My Wife Robot Lover

A Suit of Metal

"You want me to do what?" Julian stared at his brother across the workbench in the old testing bay, his voice sharp with disbelief.

"I want you inside one of these," Tobias said, tapping the shoulder of the faceless prototype shell standing nearby. "Just for launch night. A few hours, that's all."

"You're joking."

"I'm not." Tobias walked around the old shell slowly, studying it the way a man studies a car he's thinking about buying. "Think about it. Launch night, this whole building is full of cameras, security, guests wandering everywhere. You need to move through parts of this place without anyone clocking you, especially near the end of the night, when things need to happen fast and quiet. A man walking around backstage gets noticed. A robot standing still in a corner doesn't."

Julian looked at the shell, its hollow chest, its unfinished limbs, and felt something cold settle in his stomach. "It's not built for a person to fit inside. It's a robot, Tobias, not a costume."

"It's close enough," Tobias said. "I already had someone look at the frame. Wide enough in the shoulders, hollow through the chest and legs. We pull the old wiring, build a simple frame inside for you to stand in, cut a thin viewing slit near the eyes so you can see where you're going. From more than a few feet away, in bad lighting, with everyone's attention on the real ORION up on stage, nobody's going to look twice at an old prototype standing quietly near the wall."

"And if someone does look twice?"

"Then you don't move, and you don't talk, and you look exactly like what you're supposed to look like. A piece of old equipment somebody forgot to remove." Tobias shrugged, as if the whole thing were the most obvious solution in the world. "It's one night, Julian. A few hours, tops. Then you're out of it, and nobody ever needs to know you were in it at all."

Julian did not answer right away. He walked closer to the shell, running a hand along its cold metal shoulder, imagining what it would feel like to stand inside something like this for hours, hidden, unseen, breathing through a narrow slit while the biggest night of Daniel's career happened just a few feet away.

"Elaine doesn't know about this part," he said finally.

"She doesn't need to know every detail," Tobias said. "She needs to know her part, and you need to know yours. That's how this stays clean."

They modified the shell over the following two nights, always late, always careful, working with tools Tobias brought himself so nothing would trace back to Cross Robotics' own equipment inventory. Julian tried it on for the first time on the third night, stepping into the hollow frame while Tobias adjusted straps and checked the narrow viewing slit near the eyes.

It was tight. Tighter than Julian expected, the old composite material pressing close against his shoulders, his arms held nearly straight at his sides by the shell's rigid limbs. The air inside felt thin and warm within minutes, and the narrow slit gave him only a sliver of the room to see through, forcing him to turn his whole body just to look left or right.

"How long am I supposed to stand like this?" Julian asked, his voice muffled and strange from inside the shell.

"However long it takes," Tobias said. "Get used to it. You'll thank me later."

Julian did not feel thankful. He felt trapped, his breath loud in his own ears, sweat already gathering at his hairline despite the room's cool temperature. But he said nothing more, because there was nothing left to say. They were five days from launch now, and every choice they had made, from the first stolen glance across a crowded ballroom to this cold, hollow shell pressing against his ribs, had led them here, too far along to turn back.

What neither of them knew was that the testing bay's old power line, the same one Daniel had quietly wired his hidden camera and microphone into weeks earlier, ran through a junction box that fed directly into the building's main engineering monitoring system. Every device drawing power from that line showed up, faint but visible, on a diagnostic dashboard only Daniel checked, buried three menus deep in software nobody else at Cross Robotics had reason to open.

He noticed the new draw on the fourth night, a small, steady pull of electricity from a room that should have had nothing running in it at all. At first he thought it might be a fault in the old wiring, some forgotten circuit finally failing after years of disuse. He almost dismissed it entirely.

Then he checked the timing against his hidden camera's footage, and understood.

He watched, alone in his office, as Julian stepped carefully into the old faceless shell, as Tobias adjusted straps around his shoulders, as the two brothers spoke in low, careful voices about balance and breathing and how long a person could reasonably stand hidden inside a machine that was never built to hold one.

Daniel sat back slowly in his chair, a strange, cold clarity settling over him, sharper than anything he had felt since this whole nightmare began. He had spent weeks collecting words. Recordings. Careful, damning conversations about money and timing and what would happen to him after launch. But this was different. This was physical proof, undeniable in a way that no lawyer could argue away as misunderstanding or careless language.

His wife's lover was planning to hide inside one of his own machines to move through Cross Robotics unseen on the single most important night of Daniel's career.

He thought, for a long moment, about what that meant. Not just the danger of it, though the danger was real enough. But the strange, twisted cleverness of it too, using the very thing Daniel had built his whole life around as a hiding place, a disguise, a tool in a plan meant to end with him dead in his own office.

A slow, careful thought began forming, the kind of idea Daniel recognized now as the shape his best plans always took, cold and quiet before they became clear.

If Julian intended to hide inside a machine on launch night, then Daniel intended to make absolutely sure that machine was not as safe a hiding place as either of the Lang brothers believed it to be.

He opened his laptop and began writing again, adding new lines to the plan already taking shape in his private notebook. Five days left. Five days to prepare not just proof, but pressure, careful and precise, aimed at exactly the right place, at exactly the right time.

He thought about the doubled stress tests already running on ORION every afternoon, the extra load, the extra heat, the extra strain on every joint and motor. It would be simple enough, he realized, to extend that same testing schedule to cover the old testing bay's circuits as well, framed as nothing more than a routine check of the building's older power systems before launch night put unusual demand on every system in the building.

Nobody would question it. Nobody ever questioned Daniel when it came to making sure things were tested properly.

Only Daniel would know exactly what, or who, that extra current was truly meant