My Wife Robot Lover

The First Shock

Julian did not tell anyone about the burning feeling the first time it happened. He told himself it was nothing. Old wiring, maybe, or the shell's rough material rubbing wrong against his skin in the heat of standing still for too long.

It happened on the fourth night, during a short practice run Tobias insisted on, just to be sure Julian could stand steady inside the shell for a full hour without needing to shift his weight or crack the narrow viewing slit open for air. Julian stood quietly in the corner of the old testing bay, arms held straight at his sides, breathing slow and even the way Tobias had coached him, when a sudden warmth spread across his shoulders, faint at first, then sharper, climbing quickly toward something closer to pain.

He gasped, more from surprise than anything else, and shifted inside the shell before catching himself.

"What is it?" Tobias asked from a few feet away, watching a small monitor he had set up to track how long Julian could hold still.

"Nothing," Julian said, his voice tight. "Warm in here. That's all."

"You're sweating already?"

"It's tight in here, Tobias. Hard to breathe sometimes." Julian forced his voice to stay even, though his shoulders still throbbed faintly under the metal. "I'm fine. Keep going."

Tobias studied him for a moment longer, then shrugged and looked back at his monitor. "Ten more minutes. Then we'll call it a night."

Julian stood as still as he could manage through the rest of the test, though twice more the warmth flared briefly against his shoulders and the back of his neck, sharp enough to make him flinch before it faded again. By the time Tobias finally let him step out of the shell, Julian's shirt clung to his back with sweat, and faint red marks had risen on his skin where the metal had pressed against him.

"Rough night?" Tobias asked, packing up his equipment.

"It's an old machine," Julian said, rubbing his shoulder. "Probably just needs better padding before launch night."

He did not mention it to Elaine either, not directly. When she asked, the next morning, how the rehearsal had gone, he only said it had gone fine, that Tobias was being careful, that everything was still on schedule. He told himself there was no reason to worry her over something so small. A little heat. A little discomfort. Nothing that would stop him from doing what needed to be done in four more days.

He did not know that the warmth had not come from old, failing wiring at all. He did not know that three floors above him, alone in a locked office, Daniel Cross had watched the whole rehearsal through a hidden camera, timing a small, careful surge of extra current through the testing bay's old circuits at exactly the moments Julian's body pressed hardest against the shell's inner frame.

It was not enough to genuinely hurt him. Not yet. Daniel had made sure of that, running the numbers twice before he ever touched the controls, careful the way he was careful with everything, unwilling to cause real damage before he understood exactly what he needed to accomplish. But it was enough to make Julian uncomfortable. Enough to make him sweat, and flinch, and wonder, quietly, whether something about this whole plan was less safe than his brother kept insisting it was.

Daniel watched the recording twice more after the rehearsal ended, studying Julian's reactions carefully, filing away exactly how much pressure it had taken to produce exactly how much discomfort. It was cold work, and some small part of Daniel, the part that still remembered hiring Julian six years ago, still remembered trusting him with schedules and secrets and small private jokes over long nights at the office, did not enjoy it at all.

But that part of him had gotten smaller every day since the party, since the phone message, since the calm, steady voice discussing his death like a logistics problem. What remained was colder, and more patient, and entirely focused on four days from now.

While Julian rubbed at the faint marks on his shoulders that night, Daniel drove across town to a small rented storage unit he had leased under a different name three weeks earlier, a precaution he had taken almost without conscious thought, back before he fully understood why he needed it.

Inside, under a plain tarp, stood the beginnings of a second ORION.

It was not finished. Far from it. The frame was complete, built from spare parts Daniel had quietly ordered through three different suppliers over the last month, none of them large enough purchases to draw attention from his own procurement team. The chest cavity stood open, waiting for the same private surveillance system already running inside the public ORION, along with something new, something Daniel had only begun sketching out in his notebook two nights ago.

He wanted this second unit ready by launch night, not to replace ORION on stage, but to stand somewhere close, hidden, prepared to step forward at exactly the right moment if his plan required it. A backup. A second witness, in case anything went wrong with the first. A man who had built his entire career on the idea that good engineering always included a fail-safe was not about to walk into the most dangerous night of his life with only one plan and no way to correct course if it faltered.

He worked for two hours in the quiet of the storage unit, fitting wiring, checking connections, moving with the same steady, unhurried hands he brought to everything he built. When he finally stepped back to look at what he had done, the second ORION stood silent and half-finished under the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, waiting for the last pieces that would bring it fully to life.

Four days, Daniel thought, running a hand along the machine's unfinished shoulder, the same gesture he had used on the very first ORION years ago, back when it had been nothing more than a hope and a napkin sketch.

Four days to finish everything. The recordings. The pressure. The second machine standing quietly in reserve, ready for a night Daniel intended to control down to the smallest detail, no matter what Elaine, or Julian, or Tobias Lang believed they had planned instead.

He locked the storage unit behind him and drove home through empty streets, the same way he had two weeks earlier after installing the hidden camera, his hands steady on the wheel, his mind already moving ahead to the next careful step in a plan eleven years of engineering discipline had taught him how to build.

Elaine was already asleep when he got home, or pretending to be, he could not always tell the difference anymore. He undressed quietly in the dark and slid into bed beside her, staring up at the ceiling the way he had every night for weeks now, his mind too full of numbers and timing to settle easily into sleep.

He thought about Julian, standing hidden inside a metal shell built for a machine, sweating and flinching under a heat Daniel himself had chosen to send through those old wires. He thought about how easy it would be to stop there, to let the discomfort do its work slowly over the next four days, wearing Julian down until he cracked and told Elaine, or Tobias, or anyone, that something felt wrong about the whole plan.

But easy was not the same as certain, and Daniel had learned a long time ago, building machines that needed to work exactly right the first time in front of a room full of investors, that certain was the only thing worth aiming for when the stakes were this high.

Four days. He turned onto his side, away from Elaine's quiet, even breathing, and closed his eyes, running through the plan one more time before sleep finally, mercifully, found him. The recordings were ready. The second ORION was close. And somewhere across town, a man who believed he had found the perfect hiding place was slowly starting to learn that nothing at Cross Robotics escaped Daniel Cross's attention for long, not even the machines he had built to be invisible.