Shen Rui wasn't sure when the quiet changed.
One second they were lying on the hotel bed—him half-asleep, her perfectly still like a recharging android in his arms—and the next, he felt it.
That odd flicker. Not from him.
From her.
Lin Xie's breathing hadn't changed. Her heart rate—because yes, he'd memorized that weirdly consistent rhythm—remained steady. But there was something in the air. A buzz. A shift.
He opened one eye.
She was staring at him again.
He groaned. "You really need to stop doing that when I'm in vulnerable positions. You look like you're about to dismantle me."
"I am observing," she said.
"I gathered. What's today's experiment? Watching a man try to sleep while being studied like a frog?"
"Frogs are useful test subjects," she said blankly.
He threw a pillow over his face. "Why am I dating someone who says things like that and makes it sound like a compliment?"
"I chose you," she said calmly.
He peeked out from under the pillow. "You're not supposed to say that so casually. Where's the spark? The shy eye contact? The emotional awkwardness? The—"
"I lack emotional programming."
He froze.
"What?"
"I lack emotional programming," she repeated. Then, after a pause: "But I can simulate expected responses for social integration."
"…Lin Xie, are you telling me you're faking it?"
"I am attempting replication of human bonding behavior based on common partner dynamics."
He sat up slowly. "Like a boyfriend simulator."
"Yes," she said plainly.
Silence.
And then he burst into laughter. "God, I'm losing my mind."
"You are not," she said, voice neutral.
He leaned closer. "So… you don't feel anything. At all."
"I do not feel. But I process and record."
He stared at her.
And somehow, instead of freaking out, he… smiled. "Then you're learning."
She blinked. "Is that a satisfactory answer?"
"No. But it's you. So it's enough."
He flopped back onto the bed again. "But seriously, what do you mean you're recording everything?"
She rolled onto her side to face him, tucking one hand beneath her head in imitation of the way he always lay. "I am building a dataset."
"Of what?"
"Of you."
"…Should I be concerned?"
She didn't reply right away. But she did reach out—awkwardly, like she was testing something—and poked his nose.
He blinked. "What was that?"
"You smiled when I did it earlier. It may be a button."
He laughed again. "It's not a button."
She poked again.
He tried to swat her hand away. She dodged and poked again.
Then she grabbed his wrist and held it in place with impossible precision and said, "Smile."
He scowled. "Lin—"
She leaned in. Not for a kiss. Just to observe him from less than an inch away.
"I do not feel emotions," she said softly, eyes studying his like she was reading lines of code. "But when I am here, in this moment, I do not want to be anywhere else."
He swallowed.
There was no romantic lilt in her voice. No softness. No shy breathlessness.
But it hit him anyway. Hard.
"…That counts," he whispered. "I don't know what it is—but it counts."
She didn't understand.
But she filed it away.
Another variable. Another anomaly in the data.
She closed her eyes beside him—not to sleep, but to mimic him again—and said quietly, "You are disrupting my systems."
And for the first time, something inside her fluttered.
Not a full feeling. Not yet.
But a glitch.
One she didn't want to debug.
–––
Shen Rui lay awake long after Lin Xie had closed her eyes beside him—though he knew she wasn't asleep.
She didn't sleep, not really. He wasn't even sure if she could.
The room was quiet except for the low hum of the air conditioner and the steady sound of her breathing—consistent, almost too perfect, like it had been calibrated to mimic human rhythm.
She didn't feel emotions.
She had said it so casually, like reporting a temperature or reading off a scan.
"I lack emotional programming."
Shen Rui stared at the ceiling.
A part of him had suspected it for a while now. The way she responded to things—always with calculation, not instinct. The way she smiled when prompted but never laughed unless it was part of a social script. How she'd looked at fireworks like they were just numbers exploding in the sky. How she never flinched. Never hesitated. Never got angry.
She mimicked perfectly. But mimicry wasn't feeling.
And yet… she'd kissed him.
She'd reached for him.
She'd said "I chose you."
He turned his head slightly to look at her.
She lay there, face turned toward him, still and unreadable. A girl wrapped in one of his shirts, her hand curled by her cheek like a doll at rest. Everything about her looked human. Soft. Fragile.
But he knew better.
He still didn't know where she came from. Not really.
She said she was seventeen. But seventeen-year-olds didn't hack citywide security systems in ten seconds. They didn't shut down tracking drones with nothing but a hairpin and a metal fork. They didn't speak 14 languages fluently.
She'd never told him what happened to her.
Not why she ran. Not why she looked at hospitals like cages. Not why she sometimes jerked awake from silent dreams, eyes flickering like she was back in a different kind of world.
Shen Rui reached up and ran a hand through his hair.
He could've forced the issue. Could've demanded answers. Hacked her past, like he'd hacked everything else. He was capable.
But he didn't.
Because she wasn't a puzzle to solve.
She was someone he chosen. Someone who had leaned in—awkward, precise—and kissed him on the cheek like it was a line from a manual she wasn't sure she was allowed to feel.
And somehow, that mattered more than any backstory.
He could wait.
He would wait.
Until the day she looked at him and didn't just say the words from a downloaded script—but meant them. Until she felt it. Whatever it was. Whatever flicker kept glitching in her system when she touched him. He'd seen it—the confusion. The stillness right before something almost reached her.
Almost.
He smiled faintly to himself.
She was a storm waiting for a spark.
And if it took a day, or a month, or a lifetime, he'd stay.
Because she was already real to him.
Even if she didn't know it yet.