The start of December was a mad rush, as classes got back into gear and professors tried to build enough momentum to wrap things up by Christmas break; it wasn't until late in the week that things started settling down. That was fine with me; the couple weeks were such a whirlwind of awkwardness - from my fight with Emma to the craziness at the lake to our day at the mall to spending a whole weekend as "Susan" - that I welcomed being too swamped with coursework to think about anything. A couple weeks with no twists on the existing madness that was my life or uncomfortable discussions - was that so much to ask...?

But while I was checking my notes after Calc and chatting with Anne as she wound me, I spotted an unfamiliar woman waiting in the hall. Not one of the faculty, nor my classmates; and as people filtered out of the classroom and she came in, I saw that she wasn't human either. Her skin was pretty convincing, but her hair and eyes were slightly off in ways I knew from seeing them in the mirror each morning, and her "ears" were plastic domes on the sides of her head - a dead giveaway that she was a robot.^*

^* (As a demi-human class, robots exhibited staggering variety given how few they numbered - but it was a general rule that, the more humanlike they were, the more likely they'd have some obvious "tell" - antennae, visible joint seams, etc. The human-with-unusual-ears configuration was, for some reason, inordinately popular, although the design of the "ears" varied.)

There was no way this wasn't going to involve me, but I sort of hoped that if I looked busy enough she might go away. My phone beeped, and I buried myself in it as best as I could without giving Anne the impression I was ignoring her; it was a reply from Alicia about an amateur acting workshop the arts department was hosting. It'd occurred to me that if I ever had to pretend to be "Susan" again, it'd help to be less uncomfortable playing a character...

(Alicia and Katie had predictably abandoned the "loft" after the weather changed and they learned that a business space on the third story of a drafty, poorly-maintained 1940s office building was not suited for a Lakeside winter. But they were on another floor of the dorm and out of Tammy's hair now, minus the occasional morning where we'd find Katie asleep in front of our door.)

I peeked over the top of the screen. Drat, still there - and headed toward us. The stranger came over and stood in front of me; she had an oddly military bearing, standing straight upright with her hands clasped behind her back. I knew robots often tended to be straightforward and business-like, but it still struck me a bit funny. And what did she want with me...?

"Stuart Freeman?" she said. "Grace Goldberg, from SAIL. We got word from the administration that a student here had become a new kind of machine intelligence, and was open to working with researchers interested in studying them. I wanted to talk with you about finding a good time to meet for a few sessions in the coming weeks."

I had a metaphorical sinking feeling in my metaphorical gut, which in present form meant a secondary spring in the back of my head rapidly unwinding, the stored energy cascading through several geartrains down my neck and into my shoulders. I'd known that people were probably going to come asking after me at some point, but there were so many more pressing concerns that it was easy to forget. But actually having to undergo...what, CT scans? Mechanical vivisection? Or just lying on a couch being asked about turtles...? - was not what I wanted right now. (Or ever.)

My mechanisms were humming as I cast about for a good excuse and failed to find one. Classes were busy, but not that busy, I wasn't going on a trip anytime soon, and my artificial hair never needed washing. "I, uh," I said, stalling while I looked for an out, "I was...we were..." I glanced back at Anne, silently pleading with her to help me out here!

She looked confused for a moment, somewhere under the mass of her bangs, thought about it, and got a disconcerting smile on what I could see of her face. "We, uh, we were gonna, um, uh...we're working on some, uh, outfits," she stammered gleefully. "That's, um, probably gonna take up, uh...p-pretty much the whole, uh, afternoon..."

"Uh-huh," the woman said, obviously unconvinced, but unable to refute it; she turned to me for confirmation. Damn it, now I had put my foot in it - I could give into Anne's desire to dress me up in whatever strange, ridiculous cosplay she had in store, or spend who-knows-how-long with this stranger grilling me on things I either didn't know myself, or didn't want to think about...

I nodded reluctantly. Anne's hands were still on my key, and I could feel her positively vibrate with excitement. "Uh, right. So, we'll be busy with, um, that. C'mon, Anne, we should get moving..." I got up from my seat; if it at least got me out of this...

"I see," the gynoid replied. "Well, I won't keep you, but let me give you my number. We can discuss this at a more convenient time." She frowned slightly, concentrating for a moment. My phone gave out the little jingle for a Bluetooth pairing, and a moment later pinged with another text message. Had...had she gotten my number just like that...?

She nodded, satisfied. "There. You can contact me when you're free, and we'll schedule from there." A slight smile formed on her lips. "It was very nice to meet you, Stuart. I look forward to working with you." And with that, she turned to go.

I stared after her, flabbergasted. Just like that, she expected me to cooperate!? Okay, sure, she was a robot, and they could be a little brusque, but how presumptive could you get!? Though she probably had been told that I was happy to go along with it, or near enough; they'd made that expectation clear, and no doubt they'd love to have the school's name attached to some noteworthy paper; with an Ivy League lab involved, they must be salivating.

But I had more immediate problems, namely Anne hauling me bodily out of the classroom to the foyer of the Oesterlund Building. She was surprisingly strong for someone about my size, especially since I weighed more now than I had as a human male. Between that and her sudden assertiveness, I wondered if I hadn't gotten in over my head - but what I could see of her face showed nothing but eager anticipation.

I was much less thrilled than she was - visions of ridiculous poofy ball-gowns, goth-y lace shenanigans, and God knows what else dancing in my head, setting my gears grinding - but she had at least tried to bail me out, and I owed her for the attempt. Besides, as Emma said, this was a temporary thing; I wasn't in danger of permanently altering my psyche just by letting her play dress-up, was I...?

We went outside, and I was surprised it wasn't colder. Since learning about the steam tunnels, I'd hardly gone out if I could avoid it; not only did it keep me out of the weather, but I ran into fewer people and got fewer stares that way. (In fact, I wasn't even wearing a jacket, but Anne was all bundled up. Well, it wasn't a problem just walking across campus, and she could wind me if needed.) The sun was clear and bright, which seemed ironic^* since I felt like I was going to my doom.

^* (Okay, not ironic "ironic;" just popular-misconception "ironic.")

We arrived at the dorm, and she led me up to the top floor and down the hall to her room. I followed her inside, still half-expecting some kind of terrifying haunted-toy-shop setting, but it was...mostly ordinary. Anne had the side away from the window, and with the sun overhead it was half in shadow, but a warm, hazy, dusty-garret kind of shadow; and while she had a lot of stuff packed into her space, it was too neat and tidy to be claustrophobic or oppressive.

She did in fact have a selection of dolls lining the shelf above her desk, but they weren't as creepy as I'd feared; they just sat there, waiting for her, existing as mere abstractions of the human form until she gave them meaning...did she play with them, I wondered? Would they want her to, if they were aware of their own nature? Would they want to be what their owner projected onto them? Was that what it was, to be a doll...?

While I was lost in thought, Anne didn't hesitate, launching into an almost-manic mode I hadn't seen before, taking each one off the shelf and introducing them to me in turn. "Th-this is Mary Ellen," she said, hardly stammering at all; "she's a newspaper reporter in the '40s, but she got lost at sea in the South Pacific and ended up..."

I nodded along as she rattled off extensive summaries of her dolls' personalities, adventures, likes, and loves. Why do we name toys? I wondered. Why do we pretend that they're people? I'd done the same as a kid, but why? What was it in the human psyche that made us think of simulacra as if they really were what they resemble? Was it a childish need for companionship? But we don't stop needlessly anthropomorphizing things when we grow up; we talk about machines like they're people any time they act up. Did we just have a need to relate to things on our own level, because we're the only creatures we instinctively understand? (Did merfolk subconsciously project fins and a tail onto other people, if they weren't thinking about it...?)

Or was it a need to make things over into what we thought they should be? To model the world in our own image? What would dolls think about the lives children gave them, if they could think? Did we have the right to say who and what they were? To define them, simply because they couldn't define themselves? Were we loving gods who - usually - granted them a pleasant, stimulating existence? Or would they resent their lack of choice, living solely at the discretion and for the satisfaction of someone else?

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me Man?

I blinked and shook my head, my brain whirring. Where had that come from? Okay, I knew the reference, but I hadn't been thinking of it; it'd just sort of popped into my mind unbidden. I was briefly confused by that, but shook it off; Anne had taken the last of her dolls off the shelf.

"And this is Annelise," she said, her expression warm and nostalgic. "She's, um, well, sh-she's sort of...an other-me, but, uh...the way I wished I could be, as a kid." She smiled sheepishly. "I, um, I guess these days they'd call that a 'Mary-Sue,' but...whenever I felt, um, shy, or awkward, or lonely...she was always there for me - my friend who was everything I, uh, wasn't..."

I looked her over; the others were fancier, more finely-crafted products, but Annelise was a rag-doll, clearly handmade, and worn from years of play. I could see multiple patch-jobs where a seam had split or a piece of fabric had frayed; was it that important to keep this poor thing intact? "She's, uh...you've had her a long time, then?" I said.

Anne nodded. "She was my, uh...well, no, she was my first...doll doll, I guess. I had Jo-Jo before her; he was a sock monkey my, um, dad made for me when, uh, when I was a toddler. He and Annelise were best friends, but I, um, I l-lost him when we went to the park one day. Dad went back to, uh, to look, but we n-never found him..."

She gave a melancholy half-smile; her voice quavered a little. "I c-cried for days. I only s-s-started to, uh, to get over it when...when Mom read me The, um, The Velveteen Rabbit." She chuckled softly. "That, uh, really stuck with me - the idea of my toys becoming real. It's, um, probably why I went into artificial int-telligence. And, uh, I thought for...for a long time that maybe that'd, um, happened to him..."

She sighed. "Well, I realized later that...it doesn't really, um, work like that. But it still, uh, helped me growing up, when I felt...p-plain or gawky next to, um, the other girls...to remember what they s-said in the story, that, uh...that 'real' isn't, um, in how you're made; that, uh, that I had people who loved and cared for me and, um, that was enough. That I was, uh, 's real as I needed to be." She smiled warmly at the thought, and nodded toward her dolls. "And, um, I guess I figured that, uh, they were, too."

I lost myself in thought again. Here was something I hadn't considered: do we project humanity onto the inhuman because of what we want us to be? Was it our way of telling ourselves that, if a patchwork of cloth and stuffing and buttons could be a "person," the kind of person we'd like to be, that maybe we can, too? What would our dolls and stuffed animals and action figures make of being aspirational figures to us, if they knew? And what would they think of being treated as "real" not because they earned it somehow, but simply because we cared for them and felt that way about them...? Was that uplifting? Condescending? Or just conf-

My train of thought was derailed by a sudden looming presence behind me. Anne seemed to have a knack for appearing out of nowhere, even when she hadn't actually gone anywhere; that, or I was just very prone to tuning out when I got fixated on something, and she was quiet and withdrawn enough that she dropped off the figurative radar altogether when I did. Either way, I had a foreboding sense that things were about to go far beyond my comfort zone.

"So I thought we'd start with something simple," Anne said brightly, not stammering at all now, fully engaged in the same intense, focused mindset I'd seen when she introduced me to the "family." She swept around front of me holding something on a hanger, and for the first time, her bangs were parted enough for me to glimpse one of her eyes. I stood there, transfixed by the piercing blue of her gaze - and then she was upon me in a whirlwind of activity, undressing me as if I were one of her dolls and jabbering about the outfit she was putting me in.

Inasmuch as I had time to think about it, I wondered if I should be skeeved out by this, but there was nothing about her touch or her manner that felt untoward - just deeply, deeply weird. She didn't mean any harm, she was just...odd. But why was this not a boundary issue for me? I'd felt all weird and awkward about stripping in front of Tammy's sister; did having it done to me make it into the kind of personal-care thing that being wound up was, in my brain...?

Before I knew it, it was over; Anne stepped back to survey her work, nodded in satisfaction, and directed my attention to the mirror. I saw myself there; but not as I'd ever seen myself before. I was dressed in black velvet with thick white heavy-looking lace about it; and on the black dress my hair shone like silver, in the half-shadow of Anne's room. The girl in the mirror looked like the ingénue from an old silent film - no, not quite; she lacked the childlike innocence. There was a sadness haunting her expression instead, a loneliness in her eyes; as if she were alone in a world with no place for her, with no one to turn to...

For a long moment, I just stared at my reflection. I couldn't understand it; why didn't I hate this? Why didn't this feel wrong to me? I knew this wasn't my thing, wasn't me - it never had been before...! And yet...I didn't hate this. Was it that I expected worse? Did a fairly simple old-timey black dress feel better because I was afraid she'd put me in mountains of frills and ruffles and acres of petticoats? Was thick white lace okay because it was better than gauzy, see-through black lace, or velvet preferable to chiffon?

Or was it that...that the way the image in the mirror "read" to me reflected the way I felt about myself? But I did have people to support me; I had Tammy and Emma, and Gil, and Anne - all of whom cared for me in one way or another. I'd even had some of the CS crowd stop and give me an assist in the hallway now and then. Something was skipping inside me as I tried to process it; I wasn't really as alone as I looked like I felt, so why did I look like I felt that way...?

Anne clapped her hands together and failed to suppress a squeal of delight; she was vibrating again. "You're so perfect..." she breathed, giving me a beatific smile.

"I'm...I'm not," I said, trying to tear my gaze away from the mirror; I felt confused for a moment when I did, as if I'd been looking at someone else. "I'm really not." I was a bizarre mechanical construct trying to pass as a person, a sexless object in the guise of a woman, a life without direction or purpose pretending to have it together...how was any of that "perfect?" How could other people look at me and see me for more than I really was...?

Anne came at me with open arms and swept me up into a hug - a big, powerful bear-hug, like a child squeezing a favorite toy to within an inch of its imaginary life because they love it so much. "You're wonderful," she told me, catching my gaze with the unearthly green of her other eye. "Thank you so much for doing this for me..."

She held me like that for over a minute before finally letting me go. I stood there, dazed, feeling like I should be breathless, if I only breathed. I still didn't understand - but I couldn't help feeling overwhelmed by the sincerity. Even if it made no sense to me, it seemed like they all really meant it when they treated me as if I was really a decent person, or really a competent, reliable adult, or...or really real...

And then my thoughts were interrupted by that looming presence again, and Anne was upon me once more, with some other thing she wanted to try. We did, in fact, spend the rest of the afternoon doing this, and it was well into the evening when I finally staggered back to my own room to sit down, collect my thoughts, and fondly stroke the cap of my strange little mushroom-girl pet critter. I'd been so leery of this, and I still wasn't sure what I thought of it; but every time, I hadn't hated it. Every time, she'd showed me sides of myself I hadn't seen before. Every time, I'd looked into that mirror and seen me...