Assertions are certain predicates that a program expects to be true at that particular point in execution. In many languages, if the assertion fails—if the expected condition is false—the program considers itself broken, and exits. Crashes. Shuts down.

For a brief moment as I come back to consciousness, everything seems normal. I let myself believe that I've just been sleeping, trapped in a bizarre dream where the people in my life play extreme, unrealistic parts. Sven, a diabolical mastermind building androids and then imprisoning them under his office building? Davis, giving a pep talk to un-possess me from the demonic mind-control of a robot named Darwin? And me, a raging, uncontrollable psychopath with a vendetta against humans?

Me, someone who's not a human?

But as soon as I open my eyes, and I see the gridded metal rising above me, I sit up straight. Everything was real.

And the moment Sven walked through that door, I crashed like a malfunctioning machine, because that's exactly what I am.

Davis leans back against the bars across from me, almost as far away as he can get. He watches as I wake, the bridge of his nose split and a bruise forming along the angle of his jaw. The memory of my fist breaking his skin, of my shoe connecting with his face, slices me like a hot knife.

I adjust my weight slowly so that I don't startle him and ask, "Are you okay?"

"I don't know."

I crawl across the concrete, then hesitate. He doesn't look wary; in fact, he winces and then shifts closer. I shuffle to his side and tilt his head toward the light, examining the bruise.

"I'm sorry," I say. I know it's lame, and the irony—of being a computer and knowing I should be more than capable of something better—tastes bitter. Can computers even be sorry?

"It's fine," he says, ducking out of my grip.

I don't know whether he's accepting the sad apology, or talking about the injury, so I stand up and leave him be. I wrap my hands around the bars and peer as far as I can toward the front of the room; I can just barely make out Maven on the opposite side. I move to the other side, which is a shared wall of bars with the cell beside us. I can see down the line to bits and pieces of Darwin's still form.

He's somehow been broadcasting himself to me, and I don't know why. Considering the way I went after Davis, maybe it was for revenge. I had easy access to Sven; if he'd managed to take control of me while we were alone at home, there might not have been anything to stop me from killing him.

My eyes traverse the rows one by one, first our side and then the other, then back again for the next pair of prisoners. Finally, I come to the woman—the robot—occupying the one beside us. Her eyes are closed, but I can tell she has the face of Helen, who launched a thousand ships. Full, pink lips; high cheekbones and hollowed cheeks; the kind of elegant beauty reserved for princesses and pop stars.

I gravitate toward her, entranced. What's her story? Why was she created, why was she labeled a failure?

Suddenly her eyes snap open. As if that isn't enough to make my heart stop, she lunges at me through the bars. I leap back with a gasp, shaking.

"You," she hisses. "The replacement."

A line forms where my eyebrows draw together. I don't understand what she means.

"Sven was mine! I loved him!" she shrieks, shaking the metal between us, making the cage rattle.

Suddenly Davis is there beside me, pushing me farther back from the angry android. I obey, nauseated. The others are in various states of brokenness. One hasn't blinked since we walked into the room, and I fear he might actually be shut off, like Darwin.

"We're going to get you out of here," I say, even though half of me thinks she'll murder me as soon as the door is open. That, and we don't have an escape plan.

"I don't want to get out! I want Sven!" she screams. "You took Sven from me!"

"I didn't—"

Then it hits me. She doesn't know. She has no clue she's a computer. I skim the prisoners again. How many of them are unaware?

I glance at the the human cages and their occupants. How could anyone think this is normal? How could anyone want to see the man who put them all down here? How could anyone still love him after that?

Even as I ask myself the questions, my brain knows. There's something wrong with her programming. With all of theirs. I'm looking at the failed experiments that came before me. Sven's original attempts to make the perfect partner, all trapped down here forever because of some bug in their code.

What was the bug in mine?

"Ronnie, talk to me," Davis says, frowning. He grimaces as he moves back to the opposite end of the cell, but he doesn't limp. "How? What? Why? Please tell me I'm wrong and we're not in a room full of androids."

I look at the floor. Does he not know about me yet? He didn't figure it out when I got possessed by the supposedly depowered one with flickering eyes? And Maven's words. You're one of us. She, at least, knows.

Davis takes my silence as affirmation and falls back against the bars, his knees half-bending before he catches himself. "Did you know about this? Did you know you were...?"

Well, that answers that question. I shake my head, and then I remember his parting words at the keynote. Carlos is human.

"Did you?" I ask, afraid of the answer.

"Hell no," he says immediately. "How could I know? I mean, you're different, but you're so damn...human."

A hollow laugh escapes my throat, but it's forgotten as a new voice joins in.

"The Turing Test," Sven says, appearing from nowhere to loom over us both. I curse his height, because having to look up at him feels like giving him power.

I can feel Davis glaring daggers at Sven, but he simply smiles at me, spreading his hands wide just like he does in the dreams. "Congratulations," he says. "You passed."

A trembling flood of hatred has me flying toward him, pressing myself as hard against our cage as I can, reaching for him through the bars. I don't care about the damn Turing test. I don't care if I've managed to fool everyone around me into thinking I'm human. I don't care if he's proud of it. I care that everything I've known up until now has been a lie. My supposed childhood, my dissociative emotions, and most of all, him.

But he simply steps out of my reach. "Ronnie," he chides, his tone grating in its disappointment. It's like I'm simply a misbehaving child, rather than someone he promised to love until the end of his life. "I know you're not thinking clearly, but you don't need to start behaving like your neighbor."

He nods toward the woman beside us, still half-hanging into our cell, glaring at us.

"What did you do to her?" I growl.

"I did nothing except give her life," he answers, as if he sees nothing wrong with that. He backs away, strolling between the cells, and gestures to encompass all of us. "Everything you see here is all a pursuit to find the perfect combination of bionics and software. Each"—he points to Darwin, then Maven—"generation"—he indicates the short-haired woman next to Darwin and then the unmoving man beside Maven—"better"—the next two—"than the last."

He makes a sweeping motion, folding us all into his final group, and returns to us.

"Ronnie." He says my name like we're old friends meeting at a bar. "Let's just move past this, shall we? You can do that for me?"

I frown. "Why would I do that? How can I just forget this?"

"Fascinating," Sven murmurs, studying me.

I try my hardest not to shift or look away, and to ignore the fact that I'm trapped in a cage. We have to be strong. We have to defy him.

"You see, everyone else down there, they had flaws. Developmental flaws, logic flaws, flaws that made them volatile or unable to commit or immune to charms." He starts pointing at the other cells in turn again, beginning with Maven and skipping Darwin entirely. "Too detached. Too clingy. Too incapable of doing anything alone. Too logical. Too literal. Too metaphorical." He lands on the woman beside us and says, "Too jealous." The man across from her. "Too permissive."

He turns back to me. "But you were supposed to be the one. You were the first one capable of the most human process of all. Evolution. All you needed was a little education, a push in the right direction. Everyone else here was taken out of commission because they couldn't adapt, but you...." He looks like he wants to reach out and touch me, and I'm struck with Darwin's memory of him doing just that, electrocuting him and rendering him useless.

But he doesn't come any closer, only gives me that longing gaze. "You were almost perfect."

I press my face hard against the bars, straining for each inch closer to him so that he can feel my hatred as I look him in the eyes. "Almost doesn't count," I whisper.

That snaps him out of it. "Ah, yes," he says, back to business. "Darwin. I have to admit I didn't see that coming."

"Why is he shut down?" I ask. "What did you do to him?"

"Darwin was powered down years ago," Sven says with dispassion. "He became dangerously unstable. I don't know how he managed to broadcast to you. I assume it began once you were within range."

Once I started working here. It makes sense now. With me upstairs, Darwin could finally reach me from the basement.

"How did I even get this job?" I ask. "Was that all a sham? The interview, the welcome when I came on? You already knew who I was. I was built for you. None of this was organic."

"Of course it was. All of it was real. You showed an aptitude for coding, which made perfect sense given the circumstances. Your neural net is capable of rewriting itself, why shouldn't you make a living doing the same sort of thing? I organized the interview and let you loose. Everyone you met during the process was unaware. And you passed that interview with flying colors. It was a marvel of engineering. A piece of software that writes software."

"And that's when my life started?" I press. "Not in a suburban town in Ohio? I never got into college here and stayed for the work? I was created here. I've never really seen the world."

"You've seen enough to know that no one will accept you as you are better than I will."

"You cheated." I turn to Davis as he jumps into the conversation; his eyes are narrowed and his arms folded tightly over his chest. "You expect Ronnie to just forget that, too?"

Sven's eyes barely flick toward my cellmate. "You're not involved in this."

"You got me involved in this!" Davis shouts.

"Ronnie got you involved in this," Sven corrects.

I open my mouth to protest, but he's right. I brought Davis to the basement. My reckless curiosity might be the death of him, literally. A protective swell crashes over me, and I start to step between him and Sven, but he interrupts.

"Ronnie didn't kiss me!"

"What?" I swing around. "Who said I did that?"

Both of them ignore me. "Ronnie didn't get drunk at a company party and break down about a failed relationship. Ronnie didn't break out the hundred-year-old wine and get me comfortable while everyone else went home. Ronnie didn't wake up next to me in the morning. And Ronnie didn't keep coming back for more. You did!"

My mouth falls open as I realize how colossally I misunderstood Davis's original statement.

"You used me as a crutch so you could hobble along until the next big thing came along," he adds. "You didn't even think it would hurt to see you sitting right across from me flirting with the new hire!"

My eyes widen. My head starts to spin. Everything is jumbling together like the center of a black hole, and as the pieces draw closer some of them start to fit together. The new hire. Across from me. Flirting.

"What we had was temporary," Sven says.

Sven and Davis? Sven and Davis...and me. Sven did to Davis, with me, what he did to me with that woman in the kitchen.

"You never said that!" Davis yells, his voice bouncing off the walls. We've captivated the attention of every single functional android down here, and I wonder how no one has heard us from upstairs yet. Of course Sven's secret lair must be soundproof.

"It was implied." Sven regards Davis with a shocking lack of empathy. "What? Did you think it was forever? It's not like I gave you a ring."

An unbearable itch spreads from my third finger, enveloping my left hand. I look down, surprised to find my ring still there; it's alarming how quickly I've gotten used to its weight, how bare I remember feeling for those few short hours after I threw it away. But now, without thinking, I seize it and wrench it off, and fling it through the bars at Sven. It pings softly as it hits the floor and rolls to a stop at his feet, capturing the attention of everyone in the room.

"You're a monster," I tell him. I see the red creeping into the edges of my vision, feel the churn of trembling rage in my stomach.

"Ronnie," Sven sighs. "Think this through. You don't want to do this."

But I ignore him. "You wanted some...cleaning rag, that you could carry around in your shoulder and throw down every time you made a mess. And when you invited someone else over and they made a mess, I'd clean that up, too."

I raise my eyebrows, a desperate smile on my face as I hold back my tears.

"I'm done."

Why am I crying? He cheated on me. He used me. Logically, I should be running out the door and never looking back. But—I curl my fingers around the metal bars between us—he made that option inaccessible, too.

"Ronnie, stop. You know you'll never find anything like this again," Sven threatens.

"Well frankly, this was horrifying," I choke. The red is closing in now, but I don't care. I don't care if Darwin is possessing me again, because right now it seems like he was right all along.

"Who will put up with your complete lack of empathy?" Sven continues. It's like I haven't even spoken. "Do you have any idea how hard it is, day after day, to keep trying? To keep reaching out to you, keep doing the little things, and get nothing in return but a one-line text message or a 'thank you'? I've tried so hard, Ronnie, I really have, but it can be exhausting to love someone who's so emotionally...unavailable."

My throat hardens, pushing the tears out faster. I feel the red weaken, like an incoming wave intercepted by a receding one. Maybe he's right. Maybe I did this. If I had just been more attentive, more empathetic, more loving. Better.

"No," Davis says, surprising me. "It's always our fault. It's never yours. Look at this room full of people. It was all of our faults? Every last one of us? The only thing we have in common is you." He moves closer to me, hovering just behind me as I squeeze the bars until my knuckles are white. "I don't think that's a coincidence."

I lift my chin, trying to believe Davis, but it's not the way I'm wired. Sven looks from him to me and back again several times. Then he finally nods, his lips pressing together.

"I'll let you think about it for a while," he says, turning away. "Maybe you'll change your mind."

I listen to the click of his expensive leather shoes as he walks away, and then I come to my senses. Davis is human. Leaning as hard as I can against the bars, trying to keep Sven's back in the range of my right eye, I call after him.

"He needs food."

I see him falter, but only for a second. He keeps walking. A moment later, the swish of the elevator signals his departure. The lights shut off, leaving us in the silent red glow of the emergency exit signs.

{

Fun fact: Ronnie and I share a profession :)

However, I've never been imprisoned in the basement of my office building.

I might be a robot, though.

}