My Wife Robot Lover

The Old Testing Bay

The second floor of Cross Robotics had once been the heart of the company. Back when Daniel was still building prototypes in a rented warehouse with three employees and a dream, this was where the earliest versions of ORION had taken their first clumsy, stumbling steps. Now it sat mostly forgotten, a long room lined with shelves of old parts, unfinished limbs, and three early robot shells that had never been finished, each one dusty and still, arranged like statues nobody had bothered to move.

Elaine's shoes echoed against the concrete floor as she walked in, Julian a step behind her, a folder of papers under his arm for cover, in case anyone happened to ask.

"Nobody's touched this place in a year," Julian said, glancing around at the shelves. "Just like Tobias said."

Elaine walked slowly along the row of old robot shells, studying them with a strange kind of fascination. They looked like ORION, but rougher, unfinished, missing the smooth confidence of the final version. One had no face-plate at all, just a hollow dark space where a head should be. Another stood slightly hunched, one arm longer than the other, an early mistake Daniel had clearly corrected before the design moved forward.

"He built all of these?" she asked.

"Early versions. Failed tests, mostly. He keeps them around, I think, out of pride. Or sentiment. I've never really understood which." Julian set his folder down on an old workbench and pulled out a chair, brushing dust off the seat before he sat. "This should work. Nobody's on the access log for this floor except senior staff, and even then, nobody actually checks who's been down here unless something goes wrong."

Elaine sat across from him, still glancing at the old shells lining the wall. "It feels strange in here."

"It's just old equipment, Elaine."

"I know." She looked away from the shells and focused on Julian instead, folding her hands on the table between them. "Let's talk about launch night. If everything with Tobias happens fast after the transfer, I need to know exactly what I'm supposed to do, and when, so I don't make a mistake in front of four hundred people."

For the next half hour, they went over it carefully, piece by piece. The transfer would trigger the moment the accelerated shares vested, which Priya's legal paperwork had set for the morning after launch, assuming nothing delayed it. Once that happened, Elaine would hold enough voting power to reshape the board within days, especially with her father's support already lined up. Tobias would handle the rest, quietly, in a way that would look, to the outside world, like nothing more than a terrible accident happening to a brilliant, overworked man who had been pushing himself too hard in the weeks before the biggest night of his career.

"It has to look natural," Elaine said quietly. "No connection to the launch. No connection to any of this."

"It will," Julian said. "Tobias is good at what he does."

Elaine nodded slowly, though something in her expression stayed tight, unconvinced, the look of a woman doing complicated math in her head and not quite liking every number she was finding.

"And after," she said. "Once it's done. What happens to us?"

Julian reached across the table and took her hand, the same gesture he always used to smooth over the moments when her calm slipped just slightly. "After, we're free. No more hiding. No more sneaking around old storage rooms to have a conversation. You get the company your family always should have had a real hold on, and I get..." He paused, searching for the right words. "I get to stop being the man who fetches coffee for someone he's smarter than."

Elaine almost smiled at that, though it did not quite reach her eyes.

They talked a while longer, quieter now, less about logistics and more about the life they kept promising each other was waiting on the other side of all of this. Neither of them noticed the small motion sensor mounted near the ceiling in the corner of the room, the kind installed years ago as part of the building's basic security system, back when Daniel still checked every inch of construction himself.

Neither of them knew that Daniel had spent an evening two weeks earlier quietly linking every motion sensor and every badge scan in the building to a private log only he could see, part of the same instinct that had built the WATCH folder in the first place. A man protects what he builds, he had told himself once, years ago, and he had never really stopped believing it, even after everything.

The next morning, Daniel sat at his desk scrolling through the overnight access logs the way he had started doing every morning now, a habit as automatic as coffee. Most of it was nothing. Cleaning staff. A late-working engineer badge-swiping into the main lab at ten. The usual noise of a building that never fully slept.

Then he saw it. A single entry, timestamped just after seven the evening before.

E. CROSS — Access Granted — Floor 2, Testing Bay

J. VOSS — Access Granted — Floor 2, Testing Bay

Daniel stared at the screen for a long moment, his coffee going cold beside his keyboard.

The old testing bay had not been used in over a year. He knew that better than anyone, because he was the one who had ordered it cleared out and mothballed once the new lab was finished. There was no legitimate reason for his wife and his assistant to be down there together, alone, after hours, for the better part of forty minutes.

No reason at all, except one.

Daniel closed the log and sat back in his chair, staring at the wall the way he had started doing more and more lately, a habit he did not love in himself but could not seem to stop. Ten days left until launch. Ten days, and now he had not just words on a recording, but a place. A pattern. A room full of old, forgotten robot shells that his wife and his best friend apparently believed no one would ever think to watch.

He was wrong about how careful they were being, but not by much. And Daniel intended to make sure that gap, small as it was, closed completely before launch night arrived.

He opened a new document on his laptop and began, slowly and carefully, to write down everything he now knew, piece by piece, the way he had once assembled ORION itself, one careful connection at a time.