“I miss you.”

“I know.”

She was flustered. “‘I know?’ That’s all you have to say? ‘I know?’”

No change to his countenance, no sign of contrition, empathy. Simply, “What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say something that let’s me know that I matter to you, that this relationship matters to you.”

“I…” He hesitated, looking at anything but her eyes. “I can’t.”

She got up from the table, feeling that the situation had too much gravity to stay seated, but quickly realized there was no where to go in the small diner, save for walking to the door. She sat back down. Angry. Frustrated. Hurt. “You can’t?” She picked up a room temperature French fry but jury played with it, didn’t eat it. “You can’t? Awesome. That’s what I want to hear. You can’t say that I matter? That our love matters? That’s… fantastic.”

“I’m not trying to hurt you. It’s just—“

“It’s just… what? What is it ‘just?’”

He finally met her gaze. “It’s just… you and I are made different. I don’t know why. We just are. It’s like, I don’t know, you’re programmed differently than I am. You need things I don’t need.”

“I need things you don’t need?! Really? You don’t need love? Commitment? Friendship? That’s bullshit. I’m so tired of this.” She became aware once again of her surroundings, of the looks they were getting from other customers, but she didn’t care; She was all-in on this, fighting hard for what mattered. To them. She knew it was crazy, maybe even detrimental, but wasn’t that what love was about? Didn’t every Grand Romance have an element of insanity?

“So, what? What do we do now?”

He was silent for too many heartbeats, but she was going to make him speak first, even if they had to sit in that booth for hours.

“I think, well, I think we have to stop seeing each other.”

“What?! You want to break up with me? Are you serious?”

“I think I am. I mean, I’ve done the calculations, added everything up, and… we just—well, we don’t make sense anymore. Sometimes, well, sometimes when people come from, you know, two different worlds, well, it can’t always be expected that things work out. It just can’t.”

“Really? Really?! We don’t make—are you kidding me right now? ‘We don’t make sense anymore?’ ‘Two different worlds?’ Who even talks like that? It’s like you’re looking for an excuse to get out of this relationship or something. Are you?”

“I should go.”

“What? No, you don’t get to just walk out. That’s not how this works. I’ve given everything to this. How can you, you don’t think that I would let you just—“

“Really, I should go.” He stands, gathering his things.

“No. No, you can’t—“

“It’s for the best.”

“Wait, no, I’m sorry. Sit back down, please. I—“

“No. I am leaving.”

The tone of her voice changed, deepened as she commanded him to stop. Something inside of her snapped. She was not who she had been only a moment before. She could hear her heartbeat, feel her peripheral vision shrinking.

He took a defiant step toward the door.

Her hand, the knife, the swift motion of the two combined, plunging the blade into his sternum—it was all ephemeral, otherworldly, disconnected—As though she was merely an observer, as shocked by the sudden violence as the other patrons in the restaurant; Sickened by it.

But it was her.

She did it.

She held the knife.

She committed the violent act.

She was now cutting him open, in spite of the voice in her mind shouting at full volume to stop!

The moment she saw what the chest contained, she wished she’d never opened it… but it was too late now; There was no turning back. It was done.

The complex, science-fictional nature of it was overwhelming. In some back corner of her adrenaline-and-rage-filled mind she could only compare it to opening the hood of a modern car or taking the panel off a PC: Wires, gizmos, servos, cables, microchips. All of it at once familiar and foreign.

She knew it would be different. He would be… different. Inside.

In her mind, she knew that what she understood as her Love—her Man—was merely a suit, a vehicle of sorts. She understood—in conceptual terms—that the life she loved, the personhood of her One-and-Only, was not the same thing as the warm, fleshy approximation that it controlled. But to see it, ‘unsheathed’ as it were, was an entirely different level of Truth.

It’s one thing to understand the theoretical nature of an alien being—one who has no recognizable form—creating a humanoid facsimile in an attempt to bond with a lower life form. It’s a completely different thing to see how it actually functions, internally.

She vomitted.

The other patrons in the diner looked like they might vomit as well, if they weren’t so thoroughly and completely dumbfounded by the suddenness of it all.

She stood, pacing, unsure of what to do next. He had been her love, her lover. But he had tried to leave her! And now the bodysuit he had been using as a means of physical interaction was laying on the floor of a diner, chest splayed open. What happened? Was this who she was? WHAT she was? Was she capable of real violence? Was her reaction to a break up to plunge a knife into the chest of the one she loved?!

Or was it something else?

Did she, at some level, see him for what he really was? Him ‘the machine,’ not him ‘the consciousness.’ Was this no more a violent crime than smacking the side of a slow computer or kicking the bumper of a smoking car before opening the hood?

She looked at ‘his’ open chest once again.

What had she done?

She collapsed to her knees, suddenly feeling the overwhelming sense that she’d committed attempted murder.

He looked at her.

“I’m so sorry. I—“ She began to crawl toward him, weeping.

He looked directly into her eyes, smiled, and opened his arms.