Protocol Alpha

Noel Oakley was fifty-two years old and had spent the last five of those years eating dinner alone at his own kitchen table, which was the kind of detail a man notices around year three and stops noticing around year four. He ran a small garage two streets off the rail yard, widowed, no kids, a dog named Juniper who slept more than he did. His wife Ruth had been gone since the spring of 2020, and in all that time he had not so much as held a woman's hand, unless you counted the occasional handshake at a funeral, and he did not count those.

So when Val Davis slid into the booth across from him at Murky's on a Thursday night, he figured she wanted help with her car. She had that look. Val was thirty-one now, which still threw him off, because in his head she was perpetually the loud kid from the night class in small engine repair he'd taught eight years ago, back when he still took side work teaching adults who wanted to fix their own junk. She'd been twenty-three then and already talked like she owned the room.

Turned out she didn't want help with a car. She wanted help with a person, sort of.

"You know I build companion units now, right?" she said, after the second beer. "Symbiont Systems. We do synthetic partners. Not the cheap stuff, the real deal, skin and warmth and all of it."

Noel had heard of the company, mostly from a billboard by the highway that made him uncomfortable in ways he couldn't articulate. He said so. Val laughed and jabbed her finger at him like he'd passed a test.

"Good. You should be uncomfortable. That means you're honest, and honest is what I need." She leaned in over the table. "Here's the deal, Noel. We're testing a new touch protocol. The engineers can make it move and talk all day, but we need real human feedback on how the contact actually feels. Not lab data. A regular guy. And I don't mean any offense, but you are extremely regular."

"Gee, thanks," he said.

"Four paid sessions. You sign a thing, you show up, you touch a unit in a controlled way, you tell us what it felt like. You answer questions. That's it. There are rules, strict ones, and nobody is going to ask you to do anything weird or complicated. And it pays better than an oil change, believe me."

You can probably guess what he said, and you can probably guess that he spent the whole drive home telling himself it was just for the money, which it was, mostly. A man gets lonely in ways he doesn't have words for. He told Juniper about it that night. The dog thumped her tail, which Noel chose to take as approval.

* * *

The office of Symbiont Systems sat on the third floor of a converted warehouse in the industrial district, all exposed brick and mismatched furniture, and Noel felt like a work boot in a museum the second he walked in. Val met him at the elevator and walked him past a lounge where a man in a nice suit, forty-five or so, was arguing cheerfully on a phone about quarterly numbers. That was Kyle Barton, she explained, an investor, here for a demo, so everybody was on their best behavior today.

The briefing came from a woman named Adelaide Carlyle, twenty-eight, lead engineer, who had the organized energy of someone who alphabetizes her spices and her revenge. She sat Noel down in a small conference nook with a mug of coffee he hadn't asked for and walked him through the paperwork line by line.

"Four sessions," she said. "Each one covers a different category of contact, and each one stops where it stops. Nothing escalates without you saying yes to it out loud, and the same goes for the unit. You can end any session at any second, for any reason, and nothing bad happens to anyone. Do you understand the shape of that?"

Noel said he did, and the strange thing was that he meant it. There was something steadying about how plain she was about it all, like reading a manual for a machine he actually wanted to own. He signed. Adelaide collected the clipboard and looked at him for one extra beat.

"For what it's worth, most guys fake their way through the first session," she said. "You don't seem like you will. Val said you wouldn't."

"Well, she's known me eight years and I've lied to her maybe twice," Noel said, and Adelaide laughed, one short honest laugh, and led him down the hall to the white room.

The demo room was clean and bright, a single chair in the middle, monitoring equipment along one wall, and standing in the corner like it had been waiting all morning was the unit. Tall, built like a man in his thirties, dark hair, a face that was handsome the way a magazine cover is handsome. The tag on its wrist read Unit 7.

The stillness was the first thing that got to Noel. The thing didn't shift its weight, didn't blink on any rhythm a person would recognize, just stood there and watched him come in with eyes that tracked him smooth as a cat's. He'd rebuilt engines his whole life. He knew what a body sounded like when it was alive, all the little ticks and breaths, and this body had none of them, and his skin crawled up the back of his neck before Adelaide even finished her introduction.

"He's calibrated for calm," she said, patting the unit's shoulder like it was furniture, which, Noel supposed, it was. "Session one is hand contact only. Guided. I'll be behind the glass the whole time, talking you through it. Ready when you are."

He was ready in the way a man is ready to jump off a dock into cold water; he said yes and then stood there dreading it. He sat in the chair. Unit 7 crossed the room, and up close Noel could see the pores in its skin, the tiny flaws engineered in on purpose, and somehow that was worse and better at the same time.

"Take his hand," Adelaide's voice said from a speaker. "Palm to palm. Just hold it there."

The hand was warm. That was the part that undid him a little, the simple warmth of it, a warmth with no fever and no tremor in it, steady as a running engine at idle. Adelaide's voice walked him through the pressure, light, then firmer, then a slow squeeze, and he gave his answers out loud, flat and technical at first, and then less technical than he meant to.

"It's like holding a hand that's paying attention," he heard himself say. "Ruth used to..." He stopped there. Nobody in the room pushed. After a while Adelaide said the session was complete and he could let go, and he did, and his own hand felt strange and loud without the other one wrapped around it.

* * *

Session two was a week later, a Thursday again, same elevator, same white room, and this time the protocol was a hug. A long one, Adelaide said, three minutes minimum, so the sensors could log the adaptive response in the skin. Noel did not tell anyone at the garage where he went on his Thursdays. He'd have made up a doctor's appointment if anyone asked. Nobody asked.

The hug was worse than the hand, in the way that a deeper cut is worse than a shallow one. Unit 7 wrapped around him and the warmth spread across Noel's chest and back, and the skin adjusted as it went, going softer where it pressed against him, warmer along his spine, and somewhere in the second minute Noel noticed the unit had a scent now, faint, like clean cotton and something almost like skin after a shower, where last week there had been nothing at all. They were teaching it to smell like somebody.

He stood there in the arms of a machine that had no heartbeat and felt the whole thing land on him sideways, that five years of nothing had been walked into this room and put on like a coat. He gave his answers. He said the warmth was good. He said the scent was almost too much, in a way he couldn't explain, and Adelaide's voice said that was exactly the kind of thing they needed to hear.

When the timer ended and Unit 7 released him, Noel stayed in the chair a moment longer than the protocol called for. The unit stood back at its post in the corner, still as a coat rack, watching him with those patient manufactured eyes, and Noel had the thought, unwelcome and quiet, that there were two sessions left and he was already counting them.

Val caught him in the hallway after session two, while Adelaide was still in the white room wiping down sensors or whatever it was she did back there, and she had that look on her face she used to get in night class when she'd figured something out ahead of everybody else and was deciding whether to say it. She was thirty-one now, still quick in the way she'd been at twenty-three, still talking with her hands when she forgot to be careful. "So the data's good," she said. "Better than good, actually. The adaptive warmth readings from you are cleaner than from the last three testers combined. Noel, I have to ask. Are you willing to go to the next level?"

He'd known the question was coming. He'd known it since the third minute of that hug, when his own arms had settled on the machine's back like they belonged there. "Yeah," he said, and it came out faster than he'd meant it to, no pause at all where a careful man would have put one. "Yeah, I would. I'm curious." That was the true part, or the truest