Chorong and William walked, heading back to his car. The moonlight and the streetlights lit their path. A simple carrier robot—essentially a sophisticated shopping cart able to follow a customer around—strolled behind them, carrying plastic bags with groceries. Chorong kept glancing at the robot.


    “I told you I can hold the groceries, Master,” she said.


    “Let the carrier do its work,” William said. Though what he said was warm, his words felt sharp to Chorong, as if the words hid a steel blade inside them. Chorong took a glimpse of William’s face. It looked stern.


    “Master, I’m not so different from that robot behind us. I can carry things. I can help,” she insisted. Her master did not reply.


    Chorong twirled her hair around her index finger, trying to guess why Master was rather unhappy. Was it because of what she answered to his question just after watching the movie? Before groceries, they watched a movie at the theatre together. It was a story of a young boy losing his sister and then taking revenge on the killer by sacrificing his own life. William asked her what she thought; she answered that the main character was foolish for sacrificing his own life for revenge.


    No, that’s not why Master is like this, she thought. She had been feeling that her master was getting more and more…cold toward her recently. She had been just trying to act like Katherine by using any data she could get on the dead girl, so she didn’t really know why Master’s state was moving further and further away from being happy. She truly wanted William to be happy.


    Chorong and William entered the parking lot building. They had to go watch the movie together after William got off work, so it was late, and the lot was nearly empty.


    Then, Chorong’s ears picked up a sound. She turned her head toward the source of the noise. A man was there, wearing a handkerchief over his mouth like a mask.


    He started talking: “Give—”


    Chorong remembered a scene from the movie. The main character got stabbed by an opposing gang member in an alley with a knife, nearly costing his life.


    Chorong stepped forward.


    The next thing the man saw was the parking lot’s ceiling. Then he thought he saw the girl’s face; however, it disappeared for him within a split second, so he wasn’t sure if he actually had seen her. He felt something like two small rocks hitting his face repeatedly so fast that he felt like he was getting shot by a Gatling gun. Fortunately, the physical pain was soon gone with his consciousness.


    William watched in horror as Chorong sat on top of the man’s chest and pounded his face with her small fists. Red liquid splattered.


    “CHORONG!” he shouted.


    Chorong stopped and turned her head to face him.


    Her white shirt was now mostly stained red. Red liquid also painted her left cheek and hands. A pair of soulless eyes stared into William, which seemed to glow in the dark, like those belonging to monsters from horror stories.


    He found himself taking a step back, away from his own creation.


    She stood up and approached William. When she reached her hand out toward him, he flinched.


    A knife was in her hand, with the blade pointing away from William. “The man had a weapon.”


    “…”


    William could not say anything.


    William sat on his couch in the living room, facing away from Chorong, who stood at the doorway to the living room in a set of clean clothes.


    After the man was knocked down, William called the police and told Chorong to run back home. He applied blood onto his clothes and told the officers that he did it. Fortunately, the man they had met was a wanted criminal, so the police let him go quickly after getting his information. Chorong reconciled with him at home. However, he hadn’t said a single thing to her since then.


    Chorong looked at her master. She squeezed her own arm, calculating what she should say.


    Should I apologize? she initially thought. However, her logic circuit failed and gave out NULL as the result of the calculations. She quietly walked up the stairs and into her room. She sat on her bed and looked up at the ceiling, where the glow-in-the-dark stars twinkled.


    Back in the parking lot, when she had detected that the man had a knife, she just wanted to protect William. She took the initiative and did what she thought was the right thing to do. However, when Master called her and she turned around, his face told her she was wrong.


    The face that Master was making…she would never forget it.


    It was utter horror.


    So what she had done was wrong. Why? Was protecting someone wrong?


    She stared into the glow-in-the-dark stars as if she demanded answers from them. Of course, they didn’t reply; they only glowed at a constant luminosity.The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    Without realizing it, she started humming with her mechanical voice:


    “I opened my eyes and saw


    the glow-in-the-dark stars.


    I took them off and threw them in the garbage bin.”


    William’s eyes popped open. He could hear a very familiar song: a song that squeezed his heart, a song that…snapped something inside him.


    He stood up and marched upstairs. The singing was coming from Chorong’s room.


    He barged the door open. Chorong, who was sitting on the bed, turned to him, her eyes open wide.


    “Master?” she said.


    William lost control of himself and of the words coming out of his mouth.


    “PLEASE STOP!” he shouted.


    Chorong froze on the spot.


    Words escaped his mouth in a voice like he was begging. “Please stop. Stop reminding me of my daughter. She’s gone; I know she’s gone, and I miss her. I miss her voice. I miss how she sang. I miss how she acted. I miss how cute she was. Chorong, she would’ve never done things you’ve done. You are not her. You are NOT Katherine. So, please, Chorong, stop reminding me of Katherine. Just…STOP!”


    Silence. Chorong and William stared at each other without saying anything. William’s chest huffed and puffed as if he had used all the air inside his lungs to say the words he had just spit out from his mouth. Chorong just stared at him.


    Then, William turned around, softly closed the door behind him, and walked down the stairs.


    Chorong didn’t move. She stared at the door as if her master was still in her room at the doorway.


    She did not understand what just happened.


    Did…Master just yell at me? Did he just express anger at me?


    Her memory told her that he did, but she could not answer why. Why was he so mad? Because of the fact that she was just singing a song? Was it because she woke him up from a good sleep?


    You are NOT Katherine, Master’s voice played in her memory.


    “…I just wanted you to be happy, Master,” she muttered to herself; she did not know why she was vocally talking to herself.


    She remembered how she spent time with Master: walking, fishing, jogging…She remembered how she snuck out of the house every day Master went to work so she could practice singing and surprise him one day. She remembered how she always put a blanket on Master if he was sleeping on the couch in the living room.


    She felt the artificial muscles around her eyes twitch. The twitchiness infected nearby facial muscles and soon expanded to her entire face, and then to her entire body. She felt as if something was squeezing her heart, even though she didn’t have one. Liquid poured from her eyes and flowed down her cheek as her entire body rocked. She felt like a thousand knives were stabbing into her chest and scraping out whatever was inside.


    “I just…wanted you…to be…happy,” she said through her loud sobs. She had trouble controlling her voice as her facial muscles refused to listen to her commands.


    Yes, this was the moment when she finally understood what pain is.


    She had to do something. Anything, to distract herself from what she was feeling. She saw the window in her room open. She leapt off from the bed, dashed across the room and jumped through the window.


    “James!”


    James opened his eyes. He slowly sat up with messy hair and half-closed eyes. He looked around, only to realize he could only see the sides of his tent.


    He thought he heard his name; was he wrong?


    “James!” a familiar, autotune-like voice shouted from afar.


    James hurriedly opened his tent and emerged outside. The cold night breeze greeted him, making his neck muscles tense up. His tent was behind a bush near the main stage, hiding away from the park guards. He slowly peeked over the bush.


    Chorong was running at an incredible speed on the park’s path, looking around for him.


    “Chorong!” he called. His voice didn’t come out clearly because he had just woken up, but Chorong’s head snapped toward him, and she saw him. She slid to a stop and then dashed again toward him. Before he could react, she charged into his body with enough force to make him stumble back a bit.


    “Woah, Chorong—”


    “Is my voice that horrible?” she shrieked, looking up at his face as she clung to his shirt.


    “Huh? Wha—”


    Then he realized her face was looking more reflective than usual. It was a bit dark, but when he squeezed his eyes a bit, he realized that her cheeks were wet; trails of water flowed down from her eyes down her cheeks.


    “Is…my voice…that bad?” she said in a strained voice. Her voice was lower than before, but she was sobbing even harder. “Am I…that…MONSTROUS?”


    James stood still for a moment, not knowing what to do. Other than Chorong’s sobs, the night was quiet.


    Then, the busker hummed the first song that came into his mind:


    “


    When the train travelled through the stardust,


    A boy cried out as he looked for his mom.


    He walked and ran, but no one was there.


    He then saw a woman and asked,


    ‘Is this the train to the stars?”


    And she answered, ‘No, boy, this is back to Earth.’


    The body got on the train, and he could see the orb


    Then he could see a train going the other way,


    And he saw the mother on that train.”


    Soon, Chorong’s sobs subsided into sniffles. James looked down at her face and softly asked, “Are you good now?”


    Chorong nodded, even though some tears were still escaping her eyes.


    They quietly sat down together on a park bench. James tried his best to not show how cold he was feeling. Chorong stared at the ground, sniffling from time to time.


    “May I ask about the song you sang, James?” she asked.


    “Oh, uh, I sang whatever came into my mind,” he said.


    Chorong turned to him and tilted her head. She felt like he was hiding something.


    “What is the song?” she asked again, her eyes locked onto his.


    James’s eyeballs darted around, and then he sighed as if he gave up. He pulled out his phone and went to a music streaming site. He searched for the song and pressed the play button: a female, high-pitched singer sang the same song.


    “I don’t think this was the most appropriate song to sing for you, but…”


    Chorong concentrated on the singing, and realized that the singer’s voice was just a bit…unnatural. There was just a bit of discontinuity in the syllables, similar to hers, but to a degree ordinary humans would never notice.


    “Who is this?” she asked.


    “Her name is Fanny. She’s an artificial singer from Mi-Ray.”


    Chorong’s eyes twitched when she heard the word artificial.


    “…Yes, she’s a robot. Like you. That’s probably why the song came into my mind first,” the busker confessed.


    Chorong didn’t reply and instead focused on the song again. The singer’s voice was…something. She couldn’t describe it in words, but she felt like some of her heart that was torn away was starting to beat again.


    “Can you tell me more about her?” she asked.


    “Uh, I first heard about her when I was back in my hometown. A trader came, and I bought a tape of her songs from him. Apparently, her voice is a copy of a famous singer who passed away, and the company behind Fanny got some sampling of the original singer for the robot to sing in the same voice.”


    As James explained about Fanny, an idea slowly formed in Chorong’s head. It was an idea that would forever change her life…and James’s.


    “James, would you mind waiting here?”


    “Wha—”


    Before he could ask anything, a strong breeze swept his face. Chorong was gone. He caught a glimpse of her turning around a corner and dashing away, following the park’s path.