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programs and wires, nothing much to love, unless you programmed the robot for such a thing. She toyed with the hem of her shirt.
    “It happens from time to time,” Brandon said. He pulled her hair back and twisted it up. She felt the clip go in place in her hair.
    “Isn’t that strange?” Cass asked.
    “Why would it be strange?” Brandon shrugged.
    “A robot with a human?”
    “What’s so different?” he wondered.
    Cass frowned. She shook her head, there was no point in getting into it with him. “So what’s this surprise?” Cass asked. She turned to Brandon with a genuine smile on her face. Doctor Gerard would have to wait. Right now she was getting to spend time with someone who didn’t make her feel like a robot. Even if their interaction wasn’t genuine as she feared, at least Cass could enjoy how it felt to be treated as Brandon’s equal for a time.
    “You’re killing me,” Brandon said.
    “What did I do?” Cass asked. She turned to him and placed his hand on his arm. She looked him over, but there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him.
    “Just an expression.” Brandon laughed at the look on her face and took her by the hand. “This time I’m driving, my plans don’t include us going several miles away from our destination to some strange place that makes you faint.”
    “Power off,” Cass said. “Automatons don’t faint.”
    “Isn’t it still kind of the same thing?” Brandon wondered, tugging her toward the door. She followed him out the door and to the elevator.
    “I don’t know, is it?” Cass asked. She fingered the delicate flower clip he’d placed in her hair. She could see it in the reflection: thin and transparent with pink petals that seemed like they were spun out of the very air itself.
    “Well, technically I guess not. You power down and everything stops running. That can’t happen for humans, when it does we’re dead.” He said it as if she didn’t already know that. The elevator whisked them up to the roof and she followed him out into the overcast day. “But really, something happened that frustrated you or disturbed you and you sorta passed out. That’s a reaction with humans.”
    “Huh,” Cass said. She opened the car door and got in. Remembering what he’d said the day before, she latched the seatbelt secure and tried not to get sick as the car spiraled up into the air and merged with traffic.
    They were going in the opposite direction as the day before. Hover cars whirred by on either side of them and shadows cast down on Cass from hover cars that were up higher than they were. If there was any reasoning to how the flow of traffic worked, Cass couldn’t tell. It all looked like a mess to her. Cars above them and below them and beside them. She watched as a green car merged with a lane above it and then circled the top of a towering building.
    “If I could get sick, I think watching these hover cars would do it to me,” Cass told him. “I don’t understand how you can drive in this.”
    “If I’m correct, you can drive in this too, you just don’t remember.” Brandon looked over at Cass to catch her frowning. “Don’t you think that’s odd?” he asked.
    “That I can fly but don’t remember having flown before?” she asked.
    “No, that you’re feeling emotion all of a sudden,” he said. “You were just frowning. Automatons don’t frown. I’m not even sure automatons are programmed to frown.”
    She wanted to argue that robots didn’t have emotions, except she knew that was a lie. She was experiencing emotions. She got frustrated, she felt pitiful, and she had been embarrassed. Over the last day she had felt more emotion than she’d thought possible for an automaton.
    “Kinda,” she mumbled. “But then aren’t some automatons programmed to be lovers? Wouldn’t they need a range of emotions?”
    Brandon shrugged and nodded. “It’s not something that’s been with you all this time,” he commented. “Another little secret