It was still the middle of the workday for most people, so the FreshFoods was mostly filled with grocery delivery Pickybots gathering people’s online orders. The big gray boxes rolled down the aisles, grabbing stuff off shelves with their claws and dropping boxes into the openings on top, looking for all the world like hyper efficient trash cans. Actually, now that I think of it, there might have been a line of Pickies for picking up litter specifically. Pickybots didn''t need to look cute or humanoid. They did one thing: collecting items to deliver them back to their assigned home base.


    But I did see a few Mrs. Hudsons wandering around the grocery store too. Those were rarer and more expensive than Pickies, but they did a lot more too: cooking and cleaning, with the possibility of installing an extra mod to enable childcare. A girl in my kindergarten class used to get picked up from school by her Hudson. They weren''t nearly as realistic back then, of course.


    I think nowadays the latest model goes for as much as a year''s salary on minimum wage, making the decision between buying a bot and hiring human help a real tossup for those who could afford it. Not that I was ever going to be that person. I wondered if Naya could learn to cook or clean, or if that was just impossible with her programming.


    If I looked closer, I could spot a few Cupids with their owners on cute little grocery-shopping dates. They looked just like unnaturally attractive people with their more ordinary partners, but if you knew what you were looking for, there were tells: the ApolloCorp logo disguised as a birthmark on the side of their necks, the heart-shaped mark on their cheekbones, the weird glitteriness in their irises that Naya and other ApolloCorp humanoids all shared.


    And the way their humans acted with them too: clinging possessively, but looking around with anxious shame in their eyes. Like they thought everyone around them was judging them for their choice of robot partner.


    I wasn''t, obviously. None of my business what random strangers chose to do with their lives. Although, if I had the money for a top of the line Cupid, I''d rather get a bigger apartment. Or new instruments I didn''t pick up off the street. But everyone has different priorities in life, I guess.


    I pulled a box of pasta off a shelf with my ordinary human hands and consulted the list Angie sent to my phone for what vegetables I should try to eat this week.


    Fortunately, the elevator was working for once when I returned with my bags. A small group of my neighbors were huddled around the lobby, waiting for the glowing down arrow to ding with its arrival. Mrs. P from next door was there too, dragging along her groceries in a little handcart.


    “Maybe this time they’ve fixed it for good,” someone I didn’t recognize said, and everyone else laughed bitterly. It wasn’t likely with how old this building was.


    I caught Mrs. P peeking into my grocery bags. Turnabout was fair play, then: I leaned to one side and looked at what was in her cart. Many boxes of saltines, plastic bags of dill and parsley, bell peppers, cans of fish.


    “Hm,” she said.


    “Hm,” I echoed.


    When the elevator arrived, I helped her get her cart into it.


    “Maybe there’s hope for you yet after all, Odessa Kondratchuk,” she said, once we had been spat out onto the eleventh floor.


    “Glad to hear it,” I grunted, dragging her cart out of the elevator.


    When I returned, Naya was still standing in the space between my bed and the window. No, she wasn''t standing, she was moving. Dancing. I watched, reusable grocery bags in hand, as my Syren spun around, twirled her arms and swung her hips in time with what I''ve been calling Ocean in my head. Her long violet hair spun around with her.


    She was... Okay, to be honest, she wasn''t actually that great. Her movements were kind of stiff, but that wasn''t my biggest problem with how she was dancing.


    Angie wrapped her tail around my legs, reminding me to put my groceries away before I got too into it. I shoved everything into the fridge and pantry and went back to my room, knocking on the door as I opened it this time.


    Naya stopped and turned to look at me with a brilliant pop-star smile. “Welcome back! How was grocery shopping?”


    “Same as always. What are you practicing right now?”


    “The dance for our song?”


    “Okay, cool.” I curled and uncurled my fingers, feeling so uncomfortable I could die. I always hated giving people negative feedback. “Can you tell me... why you are doing the moves you''re doing?”


    “Why?” Naya echoed. “Because... It looks cool, I guess?”


    “Remember we talked about putting emotion into your voice? Dancing is also like that. Your movements need to make sense with the emotions of the song.” Although I was as much of a dancer as I was a singer, so really who was I to criticize her on this.


    Naya tilted her head from side to side. I finally realized that was the gesture she made when she was taking in new information. “Can you walk me through the emotions of the song, then?”


    That seemed about as appealing of an activity as pulling all of my organs out with a fishing hook. But if I wanted to improve her dancing...


    I pulled the lyrics sheet and a marker out of the closet-studio and sat down with it at the kitchen counter. “Okay. Here we go.”


    As I scribbled out my feelings, verse by verse, I couldn’t help but feel like a failure of a lyricist. Wasn’t the point of music to get the emotions across without having to spell them out? Shouldn’t Naya just... get it? Even though she didn’t feel things the way a person did? Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    Maybe I should’ve shown these lyrics to an actual person before I started actually making this song. But I didn’t really know anyone who would’ve given me good feedback on them. I kept the music-making as a lowkey secret from most of my friends and acquaintances, though they knew I DJed a little on the side sometimes. My family had wanted me to do something more practical with my life, but I just couldn’t get interested in my more practical major enough to turn it into a career.


    I looked at my lyrics sheet again. After this gig, I’m going to put myself out there and try talking to other musicians at the show. It’s going to happen.


    Filled with resolve, I finished annotating my own song and handed it back to Naya. “Does this help?”


    She stared at it. “I can’t read this word.”


    I rewrote it again, more neatly. “Rebirth. Charging forward into the unknown.”


    “I see. So does this mean I should run forward on the stage?”


    I laughed. Naya frowned.


    “No, um... I think for this verse, you need to like... Okay, are there any videos of opera singers in your database?”


    She tilted her head from side to side, then nodded.


    “Do the like, arm thing they do.” I demonstrated, pointing my fingers like a ballerina and waving my arm up and down in front of myself. “In time with the bassline.”


    She stared at me some more.


    “Okay, have you ever seen the video of the 2.0 Syren doing the heavy metal song about fire? It was called Inferno or something?”


    Her eyebrows went up, and she nodded again, more vigorously.


    “Can you do something like that?”


    “Like this?” She did a perfect imitation of the routine from the Inferno SoundShare video that went viral when I was in middle school— 2.0 jerkiness and all.


    “Yeah, like that but smoother,” I said. “Just the arm part, not the whole thing.”


    She did it again, smoother.


    “That’s great!”


    It was gratifying how quickly she learned from my instructions, how accurately she executed everything I wanted from her.


    I needed to make dinner, according to Angelica’s repeated meowing at the door. And then I needed to actually finish putting the song together. And then I had work tomorrow, and I needed to get clothes and stuff for Naya’s new look... I’d have to find a shop in person to get Syren face paint and hair inserts from since an online order wouldn’t deliver fast enough. The weight of the many tasks ahead of me seemed to sit on top of my shoulders as I opened my bedroom door again and returned to the kitchen.


    “I guess you can keep practicing for now,” I said uncertainly as Naya followed me out. “Unless you want to help with dinner, or something.”


    “Aye-aye, cap’n!” Naya saluted. “I do not have the capabilities to help with dinner, so I will continue to practice my dancing!”


    Part of me wanted to invite her to sit with me while I made dinner, but I always felt awkward eating if the other person wasn’t eating with me. And Syrens were definitely not built to simulate ingestion the way Cupids could.


    Plus, the last time someone sat at my kitchen counter and swung her legs back and forth while I slapped together a pasta on the stove, we were having our third date. The fling fizzled out not long after that, but the scene stuck in my head as an activity reserved for Third Dates. If a friend was over, we’d be cooking together. If a potential paramour was over, I was cooking to try and impress them (although I wasn''t exactly a five-star chef myself, a surprising amount of twenty-somethings on matchmaking apps could barely boil water).


    Naya was many things, but a potential paramour she was not.


    I tapped my fingers against the edge of the stovetop while I pulled out a box of egg noodles and the instant sauce packets I bought at FreshFoods earlier. “Potential paramour” kind of had a ring to it. I’d have to write that down later.


    “Poten-tial pa-ramour, po-ten-tial pa-ra-mour...” I kept muttering to myself as the water boiled. I added an egg and frozen spinach at the last minute so it at least resembled an actual meal.


    I ate my broke-bitch noodles while the beginnings of a new song congealed in my head like the sauce on the linguini, then went back into my studio to keep polishing the first song I made with Naya until the night grew late and my Kittipet was once again demanding I go to bed in time to get ready for work the next day.


    “I’m going to come up with a new look for you tomorrow,” I promised her, when I finally took off my headphones and turned on the lights again. Coming back to the real world after a long stretch of music creation was always weird, but I’d made a lot of progress. There was a cool instrumental solo leading into the bridge now, and I used the multiple vocal takes to, hopefully, create an interesting effect. I pitched Naya’s voice up and down on the chorus to make it sound like she had backup singers with her. I wasn’t sure if it was done, but it was definitely a lot more complete than it had been at the beginning of the day.


    I slid my headphones over Naya’s ears and hit play. “I guess this is the first demo.”


    “Oh! It sounds very different now. Is that me singing? Wow.”


    “Humans generally think their voices sound weird in recordings, because the way we hear our own voices when speaking and how we hear them from an external source doesn’t match up,” I explained. I read that on a SuperBoard post once. “Does it feel like that for you too?”


    “No. I think my voice sounds the same to me no matter where it’s coming from. But you made it sound different! I like that! And I remember doing the takes to make my singing sound like that too. Now whenever I hear this song I’ll remember it’s not just a random Syren singing, but me. Naya.” She sounded as excited as a human. “Okay, now shush, I want to appreciate it properly.”


    I shushed. I watched her listen to it. She made little half-attempts at dance moves as she did, still trying to figure out the appropriate way to move for the song. I think she liked it. It was hard to tell. Harder to tell if it mattered whether or not she liked it, since she wasn''t even a representative of my potential audience (human Syren music fans).


    “I''ll probably keep messing with it for a bit more,” I said. “Tomorrow, though. I''m going to go to sleep now.” This last bit was mostly said to placate Angelica, who was batting at my ankle again.


    “Understood. I need to spend some time processing all of the new input I received today too,” said Naya. I still wasn''t totally clear on how that worked.


    “Do you want to stand in the window for that?” I asked. “So you can recharge at the same time.” It might be a little weird to have her standing there while I slept, but I was sure I could get over it if it was more efficient for the both of us.


    “I thought you wanted to keep your work and sleep spaces separate,” Naya said slowly.


    “I just use the closet for my music stuff because I soundproofed it. And you''re not...work. Not exactly.”


    She blinked her large aquamarine eyes at me. I wondered if there were precious gems set into her irises to make them sparkle like that.


    “Just don''t watch me get changed, okay?” My face felt hot. I wasn''t even sure why that would matter. The way I saw Naya, person, robot, singer, friend, partner, collaborator, tool, seemed to change with every second I spent with her.


    Maybe I could write a song about that.


    At any rate, I got ready for bed, Angelica curled up next to me so she could wake me up in the morning, and Naya positioned herself so she could catch the most sunlight come morning.


    As I was drifting off to sleep, one last thought occurred to me:


    I needed more human friends.