I was sitting with my parents, watching a movie in their room. Strange, even then, because I never usually spend time with them like that. But something about the moment felt… still, almost too still, like the air had weight.

After a while, hunger gnawed at me. I told myself I’d just run downstairs, grab something quick, and come back. But the second I stepped toward the stairs, something shifted in me. It wasn’t just nerves. It was that cold, primal feeling, the one that whispers don’t go down there. My chest tightened as though the house itself didn’t want me to move. I’d felt it before, whenever I had to cross through darkness—but this was heavier. Almost like the dark had noticed me first.

I forced myself down, flicked on the lights, and tried to shake it off.

And then I froze.

Through the wide glass wall looking into the garden, I saw him. My father. Or at least, something that wore his shape. He was outside, standing stiffly, too stiffly. His arms jerked at strange angles, his legs moving with the mechanical rhythm of something pretending to be human. His face—expressionless, slack, like it didn’t quite remember how skin should rest.

My instincts screamed at me. I bolted upstairs, the air clawing at my throat, and burst into the room where my parents were. But before I could get the words out—before I could even breathe—it appeared.

Something climbed onto their balcony. The door had been left open to let in the night air, and through that opening, it slid inside.

It wasn’t my father anymore. It wasn’t anything human.

My real father jumped to his feet, lunging at it, fists slamming desperately, but it was useless. His blows landed like feathers against steel. The thing hardly reacted, each movement of its body fluid yet rigid, like a nightmare caught between bone and machine.

Panic swallowed me whole, but my eyes caught something glinting beside the bed. A fork. Left behind on my father’s nightstand from an earlier meal. It felt pathetic in my hand, like a child arming themselves with a toy against a monster. But there wasn’t time to doubt.

I launched forward, stabbing into the thing’s neck—high, where I thought it mattered most.

And it worked.

The creature spasmed violently, collapsing to the ground. The fight drained from it all at once.

But then it shifted.

Before my eyes, its body melted, reshaping, until what lay before us was no longer a monster, but a child. A girl.

She couldn’t have been older than ten. Her hair was a pale ashy blonde, straight until the ends curled into delicate spirals. Her skin was unnaturally smooth, almost porcelain, gleaming faintly under the weak light. Her eyes, though—those were wrong. Black, fathomless, swallowing the whites entirely, yet framed by long golden lashes. She wore clothing too fine, too deliberate—an ornate child’s coat cut like a dress, its fabric a dark denim shade that didn’t belong to any store I knew.

We didn’t breathe. None of us.

Time passed in silence as we tried to understand what had just happened. And then we did. She wasn’t a girl at all. She was a machine. An android.

Somehow, my strike had pierced what we later understood was its core—the system that let it alter its form. And what we saw now was its base body. Its first self.

Eventually, impossibly, it stirred again. It blinked, or at least simulated the motion, and sat up. In this form, she wasn’t dangerous—fragile almost, incapable of the violence I had seen moments before.

But she wasn’t harmless. No machine like that ever could be.

My parents whispered arguments late into the night. Reporting her would bring the government down on us. They would say we had stolen something, interfered with their property. It was safer—for them—to keep her.

So we did.

She told us her name. A.I.L.Y.A. Not a name, but an acronym—the mark of the company that had built her. The government’s creation.

But when I looked at her, sitting in silence with those endless black eyes, the curls of her pale hair falling like wires unraveling, she wasn’t just an acronym. She was Ailya.