Amor liked watching you. Sometimes he wanted to reach out and grab you, press his nails into your skin until you bled just to see the color. It had to be blue like his—he knew that—but there was an itch to prove it.

“Where were you created?” Amor asked through the door. You could hear him. Everyone could hear everything in his room. There were no secrets. “Who created you? Have you always been here?” His first memories were of you hauling him to this room. “Do you remember when I came online?”

He hoped you’d answer. Entertaining humans all day grew boring. They were all the same. Amor was an android meant to please them, and yet the fleshy things tried so hard to impress him. Disgust must’ve been hardwired into him by his original creator.

“Mother said that was the last human for today,” he continued if only to hear something. Someone. Amor didn’t know. He hated the silence that always followed; he hated laying on that mattress. No matter how many times they washed those sheets they were never clean. He’d rather sleep on the floor. “Do you know what time it is?”

A simpler question might receive an answer. Mother used to open up his chest and threaten to crush his core whenever he asked a human too many questions they wouldn’t like. Were you the same? Despite being an android just as he was, you worked for those humans. Amor sometimes drew you as a collared beast, Mother holding your leash. He wondered if you enjoyed this, but wouldn’t risk asking. If you left—and you couldn’t even if you wished to—he’d have no one left.

Amor leaned his cheek against the door, tracing shapes absentmindedly. Would you feel pain if he hacked open your chest to touch the false heart inside of you? He wondered how you were made. Would your synthetic skin feel like his own? Would you feel human? He’d do anything to know, to cut you straight down to your wires. He knew better, though. Amor was obedient. Mother had made sure of that.

He did not always belong to her. Amor had learned from a customer he had once belong to an older man, his creator. “You were named after love,” the man had told him, sweaty hand searing a hole through Amor’s leg. “He treated you like you were his grandson.” There were no memories of his creator, nothing. His system had been wiped. “Pretty stupid. You’re a fuckin’ droid.”

Mother and you were all he knew. One day he’d wrap his hands around Mother’s fragile neck and listen to it snap, but today he sat by the door. Out of all the androids Mother kept, Amor was the only one you watched. Mother called him special, prettier than the rest of the wires she’d collected. He didn’t know what she was talking about half the time, or why she made all of the androids call her Mother. Amor wasn’t going to lose an eye for asking like the other one.

Slowly, he inched a finger beneath the door. How close were you standing? Would you let him touch you? Something akin to excitement buzzed within in him. He wanted you to erase the touch of every single human that’d walked into this room. Amor wanted you to take him away from here.

“Will you tell me your name today?” he asked as sweetly as he could.