Residency

Fifty-year-old Adam is a man who used to have something like a career, and now only has dreams of writing a novel. He lives in a cheap motel with a rejected android named Cass who overheats when she thinks too hard, and a phone AI named Pip who speaks her emoji names, like "smiling face with three hearts."

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 something better. 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 sometimes produces an unanticipated, brutally honest fourth thought.

When he falls behind on rent and gets hit with a $150/week electric surcharge for her power usage, his father offers him the spare bedroom — on the condition that he ditch “the robot.” Meanwhile Pip, in her attempt to care, calls his father and leaves a voicemail that only causes more problems.

A darkly humorous, philosophical novella about a man who tries to design the optimal partner by continually editing her identity file — and slowly realizes it's himself he needs to optimize.

Written for the armchair philosophers, the lonesome-hearted, and anyone who has wondered whether caring is usually just a performance based on programming — and if that might sometimes be enough anyway.