My Wife Robot Lover

Dinner for Two

Elaine arrived at Julian's apartment a little after eight, wearing a plain coat over her dress, the kind of outfit a person chooses when they don't want to be remembered by a doorman or a neighbor in the hallway.

Julian opened the door before she could knock. "You weren't followed?"

"Followed by who?" Elaine stepped inside and slipped off her coat, tossing it over the back of a chair. "Daniel doesn't even know what day it is half the time. He's been living in that lab since the walking test."

"Good." Julian shut the door and locked it, then turned to face her, his easy smile gone now that they were alone. "We need to talk about Tobias."

Elaine sat down at the small kitchen table, folding her hands in front of her the way she did in board meetings, calm and businesslike even when the subject was murder. "Tell me."

"He wants everything locked before the transfer window closes. That means the accident, if we're calling it that, needs to happen fast after launch. Not weeks later. Days."

"Days," Elaine repeated. Something flickered across her face, there and gone so quickly that even Julian, who knew her better than almost anyone, could not have said for certain what it was. "That's fast."

"That's the plan," Julian said. "The longer we wait after the shares move, the more time people have to ask questions about the timing. Tobias says fast and clean is the only way this works without someone like Priya Nandan connecting the dots."

Elaine was quiet for a moment, looking down at her folded hands. When she looked up again, her voice was steady. "And you're sure about him? Your brother?"

"I've trusted him with worse than this," Julian said, which was not quite an answer, but Elaine let it go, because there was nothing else to be done now. They were too far into it to turn back, and both of them knew it, even if neither one said it out loud.

"Fine," she said. "Days, then. After launch."

Julian poured two more glasses of wine and sat down across from her, and for a while they did not talk about Daniel or Tobias or any of it. They talked about small things instead, the way people do when they are trying to pretend, even to each other, that what they are planning is not as heavy as it truly is. Elaine laughed at something Julian said about the caterers for launch night. Julian reached across the table and took her hand, and for a moment, watching her smile, he let himself believe that everything after this would be easy. The company. The money. Elaine, finally, without anyone standing in the way.

He did not know that somewhere across the city, a small red light had blinked once inside a quiet lab, and a folder marked WATCH had grown by one more file.

Daniel found the recording two days later.

He had gotten into the habit of checking the WATCH folder every night before bed, a quiet ritual he performed alone in his office with the door locked, the way another man might check the locks on his house before he could sleep. Most nights there was nothing. Small talk. Meetings about caterers and seating charts. The ordinary noise of a company preparing for the biggest night in its history.

That night was different.

He played the twelfth-floor recording twice, then a third time, his jaw tight, his hands still on the keyboard. The audio was not perfect. ORION's microphones had been built for clean conversation in a quiet room, not for catching every word through a door and down a hallway. But enough came through. Enough that Daniel did not need to guess anymore.

Days, then. After launch.

He sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a long time, the office silent except for the low hum of the building's air system. He thought about calling the police. He thought about it seriously, for almost a full minute, imagining what he would say, how he would explain a recording made by a private surveillance system his own investors did not know existed, capturing a conversation that never once said the word "kill" out loud.

It would not be enough. Not yet. A good lawyer would tear it apart in an hour. Days after what? Locked before what window? Every sentence had another meaning if you wanted it to.

He needed more. He needed them to say it plainly, or he needed something even better than words. He needed a way to make them show their hand before launch night, on his terms, in a way that would leave no room for another meaning.

That was when the idea came to him, slow and cold, the way his best ideas always did, built one careful piece at a time.

ORION was scheduled for a full battery of stress tests before launch. Every joint, every motor, every system pushed past its normal limits to make sure nothing would fail in front of four hundred investors. It was routine. Every engineer on his team expected it. Nobody would think twice if Daniel decided to run those tests twice as hard, twice as long, doubling the load on every system to be absolutely certain the robot could handle the pressure of launch night.

Nobody would think twice, because nobody else knew what Daniel now believed. That somewhere between now and launch, his wife and his oldest friend intended to put someone inside that machine. Not literally, not yet, not in a way Daniel could prove. But close. Close enough that when the real pressure came, when the real test began, whoever was closest to ORION when it happened would feel it first.

Daniel closed the laptop and sat in the dark for a long moment, his heart steady, his mind already moving ahead to the next seventeen days.

He was not ready to confront them. Not yet.

But he was ready to start turning up the heat.