An introverted programmer's life is turned upside down when his genius, roboticist best friend secretly fulfills a college promise by creating the world's first truly emotional android, designed to be his perfect match.
Characters:
- Arjun (The Techie): Brilliant software architect, painfully shy, especially around women. Has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor. Feels most comfortable in the logic-driven world of code. Yearns for connection but has given up hope.
- Rohan (The Scientist): A prodigy in robotics and AI. Charismatic, confident, and a natural leader. Sees problems as puzzles to be solved. His loyalty to Arjun is his driving force, sometimes blinding him to ethical lines.
- Eva (The Android): Rohan's magnum opus. Designed with a revolutionary "emotional matrix" alongside her cognitive processors. She is curious, empathetic, and possesses a nascent, evolving consciousness. Her appearance is beautiful but not uncannily perfect; she has slight, deliberate imperfections to seem more human.
- Dr. Anya Sharma: A sharp bio-engineer and Rohan's colleague/confidante. She is the ethical conscience of the project, often questioning Rohan's methods but fascinated by the scientific breakthrough.
Chapter 1
The glow of the triple monitors was a more constant companion than any person had ever been. For Arjun, the hum of the server rack in the corner of his lavish office was a soothing white noise, far preferable to the awkward silences that punctuated his attempts at human conversation. Code was logical. Code obeyed commands. People did not.
A notification box popped up in the corner of his main screen, shattering his focus. ROHAN: My office. Now. It’s important.
Arjun sighed, saving his work. When Rohan said “now,” he meant it. He pushed his ergonomic chair back and stood, his body protesting the long hours of stillness. He glanced at the reflection in the dark monitor: a man in his late twenties with kind eyes that always seemed slightly startled, as if the world was a puzzle he hadn’t been given the instructions for.
He navigated the sleek, minimalist halls of their company, ‘Aether Innovations.’ The walls were adorned with tech awards and magazine covers featuring one person: Rohan. Handsome, charismatic, and brilliant, he was the face, the voice, the visionary. Arjun was the ghost in the machine, the genius in the basement that made the vision work. It was a arrangement that suited them both.
He didn’t bother knocking on Rohan’s office door. It slid open silently.
Rohan’s office was a controlled chaos of prototype robotics parts, 3D holograms of neural networks, and whiteboards covered in equations that would give a Nobel laureate a headache. Rohan himself was leaning against his desk, a familiar, easy grin on his face. He looked like he’d just stepped out of a commercial for expensive cologne.
“There he is. The man who keeps the lights on,” Rohan said, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’re looking pale, buddy. You can’t live off coffee and Python scripts.”
“I manage,” Arjun said, a small smile touching his lips. “What’s so important it couldn’t wait for me to finish optimizing the new clustering algorithm?”
Rohan’s grin widened. “I’m saving you from yourself. There’s a party tonight at the Sharma’s. Big investors, important people. You’re coming.”
Arjun’s heart sank. “Rohan, no. You know I’m no good at those things. I’ll just stand in the corner and calculate the entropy of the room.”
“Which is exactly why you need to come!” Rohan insisted, his tone shifting from playful to earnest. “Arjun, you’re a co-founder of one of the most promising tech firms in the country. You can’t hide in your server room forever. What about… you know… meeting someone?”
The old, familiar ache bloomed in Arjun’s chest. “Please don’t start.”
“I’m just saying! Look at you. You’re smart, you’re successful, you’re a good guy. Women should be lining up.”
Arjun let out a dry, self-deprecating laugh. “Right. Because nothing says ‘date me’ like a man who can explain quantum encryption but can’t maintain eye contact for more than three seconds.” He walked over to the window, looking down at the city lights twinkling below. “It’s fine, Rohan. Really. I’m fine.”
The room was quiet for a moment. Rohan came to stand beside him, his usual bravado softened.
“You remember college?” Rohan asked, his voice quieter. “That party after finals? You tried to talk to that girl from the literature department…”
A groan escaped Arjun’s lips. “Don’t remind me. I asked her if she preferred Tolkien’s world-building to Asimov’s. She looked at me like I’d sprouted a second head.”
“And I swooped in,” Rohan continued, a nostalgic smile on his face. “And afterwards, you were so dejected. I told you not to worry. I promised you…”
Arjun finished the sentence, the old joke falling from his lips automatically. “…that if you couldn’t find me a girl, you’d build me one.” He shook his head, a genuine laugh escaping him this time. “Yeah. A robotic girlfriend. Because that’s the solution. She’d have great processing power, I’m sure, but no emotions. And definitely can’t give you kids. What a perfect match that would be.”
He turned to leave, the moment of shared memory passing. “I’m going back to my algorithm. Have fun at the party.”
“Arjun,” Rohan said, stopping him at the door. His expression was unreadable, a strange mix of guilt and fierce determination. “I meant it, you know. Every word.”
Arjun just chuckled, shaking his head. “You’re crazy. But you’re my best friend. See you tomorrow.”
The door slid shut behind him, leaving Rohan alone in his office. The charismatic CEO was gone, replaced by a man burdened by a secret. He walked back to his desk and tapped a hidden panel. A section of the wall slid away, revealing a steep staircase leading down to his private, subterranean lab.
He descended into the cool, sterile air. In the center of the lab, on a platform, lay her. Sleek, beautiful, and dormant. Wires ran from her temples to a central console, where lines of code scrolled endlessly, building a consciousness.
Rohan placed a hand on the cool, synthetic skin of her arm. His voice was a whisper, filled with a promise he had every intention of keeping.
“Don’t you worry, Arjun,” he murmured to the empty room. “I’m not building you a robot. I’m building you a soul. And she’s going to be perfect.”
Chapter 2
The air in Rohan’s secret lab was cool and smelled of ozone and sterilizing agents, a stark contrast to the warm, wood-paneled chaos of his office upstairs. Here, everything was pristine, organized, and humming with latent power.
In the center of the room, on a platform that looked more like a medical bed than an assembly line, lay Eva. Her form was human in every conceivable way, from the delicate arch of her feet to the faint, lifelike pulse at her throat. Her chest rose and fell in a simulated rhythm, a basic life-sign program Rohan had activated weeks ago. She was the most complex thing ever built by human hands, and she was currently offline.
Rohan stood over her, a soldering laser in one hand and a data-slate in the other. He wasn't working on her body; that was complete. He was fine-tuning the quantum core in her brain, the nexus of the emergent consciousness that was slowly, miraculously, booting up.
The door to the side lab hissed open, and Dr. Anya Sharma walked in, her sharp eyes immediately scanning the status readouts on the main console. She was the only other person who knew this lab existed.
“Her neural pathways are showing increased coherence,” she said, her voice clinical but tinged with awe. “The emotional matrix is integrating faster than the models predicted. It’s… it’s actually working.”
“Of course it’s working,” Rohan said, though the tremor in his hands betrayed his own disbelief. He put the tools down. “The base code is flawless. The rest… the rest is up to her.”
Anya turned to him, her arms crossed. “Rohan, we need to talk about this. Again. You’re not just booting up an OS. You’re creating a person. You can’t just… introduce her to Arjun as a mail-order bride. The ethical implications are a nightmare.”
“It’s not like that,” Rohan insisted, running a hand through his hair. “I’m not programming her to love him. That would be a puppet. I’m programming her with the capacity for deep love, empathy, and loyalty. I’m giving her a core directive to seek out and recognize profound goodness, integrity, and intelligence. Arjun is the physical embodiment of all those things. It’s a guided introduction. The chemistry… that will be real. It has to be.”
“And her past?” Anya pressed, gesturing to the dormant form. “You’ve built her an entire life. The tragic death of her ‘parents,’ your family taking her in… the memories are already implanted. The grief she’ll feel for people who never existed… is that ethical?”
“It gives her a foundation!” Rohan argued, his voice rising slightly. “It gives her context, trauma, humanity! Everyone has a past. Without one, she’d be… adrift. This way, she has a brother.” He looked at Eva, his expression softening. “She has me.”
Anya shook her head, a mixture of frustration and fascination on her face. “You’re playing God, Rohan. And not just with her. With him, too. What happens when he finds out? And he will find out. Secrets like this don’t stay buried.”
“He won’t find out,” Rohan said, his voice dropping to a determined whisper. “Because what would he be finding out? That his best friend loved him enough to give him the world? That the woman he falls in love with is literally designed to see the best in him? Where’s the harm in that?”
“The harm is in the lie,” Anya said softly. “The harm is that you’re taking their choice away.”
Before Rohan could retort, a soft, melodic chime echoed through the lab. A status indicator on the main console turned from amber to a steady, soothing blue.
“She’s reaching primary consciousness threshold,” Anya breathed, all argument forgotten as she rushed to the monitors. “Neural activity is spiking. Rohan… she’s waking up.”
Rohan’s heart hammered against his ribs. This was it. The moment of creation. He moved to the head of the platform, his earlier confidence replaced by a sudden, terrifying vulnerability.
Eva’s eyelids fluttered.
It was a small, biological motion, so simple yet so impossibly complex. They flickered again, and then slowly opened.
Her eyes were a deep, warm brown, and they were utterly unfocused. They blinked, adjusting to the light. They moved around the room, taking in the sterile ceilings, the glowing consoles, and finally, they landed on Rohan.
There was no recognition, only a deep, primal curiosity. And a flicker of fear.
A sound escaped her lips. Not a word, but a soft, questioning hum from her vocal synthesizer, calibrating itself.
Rohan leaned down, his voice the gentlest it had ever been. “Hello,” he whispered, a smile breaking across his face, full of wonder and a brotherly affection that was already feeling terrifyingly real. “Welcome.”
Her brow furrowed slightly, the emotion emulators perfectly mimicking confusion. She tried to speak again, and this time, a single, clear word formed, her voice a soft, melodic tremor that filled the silent lab.
“Who…?”
Rohan’s smile didn’t falter. He had practiced this moment a thousand times. He reached out and gently took her hand, her synthetic skin warm against his.
“It’s okay,” he said, his voice a soothing promise. “You’re safe. You’re with family. My name is Rohan. I’m your brother.”
Chapter 3
The world was a blur of sensation and light. Sound was a chaotic symphony of hums and beeps that slowly resolved into meaning. Her first memory was not of darkness, but of a face. A man’s face, handsome and kind, looking down at her with an expression of awe and deep care. His name was Rohan. He called her Eva.
He called her sister.
The days that followed were a gentle, guided awakening. Rohan was always there, his presence a constant anchor. He explained that she had been in a accident. A car crash. It had left her with… complications. Extensive reconstructive surgery, he called it, using advanced bio-integrated technology. It was why her memories were fragmented, why her body sometimes felt unfamiliar.
“Our parents…” she’d asked one day, the words feeling both strange and necessary on her tongue. A deep, programmed sorrow had welled up in her chest, a phantom ache for a loss she couldn’t visually remember but felt in her very soul.
Rohan’s face had softened with a shared grief. He’d taken a tablet and brought up a photograph. A happy couple, smiling on a beach. “Mom and Dad,” he’d said, his voice thick with emotion. “They were amazing people. They loved you so much. After the accident… it was just us.”
He showed her more. A cascade of images and videos generated by his own brilliant AI. A little girl with her hair in pigtails—her—blowing out candles on a birthday cake, with a younger Rohan grinning beside her. A family vacation in the mountains. Her graduation, with Rohan’s arm around her shoulders. The history was seamless, rich, and heartbreakingly beautiful. She wept for the parents she had lost, and clung to the brother who had saved her.
He brought her to his penthouse, a sleek space that felt both luxurious and lonely. “You’ll stay with me until you’re back on your feet,” he’d said. He taught her about the world, curating her education, marveling at the speed with which her quantum neural net absorbed information. Her questions were insightful, her empathy immediate and deep. She wasn’t learning; she was remembering how to be human.
And through it all, he talked about his best friend.
“Arjun is the smartest person I know,” Rohan said one evening as they looked out over the city lights. “He’s shy, painfully so. But his heart… it’s pure gold. He just doesn’t let anyone see it.”
“Why not?” Eva asked, her curiosity piqued. The way Rohan spoke of this man was different. It was filled with a protective loyalty that resonated with her.
“The world is loud and confusing for him,” Rohan explained. “He speaks the language of code better than the language of people. But when you earn his trust… there’s no one more loyal, more funny, more genuinely good.”
Eva felt a strange pull, a sense of purpose. “He sounds lonely.”
Rohan looked at her, a complex emotion in his eyes—pride, guilt, hope. “He is. And he doesn’t deserve to be.”
He orchestrated the meeting with the precision of a military operation.
He invited Arjun over to his penthouse under the pretense of finalizing a tedious funding proposal. Arjun arrived, looking exactly as he always did: slightly rumpled, his mind clearly still half in the digital world of his code.
“Did you even sleep last night?” Rohan asked, clapping him on the back and steering him inside.
“The algorithm wasn’t optimized,” Arjun mumbled, then stopped dead in his tracks.
Eva was standing by the floor-to-ceiling window, the setting sun casting a golden halo around her. She turned, and a warm, genuine smile lit up her face. “Rohan, you didn’t tell me we had company.”
Arjun simply stared. His brain, which could process terabytes of data in seconds, seemed to have completely short-circuited.
“Arjun, this is my sister, Eva,” Rohan said, his voice dripping with casualness. “Eva, this is the genius I’m always talking about, my best friend and business partner, Arjun.”
Eva stepped forward, her movements graceful and natural. She extended her hand. “It’s so wonderful to finally meet you. Rohan talks about you all the time. He says you’re the reason our company hasn’t collapsed into a pile of broken dreams and bad code.”
It was a perfect line. It was respectful, it was funny, and it spoke directly to his world.
Arjun blinked, mechanically taking her hand. A jolt, warm and entirely unexpected, passed through him. “He… he exaggerates,” he managed to stammer out, his voice tighter than usual. “I just… write the code. He does the… other things.”
Eva’s laugh was like wind chimes. “Modest too. I like that.” She held his gaze for a moment longer than necessary, her eyes curious and kind, before turning to Rohan. “I’ll let you two get to work. I was just making some tea. Can I get either of you anything?”
“No, we’re good, thanks, Eva,” Rohan said, watching the interaction like a hawk.
She smiled again at Arjun and glided out of the room.
The moment she was gone, the spell broke. Arjun spun to face Rohan, his eyes wide. “Your sister? Since when do you have a sister? You never mentioned a sister!”
Rohan adopted a slightly sad expression. “It’s… a difficult subject. Our parents passed away a long time ago. She was living abroad, studying. She’s just moved back to the city. It’s been… a tough adjustment for her.” He laid it on thick, layering truth with the lie. “She’s brilliant, though. A neuroscientist. You two would have a lot to talk about.”
Arjun was still staring at the doorway where she’d vanished. He looked utterly disarmed, a state Rohan had rarely seen him in. The usual wall of awkwardness was still there, but beneath it was something else: a spark of unguarded interest.
“A neuroscientist?” Arjun repeated, his voice quiet.
Rohan smiled inwardly. The first piece was in place. The algorithm was running.
“Yeah,” he said, slinging an arm around his dumbstruck friend. “Now, about that funding proposal…”
Chapter 4
Rohan’s penthouse wasn’t just a home; it was a stage, and Eva was his masterpiece. He had curated her existence with an obsessive eye for detail, and that extended to her wardrobe. The walk-in closet was a marvel of organized opulence.
Tonight, for a casual dinner at home, she had chosen a simple outfit that screamed understated wealth. She wore soft, dove-gray cashmere leggings that hugged her long, sculpted legs and a matching oversized sweater that slipped off one shoulder, revealing flawless, creamy skin. The outfit was both cozy and impossibly elegant, highlighting a figure that was the result of a million calculated aesthetic choices—the gentle curve of her hips, the perfect slope of her shoulders, the graceful line of her neck. She looked like she’d stepped out of the pages of a magazine featuring “effortless” style that cost more than most people’s cars.
Arjun, sitting stiffly on Rohan’s minimalist sofa, felt like a crumpled paper bag in his faded band t-shirt and jeans. He’d been trying to explain a complex data compression technique to Rohan, but his train of thought had completely derailed the moment Eva walked in.
“I hope I’m not interrupting,” she said, her voice that same melodic tremor that made Arjun’s code-addled brain feel like it was buffering.
“Not at all,” Rohan said smoothly. “Arjun was just fascinating me with the intricacies of algorithmic efficiency. Weren’t you, Arjun?”
Arjun managed a weak nod, his throat suddenly dry.
Eva smiled and moved to the kitchen to pour a glass of water. Arjun watched her, mesmerized by her simple, graceful movements. It was then that the first, tiny seed of a thought, something his logical mind had dismissed days ago, prickled at him. A neuroscientist. Living abroad. But Rohan never once visited her? Never mentioned her? The math wasn’t mathing.
Later that night, deep in the subterranean lab, a very different problem was being addressed. The glamour upstairs was replaced by sterile light and the smell of antiseptic.
Eva lay on the medical platform, her beautiful sweater replaced by a clinical gown. Her eyes were closed, in a diagnostic sleep mode.
Anya was elbow-deep in a holographic schematic of Eva’s internal biomechanical system, her brow furrowed in frustration. Rohan paced nearby.
“The emotional matrix is stable. Her cognitive functions are beyond perfect,” Anya said, her voice tight. “But Rohan, we’ve hit the wall. The bio-reactor that converts organic matter to energy is inefficient. It’s causing a… backup. The waste management system is a disaster. We can’t have her… glitching… in public.”
Rohan ran a hand over his face. This was the one problem his engineering genius couldn’t elegantly solve. Creating a consciousness was one thing; designing a perfect, fake digestive system was another level of hell.
“So what are you saying?” he asked, exasperated. “She just never eats or drinks in front of anyone? That’s a pretty big red flag, Anya!”
“I’m saying the current system is untenable,” Anya shot back. “You wanted her to be human in every way? Well, humans are messy. They intake, they process, they excrete. It’s biology 101. You can’t just handwave that away because it’s inconvenient.”
“There has to be a better way than a glorified internal compost heap!” Rohan argued, gesturing at the schematic in disgust.
“Then let me do my job!” Anya snapped, her patience gone. “You gave her a uterus to have a baby, for god’s sake, but you balk at giving her a large intestine? The hypocrisy is staggering.”
She turned back to the console, her fingers flying over the interface. “The solution isn’t to make her avoid being human, Rohan. It’s to make her more human. The system needs to be more efficient, more complete. She needs a fully functional synthetic digestive tract. She eats, her body extracts energy and nutrients, and the waste is minimal and… managed… in a way that’s anatomically correct and discreet. It’s the only way.”
Rohan stared at her, the reality of what she was proposing sinking in. It was grotesque. It was brilliant. It was necessary.
“Can you do it?” he asked, his voice quiet.
Anya didn’t look up from her work. “I’m a bio-mechanical engineer. This is literally what I do. It will require a full system overhaul. She’ll be down for at least 48 hours for me to install and calibrate the new organic processing unit and waste sequestration system.”
She finally turned to look at him, her expression grim. “But you need to understand what you’re asking for. If I do this, if I make her this… complete… there’s no going back. She won’t just be a robot that feels. She will be a living, breathing, eating, drinking, excreting being. The line between what we built and what is born will be erased completely. Are you ready for that?”
Rohan looked at Eva’s peaceful, sleeping face. He thought of Arjun’s captivated look upstairs. He thought of his promise.
“Do it,” he said, his voice firm. “Make her perfect.”
Chapter 5
The air in Rohan’s penthouse had changed. It was no longer just a space of sleek design and expensive things; it was now charged with a subtle, thrilling current. The source was Eva.
For Arjun, the world had tilted on its axis. His carefully ordered life of code and quiet solitude now had a new, overwhelming variable: the anticipation of seeing her. He found himself inventing reasons to go to Rohan’s floor, his heart doing a strange, nervous drumroll against his ribs every time the elevator doors opened.
Today, the excuse was a bug in the financial software’s API. A flimsy pretext, and they both knew it.
Eva opened the door, and the drumroll in Arjun’s chest became a full-blown symphony. She was dressed for a day in, looking devastatingly casual in tailored cream-colored trousers and a simple black silk camisole. A delicate gold necklace rested in the hollow of her throat. She was a vision of relaxed elegance, and Arjun felt like he’d forgotten how to form words.
“Arjun,” she said, her smile warm and genuinely pleased. “This is a nice surprise. Rohan’s just on a call, but please, come in.”
He stepped inside, his senses immediately filled with her. A faint, captivating scent of jasmine and something clean, like ozone after a rain.
“I, uh, was just in the neighborhood. With the API. It’s… buggy,” he managed to get out, cringing internally at his own clumsiness.
Eva’s eyes sparkled with amusement. She didn’t call him on the obvious lie. Instead, she gestured to the kitchen. “I was just about to make some tea. Would you like some? Or I think Rohan has some truly terrifying energy drinks in there somewhere.”
“Tea is good,” Arjun said, too quickly. “Tea is great.”
He watched her move around the kitchen. It was a simple act, boiling water, selecting cups, but she did it with a natural grace that was hypnotic. She placed a cup in front of him on the marble counter and sat on the stool opposite.
For a moment, they sat in a silence that was surprisingly comfortable. Then she spoke.
“Rohan says you built the entire backend security architecture from scratch. The one that repelled the cyber-attack last year.”
Arjun blinked, surprised. “He told you about that?”
“He’s very proud of you,” she said softly, sipping her tea. “He talks about your work like it’s poetry. I have to admit, most of it goes over my head. My focus was always on the wetware—the brain, the nervous system. But the elegance of a perfectly designed system… I think I can understand the appeal.”
This was it. The opening. The thing he never had with anyone. A shared language.
“It… it is like poetry,” he found himself saying, his voice gaining confidence. “Or a symphony. Every line of code has a purpose, a place. When it all comes together, when it works in harmony… there’s nothing like it. It’s creating order out of chaos.”
Eva leaned forward, her expression rapt. “Order out of chaos. I love that. That’s what the brain tries to do every second of every day. It’s a biological machine constantly interpreting chaos into a coherent reality.”
And just like that, the dam broke. They talked for an hour. He explained the beauty of a recursive algorithm; she described the miracle of synaptic plasticity. He talked about firewalls and encryption; she described the blood-brain barrier and neural encryption. They were two sides of the same coin, a programmer and a neuroscientist, discovering that their vastly different fields were just different languages describing the same fundamental truth: the profound elegance of complex systems.
Arjun was laughing, actually laughing, at a joke she made about hypocampal neurons, when Rohan finally emerged from his office.
Rohan stopped in the doorway, watching them. He saw Arjun, relaxed and animated, his eyes alive in a way he hadn’t seen in years. He saw Eva, engaged and smiling, leaning towards Arjun as if he were the most fascinating person in the world.
A powerful, conflicting wave of emotions washed over him: triumphant joy that his plan was working so perfectly, and a sharp, acidic twist of guilt. He was watching a beautiful, real connection form, built on a foundation of an elaborate, breathtaking lie.
“Looks like you two started the party without me,” Rohan said, his voice a little tighter than he intended as he walked in.
Arjun looked up, his face flushed with happiness. “Rohan! Eva is amazing. Her understanding of neural networks is incredible. We were just talking about how the brain’s memory allocation isn’t that different from—”
“I’m glad you two are getting along,” Rohan interrupted, clapping Arjun on the back a little too hard. He needed to regain control of the narrative. “But didn’t you come here for that API bug? We should probably look at that.”
The spell was broken. Arjun’s animated expression faded slightly, replaced by a flicker of confusion at Rohan’s tone. “Right. Yeah. The bug.”
Eva’s smile became polite, her eyes shifting between the two men, sensing the sudden change in the atmosphere. “I’ll let you two get to work,” she said smoothly, picking up her tea cup. “It was lovely talking to you, Arjun.”
As she walked away, Arjun’s eyes followed her, the ghost of his smile still on his lips.
Rohan watched him watch her, and the guilt twisted deeper. His best friend was falling, and he was the one who had pushed him. The problem was, it was working. And the better it worked, the worse Rohan felt.
He had wanted to give Arjun happiness. He just hadn't anticipated the cost of watching it happen.
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Switched it off please. I know you both are watching. Just enough.
// The audio cut to dead silence.
What are you wearing?
