My Wife Robot Lover

A Place to Hide

Tobias Lang did not like meeting in person. He preferred phone calls, short and careful, never lasting longer than a few minutes. But some things, he had told Julian more than once, needed a face across the table, not just a voice on a line.

They met at a small, quiet diner on the edge of the city, far from Cross Robotics, far from anywhere Julian or Elaine might be recognized. Tobias sat in the corner booth already waiting when Julian arrived, a plain black coffee in front of him, untouched.

"You look nervous," Tobias said, without looking up.

"I'm not nervous." Julian slid into the booth across from him. "I'm careful."

"Funny. That's what I keep telling you to be." Tobias finally looked up, his eyes sharp and steady in a way that always made Julian feel, even now, like a much younger brother than he actually was. "We have a problem."

Julian's stomach tightened. "What kind of problem?"

"ORION," Tobias said simply. "You told me the robot's been showing up everywhere lately. Board meetings. Investor calls. Little private check-ins that used to just be you and Elaine and maybe Priya Nandan."

"Daniel wants it out of the lab more. Field testing, he calls it. Good for investor confidence." Julian shrugged, though the shrug felt stiffer than he wanted it to. "It's just a robot sitting quietly in the corner, Tobias. It's not a person. It doesn't gossip."

"It has microphones," Tobias said flatly. "Cameras. You told me that yourself, months ago, back when you were bragging about how advanced your boss's little invention was. Every word said anywhere near that thing gets recorded somewhere for testing purposes. You told me that."

Julian went quiet, because Tobias was right, and hearing it said out loud, plainly, in the flat light of a diner booth, made something cold settle low in his stomach.

"It's just for calibration," he said slowly. "Engineering stuff. Nobody actually listens to it unless something breaks."

"Nobody you know of," Tobias said. "You willing to bet everything on that? Your whole plan, Elaine's whole future, all of it, on the idea that nobody at that company ever presses play on a recording?"

Julian did not answer right away. Across the diner, a waitress refilled someone's coffee, the ordinary sound of spoons against porcelain filling the silence between them.

"So what do you want me to do?" Julian finally asked. "I can't exactly tell Daniel to stop bringing his own robot to his own meetings."

Tobias leaned back in the booth, folding his arms, thinking the way he always thought, slow and careful, like a man who had spent years planning things that could never be allowed to go wrong twice.

"You need a place to talk that isn't near it," he said finally. "Somewhere private. Somewhere nobody questions you being, because you work there, and Elaine's on the board, and neither of you needs a reason to be in your own building."

"We already meet at my apartment."

"Not enough, not for what's coming in the next two weeks. You'll need to plan logistics closer to launch. Timing. Access. Things you can't discuss over wine at your kitchen table without leaving a pattern someone could notice, if they were looking." Tobias tapped the table once, thinking. "What about the old prototype storage? Cross Robotics still has that second floor, the one nobody uses anymore since they moved everything to the new lab."

Julian frowned. "The old testing bay? It's full of decommissioned units. Early ORION shells that never made it past prototype. Nobody's touched that room in over a year."

"Perfect," Tobias said. "Nobody watches a room nobody uses. You need somewhere private enough that even if someone walks by, there's a reason for you to be there. You work for a robotics company, Julian. Go stand next to some old broken robot parts and call it inventory review. Nobody blinks."

Julian sat with that for a moment, turning it over. It was not a bad idea. The old testing bay was tucked away behind two locked doors, accessible only with senior staff clearance, which both he and Elaine had. Nobody from the current engineering team had a reason to go down there anymore. It was, in a strange way, exactly the kind of forgotten corner a company the size of Cross Robotics always had somewhere inside it, dead space nobody remembered to worry about.

"Alright," Julian said slowly. "I'll talk to Elaine. We can move our planning sessions there. Away from the new lab, away from ORION."

"Good." Tobias finally lifted his coffee and drank, satisfied, the matter apparently settled in his mind. "Ten days now, Julian. Once launch happens, this all moves fast. I need both of you thinking clearly, not getting careless because you think a machine is too dumb to notice you."

"It's not dumb," Julian said quietly, almost to himself. "It's the smartest thing Daniel's ever built."

Tobias raised an eyebrow at that but said nothing more, and a moment later the conversation moved on to smaller things, the kind of details that mattered only to men planning something they could never take back.

Julian told Elaine about the old testing bay that night, over the phone, keeping his voice low even though he was alone in his apartment.

"It's smart," Elaine admitted, after a moment of thinking it over. "Nobody goes down there. And if anyone asks, I'm reviewing old prototype data for the launch retrospective. It's believable."

"Tobias thinks we've been careless," Julian said. "Talking too close to ORION."

Elaine was quiet on the other end of the line for a moment. "He's not wrong to worry. I don't love that robot listening to everything Daniel wants it near these days. It feels..." She paused, searching for the word. "Watchful. More than it should."

"It's just a machine, Elaine."

"I know that," she said, though something in her voice did not sound entirely convinced. "I just want this finished. All of it. I'm tired of being careful in my own house."

"Ten more days," Julian said gently. "Then none of it matters anymore."

After they hung up, Elaine sat alone in the dark living room of the house she shared with her husband, staring at nothing, thinking about a machine with a smooth white face and a calm, steady voice that had started, somehow, to feel less like a tool and more like a presence in every room she walked into lately.

She told herself it was nerves. Ten days of nerves, and then a lifetime of not having to feel this way again.

She did not know that the presence she felt was not imagined at all.