When he’d placed the small package in the microwave, the man shut the door. It closed with a click and he moved to press the ‘start’ button but paused when he caught his reflection. He looked wild with his mid-length dark hair sticking out at odd angles with knots and tangles all throughout. He rubbed the tired from his eyes despite it being late afternoon, almost night. His hand traced his face with harsh fingers. It was a long oval shape filled with thin eyes, a large nose and thick lips. If it wasn’t for his shaggy appearance he felt he might have looked quite mature and good for his age. But that sort of hope was lost for him now. The microwave started with a short beep.

The man heard a buzz and a loud crack sound from the boy-like machine in the corner. A flash of light had caught his eye as the noise had his ears. He moved across the small room that was cluttered with a tiny tacky table with two chairs only a few feet from the single bed the fit snuggly against the length of the far wall in the tiny apartment; although it wasn’t meant to be an apartment, merely another room in the share house the man so resided. Rubbish was littered throughout and the man had to skip over a few empty take away containers and plastic bags to reach the space he’d provided for his artificial friend. The spot was roughly the same size as his bed but half the length and was cleaner and better maintained than the man could ever be bothered with for his own side. The robot was sitting with its back against the closet, legs stretched out in front and arms hanging rigid by its sides. The blonde puffy and noodle like hair fell across its forehead. The tiny red glow from beneath its white button-up shirt, right where the navel would be, signalled that it was still in off-mode.

“.” The man cursed at the small puddle of water than had formed on his roof, just above the robot boy. Something was leaking from the room above and the thought of the bath flashed through his mind. He cursed again as he yanked on the boy and pulled it away from the water that dripped mercilessly from the plaster above them.

“Now what am I going to do?” The robot had to be fixed. The man had been long abandoned by his family and lacked all the skills of creating worthwhile friendships. His parents were gone, and his siblings had just stopped speaking to him, deciding his existence was better to ignore than to tolerate so the death of his parents had caused him a lot of trouble. They had been the only people in the world to truly care about him, telling him he was ‘special’ and ‘unique’. He swallowed their lies like bad medicine, letting them quell his sadness before it took him too far into the world in his head, right where he was now. The man was quiet, smart for what most people called nerdy and a bit too aware of what was going on around him. His spatial awareness was acute which made whatever he said sound creepy and out of the ordinary. It didn’t help that he had a stutter that could make the most patient man in the world want to slap him. None of that seemed to matter though, he was alone and he’d accepted that, at least to the point he now had his own robot companion.

The man picked up a small screw driver and slowly lifted up the boy-bot’s shirt, revealing a panel. He opened it up to show the chest cavity that would have been filled with organs and blood if this person had actually been human. Instead, he fumbled through the wires and data plates to find what might have been affected.

His search was wasted since it seemed the robot was fine despite the dripping blonde locks atop its head. As the man turned to retrieve his comic book, he felt a pang through his chest. He had been trying to distract himself all day from the loneliness that always seeped in on weekends with it even though the boy in front of him needed desperately to wake up from his three day slumber.

He pulled against the robot’s shoulders, shifting him forward until their forehead’s rested together. He sent the boy-bot a silent thankyou before pressing his lips to its cheek. He then leaned over the top of it to reach behind its neck and flick the small, unnoticeable button that caused the boy to whir and chink just before the room fell completely silent.

“Hello.” A clear voice, deep and almost nasal sounding, rung through the room. The boy-bot sat back, pulling itself out of the man’s grasp to look at him with wide, cool eyes that looked all-knowing but so uncomprehending of reality. His single word made that pang in the man’s heart grow. It wasn’t the sound of a friend’s greeting, or the salutation of a long missed family member. That simple hello was cold and rehearsed. The man couldn’t have expected more from a machine but his heart still beckoned for that sense of something else. He forced that something else out from his mind though, the little addition of his imagination, and it filled his heart just enough to stifle the emotions that made him sick.

“Hey there.” The man spoke softly to the newly woken boy despite tenderness being unnecessary. The boy just smiled; something he’d been programmed to do. It made the man sigh discontentedly which caught the robot’s attention.

“Sir, what’s wrong?” Worry was etched on his face, his fake face. It was made of synthetic material that felt and looked like skin but was made of some ugly sounding rubber substance. It stretched smoothly across the manufactured cheekbones and jawline of this robot boy, hiding the harsh looking technology underneath. The eyes were the part that was strangest to the man. They could be filled so wholly with human emotion but each time the man looked into them he could see the ever so slight movement of the lens inside, focusing and refocusing on his movements.

“I told you not to call me that Junhong.” The boy-bot pouted and the man’s head swayed. It was something his little sister had done when she wanted something. This robot was slowly breaking his heart.

“I’m sorry hyung. I promise not to say it again.” The words were stony and rigid, leaving Junhong’s mechanical lips like the computer he was. The man just sighed once more, standing up and retrieving the black jacket that lay under a pile of mail, both new and open.

“Here,” Junhong lifted up his top limbs before the man bent down and continued. “Do you feel okay?” A look of puzzlement crossed the robot’s features.

“I’m fine thank you, but why do you ask?” The man was amazed at scientists and inventors these days. The boy-bot’s voice with filled with the perfect amounts of confusion, curiosity and surprise. When the man had found himself in his position of solitude, he’d spent several hours at an internet café until he found the site that sold many more like Junhong although the whole robot idea still wasn’t well known to the public. They’d made this boy with exceptionally genuine human qualities and it made the man’s heart ache. Junhong was like a human, he spoke like one, looked like one and acted like one but none of it amounted to him actually being human. For the most part, Junhong fulfilled the man’s craving for personal contact.

“Uh, no reason Junhong-ah.” He stood, clasping the icy artificial hands to pull the boy up from the floor. He caught the smell of burning food and his head snapped behind him. Barely visible smoke poured itself from the microwave. “Damn. Stay there.” He waved a hand at the boy-bot now standing beside him as he rushed to the small electronic cooker that sat on the table. Interaction wasn’t his strong point so he bought the microwave in order to avoid the world that had already given up on him. He pulled out the TV dinner that had spent far too long inside and was now charred. Usually it wouldn’t have had that reaction but he had accidently left the foil wrapper on and he realised that the meal might have been the cause of the crack from earlier.

“Do you need help hyung?” He was pushed away lightly on the shoulder and a small ‘oh’ left the robot’s mouth as he stumbled a bit. Although it didn’t seem like much it was stressful for the man to have to deal with something like a scorched dinner since he didn’t have much in the room with him for fear of it being spoiled quickly.

“Just sit down at the table Junhong. I need to fix this.” The robot did as he was told, feeling no angst towards the man for having his services rejected. Of course, he didn’t feel anything at all, but that wasn’t any different to usual.

Junhong decided to take in all his surroundings. He took note of how they’d changed; only small amounts of rubbish or clutter shifting places, the piles of clothes changing as different items were washed or worn. He noted how the bed spread was crumpled in a different form to the way he’d seen it before he went to sleep. He looked up with that same cool and wide-eyed stare that was the corner stone of his outward mechanical expression. The man was staring down at him with sad eyes. Not that he could understand why but he smiled, something he liked to think of as instinct but the man called programming. Before he sat he picked up the pile of miscellaneous things on top and stuck them on the end of the bed.

“That looks good. Can I have some?” The boy’s voice reverberated once more through the room. The man paused with his spoon mid-air above his half-burnt dinner and his eyes glassy as he stared at it. It looked atrocious and inedible, maybe the boy’s programming really had frizzed with the water and now he couldn’t tell what good food was. He felt like he was dealing with an ignorant child half the time.

“No Junhong. You can’t, you’ll break.” The man stared down at his plastic container of ‘food’. “And then I might do the same.” The last words were barely a whisper but just loud enough for the sensors in the boy-bot’s ears to pick up. The words didn’t fit with all the programmes he ran through. He had more than most computers could hope to have but none of them could provide an answer to the meaning of that sentence.

“You can break?” The man didn’t answer but shovelled the food into his mouth, trying to down the awful taste quickly before taking large gulps of water from a bottle beside him. These were new kinds of questions and now he was sure Junhong’s parts had suffered water damage, but it wasn’t the kind of damage he’d expected. The boy was more curious than usual, if robots can even be that. When Minhyeon finished he threw the container and plastic cutlery he had into the one of many plastic bags in the room and left it by the door to take out.

“Let’s just watch some TV okay?” The boy jumped when there was a heavy knock on the door and a woman with an unusually deep voice yelled through the wooden divider.

“Hey! Minhyeon! There better not be anyone in there with you! You know the rules about guests!” The man groaned loudly as he moved over to the door slowly to lean against it.

“I’m alone. You know that, Yun-Ki noona. Do you actually think I could get someone in here without you knowing?!”

“True, not that you’ve got anyone to bring here anyway!” Minhyeon heard a shift behind the door. “Damn hermit.” The words were muffled by the wooden barrier but it was audible enough for him to hear.

The landlady wasn’t much older than him but she had that crude and inauspicious nature that came with age. She had the scraggly grey hair of a woman with twenty more than her forty years and crow’s feet framing her brutish eyes. When he had first moved into the room she had been a gentle soul with a motherly nature but he soon realised that was a guise for her to earn the money from her patrons. She quickly became demanding and rude with strict rules that didn’t necessarily hinder Minhyeon’s happiness, or lack thereof. He sighed again as he moved back to his artificial friend, taking Junhong’s hand and sitting him on the bed.

 “Have you been sick recently hyung?” Junhong asked with those same wide stony eyes. His curiosity sounded dry and stale, just a reflection of the years of development it took to achieve something so human-like. The boy-bot was pointing towards the messy pile of used tissues that sat on the bedside table and spilled down between it and the bed. Minhyeon froze a second. That wasn’t the kind of question he expected from a robot, especially one that was more or less a teenage boy. His heart was beating dangerously fast as he deliberated whether or not to explain the truth but a thought flashed through his mind. He was a robot, he had no need for the same kind of task, and he would never see the outside world as long as Minhyeon had anything to do with it.

He let out an airy laugh before finally thinking of what to say. “Uh, yes Junhong.” Minhyeon coughed for dramatic effect. “I had a cold for a bit while you were asleep.” His gaze shifted around the room before he spotted the unused bin and hastily put the tissues inside. He sat back down on the opposite end of the bed to the boy-bot with his hands pressed deep into the mattress.

“Ah well you’re better now. So that’s good?” Minhyeon wasn’t sure if that was a trick question or not but Junhong’s eyes expressed his expectation of an answer just as the man saw the reflection of his face in Junhong’s eyes, the small lenses inside processing the scene before them.

“Yes, it’s good.” The room fell to the hands of silence once more and Minhyeon could sense Junhong’s functions processing the room again. He felt a crushing wave of self-pity when he realised how pathetic he was and had let himself be. The room was disgusting and practically uninhabitable and his only friend was a robot. He lived in his own filth but had no motivation or reason to better his situation. No one cared how he lived or even that he managed to survive. Even Junhong didn’t care, he didn’t have the capacity to. The clock made its short, chirpy chime when it came to the hour mark for 8pm. The clock was the bane of his existence when he was in his room, his own world. It made such a cute and happy noise that he wanted to break it each time but it was a necessity if he wanted to do anything on time. It had been something Yun-Ki had given him as a welcome gift, of course to torment him as well. It was pink with Rilakkuma bears decorating the top with a small figurine posing as the snooze button. Minhyeon wasn’t exactly rich, so buying a new clock was not something he really wanted to do. After buying the robot his pocket had been tighter than usual.

He could only speak after a long while. “I think it might be time to sleep again Junhong.” He looked up to the boy who pouted again. Minhyeon’s heart plummeted at the sight of such sadness on the boy’s face but the fact that it wasn’t true unhappiness made him feel not so guilty.

“But I don’t want to sleep hyung, I only just woke up. Can’t we stay up together just a little longer?” The man smiled weakly before raising his arm, a silent calling for the robot to move over. Junhong did as he was told and moved into Minhyeon’s hold, breathing deeply and humming shortly to signal his comfort. The man put his stubby, rough hands on the boy’s shoulders and pulled him down onto the bed. He kicked the clump of mess off the end, listening for the quick thunk as it all hit the floor. They lay together on the bed, Minhyeon’s arm cradled underneath the sway of Junhong’s neck, one drifting into slumber and the other waiting for the click before his programmes shut down for another indefinite period. But it surprised the boy to find it didn’t come before the light snores that ruffled the blonde hair draping his ear. He sat up to see what had happened, only seeing the innocent face of the sleeping man beside him.

Junhong wasn’t sure why but he got up from the bed, careful not to wake Minhyeon as he slipped off the mattress and stumbled a bit before finding his balance by the door. Junhong didn’t know what he was going to do by himself. He’d never been on his own before, at least during consciousness. Junhong looked around and scanned each item he could see in the dim moonlight that filtered through the windows. Nothing he could do that seemed at all interesting presented itself, but he did note that it was now 11.30pm, and he turned around. The only thing before him was half of the closet and the door. He didn’t know which programme was telling him to reach out to the door, all he knew was that he had grasped the handle and turned before he could decide whether it was something he should do or not.

The glow of the moon was brighter in the hallway beyond the door. Junhong stepped passed the wooden frame and out into a thin hallway that looked only big enough for people to walk single file. The house was three stories high and Junhong could tell that he and Minhyeon were on the second with one flight of stairs going up to his right and another going down to his left. The landing was small, about the size of the bed the robot had just been laying on, lit up by the large window above the front door. It stretched up to the roof and filled the two stories of wall that the door couldn’t cover.

Junhong’s programmes were whirring inside his head with this new sight. He knew everything about anything and his programmes had revealed to him his knowledge as it became necessary. He quickly skimmed through what he now knew about architecture before being able to truly appreciate the design of the hallway and the way it was filled so well with natural light.

“Junhong, what are you doing?” Minhyeon’s voice was quiet but fervent. “Come back inside, you’re not allowed to be out here.” Junhong was yanked quite roughly back by the man and stumbled again, composing himself a bit sooner than when he’d gotten off the bed.

“I’m sorry hyung.” The robot’s voice was filled with hollow remorse and Minhyeon sighed at the sound of it. He didn’t want to be evicted for having Junhong in his room but he did appreciate that Junhong was indeed curious.

“It’s okay. I’m sorry I didn’t turn you off before.” Minhyeon then guided the boy to the table and sat him on the chair furthest from the door. He looked at Junhong’s silver tinted brown eyes once more before letting out a deep breath and flicking the switch that caused the robot’s already rigid form to freeze in place. “Goodnight Junhong.” Minhyeon kissed the boy’s temple again before returning to his bed and letting sleep overcome him.