Chapter Text
Androids are just a part of life.
Human-like, they assist in any avenue in life imaginable, from customer service, to combat, to space exploration.
They look human, but when they speak their delivery is so flat that it's unnatural. It would be easy to tell that they're not real even if they didn't have the upside-down triangle in between their brows to mark them as an android. Androids are supposed to be treated just like any other machine.
Selina never did that.
After her family got Peter, a normal household android, Selina fell in love with him. She’d always wanted a brother and for a young child, Peter was the perfect companion: attentive, kind, and with unending patience. They were family, no matter what other people said.
As she got older, she realized that no matter what she wanted to believe or what she thought, people in general regarded androids as expendable. While her parents went along with her devotion to Peter, her insistence that he sit with them for their family meals, that he got his own ‘room’, that he be included as a member of their family, Selina quickly learned others found it unusual and she got a lot of scorn for it. An android is a thing to be used and then discarded for the newest model.
So, she learned to stay quiet about it. Peter is still family, she still regards him as her brother, but she’s a lot less vocal about it than she used to be.
They live in a small town; she’s been around the same people from elementary school all the way up to her last year of high school, and androids aren’t commonplace in their laid-back community. Peter sticks out. Who knows what’ll it be like after Selina graduates and takes herself and Peter to the big city for college?
Maybe it’ll be a whole new world of acceptance.
For them both.
Brushing hair out of her mascara-covered eyelashes, Selina looks herself over again in the mirror.
She looks good, she supposes. Nice enough. Her phone vibrates on her dresser and excitement leaps into her throat. At any rate, it doesn’t matter now, it’s time. She thrusts her phone into her back pocket.
Opening the door to her room quietly, Selina pokes her head out. The house is dark. Perfect. Slipping out, she walks carefully so her boots don’t echo across the linoleum. She makes it to the sliding glass door to the backyard and slowly turns the lock, her heart hammering in her chest.
This is it.
Easing the door open, she winces as it squeaks and stops moving, waiting. When the house is still silent, she takes a deep breath and squeezes herself out before closing the door behind her.
The backyard is equally dark, just cool enough to take the edge off the summer heat. Summers in the Pacific Northwest can still get a little chilly at night but there’s a nice breeze, not too cold but not too hot. She gets a foot down on the brown, dried-out grass and it crunches underfoot before she hears a soft, “Selina?” from behind her and she freezes.
Damn, caught.
She turns slowly, pasting a smile on her face.
Peter stands in the open doorway, staring at her blankly.
“Hi, Peter,” she greets.
“Selina, what are you doing?” he asks, voice tinged with the vaguest hint of confusion. She swallows.
“Just going outside for a bit! Get some fresh air.” She waits, stomach tied up in knots as he processes that. It’s a coin flip of what’ll happen next. She’s allowed in the backyard, so if he buys this excuse then his programmed response should be: Alright. Would you like some company? But if he doesn’t then—
“You are leaving. That is not allowed.”
Selina bites down a groan and for a moment, she feels a wave of hatred at his watery blue eyes that stare her down. For a moment, she despises the little upside-down triangle that sits in the middle of his forehead, marking him as an android.
For the slightest second, she hates him for what he is: a machine, without feelings. Peter doesn’t care that this is the last party for the graduating seniors before they all scatter to the winds, each of them eager to move on. There’s an itch all of them feel keenly, the one that says, Get out while you can. Because if they don’t get out now, they’ll be stuck forever, just like their parents.
Peter doesn’t care that Selina had wanted to use this night to try to hold onto the feeling of being surrounded by people she grew up with, having that sense of familiarity and comfort that comes with knowing the same people for years at a time. She's been wondering if it would be the last time she felt a sense of ‘community’ or if that would be replaced at college.
For Selina, it’s going to be a night of goodbyes and she feels, somewhere deep down, that it will be an important one. The line between before and after starts tonight.
Before she graduates and after, before she’s legally an adult and after. So many things.
She wrestles down the impulse to lash out. It’s not his fault, it just so happened tonight of all nights he landed on that response.
Licking her lips, she considers her options. Technically, Selina would normally be allowed to go, except she knows there will be drinking, and her parents don’t like the family that owns the house where the party is being held. It had felt like too much effort to ask for permission and have her parents give her the third degree about who would be there, whose parents would be monitoring them, and so on. It was just easier to sneak out and try to get away with it.
Now that’s all shot to hell. Peter will tell her parents she tried to sneak out, regardless of whether she goes or not. Her phone vibrates several times in her back pocket, and she makes a decision.
“Why don’t you come with me?” she offers, holding out a hand.
One smooth blond eyebrow raises and Peter steps outside, closing the door behind himself gently. Impatience sits like a stone in her stomach, but she doesn’t hurry him along as he walks closer, each step feeling like it takes an eternity.
“Where are you going?”
“Out,” she answers evasively. “Look, you’re going to tell Mom and Dad anyway, right? How about you come with me, make sure I’m safe, and tomorrow morning we’ll come back together.” And I’ll be grounded for the rest of the summer, she thinks but doesn’t add.
Peter looks at her still outstretched hand and then back towards the house, considering. Her phone is vibrating, the constant strum that indicates a phone call, but she ignores it, sweat beading at the back of her neck, from the stress and the heat.
Finally, he turns back to her and takes her hand. “Alright.”
Her breath leaves her in a rush. “Great!” she enthuses. “Let’s go.” She pulls him along the side of the house, encouraging him to walk faster than his normally measured stride would allow.
A van is idling in front of the house and her heart lurches with relief. They hadn’t left her then, good.
The side door slams open, and she winces as the sound cracks down the street, loud like a gunshot in the oppressive quiet.
“Aw man, Selina what the fuck’s with the bag of bolts?”
“Shut up Desmon,” she hisses as she ducks her head and climbs inside. There’re already two girls sitting in the middle seat, fingers flying over the keyboards of their phones. She crawls into the back row, sliding towards the window and ignoring Peter as he moves to sit beside her. “Peter caught me on the way out, so he’s coming.”
“He’s not like, going to rat us out, is he?” One of the girls—Tracy—asks, turning around in her seat and sending a nervous glance at Peter.
“No,” Selina answers tonelessly. “Most androids don’t auto-report low-level crimes or else the police would be overwhelmed, and I’ve programmed that out of him anyway. My parents won’t make him give up any information as long as no one asks them about it.” She glares at Tracy, making her flinch. “So, if no one gets into trouble, we should be fine.” Underaged drinking is actually a crime that usually gets auto-reported but she’s feeling petty enough that she doesn’t mention that little fact. Let them find that out later, at some college party in the fall.
“Fine,” Tracy huffs before turning back around.
She catches Desmon rolling his eyes from the passenger seat before turning back towards the front. The door slams closed and the van rumbles to life.
Ducking his head, Peter whispers softly, “Sissy, is everything okay?”
Something ugly twists in her stomach at the childhood nickname. She used to insist on it, wanted so badly for them to be family; the longing of an only child dreaming of what siblings should be like. Now, he’s learned to only say it low enough not to be overheard, otherwise, she snaps at him. Selina wonders, in the guilty place that’s buried beneath the hot rush of embarrassment she feels whenever he uses it, if she’ll get over this one day. If it’s simply her teenage years that makes her feel like this, out of sorts whenever Peter tries to bridge the gap that her growing older has wedged between them.
Privately, she hopes so. Selina remembers the innocent way she used to love him, without shame or reservation and the way she was able to defend him to others. Defend any androids, honestly. Selina used to be vocal about the way that people so often devalued their androids.
Yes, they were programmed to obey, and they were owned the same way dogs or cats are owned but why then do people treat their pets so much better than their androids? A machine, yes, but a machine with a human face. One that listened without judgment, without prejudice, one that cared for you on the good days or the very bad. Selina didn’t understand why more people didn’t love their androids the way she did. Not the sexual ‘I fell in love with my android’ kind that the news so often likes to report on and people snicker about, but the way you get attached to something and can’t imagine trying to live without it.
Even on her very bad days, on the days like tonight where her anger at him feels all-encompassing, Selina knows that she wants Peter to be there for the rest of her life. Wants Peter to be the one to take care of her when she’s old, the person who would have known her the longest, and been there every step of the way along her life’s journey. Where else could you find that level of loyalty?
“Everything’s fine,” she replies. And in a way, it is. Though she’s upset that he caught her and she’s now forced to drag him along, on the other hand, there’s a sort of relief in it too. Selina had been worried about getting back home in the early morning hours. They’d promised they’d drive people home again, but she knew there would be drinking. At least Peter could drive them all home without her being drunk in the backseat, worried about them crashing because the driver would likely have been drinking too.
“I’ve texted your parents,” he continues, and her eyes flutter closed, taking a deep breath. She can already hear her father shouting. Peter pauses. “…Our parents?” he corrects timidly when she doesn’t respond. Another leftover remnant from her childhood.
It’s not his fault, she reminds herself. If only her birthday was earlier in the year, then she could have overwritten his protocols.
But wishing for something doesn’t make it reality.
“That’s fine, Peter. Thank you.”
The truth is her family isn’t rich enough to own an android, most of the people in their town can’t, so Peter stands out already, let alone when they stand next to each other. Selina, dark like the rest of her family and short, Peter tall and pale, short cropped blond hair that makes him easy to recognize when he walks beside her and her parents.
He’d been a gift from her grandmother, because as a child, Selina had taken one look at him and fallen in love. She wouldn’t leave him alone. No longer was he the fly on the wall, ready to jump in if someone needed something, whenever Selina came over she demanded Peter’s attention and forced people to pay attention to him too. Treat others how you want to be treated, she’d repeat over and over again when her other family members would make a negative comment about Peter or tried to treat him badly. She was a thorn in everyone’s side until they all learned that it was simply easier to ignore Peter or treat him with the vaguest sense of politeness that they could muster.
Peter had been the best friend, the big brother, she’d always wanted; he was always ready to play a game, listen to her talk, or take her to the park. When her grandmother died, out of all of her children she’d given Peter to Selina’s mother because Selina herself had loved him that much, and to Selina, that meant everything. She decided from a young age that in the same way Peter dedicated his life to hers, she would to his.
(Never mind that he doesn’t have a choice in the matter.)
Selina found out quickly that she wasn’t smart enough to be a programmer. Oh sure, she’s taught herself to read code, but being able to program something from scratch? That takes creativity that she just doesn’t have. But what she does have is tenacity. She loves Peter and though she recognizes that parts of him annoy her, she cares about him greatly.
So she taught herself how to code, and how to fix robots and androids alike. His maintenance costs should have gotten to the point where they could no longer afford him, but Selina has been able to stay ahead of them so far.
Piecemealing expensive specialty tools, studying in her spare time about mechanics, coding, and everything in between. She wants to work in robotics and has dreams of maybe one day working herself up to—while not working with the code itself —helping test out the bugs that are so frequently apparent.
Technically, android technology has stagnated for many years. Though they’re still a high-ticket item, there’s a block with how ‘real’ they can get. They look real but their actions and responses lack that distinctly ‘human’ touch. There’s no creativity, no critical thinking. Androids will frequently get ‘stuck’ if given a command that they can’t work out, getting caught in feedback loops of the same behavior.
It’s challenging and something that Selina has honestly found herself enjoying, trying to figure out the best way to program around what Peter already has to work through his bugs. She’s gotten pretty good at it if she does say so herself, but she’s hungry to test herself on the newer models. Technically, not much has changed but she wants to get out, into the world, into the rest of her life.
With Peter at her side though, always with Peter. Her parents have already agreed to let him go with her when she leaves for college. Once she turns eighteen, he’ll legally be given to her, giving her rights over him as her property, letting her change over the last remnants of the pesky baked-in protocols that rat her out to her parents.
The van rumbles to a stop and they all start to pour out of it, into a party that’s already in full swing, strings of lights criss-crossing over their heads, loud music playing, and teenagers huddled in small groups with familiar red cups in their hands.
Dark mountains covered with pine trees loom over them. The reason they’re partying here is because it’s out in the boonies of town, too far away from neighbors to care about the noise. There’s enough property for teens to slip off together into the dark, either to do drugs or mess around.
The moment Selina gets out of the car, she ditches Peter and runs for the kitchen to grab a drink, greeting others as she passes. Everyone will recognize Peter as being her android, she’s one of the few who has one and they’ve seen him often enough to know he belongs to her family, so she isn’t worried about someone questioning why he’s here.
Hours pass and as she drinks more and more, time gets sticky. Everything gets a delightful haze over it, a bubble of happiness where everything her classmates say is hilarious and she’s the funniest person in the room.
After enough time drinking and laughing with her classmates, she stumbles her way outside, looking around for Peter. He’s usually easy enough to spot with the almost coverall-like blue uniform that he wears constantly. She thinks she spots him a fair distance away with a few other people, so she starts to make her way over, stumbling over the uneven grass.
In between, she gets distracted by a greeting or two, and something loud rumbles to life over the music. Selina squints before she sighs aggressively. The family has a large industrial-style wood chipper that the boys have altered without the safety surrounding the blades so they can watch as things get sliced up. Perhaps they’re just showing the android, strange as the thought might be. By now, everyone is pretty used to Peter, so they don’t show that much interest in the him but perhaps they’re drunker than she’d figured.
She watches as the boys gather around Peter until she can barely see the blond of his hair between them.
Then, he’s being lifted above the crowd, suddenly fully visible, and Selina’s heart flies into her throat. She starts running, but it feels like she’s running through sand, each step heavy and slow as if she’s dreaming.
Somewhere, someone is screaming.
Everything feels like it’s happening in slow motion that’s missing frames in between.
Here she is, shoving people out of the way.
Here she is, diving at the woodchipper.
Here she is, reaching her hands inside.
Here she is, dragging Peter out.
Then, like a film running out on a reel, everything fades to black.
There are flashes in between.
Seeing the dark sky lined with stars, something beneath her was hard and unyielding.
White and brightness.
Waking up in pain, and seeing her parents, before she drifts away again.
It feels like trying to cup her hands around sand, impossible to catch and keep.
Slowly, it feels so slow, but eventually, she starts to wake up long enough for them to tell her information before she slips away again.
Oftentimes, Selina wishes they wouldn’t.
They had to amputate both her hands.
The knowledge settles over her like snowflakes. The longer it goes on, the heavier the knowledge becomes as it blankets her, growing deeper and deeper.
Selina will never become a mechanic, will never learn how to drive, will never be able to feed herself, never, never—
Each day she wakes up a little more healed, another piece feels like it’s lost to her, as she gets well enough to attempt to do more and more and she realizes exactly what her new reality is going to look like.
There are prosthetics, some so advanced that they’re almost as fluid as a real hand. Almost. But not quite. However, if they catch it early enough, they can hook into the remaining nerves and the quality of life is greatly improved. Even before her accident Selina had heard about them; the technology is truly amazing.
There’s no way her family can afford them.
Instead, she’ll be lucky if she can afford any prosthetics at all. Though the doctors all try to reassure her that she can still do a lot with them, she knows better. The career that she’s been striving for for years is now completely out of reach.
She feels lost, adrift at sea without an anchor. What does she do now? It’s not like some of her classmates that she’s heard ask that question. Selina was confident in the direction her life would take. Now, she has no idea. Forget trying to ‘find herself’, she doesn’t even know what she can do now, broken as she is.
Luckily, her story has gotten shared around her community enough that they’d pitched in to fundraise for the cost of repairs for Peter.
Selina had been able to save enough of his torso and central systems that in the grand scheme of things, his repairs weren’t that costly.
Finally, he has an actual use. He can feed her, bathe her, and help her to the restroom. He lives in the hospital room with her, idling until she wakes up and he attends to her needs.
It’s helpful for everyone. The nurses can concentrate on patients who don’t have androids to help them, they only have to come in to administer her medicine. And it’s nicer for her, not having a stranger wipe her ass as she seethes at the injustice of her new reality.
Peter stands unassumingly in the corner until she wakes up and makes him sit beside her bed. His presence is the only real comfort she has anymore.
One day, when it’s just the two of them, Selina still getting used to the feeling of being vaguely numbed out but also in pain, he speaks into the otherwise quiet room.
“Selina?”
“Yeah,” she grunts.
Androids don’t really ‘fidget’, though they do have some idling animations. Otherwise, humans find them too unsettling if they stand or sit perfectly stock still. Selina watches through half-lidded eyes as he blinks, falsely ‘thinking it over’ as if he needs to struggle to find the words. It’s a lie, he knows exactly what he wants to say. Selina could probably pick out the specific line of code that gives him this expression, a faux consideration.
“I am sorry for what happened. I have no excuse, but I regret that it has caused you so much harm.” His voice sounds hollow with the lack of emotional sincerity that people often complain about. It’s never really bothered her, and it doesn’t now.
“Don’t say that. The guys who threw you in are to blame, not you.”
His eyes are blank, transparent as polished blue sea glass as he processes that. “You have been injured for my sake, if I—”
“If you had what?” she interrupts, fury curling in her gut uncomfortably, forcing its way through the dull haze that she’s been feeling otherwise. “Told them to stop? They wouldn’t have listened to you. We both know you couldn’t have fought back even if I ordered you to.” Selina takes a deep breath. “Help me sit up. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
Silently, Peter stands and starts pressing the button on the side of her bed that raises it up, while she winces in pain. He adjusts her pillows around her as she attempts to get comfortable.
“Do you hate me?” he asks suddenly, and she starts at the question, staring at his torso that has taken up the entirety of her vision. Peter pulls back enough so they can look at each other. “I have overheard the nurses talking. They said they would hate me, in your shoes. That they wouldn’t be able to bear the sight of me.”
Selina sucks in a surprised breath. Indignation swells, and it’s a familiar feeling, the urge to protect Peter from the cruel comments people make so thoughtlessly.
“Don’t listen to them,” she says firmly. “You’re family, got it? You would have done the same thing if the roles were reversed. Would you hate me if you got destroyed pulling me out?”
Peter stares at her, unblinking before he shakes his head. Selina manages to smile. “Then the matter’s settled. Ignore them. People spout shit that they don’t understand. The only people I’m mad at are the people who threw you in. End of discussion.” She starts to reach up to touch his face, feeling the way her hand wants to cup his cheek, but then she catches sight of her forearm and the empty space after the wrist and she grimaces and lets her arm drop back down.
“Selina?” The voice of her mother breaks the moment and Selina turns her head to see her hovering in the doorway. Smoothly, Peter moves away, and her mom walks the rest of the way in, her big purse jingling as it jostles against her body then the floor as she drops it before sitting on the bedside chair.
“Hi, Mom,” Selina says with a small smile. “I didn’t know you were coming by.” It’s still the afternoon, so her mom shouldn’t be out of work yet. It’s strange for her to be here already. Or is it the weekend? It’s so hard to keep track of the days. Every day when she wakes up, Peter gives her the time, date, and forecast, but the information slides past her like water off a duck.
It doesn’t feel useful when she considers everything else that she’s dealing with at the moment.
Her mom sighs aggressively, letting her shoulders slump with theatrics. “You would not believe the last few days! It’s been so tiring.” When she brightens as if something just occurred to her, Selina has to fight not to roll her eyes. “So, Selina honey, your father and I have news,” her mother says, a false smile on her face as she perches at the edge of her hospital seat, as if ready to fly up and out of the room at a moment’s notice.
For a wild moment, she thinks that maybe they’re getting a divorce. That her accident has been too much to handle. But the tone is overly sweet, more annoying than anything else, and not at all how she thinks her mom would start that conversation. She relaxes slightly.
Her parents have no idea how to handle her. Her mother compensates by being overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic while her father has completely shut down and is silent on the rare times he’s visited at all.
None of them seem to know what to do.
She doesn’t go on, so Selina is forced to ask, “What is it?”
“We’ve been contacted by that one android company. Hmm. What was it called? The one that made Peter?” Her mom furrows her brow in thought, waving her hand in a circle as if that’ll cause the name to appear out of thin air. Selina’s eyes widen.
“Alpha Corporation?!”
Her mother smiles. “That’s the one! They heard about your story.”
Her story. It’s been everywhere, and not just in their small town. ‘Girl Saves Android, Loses Both Her Hands in the Process’ has been a compelling headline. Though Peter could flick through her social media on her phone for her, Selina stopped bothering after a few times seeing the sheer number of notifications that kept pouring in.
“They’ve offered to pay for prosthetics, isn’t that amazing? Your father is still in talks with them to make sure it’s all legit, so we haven’t brought it up yet, but it seems like it is! Just think of it, free prosthetics!? And of course, they’ll be the latest version! Isn’t that great, honey?”
Advanced… prosthetics… Selina can hardly believe it. It would literally change her life—it could allow her to continue with the path she’s set out for herself.
There would be hardships, and she’d have to relearn how to do basically everything, but it still sounds better than the alternative, better than what she has now.
It sounds too good to be true.
“What’s the catch?” she asks.
Her mom wrinkles her nose at her. “Ugh, just like your father! Sometimes a good thing is just a good thing.” Selina gives her a flat look and her mom huffs out a breath. “They think the story will be a boon for sales so we’re going to get a lawyer to work out a deal, something about helping with marketing after the fact.”
There it is. But still, even that seems mild. Selina does love androids so it wouldn’t feel bad to promote for the company. And besides, Alpha Corp is the place to be if she wants to be an android and robot mechanic. Maybe this could be a big break for her, maybe she’ll get the chance to speak with some employees inside the company. If they remember her name and her story, then in a few years after she graduates from college, then maybe she could have a connection?
While she’s been thinking it over, her mother has continued talking, and she only hears the tail end of her monologue. “You’ll have to be flown out there though. I hope that won’t be a problem? Your dad is skeptical of course but they said you can bring Peter, so I think it’ll be alright. It’s your life, right? We can’t let this chance go to waste just because you’ll be gone for a month, maybe two.”
“Wait, gone? Gone where?”
“To New York, honey. They want you to be close to their facilities. Since there’s a long period of rehabilitation after the surgery they have to make sure everything works out properly.”
New York. It almost feels like too much to hope for, like this is all some sort of alternate reality and any minute now she’ll wake up to find out it was all a dream.
Her mom presses a hand on top of her blanket-covered knee. “I think it’ll be good for you, don’t you think so, Selina?”
“Yeah…” she says softly, “yeah it sounds great.”