High-end. Silicone. Some kind of next-gen formless doll situation, the sort of thing that exists on the bleeding edge of personal technology where people spend thousands of dollars on lifelike companions with warming elements and AI integration.
Except I spent a hundred dollars, and this thing looks like it cost more to design than my entire workshop.
I’m rationalizing. I know I’m rationalizing. The shape in the crate doesn’t look like any silicone product I’ve ever seen. It looks like something that’s choosing to hold still.
I reach out and touch its arm.
The surface is warm.
Warm the way skin is warm, the way something alive is warm, and my fingers freeze against it because I was expecting the cool, inert smoothness of silicone or resin or whatever space-age polymer you’d use to manufacture a personal wellnessdevice.
This feels like touching the inside of someone’s wrist. There’s give to it, a softness over something denser underneath, like muscle beneath skin, and the texture is slick and smooth and softly yielding in a way that makes every hair on my arm stand up.
Then something happens in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
The iridescence ripples outward from where my fingertips rest, a slow pulse of color that moves across the entire body like light through water, teal bleeding into violet bleeding into gold. The warmth intensifies just slightly, just enough that my hand twitches but doesn’t pull away.
And then it moves.
The arm I’m touching flexes. A slow, liquid contraction, like a muscle stretching after long disuse.
The fingers of its hand, which I now realize are longer than human fingers and not quite the right number, curl and uncurl like a fern frond testing the air.
I yank my hand back so fast I knock over a jar of mica powder on the worktable behind me. It hits the concrete floor and shatters, sending a plume of rose gold into the air between me and the crate, and for a surreal half-second I’m standing in my own glitter bomb watching a full-sized humanoid shape wake up inside a shipping container.
“No,” I say.
It keeps moving. The whole body now, slowly, the way someone stirs from a very deep sleep.
The torso expands and contracts. The head lifts, and where a face should be there’s a smooth, featureless surface of shifting color, teal and violet pulsing in a rhythm, like breathing.
“No,” I say again. “Absolutely not.”
I’m gripping the edge of my worktable with both hands. Mica powder is settling on my apron, my arms, the floor, catching the fluorescent light and making everything look like a craft emergency at a fairyconvention.
The thing in the crate is sitting up. It’s sitting up. The foam cradle dimples and reshapes around it as it moves, and the motion is liquid and unhurried and so smooth it barely looks like movement at all, more like a time-lapse of something growing.
It unfolds out of the crate in a single, fluid motion, and when it stands, it’s tall. Eight feet, maybe more. Broad in the shoulders, tapering at what I’ll call a waist, with limbs that are proportioned almost right but have that uncanny fluidity of something with no bones inside.
It takes a step forward, and its foot meets the concrete floor with a soft, wet sound, and the mica powder on the ground parts around it like it’s being gently pushed aside.
I reach behind me for the crowbar without looking, and my hand closes around it, and I hold it between us like a woman who hasn’t thought through what a crowbar would do to something made of liquid.
It stops moving.
It stands there, four feet away, enormous and faceless, its colors pulsing across its surface until it settles into a slower rhythm.
Patient.
The word from the listing.
The word that made me stop scrolling at 1 a.m.
It waits.
I’m holding a crowbar up like I’m about to beat the hell out of it, and it simply waits.
“What,” I say, and my voice comes out remarkably level for someone who is two seconds away from a psychotic break, “are you?”
