When I woke up again, I knew Leo was gone. I didn’t go through the stages as I had before; I was numb from fear. The look he had in his eyes as I fought and failed to avoid sleep had followed me into my dreams, depicting an enraged Leo taking on the science lab at the office and destroying everything. Would he really be that out of control? I knew he was capable of doing a lot more than a human could. He was made of the best software and engineering in AI robotics. A normal Kboy was trained to not show any harm to humans or their surroundings.

But Leo wasn’t like the others.

My mind slipped back to the night he found out about my incident and how he passed out from the sheer control of resisting an outburst. Could he be somewhere in this world offline from the overwhelming emotions he was feeling?

I felt helpless as I laid there trying to figure out what to do. And after seeing Leo’s phone purposely left on the bedside table, I knew things were worse than I could hope for. I couldn’t help Leo alone. Scrambling around to find my phone, I unlocked it and dialled my most used number.

“Gunhee,” I managed to say when the call connected, biting at my chapped lips a little. “We have trouble.”

“Yerin, it’s after eleven, why are you ringing me?” I could hear the sleepiness in his voice but the idea that it was that late and Leo wasn’t home yet bothered me further. I got up out of bed and began trying to find clothes in the darkened room.

“Leo, he knows.”

The sharp inhale of his breath seemed to waken his senses entirely. “You promised you wouldn’t tell him!”

“I’m only human, I didn’t say it with my own mouth initially either, and you and I both know Leo is able to read our emotions better than we think he can,” I protested, flinging my legs through a pair of sweats that I couldn’t tell belonged to me or Leo until I was having to tighten the waistband. “I was sick and he left when I was asleep. You haven’t seen him today at all, have you?”

Gunhee groaned and I could tell he was rubbing at his face in frustration. “I saw him earlier and he asked me if he could trust me or not. I didn’t know what he meant and I told him of course, that I was always honest with him. He must think the absolute worst by now.”

“Gunhee,” I started, my voice shaking as the panic surged within me. “You don’t think he’s done something bad, right?”

“Of course not, he’s a robot trained to respect our world.”

“Except we all didn’t show him respect,” I mentioned, throwing a hoodie over my head and left my room to go fetch my purse. “Leo has a temper.”

“He has a what?”

“He can experience anger, he’s just very good at suppressing it. But with the look in his eyes that I saw-”

“I’ll be there in five.” The call was disconnected and I hurried to put on my shoes before leaving the apartment, making my way out into the lobby and waiting for Gunhee to show up. Although I knew it was only minutes that I waited, it felt like I stood there for eternity until his car appeared outside.

Running out the doors and right into the passenger seat, Gunhee barely waited for me to close the door before he took off again, a grim expression on his face. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel as he navigated the late night traffic. “You look like , and why didn’t you tell me he showed anger before? Was it at you?”

“Didn’t it show up on his records?” Gunhee shook his head at my question and I sighed. “It was over something I need to talk to you about when this isn’t the biggest issue in our lives. That’s odd though, in that moment he must’ve not recorded anything.”

“I trust in you that you’ll tell me when it’s right. Do you have any leads on what he’d do?”

“Last time he just collapsed from holding back.” I grimaced when Gunhee cursed and smacked at the steering wheel. “But I don’t think he’s going to hold back this time.”

“We’ll try the lab first,” he decided and the rest of the ride to Kboys Headquarters was tense and silent. We took the elevator up to the floor we needed, walking through the darkened hallways with a quickened pace until Gunhee used his swipe key to get into the locked down science lab. The lights were out but I could see the faint glow of the multitude of Kboys lined up in the main floor below. They all seemed untouched and my heartbeat eased a little finding no massacre in sight. Gunhee however was frantic, using his long legs to his ability and powering on ahead. Despite being weakened from my emotions and sickness, I managed to jog to keep up with him as he ran down the stairs and over to a room I had never been in.

When I made it to the door I gasped, finding Leo on the floor beside a wall lined with technology that I knew had to be important. Obviously, Gunhee would have guessed Leo wouldn’t use physical strength when he knew of this hub of information was more vital than any Kboy out there.

Leo glanced up at us with darkened eyes, barely smiling at our arrival. Gunhee cursed again as he edged forward. “Leo you didn’t-”

“All the information on your research is held within these backup devices, right? If the office suffers a blackout, the generators keep this information alive. But if someone or something were to manually destroy this system, Kboys would face a huge impact.” He looked up at the doctor when he referred to himself as something lesser than man, his face contorting up with pain. “I thought about attacking all those robots out there that you plan to base off of my mind. I could do it too, quite easily. The temptation was strong.”

Leo got up and Gunhee, despite being taller, looked tiny beside him. Leo sighed heavily. “But I remembered helping you in here the other week, hyung. It would be more devastating if I ruined this entire system.”

“L-Leo,” Gunhee started, and I was startled to see my best friend begin to shake. “You didn’t, y-you-”

“Then I thought about how much work you have all done. How many customers this company has. How many people are employed and rely on having a job here, Yerin included. It’s a curse having a moral compass. How humanlike of such a robot, don’t you think?”

Leo stepped around Gunhee then, coming over to collapse against me as my friend rushed to check that the systems hadn’t been messed around with. I held onto his frame as best as I could but his weight against my weakened body made us both slip to the ground, Leo grabbing me tightly as he buried into me.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated over and over, rubbing at his back as he struggled to remain calm. “I didn’t know how else to cope with it. Please don’t ever run away from me like this again.”

“Don’t give up on me then,” he pleaded from inside my embrace, and I choked back on a sob as I looked up at my best friend and what he and his department had started. I could see the guilt coursing through him as he breathed heavily from finding everything untouched.

Humans were far too cruel, and we were teaching Leo just how bad we could be.

Despite Leo’s lack of faith in Gunhee, he allowed him to pick us up and drive us to work the next day, my cold easing off enough that I felt like I didn’t need to take another sick day. And whilst Gunhee was more apprehensive than usual, he still tried to make conversation with Leo on the way there, and Leo responded to everything he said. I knew deep down, beyond the betrayal Leo was feeling, he knew Gunhee wasn’t a bad person.

It gave me immense anxiety to leave my boyfriend and best friend to travel alone together though, heading into the call center on edge and bumping into Daniel in the process.

“Oh Yerin-noona, are you alright?!” he cried, helping me upright before I fell and genuinely scanning over me to ensure I was okay. I smiled lightly at him and he grinned after completing his evaluation. “You are fine. Although you were sick yesterday and I can see the adverse signs from that. Would you like me to make you some camomile tea?”

“Actually why don’t you make two, Daniel-ah. Bring them into my office, won’t you?” We both glanced towards Younha, Daniel smiling brightly at her before leaving me to follow my boss into her office. After sitting down, and asking simple questions about my health, she finally asked what I knew was on the tip of her tongue. “That Leo bot we see around the building, he’s yours isn’t he?”

“Not… officially,” I stated weakly, her eyebrows hiking up a little at my vague answer. I sighed, feeling the urge to share everything with her in that moment but knowing the experiment was deemed classified made me hesitate.

“I assumed it was something you couldn’t talk about, given how Doctor Jung has been investing a lot of attention in you of late,” Younha said with a sigh, fiddling with some papers on her desk. “However, I feel like you need someone out of the situation, who understands the complexity of loving a Kboy to talk to. Is that something you’d like?”

I was nodding before I realised it, and soon the journey I had been on so far tumbled out of my mouth with more ease than I expected it to.