Davis's hand lands on my shoulder, squeezing gently. I look up to find him crouching beside me, his eyebrows peaked into unwanted pity. "It's going to be okay," he says, so earnestly that I almost believe that he believes it.

I just stare at him. Why is he comforting me? It means nothing. I'm not sad, I'm not scared. I only act that way for his benefit, because someone wrote it into me. I feel warm tears coating my face, physical manifestations of emotions without any just cause. There is no soul suffering under my inorganic skin. So why does he even care?

I guess that's what passing the Turing test means: To him, I'm human. Human enough, anyway, to trick him into showing empathy. But he knows now. Why does he still care? Maybe he just needs a reminder.

"You know when you go to the movies, and one of the main characters says their entire life is a lie?" I ask rhetorically, then plow right on. "My entire life is actually a lie. My memories are lies. I was never a kid. I was turned on like this, I've always been...this. But I remember something else."

I hate the fact that I can't steady my voice. There's no reason to be anything but monotone. I'm a machine. Every involuntary movement of my body is a lie, a betrayal.

I take a deep, unnecessary breath. "My mother used to make these cinnamon rolls on Sunday mornings. They were...so good. But she died before she could teach me the recipe, and I have wanted one ever since. And now I'm sitting here, and I know that I've never eaten one of those cinnamon rolls. I've never met the woman in that memory. I don't have a mother." I look at him, eyebrows raised in desperation. "Do you have any idea what that's like?"

His features sink, the shadowy ambiance making the landscape of his face look even older. He opens his mouth, and I swiftly cut him off before he can waste his energy trying to make me feel better.

"This explains everything. Why I was so stupid. Why I didn't even know what love was. I'm a—a machine! My brain is software. Just some piece of crap made up by some programmer somewhere with a naive worldview. And I'll never know what love really is."

"Ronnie," Davis ventures, his voice hesitant. He seems to be treading on eggshells, searching for the right words. "You just described the most human experience of all."

"What?" I laugh bitterly. "Thinking love could be determined by an algorithm?"

"Well, yeah. In a way." He adjusts his position so that he's sitting next to me, rather than straining his legs crouching. "I don't think there's one of us who didn't start out with some picture of what it will look like when we finally find the one. How perfect they'll be. This and that, and not this and not that. And along the way we find people who fulfill those criteria, but for whatever reason it doesn't work out."

I peer over at him from the corners of my eyes. I've never imagined Davis thinking any of those things. It's just not how he works.

Then again, there's a lot I don't know about him. Whatever happened between him and Sven, it seemed like he thought it was serious.

He sighs. "We get jaded. The original picture gets blurred. We learn. We learn to know better. But eventually something comes along, and it's just so unexpected that it blindsides you. You've no idea it's love while it's growing, and then one day you look up at the person beside you and these three words pop onto the tip of your tongue. Out of nowhere. And you get butterflies, because you really don't want to mess this one up."

I try to imagine the feeling, tiny wings fluttering against the inside of a stomach I don't even have. I can't.

"Have you ever felt that?" I ask.

He hesitates, then gives his head a tiny shake.

"Then why do you believe it?"

He grins, the same grin as always—with one side of his mouth tilting up more than the other—and I wonder how that part of him hasn't changed despite our grave situation.

"You know how you can't believe everything you see?" he asks.

Yes, that's become painfully obvious in the last hour.

"You don't have to see everything you believe, either."

"Then how do you believe?" I exclaim, then fall silent, staring at my lap. I shrug, sighing. "It must be a human thing."

"That doesn't make it impossible," Davis says.

I can't even muster up the will for a dirty look. Trying is pointless, because he's wrong. It is impossible.

"What if Sven is wrong about the Turing test?" he asks anyway. "There's a fine line between deception and the real thing. Who's to say, if you can fool me into thinking you're sentient, that you're not? I mean, look"—he grabs my hand—"your hands are shaking, you're crying...." He touches the tear tracks where they begin at the corner of my eye, temporarily wiping them away.

"Yeah, but I don't know why," I remind him. The exasperation in my voice almost sounds real, and I choke on the bitter irony.

"And you think I do?" I can see him biting his own lips on frustration, trying to make me see, but I can't. I won't. "Did you know that when I'm really happy I start trembling? Like I'm anxious, but I'm not. I'm just so damn full of joy. I don't know why. It just happens."

I stare straight ahead, at the mask of Ruby's face in the cell beside us. How has no one ever told Davis yet that he's terrible at debating?

"It's not like I decide to cry when I'm sad. It just happens. Why?" He looks away and sighs. "We don't know either."

"I'm not like you, Davis."

"And I'm not like Sven," he says stoutly. "And Sven isn't like Catherine in accounting. And she's not like my next door neighbor. Or maybe she is, because she strikes me as a cat lady...." He shakes his head.

"I'm literally just some hunk of biotech and circuits created by a team of bozos who thought it was a fine idea to use androids as mail-order spouses," I spit bitterly.

"And if God is real? Then humans are just blobs of carbon and electrical impulses created by some dude who thought it would be a good idea to give us two legs instead of four and make it really easy to trip over our own feet."

I finally manage to roll my eyes at him. "You're an idiot."

He grins. "Maybe." Then he points at me. "See, there's the Ronnie I know. You're still in there."

I stand up, my legs itching with an overwhelming urge to just move. It doesn't matter that there's nowhere to go. I pace to the back of the cell, then beat the same path to the front again, staying out of reach of Ruby.

"Ronnie...." Davis's hand closes around my wrist, spinning me around as I pass him. "You didn't ask for any of this."

"That doesn't mean it's not my fault," I murmur, shivering in the cool, damp air. Things like that don't matter to me, aside from comfort, but what about Davis? What if he gets hypothermia before he starves to death? I'm the one who pressed the button, deliberately, while he was in the elevator. For what? Nothing more than a selfish need to not be alone.

I was too scared to brave the unknown. I always have been. Maybe it's part of the reason I forgave Sven. Because I don't know what I am if I'm not with him.

And, in a twist of irony worthy only of me, I'm not even who or what I've always thought I was. The few things that shaped me—losing my mother, finding a love of computers in school—aren't even real.

I look down. Davis is still holding onto me. He is real. Organic. I wrap my hand around his wrist, too, and we stand like that for a moment, linked, as if the contact really can bridge the growing gap between our species.

"You really don't see it," he sighs.

"See what?" All I see is my own naïveté, rising up behind him like a monster made of smoke. I want to tell him to turn around, to notice it and run.

But he tightens his grip, his fingers digging into my skin. He takes a step closer, and I wither under the intensity of his gaze. I feel like he's trying to tell me something with the silence, with his posture as he shifts. Maybe there's some secret to human body language that I'll never understand.

He leans closer. My first instinct is to back away, but everything I owe him keeps me anchored where I am. It's going to be okay. I want to believe him as the distance disappears. I can feel his breath on my face, fanning a tiny flame as it rises from the ashes inside me. Is that hope? Is it belief?

His lips graze mine, hesitantly at first, then bolder. I can't help the tiny inhale that sneaks past the seal as I try to process everything. Hell, I am a processor, I'm built for that.

Why is this happening? How? Why am I kissing back?

Because I am. My lips move just as hungrily as his, parting as I feel his tongue flick against them. I breathe out as he breathes in, an insufficient supply of oxygen for the heaviness of our gasps. And none of it makes sense—I don't even need oxygen—but all I know is that I want more.

It's not at all like kissing Sven. He was demanding, domineering, authoritative, and needy. Eager to finish what he started. To get what he needed. Davis is urgent in a different way. Maybe it's just a product of our situation—now or never, with what time we have left—or maybe it's something else entirely.

His hands tighten around my hips, pulling my body closer. The heat in the space between us pools up at the bottom of my stomach, and then the strangest thing happens.

It tickles. From the inside. My ears pound, once, before I become briefly lightheaded.

I pull away immediately, focusing my eyes with difficulty. Davis holds onto me firmly as I wrap my arm around my stomach.

"Something's wrong," I whisper in answer to his worried gaze.

"What is it?" he asks, kneeling in front of me as I sink to the ground, curling my knees to my chest.

The stuttering heart, the uncontrollable shake of my hands, the closing of my throat that makes swallowing difficult and breathing impossible.

"Panic," I choke, but there's something else. Something more.

Something that flares even stronger as his hand tightens around my wrist.

I shake my head, unable to articulate it. "It's like...feathers...inside...and my head, I—I can't think straight." My voice is faint, even though I try to make it strong. What is wrong with me?

"Ronnie." Davis cups my neck in one of those large, spindly hands. He lets out a tiny breath of a laugh, his mouth curving more on one side than the other. "I feel that, too."

I'm shaking for a completely different reason now. My erratic simulation of a heartbeat races for something new. It's not fear, it's not guilt or sadness or anxiety. It's him, it's an overwhelming desire to convey to him what I feel, and it's a simultaneous inability to put it into words.

I've never been tongue-tied, but English fails me as he waits. All those dumb jokes, they were always just that. Jokes.

"I thought it didn't mean anything," I finally mumble, searching his eyes in the darkness.

I see the outline of his shrug. "Things change."

I'm silent. Yes, they do. Massively. Like the sky before a freak tornado—one moment, clear and beautiful; the next, deadly. But one thing is still the same.

Davis can't stay down here.

"Maven," I call, standing up. "Is Darwin still alive?"

She hesitates before she answers, "Yes."

I swallow, my throat spasming around the staccato beat of my heart. "Can he...you know...do that again? Take over? I need to talk to him."