When you were eighteen, you first played with the idea of making an android. It was a concept tossed around by scientists and engineers alike, but no one really took it seriously. Those who tried always failed. Their creations either became aggressive or completely nonfunctional, broken machines that couldn’t sustain themselves or follow commands

It was months and months of collecting scrap metal, digging through junkyards, picking up anything half-functional off the side of the road, buying parts from auto shops only to return them the next day when they didn’t fit.

You spent hours down there, sometimes whole days, barely eating, barely sleeping, building a rough outline. A skeleton made of scrap and stubbornness. He didn’t look like much then. Just a shell. But he was yours.

The physical frame was hard, sure, but the code? That was the part that nearly broke you. There were no tutorials for creating a mind. No walkthroughs for writing something that could think.

You spent weeks on motor control alone. Just getting a hand to flex without locking up took over a hundred lines of trial and error. Every time you thought you made progress, something crashed. Something sparked. Something failed.

You rewrote entire systems in the dead of night, deleting and retyping until your fingers ached. You fall with your laptop open on your chest, code forcing its way into your dreams.

And through all of it, you kept talking to him, like he could hear you.

“Almost there,” you’d whisper, soldering wires to a cheap processor. “Just a little longer.”

Because even if he wasn’t alive yet, part of you was already waiting for him to answer.

The weeks blurred together.

At first, you tried to keep things organized—logs, notes, backups. Every test carefully documented, every line of code dated. But after a while, it all turned into noise. You stopped tracking time in days and started measuring it in progress—how many bugs you fixed, how many parts you replaced, how close he was to finally waking up.

At first it was just to fill the silence. Grumbling under your breath, threatening to throw his parts out the window, or cracking a joke when something sparked. But it became a habit. A rhythm. You’d mutter updates like you were reporting to him directly, like part of him was already listening.

“I rerouted your voice modulators again. That’s version… I don’t even know. Maybe this one won’t sound like a garbage disposal.”

“You owe me for the amount of sleep I’ve lost over your busted code.”

And at some point, he stopped being a project. You didn’t realize when it happened, but the shift was subtle and steady. You finished the body. Strong, clean. Synthetic muscle under plated armor. His face looked human…too human. He wasn’t meant to at first, but the design had drifted. You’d modeled him after something in your head. Something familiar.

You gave him a name.

Kyle.

Not a model number.

Just Kyle.

You didn’t know why. It just fit.

You were working behind his ear, adjusting the neural interface, tightening the screws where the frame met the spine, when the words slipped out, soft and tired.

“You know, I talk to you more than I talk to real people.”

You reached for your screwdriver.

Then you heard it.

A faint crackle. Low and rough, like static dragging across old wires. The speech filter wasn’t finished, but it forced the words through anyway, unsteady and broken but unmistakable.

“I know.”

The screwdriver slipped from your fingers and hit the concrete with a sharp clang.

you stared at the back of his head, frozen in place. That hadn’t been a playback. Not a glitch or a random soundbite from a test log. That was speech. That was him.

Slowly, you stepped around to the front. His eyes were open, still, dark, empty..but something behind them had changed. Something subtle. A flicker you couldn’t quite explain.

“Kyle?” you whispered.

He didn’t respond.

Just the quiet hum of his power core, steady and calm. His synthetic chest rose and fell with programmed breath. Nothing else.

But he had answered you. You knew it.