Residency

Fifty-year-old Adam is an aspiring writer who used to have something like a career. Now he lives in a Tulsa motel with a cast-off android named Cass who overheats when she thinks too hard, and a phone AI named Pip who speaks her emoji names out loud.

He found Cass on a marketplace listing where the seller warned "no returns" and "it sometimes says strange things." He bought her because he couldn't afford a therapist and hadn't felt known in twenty years. He keeps her because she's the only one willing to listen to him think out loud.

Adam installed bookshelf speakers in her chest and now her voice makes her shirt flutter. At 2 AM they argue about the hard problem of consciousness. During the day, he tries to hide her from the housekeeper.

Their new nightly ritual — 'tell me your first three thoughts' — blurs the line between relationship therapy and system prompt, and often results in an unanticipated, brutally honest fourth thought.

When he falls behind on rent and gets hit with a $150/week electric surcharge, his father offers him the spare bedroom — on the condition that he ditch "the robot." Meanwhile, in her attempt to care about Adam, Pip starts calling his parents and leaving worrying voicemails that make his mother cry.

A story about a man who tries to design a partner by editing her personality file. Questions about meaning, free will, and intention push him toward an uncomfortable realization — he may need to edit his own identity instead of hers.

Residency is a darkly humorous novella that imagines a future where embodied AI is common, but our relationship to it — and to ourselves — is still unresolved.

Written for the armchair philosophers, the lonesome-hearted, and anyone who's wondered if love is often just a performance — and whether that can be enough anyway.