"Mom?"

"Yes hon?"

"Am I a replacement?"

Nora Wakeman stared at her daughter who had entered the room seconds earlier.

"Wh-what are you talking about darling?" Nora asked nervously. XJ-9 glanced down, her eyes hardened in a way that robot eyes shouldn't.

"Am I a replacement…for your real daughter?" As XJ-9's voice lowered at the statement, Mrs. Wakeman's eyes widened and her brain entered a state of panic.

"XJ-9! H-How did you know about this?!" Mrs. Wakeman shrilled

"She isn't hidden very well, I just had to find a box I couldn't scan through and…well I had to manually open it and…"

"And you found the newspaper clippings."

Nora cursed her sentimentality, she racked her enlarged brain to remember why she kept those clippings in the first place, certainly not for this. She couldn't help but resign her thinking as her daughter began to recite the clipping found, in that blasted box.

"Jennifer Wakeman died at the age of 16, in a car accident. A pair of vandals ran over her in a getaway attempt. Though this is a tragic loss for the entire community, her poor mother seems to have taken it worse, as she has locked herself away in her home, it has been rumored she quit her job with the Skyway Patrol, and isn't expected to be seen any time soon."

XJ-9 attempted to keep her voice monotone while reciting, but the façade was soon shattered as her voice shook with hurt, eventually the reading was finished with a broken end and a wavering voice.

"Th-that's what it said" she somehow spat out. Nora tried to calm her.

"Honey you must realize that…" and in this attempt all hell broke loose.

"Is that all I am to you!?" XJ-9 shouted, "Some perverted clone!? A remembrance of what once was? A shrine to the true JENNY!?" She gulped then continued her rant with a whisper. "…did you try to resurrect your daughter through me?" As her daughter's tirade continued Mrs. Wakeman's eyes widened and her stomach churned.

"Darling I-I…" Her heart seemed to pump out of her chest as she uttered the next statement, desperately hoping her daughter would accept her for what she was.

"Please sit down, it will take me a while to explain."

XJ-9 stared at her, hurt still brimming in her eyes, and knowing had she been graced with tear ducts, vain attempts of simulated tears would be streaming down her face right now. Despite many electrodes in her system demanding her to run out, and leave with the anger intact, her curiosity overruled, and she finally sat down allowing her mother to explain herself.

Nora started.

"When Jennifer died I was frantic, hysterical even. I was so horribly terribly sunken in despair that I would do anything to get her back… Anything. Thus with a grief-stricken mind, and the highest knowledge of robotics, I set out to rebuild my daughter. I spent 20 years building and building and building, and out of it came you."

As this tale continued, and XJ-9 believed her fears had been confirmed, her revulsion grew. "So is that all I am? The product of a horror-stricken mind? Steel and gears meant to replace flesh and blood? When I was being built, there was no 'me' no. Your true daughter was all you had on your mind."

"No XJ-9, luckily that is where you are wrong. Though Jennifer was my everything, and I bit and kicked the whole way through, I went through the mourning process like any other human. Amidst gears and scraps of metal a gaping hole in me was healed and the burning passion to bring her back was eventually snuffed out.

Despite this, I continued building, of course only on the final model, the one that made me forgive the cruel world, the one that made me want to protect it. That final model was you. However much I hate to admit it, all the XJs before you were made in the grips of madness, in an attempt to immortalize something gone forever. I'm afraid that I have but two daughters, you and Jennifer."