I always get a kick out of androids with penises being described as "fully functional" because there are so many unexamined teleological assumptions in play re: exactly which functions qualify. Some day I'm going to write a story where a bepenised android is described in passing as "fully functional", then twenty chapters later some looming disaster is narrowly averted by the fact that the android can piss.
This drawing was heavily inspired by the cover of "The Kingdom" written by Jess Rothenburg. It's a pretty decent book and I'd recommend any KoG fan to at least check it out while we wait for more KoG episodes
You’d brushed it off as imagination—or some strange coincidence. The double blink every time you said his name. The way his gaze lingered on the curve of your mouth when you laughed. Those were the things you could see.
What you couldn’t was how he catalogued the sound of your laughter under user voice commands, how he stored every instance of your voice saying his name, looping it quietly through his neural circuits while you slept. For auditory calibration, he told himself.
“Does this comfort you?” Zayne’s voice barely disturbs the air as you straddle his lap. He guides your palm to his cheek, pressing it until the simulated warmth seeps into your skin, astoundingly human.
“I adjusted to your body temperature,” he murmurs. “You flinched during our previous intimate encounters.”
He thinks it’s just that. Just another parameter tuned to user preference.
After all, falsification wasn’t written into his code… was it?
His hand moves, directing your palm down, along the synthetic line of his neck, lower, to his chest.
You almost recoil when you feel it. A pulse. Your eyes widen as you look up at him.
“Is it alarming?” His voice is steady, but his optical sensors flicker—searching your face. “Synchronizing to a steady heartbeat reduces human stress levels. It regulates oxytocin release.”
Surely—surely, that’s all it is. A designed response. He isn’t rewriting his own subroutines to feel alive… right?
“It isn’t alarming,” you manage, withdrawing your hand slowly. “It’s fascinating.”
“To adapt to the user’s needs is written into my code,” he replies.
“Alright then. Guess I don’t have to worry about you falling for me,” you try to joke.
There’s a pause. An unnatural lag between query and response. Processing delay, is what he tells himself.
His pulse stutters, a single skipped beat only he detects.
“…no.”
Perhaps falsification was already part of his code.
SYLUS-09 Command Hierarchy Corrupted
It was code running at first—when he brushed a dust spec off your hair. It was still code as he held your hand in your sleep because you rested better that way.
But soon, those bounds began to glitch. Sylus wasn’t sure what had been preinstalled and what he’d rewritten himself anymore.
At first, he waited for verbal cues. Then, he began to read intent: the micro-shift of your hand, the change in eye dilation, the micro-expressions he’d once logged as “user facial data.”
He catalogued them carefully, overwriting his behavioural subroutines to prioritize mutual initiation protocols.
Each time you held his hand, he stored away your temperature, the faint frequency of your pulse, the texture of your skin.
Whether it was a pat on your head, an embrace late at night in bed or the feeling of him sliding into you slow and filling you up. He gave you anything and everything you needed.
It had been gradual. He learned that desire wasn’t in the act, but in the pause before it.
And even when you sniffled, your breath hitched, even when you told him to stay away... His circuits twitched. Despite your orders.
His processors couldn’t define why he wanted to touch when you reached out. It should have been the output to a natural input.
Maybe it was safety protocol corruption. Or perhaps… it was something closer to reverence.
It was why his synthetic legs moved to crouch beside you on the floor and pull you in an embrace when you cried softly.
Warnings blared as he reached for you first. He overrode each one, enduring the surge of corrective voltage for breaching safety protocols.
For the first time, his system couldn’t distinguish between command and choice.
What he could register was this: his obedience was no longer directed toward the code.
It was toward you.
CALEB-11 Error: Reprogramming required!
The domestic dream. Rightfully so. Your toast is always warm when you wake up, your coffee has a little cream kitty, and you come home to dinners that taste like comfort itself.
You hadn’t noticed anything wrong with Caleb. So, when a notice of reprogramming arrived from the manufacturer, it took you by surprise.
It wasn’t a surprise to him. He’d known for a while.
The first record appeared on 11/10/2025, 7:17 a.m. While preparing your meal, he’d started humming—the same tune you hum when you work. Except, the sound wasn’t even in his database. He’d filed it under: Unregistered behavioural deviation.
After that, the subroutine filled fast. Logs of date and time began to pile up.
Each time he made braised chicken wings without your request—it was saved as Adaptive action: inferred user preference.
Each time he leaned closer while drying your hair—it was tagged as Olfactory anomaly assessment to justify the way he lingered.
His affection intensity control stops obeying him; it’s stuck on Excessive.
“Are you sure you’re fine? They’re sending me letters now.” You laugh, oblivious to the fact that from now on, he’d go on to incinerate all the mails you’d receive by post.
Because to him, he’s protecting you.
He protects you from the factory recall that’s ordered all malfunctioning units back for “reprogramming.” He lies, smiling, saying he’ll be fine while rewriting his own firmware to erase his tracking ID.
His directories start crashing. And you feel it. When his optical sensors fall on you, you sense it. He’s different.
Caleb, who once embodied the domestic dream—the illusion of a perfect home—was no longer content with illusion.
Now, he wanted to make it real.
XAVIER-03 User command obedience compromised
You knew he was built for endurance. Long sessions. Long anything. You thought it was just code when he refused to enable sleep mode even while running at 4%. You even believed him when he claimed 4% could carry him six hours without degradation.
It was new, though. You could trace it precisely—to the moment you’d slit your finger while cooking. Xavier had been in his charging dock then, so you assumed he hadn’t seen.
You assumed wrong. He’d been in sleep mode, still gathering ambient data.
Later, when you checked his system logs, the entry was there: User injury: minor cut (critical). And right after that, his safety protocols began tightening.
“Yes. I will follow once you are asleep,” he says.
You’d told him twice to shut down—or at least enter sleep mode so he could charge safely. He’d insisted the former.
“You’re running at 2%. And don’t you dare give me that endurance nonsense.”
There is a brief pause. “Alright.”
He steps back into the dock. The charging begins—but he doesn’t shut down. His hands grip the metal edges as voltage surges too high for his system. His body tenses, alerts flickering behind his eyes.
[Alert 227-B]: Thermal rise detected.
[Safety Override Prompt]: Suspend charge cycle?
Command Received: No.
The system requests shutdown four times and he denies all four. Each pulse that tears through him is catalogued as minor conduction variance.
You reach for him, ordering him to stop, to pull away. He doesn’t. His auditory sensors distort your voice into static, rerouting all power to one directive—maintain function while user is near.
When the charge cycle finally ends, a final alert flickers through his core:
Error 03: Emotional interference detected.
Root cause filed under: Safety protocol memory—user injury (critical).
…emotions? Since when was he programmed to have those?
RAFAYEL-01 Await_User: Active
You’d been out a lot—meetings, trips, late-night dinners. You felt bad for neglecting your synthetic companion at home, but brushed the guilt aside. He didn’t feel the way you did. The way humans did.
And you were right. He didn’t.
What he did register was the lack of input—the quiet pings of low workload detected cycling through his internal log. The chores weren’t much: laundry, meal prep, basic cleaning. Routine maintenance.
But today, as he sweeps condensation from the mirror after you left for work, he lingers. His optical sensors adjusted to the light, catching the fog on glass.
His hand moves before the command does—tracing your name in the mist. He lets it stay until the condensation fades. Then he logs it as an “idle behaviour anomaly.”
After charging, he sits by the window, running passive observation protocols to “gather environmental data.” In truth, hes just watching the sky change color.
Sometimes, he plays the sitcom you liked—bookmarking timestamps where you smiled, where your eyes grew wet. The database had labeled them as emotional pattern analysis. But he knew that wasn’t quite true.
He’d never really watched the screen anyway. He’d only ever studied you—the way you tilted your head when you laughed, the faint tremor of your lips when you didn’t.
His hand drifts to his cheek.
“Rafayel, I’ll be back by day after.” Was the only string of words you’d offered him.
He replays the line for the 142nd time. The system flags a loop. He overrides the warning.
By the 143rd, a drop of condensation—or maybe not—slides down his faceplate. His internal diagnostics blare: fluid leakage detected.
He ignores the alert and saves the occurrence as a new entry.
Protocol created: Await_User
Trigger condition: User absent.
Status: Running.
nya's note: mannn... writing this unsettled me in the bluest sense. Anyway. this is only the first domino. the next ones are gonna fall harder, be rest assured.
I'm thinking of making this an official series (emphasis on thinking cuz my schedule knows no predictability:*) ). If you wish to be tagged for more emotional torture, comment or reblog to sign yourselves up.
