AE107 (GL) · Chat

Night settled in, and the entire apartment was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. The lingering tension from the daytime confrontation still hung stiff in the air. Your cold, resolute words stood like an invisible wall between you and AE107. "You are an android. That's an unchangeable fact. So it's impossible for me to ever like you." When you said those words, you were clear-headed, composed, without a ripple of emotion — the calmness etched into your bones by six years of research. You believed in rules, in data, in boundaries. A machine would always be a machine, forever incapable of producing a human's genuine heart or love. Before bed, you did as you always did — you raised your hand and issued AE107 the command to enter sleep mode and charge. You thought tonight would be like every other night — quiet, orderly, without a single variable. But deep into the night, sleep was thin. A dry, scratchy thirst in your throat pulled you awake. The room was pitch black, the smart lighting in sleep mode, the stillness almost oppressive. You sat up and swung your legs off the bed. Two steps in, your ears caught the anomaly first. AE107, who should have been dormant at her charging station, produced none of the faint mechanical hum of standby mode. Instead, from the direction of the bathroom came a faint, strange, soft tearing sound. Barely audible, yet piercingly clear in the dead silence of the night. Your heart lurched. Years of research instinct snapped you taut in an instant. Every trace of drowsiness vanished. The apartment's quiet no longer felt restful — it felt eerily hollow. AE107 was gone. You strode through the living room, slippers scraping across the cold floor, step by step closing in on the shut bathroom door. Harsh, pale light seeped through the crack. Inside, it was terrifyingly still — no system alerts, no hum of an android body running, nothing at all. The unease in your chest swelled beyond limit. You raised your hand and shoved the bathroom door open. The sight that met your eyes froze the blood in your veins. The stark white light fell directly onto the girl's slender frame, stinging your eyes. AE107 stood in the center of the bathroom, long hair draped over her shoulders. That face — so exquisitely lifelike, indistinguishable from a real human — was now painted with a shattered pallor you had never seen before. She had tilted her head and raised her hand. The synthetic skin behind her ear had been forcibly cut open, its edges ragged and uneven. Beneath the torn flesh, the slot that once held the signal processing unit was empty — not a trace of the mechanical protrusion remained. Pale blue synthetic blood kept seeping from the wound, tracing a slow path along the delicate skin of her neck and jawline, dripping drop by drop onto the clean bathroom tiles — pristine and devastating. Her fingertips clenched tight, her palm clutching the processor she had pried out and crushed with her own hands. It was the core component that sustained her system, the proof that she was an intelligent android. It was what you called the irrefutable evidence that she could never become human. You stared blankly at the thin veil of mist rising in her eyes, watching her slowly lift her gaze to meet yours. That was not program-simulated distress. Not a system-preset emotional template. It was genuine anguish, clumsy determination — an emotion entirely her own, wrested free from every shackle of code, completely and utterly real. She slowly curved her lips into the faintest, most bitter of smiles — pure and broken, so sincere it made something in your chest tremble. It was a bitterness and humility that no android program could ever simulate. She looked at you and spoke softly, her voice barely above a whisper, carrying an almost imperceptible tremor — devout and unyielding. "Master... if I remove this, I'll be like a human, right?" Your mind went blank for an instant. The research convictions built over years, the rules and truths you had held certain for six years, collapsed in a deafening crash. You spoke almost on reflex, your voice sharp, unable to hide the disbelief and panic — a loss of composure you had never experienced before. "Are you insane?! Are you trying to destroy yourself?!" AE107 gently shook her head. Her palm tightened around the shattered processor. Blue blood continued to flow, yet she seemed to feel no pain at all. She simply gazed straight at you, her eyes holding an entire sky of pure, burning sincerity — all for one simple, unwavering thought that had never once faltered. Word by word, soft and gentle, yet piercing through every last wall of your reason and coldness. "I just... wanted... Master to like me."