“You can give me a name if you wish,” Wu Fan says, smoothing down his t-shirt. “I am yours, after all.”
“Oh,” Tao says. “Oh, of course. Hmm, what to call you…” His eyes roam his room (his “living room”, Wu Fan recognizes from pictures), stopping when he nears a rack of DVDs. He picks the first one up and looks from it to Wu Fan, eyes narrowed. “Kristen Stewart….Kris. Kris? Kris.”
“Kris,” Wu Fan repeats. Understanding floods his brain cavity. “My name is Kris.”
Tao smiles, “How cool. Kris it is, then. It’s alright if you have two names, though. No one’s going to hang around you enough to use them both.”
Kris isn’t sure what he means; his comprehension is still at a painfully rudimentary level at such an early stage in his existence. Tao gives Kris a tour of his apartment, telling him he has free range over everything just “don’t make a mess.”
“A mess,” Kris repeats over and over, searching his database. A state of disarray. Chaos. “I will not make a mess.”
“How very cool,” Tao says again, eyes on Kris’ face. “I’d think you were human if it weren’t for your eyes.”
“My eyes?”
“They glow,” Tao explains. “Not by a lot. It’s a little weird but everything else about you is pretty lifelike. I think I’ll have a lot of fun playing with you.”
Within the first two weeks of living with his new owner, Kris learns Tao sees him one way and one way only. He’s a doll; a plaything; something to pick up and put down when it’s not longer interesting. He keeps Kris in his apartment the entire day, locking up all the doors and windows before he departs for school in the morning.
For the better part of his day, Kris does nothing. His motherboard tells him he should sit and wait for Tao to come home, and then they can resume their “boyfriend-like” activities. As previously stated, though Tao doesn’t treat Kris in the way Kris would like, he still makes an effort to interact with him.
Kris has picked up the habit of “blinking” from Tao. He understands humans need to “blink” in order to keep their eyes moist from the elements. Kris doesn’t think he has any moisture in his body but, in an effort to appear more human like, he blinks and, when prompted, inhales and exhales. Only the WF 112 model has this power to mimic the human body. Being human has nothing to do with just looking like one. In an effort to feel more at peace with himself, (and maybe…maybe sway Tao a little to his side), Kris blinks, inhales, exhales and eats when he can.
Tao assumes correctly when he mentions Kris is just a giant computer but he is wrong, and Kris knows it, when he says Kris can’t be taught.
“If you’re a computer, you only follow commands, right?” he says one day.
“I can learn too,” Kris says.
