LAURENCE FIRST MET his girlfriend, Serafina, at a robot fashion show, with robots modeling human clothing and human models wearing robot fashions, like mechanical lingerie. The event happened at a garagey artspace somewhere south of South of Market, with a gunmetal trough full of artisanal vodka. Laurence had come this close to mistaking Serafina for one of the models—her cheekbones and oval face, her lustrous skin and shiny red/black hair were that amazing—but he’d realized just in time that she was one of the robot makers instead. Serafina’s “model” was a steel sylph, with ball-and-socket joints that let it strike a pose, pivot, talk with its delicate hands. Laurence had helped to build battle bots in college, but never artificial supermodels, and he’d managed to say something witty enough about the difference between the two that Serafina had friended him on MeeYu.

They met for coffee a few days after that, and the coffee date morphed into a dinner date, and the third time they hung out it was tacitly a sleepover; Serafina had a toothbrush and condoms in a pouch of her vinyl shoulder bag, which was Twiki from Buck Rogers. Pro tip: Do not think of “beedi beedi beedi” while you’re having sex for the first time with the most beautiful woman alive, or you will have some explaining to do (even if your motion, rocking the bed frame, does have a sort of “beedi beedi” rhythm). After that, they hung out every other day, held hands on the street, skipped through traffic, whispered in each other’s ears in public, clung together skin to skin every moment in private, swapped gene prints, traded odd little gifts, and wondered how soon was too soon to say “I love you.”

Laurence had soon found that letting people know he was part of Milton Dirth’s Ten Percent Project was a superfast ticket to getting laid. Among the crowd who worshiped Milton, Laurence was a rock star. About fucking time, really. And yet there was still no way he was in Serafina’s league. She was perfect. He was damaged goods. He never forgot this disparity for a second.