I was making myself sick with the life I was living. There was no excitement whatsoever in it. But I did nothing to change it: I hated my life, yet I kept at it. There I was, too: obligatory lunch break at one for one unpaid hour exactly, eating a three-pound meal deal in my sticky leather chair, pinned behind my desk like a bug in a glass case. I despised my colleagues and I despised my life, but this wasn’t because I despised myself. Quite the opposite: I knew my own value, which made me angry, but I didn’t know what to do with this anger. I had nowhere to put it. I was prone to internal fits of rage, in which I envisioned myself, machete in hand, hacking through those stupid window decorations and into my fellow bots, as a collective punishment for our collective surrender. In my frustration, in my madness, the girl’s serene compliance to her schedule reached out to me. It lit a spark of hope at a time when I needed it desperately. Her tightly regulated routine struck me as necessary: not a default response to lack of stimuli or a dull inner life, but a deliberate decision.

Survival: she had it down. She was born for it. It wasn’t hard to imagine her as a small child, paying the same undivided attention to each action in her day, slotting wooden shapes into their correct places or directing a plastic spoon to her own mouth. As is the case, sometimes, with young children, she had the air of the expert about her, yet no pretension, and this was simply because she excelled at being normal. She was better at it than most members of human society. I could tell. Her normal life, unlike mine, unequivocally had meaning. She had, I realized, a long-term plan.

It took me days to work out how I felt. Then, one day, I finally got it. I was jealous. And a little aroused. The two feelings added up to one nauseatingly intense, physical sensation, which I eventually had to admit was desire.

I began keeping track of her movements. I quickly realized that her schedule never changed: 9 a.m., 2 p.m., 4 p.m., 4:30 p.m. Soon, my observations became more detailed as I grew hungry to discover more. She always wore the same scarf; a lucky charm, I assumed: a token of someone’s affection – her mother’s, I thought – that she’d packed to take to college. And later, as the weather grew harsher, a pale woollen coat joined the scarf, and yet she always kept her fingers interlocked in the thick cable pattern, even when there wasn’t a wind. It seemed to me she was protecting herself from the world.