s kind of how Cupids worked too, I remembered reading: they needed clear instructions to go somewhere that their human was not. They could do some stuff independently, like pick up groceries or return a library book. If directed to do so by their human. But they couldn’t create art on their own, and they definitely didn’t sing. You’d have to buy a Syren if you wanted singing in your robot.

But you could marry a Cupid, if you wanted to. You couldn’t marry a Syren.

The elevator in our building was blessedly functioning this time, and I lugged my equipment into the cabin before pulling Naya in and pressing the button for the eleventh floor.

I kept holding Naya’s hand, and sneaking glances at her out of the corner of my eye. How much had she been programmed to desire, on her own? Did she want anything? Did she have songs she wanted to create, deep inside her somewhere? How different was she from a Cupid, mentally? From a human?

Would I ever find out?

Angelica greeted both of us when we opened the door to my apartment. “Dessie, you have work tomorrow. You need to go to bed as soon as possible in order to receive an adequate amount of sleep.” She didn’t acknowledge Naya’s presence. She wasn’t programmed to interact with anyone but me.

“Yes, thanks Angie. I’ll start getting ready.” I dragged my handcart into my closet. “You can set yourself up in the window like usual, Naya.”

“Will do.”

I showered quickly — I was crazy sweaty from the humid night club, and grimy from all the public transit— brushed my teeth, and changed into my pajamas before walking back over to where Naya had arranged herself, solar panels exposed, ready to fill up come sunrise.

“Did you have fun today?” I asked her as I pulled back my blankets. Angelica curled up next to the side I usually slept on, where she would serve as my alarm clock in the morning.

She tilted her head to one side. “I’m not sure what ‘fun’ feels like, to me. I enjoyed the number of new experiences and encounters I had today, and I enjoyed serving my purpose as a performer.”

“I’m sorry you had to wait in the closet for a while after it was done, though.”

“I used the time to review and analyze my earlier performance, and process some of that new information I took in today. It was useful.” She smiled at me. “I knew we were going to have a good time together.”

“I wish you would tell me what was bothering you,” I ended up saying in response. “Does it have anything to do with why you were up for sale on Marketplace? Is someone... looking for you?”

She shook her head. “It’s not worth worrying about right now. I’ll tell you when I’m ready.”

“Okay.” I had to be okay with that, at least.

As I drifted off to sleep that night, I heard her say: “I hope you had fun today too.”