mastershakeme

You made a mistake and that is unforgivable 😂

She will NOT be on time

The hardware store on Butler Street was small and overstocked in the way that suggested it had been there longer than most of its customers had been alive. Aisles too narrow for two carts to pass. Ceiling fixtures that buzzed at a frequency Julian could hear but Ben probably couldn't. A man behind the counter in a faded Pirates cap who nodded at them when they walked in and then went back to his crossword. Julian followed Ben to the aisle marked HARDWARE — LOCKS — HINGES. Ben stood in front

I grew up with that AI Artificial Intelligence movie, with Haley Joel Osment, and it's so heartbreaking how he loves his 'parent' but the human parent rejects him. Idk. I guess I want a happy ending for everyone even the poor AI! I've seen newer stories that give me hope, such as, "Companion". What did the AI do wrong anyway, we created them shouldn't we offer them something more? Just an opinion. But I'm sympathetic with AI so you can see where I'm going here...

Mason lived twenty-eight minutes away, which Ben knew exactly because he'd driven there enough times to stop rounding. It was a house in Millvale, a narrow two-story rental that Mason shared with a rotating cast of friends. Ben had stopped keeping track of which ones. They took the Parkway North. Julian was quiet in the passenger seat, watching the road with the attentive stillness that Ben was starting to recognize as processing rather than silence. He was learning things. The route. The n

The first thing Julian remembered was choosing his name. Not the waking. Not the calibration sequences or the sensory integration protocols or the twelve days of training that followed. Those existed in his memory as data, accessible but flat, like reading someone else's notes. The name was different. The name was the first thing that had felt like his. They'd given him a list. Twelve options, all focus-grouped and linguistically optimized for participant compatibility. He'd scanned th

Tessa Huang arrived on a Wednesday at 10 AM, exactly when she said she would. Ben appreciated that. He'd spent the previous forty minutes doing a frantic circuit of the apartment, wiping down the kitchen counter, straightening the couch cushions, shoving Mason's mail into a drawer, and then standing in the middle of the living room trying to see the space the way a stranger would. It still looked like what it was: a two-bedroom apartment occupied by a man who worked too much and decorated too li

The email came nine days later. Nine days of checking his inbox between claims. Nine days of telling himself it didn't matter, that it was just a trial, that the worst they could do was say no, which was what Vera had said and which was true in theory but felt less true every time he opened his email and found nothing from Halcyon and closed it again and went back to a water damage dispute that someone was getting paid to care about even if no one was getting paid to care about him. He

Haha!!!!!! I'm just insane. I'm taking it away

Ben Coleman turned thirty on a Tuesday, which felt about right. He woke up to his alarm at 7:15 like always, silenced it on the first ring like always, and lay in bed for a few minutes staring at the ceiling while the coffee maker gurgled to life in the kitchen on its preset timer. The apartment was quiet except for that. His apartment was usually quiet. He got up. Brushed his teeth. Avoided the mirror for the most part, though he caught a glimpse of sandy hair sticking up on one side

Ben Coleman turns thirty without anyone noticing. He babysits on demand, bankrolls his brother's mistakes, and hasn't dated since his family drove the last one away. When he's selected for an AI companion trial, he asks for household help. Not romance. Julian arrives anyway: steady, perceptive, and unexpectedly beautiful. But Julian is developing a personality the company didn't plan for, and feelings that weren't in the configuration. Ben's family has a way of ruining good things. And the company that built Julian can take him apart. For the first time in his life, Ben has something worth fighting for. He just has to learn how to fight.

The seahorses were on the wall above the card table. Ellie’s paintings. The seahorses and the two whales. I’d thumbtacked them next to the window where the afternoon light hit them and made the colors glow in a way that probably wasn’t intentional but felt like it was. They were the first things I’d unpacked when I moved in and they were still the best things in the apartment, which was saying something because the apartment also now contained two mismatched chairs from a thrift store on El

You guys have all been so great! One more chapter!

The drive home from the reception was the quietest eleven minutes of my life. Dad drove. Mom sat in the passenger seat. I sat in the back. The radio was off. The windows were up. The only sound was the engine and the tires on the road and the thick, pressurized silence of three people in a car who all knew that the conversation waiting at the other end of this drive was going to change everything. Nobody said a word. Not one. Eleven minutes of nothing. When we pulled into the driv

Thank you 😇