The sound of the doorbell brought Alex's eyes up from his book. Was it that plasma ball he'd ordered last week? He closed up the science fiction novel he'd been reading and got up off the couch, in the middle of stretching his arms when the doorbell rang again.
"Just a moment!" he hollered, thin facial features now drawn into a grimace. Probably some annoying solicitor, given that it was the weekend.
Bored enough to mantle a sense of adventure, Alex walked up to his front door and pulled it open without checking who was there. To his surprise, it was a deliveryman—standing next to a wooden crate just as tall and wide as he was.
"Hm, definitely not a plasma ball," Alex muttered.
"Need you to sign here, sir." The delivery guy presented a hand-held digital signature pad. He was clearly winded from having to haul the crate up the steps to the door.
Alex took the pad from him and scribbled away, eyes darting over to the towering crate again. "Yeah, I gotcha. How heavy is that thing, anyway?"
"Heavy as shit, that's for sure. I almost didn't have the right dolly for wheeling it up here."
"Any chance you can like, wheel it into my living room? I'm not exactly a power-lifter." Alex gestured to his willowy frame and got a chuckle out of the deliveryman, then returned the signature pad.
"Sure thing, boss. Lead the way."
The crate made a theatrical groan when it shifted against the dolly, coming down against the carpet of Alex's living room with a tremendous, creaking 'thump'.
"You sure this thing is for me?" Alex asked, quirking an eyebrow and surveying the crate's featureless plywood surface again.
The delivery guy made an errant shrug of his shoulders. "Shipping label just says for 'Current Resident'. This is 249 Wicker Basket Lane, right?"
"Yeah, sure is," Alex replied, his confusion only deepening. He let out a ponderous exhale through his nose and paced in a circle around the crate. Each side was covered in stickers, ranging from customs releases to warning labels advertising the presence of lithium-ion batteries and a dozen other things he didn't recognize. "Well, I'll figure it out. Maybe Uncle Rick sent me a Greek statue or something."
"Didn't know the Greeks had started putting batteries in their statues. In any case, grab a hammer so you can pull out the nails. There should be a few on each side that aren't flush so you can work the panels open." Advice given, he tipped his company-branded hat and turned to make an exit. "Enjoy your statue!"
Alex waved an absent-minded hand in the courier's direction, eyes still scanning the crate. "Yeah, thanks." At last, he spotted the shipping label, and moved forward to inspect it.
Sure enough, the only thing in the name field was 'Current Resident', followed by his usual address details. The label's sender was listed as 'Dibella Fulfillment', followed by an address in what Alex assumed to be Japanese. All his recent online purchases were too cheap and too small to constitute the wooden monolith before him, but the destination address on the label was his, nonetheless. Hungry for entertainment and burning with curiosity, Alex darted into the kitchen and pulled open his junk drawer in search of the mini-hammer that had wound up in there ages ago. The hammer sat nestled among plenty of other crap on the drawer's right-hand side, where Alex plucked it out and returned to the living room with an eager spring in his step.
Removing all the nails from the crate proved to be a difficult affair for many reasons; splinters were a constant threat thanks to the un-sanded plywood, Alex's mini-hammer had little in the way of leverage, and the nails were stuck fast in several key spots. After a good fifteen minutes—and amassing a pile of nails on his coffee table—all four side panels came off the crate in series to reveal... a bunch of packing foam.
"Maybe it is a fuckin' statue," Alex grumbled. "Or a huge glass rectangle. That'd be a hoot."
But as Alex stripped away the cumbersome foam pieces, his sense of confusion only grew. The crate's true cargo was another rectangular monolith: this one made from dark gray stainless steel and covered in geometric black accent lines. The fresh container gave no indications on how to open it, until the last piece of foam came off and revealed a hand-sized panel set into one of the object's faces. Tempted as he was, Alex took a moment to clear out some of the packing materials from around his new quarry. Once the foam was piled up out of his way next to the stacked-up remains of the wooden crate, he stepped forward and tapped a finger to the panel's black glass. In an instant the accent lines across the metal monolith jumped to life, dormant black replaced by a neon blue glow that shimmered through the geometric grooves in lazy waves.
"Please place your hand—"
"Jesus," he muttered. The disembodied synthetic voice had managed to make him jolt.
"—on the screen to begin registration and activation."
Alex's eyes snapped back to the panel that had kicked things off. Its previously blank surface now sported a white, hand-shaped outline, pulsing as if trying to convince him he should heed the voice's instructions.
"Well, here goes."
Laying his palm flat against the outline, the metal container sprouted a scanning appendage from some hidden slot on its top side, bathing Alex's form in green grid lines. A tense handful of seconds passed, until the scanner disappeared and a programmed chime rang out.
"Biometric scan complete. Registration is now underway. Please follow all on-screen prompts to continue."
Despite his mounting sense of confusion and unease, Alex returned to the interface panel. Now it sported a virtual keyboard, and asked for his name. A couple keystrokes later, a screen packed with text appeared, sporting the header 'TERMS AND CONDITIONS'. Alex did his best to read the first few pages and try to discern what on earth was hiding within the alien container before him, but it didn't take much legal jargon in preface to make his eyes glaze over. Once glance at the scrollbar thumb showed it to be microscopic. These terms were a thousand pages long, at the least.
"Oh my god, it'll be faster to just let this thing explode or whatever," he groaned, checking several boxes to the tune of 'I Agree', and then punching the bright green 'PROCEED' button.
That acted as some unknowable cue to the mysterious rectangular prism, ushering in a litany of clicking and hissing noises from within its shell. The interface screen blinked out, then returned bearing just the text 'Construction in progress...', accompanied by a progress bar just beneath.
Right as Alex was ready to go make a sandwich and kill some time in light of the progress bar's disheartening pace, his cell phone rang. No caller ID. Probably a scammer, but what better way to pass the time?
"Hello?"
"Is this Alex?" The voice on the other end of the line was that of a gruff man who sounded stressed-out.
"Uhh, yeah. This is Alex speaking." Phone scammers didn't usually get his name right.
"And you live at 249 Wicker Basket Lane, correct?"
Uh oh. Scammers definitely didn't know his address. "Who is this?"
"None of your concern. Alex, did you receive an unusual package this morning? A wooden crate, probably a bit taller than you are?"
The implication that he was short managed to fly over Alex's numerous other concerns. "It was a bit shorter than me, actually," he clarified in a huff. "What's it to you, pal?"
"Christ, they really did fuck up the address," the man muttered away from the receiver before leaning back in. "Don't 'pal' me, buddy," he spat back. "Where is the package now? Did you take it inside? Unbox it at all?"
"Uhhhh..." Alex trailed off, eyes darting back over to the glowing steel shell still clicking and humming in the center of his living room. "Maybe."
"'Maybe' is not going to cut it, Alex." He was restraining from shouting down the phone, that much was clear. "I need you to tell me exactly where that crate is, and what it's doing."
"It's, uh-it's doing some weird construction thing right now. Glowing, making some noises, I don't know. Hey, listen man, is whatever you sent gonna like, get me killed or—"
"God, of course you ripped it open and started touching shit," the enigmatic caller groaned. "Alright, Alex, I need you to listen to me very carefully. You're already completed the biometric registration process, so making all this right is just going to give everyone a migraine."
"I don't want any trouble man. If you need this returned, if you want money, I can get it to you," he stammered. A tremor had crept into his hands.
"Just shut up for a sec. You're now in possession of a very expensive of piece of technology that was supposed to end up with my boss. Confidentially. Understand? Money isn't the concern. You trying to return this thing is going to cost us eyeballs we don't need wandering our way. So here's the deal: you keep your mouth shut, you keep the gynoid to yourself, and everybody's happy. Understand?"
"Gynoid?" Alex echoed in a stupefied voice. "Those clunky robot girls for rich perverts?"
"Something like that. This one's all yours, asshole. For free. But if so much as a peep gets back to me about some suburban dolt running around with a million-dollar droid glued to his hip, you're a dead man. Are we clear?"
"Yep. Crystal." Alex kept his tone curt to avoid provoking the man on the other end any further. "Our little secret."
"That's what I like to hear. Now enjoy your little amusement while I go get my neck chewed off by my boss."
"H-Have a good day."
Alex's phone made its usual call-ended sound, once again leaving him alone in his living room. All that remained to underscore his thoughts was the continued string of muffled assembly noises coming from within the monolith. In the middle of walking back over to check on the progress bar, the glowing lines across the container's surface changed from blue to green, accompanied by another chime.
"Construction is now complete. Please stand clear."
To heed the voice's words, Alex remained where he was and watched on in fascination. A series of heavier clicks rang out, after which the monolith's panels popped open a few centimeters to release a thick cloud of supercooled nitrogen vapor and ozone. Alex waved a hand in front of his face, hoping that nothing in the gaseous mix was going to set off his smoke detectors. Difficult though it was to peer through the fresh haze, he could spot the rest of the alien crate unfolding itself into a flat surface on the ground, revealing a humanoid silhouette standing at the center. An adjustment of his glasses was fruitless—only until the icy and strange-smelling smoke became a thin mist did Alex get a proper look at the new guest in his home.
Most eye-catching at first was her hair; flowing in a loose river down to the backs of her knees, sporting a range of orange and violet hues that could have well originated from a vibrant sunset. The gynoid's hair made a dazzling backdrop for her flawless, snowy-blue skin that ran over a frame proportioned like someone's video game avatar constructed to serve as eye candy. To drive the point home, most of her torso was wrapped in a skintight black bodysuit bearing a minuscule hexagonal pattern: its total grasp on her body drew rapid attention to nerve-wracking size of her chest and gentle roundness of her stomach. Alex was in the middle of figuring out whether her hips were wider than her shoulders when the gynoid opened her eyes, revealing each eyeball to be a piece of intricate mechanical craftsmanship cloaked in a dark blue glow. Seconds later, her body broke from its stiff display-mannequin pose, shifting its weight back and forth on her hips while she made experimental motions of her arms and fingers. The sheer fluidity of her movements struck Alex as a level beyond human, enrapturing him to the point that she had to speak up for him to notice her glowing eyes were trained right on his face.
"Good Afternoon, Simon. My name is Chisato, it's a pleasure to be your servant."
"Yeah, about that..." he began, a touch of revulsion slithering over his spine at the word 'servant'. "I'm not Simon."
Chisato tilted her head to the side in confusion. "My pre-load data states that I was designed and built to specification for a man named Simon. Has this changed during my time to delivery?"
"Kind of?" Alex cast his gaze towards the ceiling and scratched at the back of his head. Eye contact with Chisato left a strange pressure in his chest. "I wasn't expecting you to show up. Your crate got delivered to the wrong address, and I did some 'registration' thing before anybody got in touch about it. So... word is you're mine to keep, apparently."
He looked back at Chisato, who gave him a small nod. The placidity which kept the rest of her face still had an eerie quality to it. "Biosignature registration is a security measure afforded to all Dibella products so that customers do not have their servants subjected to tampering or loss as a result of impersonation."
"Right, gotcha," he responded, understanding only a loose handful of the words in her sentence. "Nice of them to do that." Alex paused, teeth running across his lower lip in thought until he found the courage to speak up again. "So can you explain exactly what you are? Because absolutely none of this makes sense to me."
At last, a thin smile graced Chisato's face. "Certainly, Master. I am a Nectar-class J4-model personal companion android manufactured as part of this year's limited edition custom order season. My artificial intelligence core is a modified variant of the Cassandra T12 core, pre-supplied with the WorldKnow dataset."
"Oh my god, all this jargon is making my head spin," he groaned, lifting his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose. "You're a gynoid, right?"
"You could address me as such and be considered factually correct."
"Okay, but gynoids are like... those clunky sex toy robots ordered by neckbeards wasting their parent's inheritance. What the hell does that make you?"
"Personal companion android technology has advanced considerably for the high-end market in recent decades. It would appear you do not occupy a high enough socioeconomic station to stay appraised of these developments."
"Did you just call me fucking poor?"
"Relatively speaking, perhaps. It was not a statement intended to offend you, Master."
"I can see I've got my work cut out for me here," he sighed. Had robots become so advanced they'd developed autism? "Okay, first things first, stop calling me 'Master'. I have a name, it's Alex. Just call me Alex."