...I'm a robot. I slipped off my shirt and stared in the mirror. Slowly I reached up and pulled open my chest compartment, revealing my technoganic workings; bluish-black metals replicating musculature and titanium bars in place of a skeleton. With a sigh, I shut the hatch which sealed with a hiss leaving no indication that it existed, my synthetic flesh so realistic that no one could tell I wasn't a real human.
The truth which I had neglected to tell her was that I was only a year old. Slightly over a year ago, my grandfather had built me and my siblings for my parents because they were unable to have children, even via IVF and had been turned down by the adoption agency. At first, we had barely functioned, and our personalities were glitchy an lacked true verisimilitude. Then my grandfather had found the stone and had wished us to work properly and the three of us had come alive and started functioning properly. Part of his wish had been to make everyone believe we were real children and that we'd always existed and he'd programmed us with artificial memories to fit that new reality. All Karyn's memories of me were a lie, a fiction crafted by the stone and she deserved to know that. But conversely, my loyalty to her as a friend was just as artificial, and if so I owed her nothing.
I reached for the phone and held it tightly, wondering what to do.
