01110010 01100101 01110000 01101100 01100001 01100011 01100101 01100001 01100010 01101100 01100101 [Replaceable]

"Ms. Yamane?"

I push open the door to find her at her desk, absorbed in her monitor. When I say her name, she doesn't look up. "Yes?" She drags her stylus across the screen. After a moment, and a few more windows opened and closed, she finally shifts her gaze. "Dita. What are you doing here?"

"I thought you called me in."

"Why would I do that?" She blinks at me, bemused. In the chair behind her, Tsuruki stares me down with empty eyes. "You don't work here anymore."

Before I can respond, everything disappears – Tsuruki, Ms. Yamane, her office with the lace curtains and armchairs. It all goes up in smoke. I find myself in the center of a dark room, walled in mirrors; it's then that I realize I'm not myself.

Not quite, anyway. My body is my own, but my clothes are different; instead of my costume, I'm wearing a white sundress, with a buttoned bodice and flocked skirt. As I move towards a mirror, stiletto sandals make me sway. And my hair, for the first time in my life, looks like it's grown. It's all one length now, thick and smooth as silk, shining in the light that isn't there – it spills over my shoulders in a black cascade, as long as my ponytail used to be. I feel it brush the small of my back.

I lean in close to the mirror, blink into my own eyes. Like blood dried on a knife, they've hardened from red to brown. Suddenly, something appears on the mirror, a pale starburst marring the glass—when it does I flinch, instinctively, then reach out to touch it. It's warm, just slightly wet. My finger leaves a trail that cuts it in two. I lean in close again, and as if I've flipped a switch, the mist on the mirror thickens; if I didn't know it were impossible, I'd think it had come from me.

My hand rises without my willing it, as though pulled by invisible strings. Moves to push my hair over my shoulder, and tuck it behind one ear – one pink, soft, seashell ear.

My heart – my heart? – skips a beat. Out of nowhere, Zima appears in the glass beside me, as much himself as ever. "What are you still doing here?" he asks, shades of Ms. Yamane's surprise in his voice. "I thought you'd be gone by now."

"Gone? Gone where?"

"Somewhere. Anywhere." He shrugs. "You can't stay here."

I feel something like sand filling my throat, something like dust burning my eyes. My vision swims. "Don't you need me anymore?"

"I'm sorry, Dita. We're different now." He doesn't touch me. He doesn't smile. He speaks as if he's reciting a data entry, in a cool, dry monotone – as if it doesn't matter at all to him, what I do or what I am. "I guess this is goodbye."

In the glass, I see him turn to leave, and whirl to stop him—but he isn't there. When I turn, there's nothing there but the mirrors, my paper-white face trapped in each one.

I woke in my pod with a gasp, booting up in one sharp blow. The display in the door read nine o'clock. "It's late," I said to Zima when I got my bearings, and saw him leaning against one wall. Disconnecting from the pod, I stepped out on legs brittle as blown glass, my whole body weak in the wake of the dream. "Why is it so late?"

"Beats me. Pods were set for seven, but you didn't wake up. I couldn't get you to boot." He cocked an eyebrow. "Another dream?"

I pushed my hands through my hair and shuddered. "Yeah."

"Was I right?"

It took me a second to remember what he was talking about. Maybe the next one will be a death dream too. "Sort of."

"Well, I hate to wake you with bad news, but it seems they're not cutting us any slack. It's our first day back on duty, remember?" He pushed open the door and beckoned me into the hallway, wearing the wry ghost of a grin. "And we're already late for an engagement."

Zima briefed me on the elevator. Apparently, before I woke up, he'd received a summons from Aiko on our supervisors' behalf. They wanted us upstairs – upstairs meaning the top floor, meaning the biggest offices and the highest-ranked bureaucrats, meaning something important was going on – as soon as possible. They hadn't said why, but according to a tip from Aiko, that morning had brought an unannounced visit from a pair of fairly big names – or at any rate, people it was vital we impress. She thought they were representatives from the ministry responsible for our financing. Which of course meant the whole building was in a panic, wheeling out the best of the new projects and slapping a fresh coat of paint on old ones. If there was one thing humans never felt they had enough of, it was money.

He and I weren't exactly new projects, but we were impressive nonetheless. I'd had to endure a lot of gawking sessions with the higher-ups, during my first few weeks of life; I assumed Zima'd had it even worse. But even now, years after that fuss had died down, we were still made to put on a show for every fat cat and bigshot who wandered in our front doors. We were the best our facility had to offer, which made us its primary claim to fame. We'd been very expensive, and highly experimental, and our supervisors paraded our success as a means of proving their worth – as they saw it, if they could pull us off, what couldn't they do?

There were few things I hated more. Zima could be charming, when he wanted to be, but I wasn't so lucky. I tended to spend these occasions staring at my feet and gritting my teeth, trying not to shoot off my mouth. So I couldn't help but drag my feet as I followed him, first down a corridor, then through a pair of huge, heavy doors; I doubt I could've budged one of them, had I tried, but he pushed them open like curtains. They gave way to a vast receiving hall, with high ceilings and parquet floors. Through picture windows, the sun poured in blindingly bright.

In the center of the hall were a cluster of people, and when she saw us, one broke off. She looked as though she were about to sweat right through the pits of her suit jacket. "Where have you been?" she hissed under her breath, so her guests wouldn't hear her lose her cool. "We had Aiko send the summons an hour ago!"

Zima and I exchanged a glance. "Our apologies, Ms. Ichida," he answered for us. "There was a malfunction with the pods."

"Well, you'd damn well better make up for it now."

The group was made up of another woman and two men – Mr. Satou and Ms. Nakajima, the visitors from the ministry, and our supervisors Ms. Ichida and Mr. Inoue. They were of higher rank than Ms. Yamane, so they had the privilege of showing us off for company. "You haven't met Zima and Dita yet, have you?" Ms. Ichida addressed her guests, going from livid to simpering in five seconds flat. "We like to think of them as our crown jewels."

I suppressed a snort. Mr. Satou – a reedy, frog-faced man, not as tall as Zima but close – nodded vaguely in our direction. "Yes, yes, I've met the data bank before. I remember when it was launched. The other one, no."

"Well, I've never met either of you. Ayano Nakajima; how do you do?"

"We're just fine, Ms. Nakajima. Up a little late, but fine." Zima flashed her a winning smile. "How are you finding the place so far?"

"Oh, it's a lovely facility. And everyone's been very nice." She tittered and batted her eyes behind their glasses, smoothing back a loose wisp of salt-and-pepper hair. Good God. She's one of those."But I've been most looking forward to meeting you."

I didn't know which I disliked more. The people like Mr. Satou, who so obviously considered us objects, or the people like Ms. Nakajima – the middle-aged women pining for thrills in dull marriages, who got their kicks flirting with boy-shaped 'coms like Zima. And it wasn't that I was jealous, either. It was just embarrassing to watch. "Now, why would you do a thing like that?" Zima said sweetly, well-accustomed to humoring her type. "I'm nothing special."

"Nonsense! You're a marvel of technology. I've been hearing so much talk of you, for such a long time; when we made our plans to drop by, I was so hoping to get a look." She rested a hand on her hip, looking him up and down. "And aren't you just the cutest thing!"

"Honestly, Ayano," Mr. Satou cut in, "it's a machine. Is that really the pertinent factor here?"

"I'm just saying, it's quite an accomplishment. These brilliant people—" she swept her hand out to indicate Ms. Ichida, Mr. Inoue, the windows, the ceiling, whoever had really done the work she was so enamored of "—have not only managed to build a persocom capable of storing and utilizing an entire nation's worth of data, but they've managed to make him incredibly adorable – and so charming, too!" She cut loose with a gale of laughter, equal parts schoolgirl giggling over her cootie-catcher and witch cackling over her cauldron. I forced myself not to wince. "They ought to be awfully proud."

While Ms. Nakajima went on fawning over Zima, Mr. Satou turned his gaze to me. As he inspected me, his eyes began to narrow, and he gestured to Ms. Ichida. "This one doesn't even look like a persocom," he informed her, still staring at me as if I were an animal in a zoo. "Where are its ear units?"

"Oh, they're the same as Zima's," Ms. Ichida assured him. To demonstrate, she actually reached over, turned my head to one side, and pushed back the hair feathered over my left ear. I stiffened – and I saw Zima glance at me, with warning eyes – but I behaved, and I didn't jerk away. "Just hidden under her hair."

"I see." I felt an urge to lance his swollen eyes like boils, drain the suspicion brewing there. The contempt—as though I had personally offended him. "Interesting choice."

"Yes, well, they're actually multifunctional. Zima and Dita both wear special shades, to assist them in their duties, and standard-model ears would make it difficult to wear them. Dita," she said, in the tone of voice you'd use to tell a dog to sit, "show Mr. Satou your shades."

Sure, Ms. Ichida. Since you asked so nicely and all. "I don't have them," I mumbled. "Zima does."

Before she could start snapping her fingers at him, he produced my shades from a pocket on his coat, handing them off to her. She pasted on her biggest, brightest suck-up smile. "See, the shades have magnetic arms," she said, and instead of asking me to put them on, decided to demonstrate herself; she shoved them over my eyes, none too gently of course, and they clicked into place. The sun-drenched room turned amber. "So that persocoms with ears like hers can wear them."

"And the magnets don't damage the computer?"

"They were specifically designed not to. They're strong enough to secure the shades, but not enough to affect the drive." She pushed up my bangs to let him get a better look at them. "And the shades themselves are multifunctional, too. They serve as sunglasses, in their basic mode, but they can also display data and images, and perform several other tasks specific to the computer to which they're registered. For example, Zima's shades have a tracker mode, which allows him to use his data to pinpoint and monitor almost any signal—" not to mention a lying bastard mode, which allows him to keep said signals a secret "—and Dita's have an emergency shutdown mode, which allows Zima to manually override her systems when necessary."

Ms. Ichida went on talking, after that, but I didn't hear what she said. Well aware that – as May had said, that day in Ms. Kano's office – I was meant to be seen and not heard, I shut off my audio receptors and literally tuned out. It was better that way, I figured; they weren't speaking to me, only about me, and if I couldn't hear them I wouldn't be tempted to mouth off. Standing there savoring the silence, I got to thinking my life would be much easier, if I could just mute human voices all the time. I wondered if they occupied their own frequency, one I could filter out. I wondered if there was an audio setting for that.

But I could only escape for so long. I didn't know if she had just grown bored of Zima, or if she honestly had an interest in me, but Ms. Nakajima wandered over just as Ms. Ichida removed my shades – apparently having managed to chatter about them for an entire fifteen minutes. "Now," I heard her demand, when I switched my audio back on, "what exactly does the little one do?"

"Dita is a data security program. She was built to protect Zima, from any number of threats to his data – hackers, bugs, system malfunctions, et cetera – and programmed to do so at any cost."

"So what? She's a walking, presumably talking – she doesn't seem terribly friendly, but I'm assuming she does speak – antivirus?" Ms. Nakajima looked at me skeptically. "Is that really cost-effective?"

Ms. Ichida threw Mr. Inoue a panicked glanced. I had expected this much – women like Ms. Nakajima, as much as they adored Zima, never seemed to like me – but the last thing they wanted was the people holding their pursestrings calling their spending into question. "Well, that's not all she does," he said as he swooped in, resting a hand on my shoulder. "She's also equipped to proactively eliminate external threats to data security. Outside of simple storage and defense, Zima and Dita also function as a search-and-destroy team – he uses his data to track the aforementioned threats, and she uses her attack programs to neutralize them."

"Mm." She seemed to consider that, still not wholly convinced. "So she's combat-class, then."

"Not solely combat-class. But yes."

She studied me a second longer, still with that doubtful crease to her brow. Then, she shook her head, and snorted. "Then what in the world is she dressed as? Isn't that getup a little—I don't know, impractical, especially if she's a combat 'com?"

Without thinking, I blinked down at myself, feeling a flush climb my cheeks. Sure, my costume was complicated, maybe even impractical – but it was mine. I'd never wanted to wear anything else. "And what's this? Is she blushing?" She grabbed me by the chin and jerked my head up, to be sure. Up close, her skin reminded me of crumpled crepe paper, the whites of her eyes trellised with veins. "You spent government money to give a data security 'com synthetic blood vessels?"

"No, we never—"

"Talk about cost-ineffective!"

I could feel the tension in the air. Well aware that I wasn't the only one being humiliated – that our failures as well as our victories fell on our supervisors' heads – I braced myself for what would come next. "Well, Ms. Nakajima," Mr. Inoue said, "as your colleague so eloquently put it, that's not really the pertinent factor here, is it? Dita's only an accessory. She can be easily remodeled or replaced."

"Exactly," Ms. Ichida added, seizing her chance for recovery like a drowning man would a raft. "Defense and attack programs are simple to remove and install. You make some excellent points, Ms. Nakajima, and I assure you both that if any of our units are found to be cost-ineffective, we'll be more than happy to have them recycled and switched out for more efficient models." They both began to drift methodically away from me, gravitating towards Zima as Ms. Ichida spoke. "What's really important is what can't be replaced – not easily, anyway. As you've noticed already, Zima is an absolutely unique feat of modern engineering, not to mention extraordinarily powerful and…"

My audio was still on, but her voice faded away. I couldn't see them, any of them, now that they'd moved from my line of sight, and it felt as though I couldn't turn my head. As though if I tried, the hinge that held it might crack, and I might come to pieces. As though someone had slit my casing and filled me with concrete, made of me a statue where I stood. It shouldn't have hurt like it did, hearing them say I was nothing, only an accessory; I knew that, and it had never bothered me before. I didn't mind being replaceable, so long as I wasn't actually replaced.

Something cold began to crawl over me, twining itself around my limbs. My sensors indicated room temperature, but my skin felt like ice. Until I felt someone touch me, through what seemed a blanket of snow—until a warm, heavy hand slid over my shoulder, and squeezed it, and I knew it was Zima because I would know him anywhere. "Well, it's been lovely," I heard him say, "and I wish we could stay, but I'm afraid Dita and I have business elsewhere. We really must be going now."

"What?" Ms. Ichida's smile wavered, if only for a split second. An edge crept into her voice. "What business would that be? We haven't approved any additional activities for today."

"It's not a planned activity. Aiko just sent me a summons from Mr. Morita." I recognized the name of another of our supervisors, several rungs higher on the bureaucratic ladder. Zima cocked his head. "It was marked urgent," he said innocently, "but if you think it's more important that we stay here—"

"No, no," Mr. Inoue broke in, as we'd both known he would. "Please, go. We wouldn't want to keep Mr. Morita waiting, would we?" Through the teeth flashed in his thousand-watt smile, he told his guests, "We don't like to encourage negligence in our units, nor disrespect for authority. I'm afraid that if Mr. Morita needs them, we have no choice but to send them on their way."

"Of course, of course. I would do the same thing." Before we left, Ms. Nakajima squeezed in one last wink at Zima, wiggling manicured fingertips in a dainty wave. "It's been a real treat."

"Same to you, Ms. Nakajima. Mr. Satou." He bowed his head in her direction, then his, and took me by the hand. "We hope you'll enjoy the rest of your visit."

My hand in his, I followed him down the same corridor we'd taken coming up, to the same bank of elevators shining silver in the light. He didn't say anything. We stood there in silence, waiting for a car to come, and when it did he steered me gently inside; I just sort of fell against one wall, numb, while he did something with the keypad. Pressed something to stop the elevator, I thought, so that it wouldn't move, and the doors wouldn't open.

He came to me and crouched down to my level, held my face in his hands. When he pressed a kiss onto my forehead, the ice finally began to melt. "Dita, love. Don't listen to them."

"Don't listen to what?" I said bitterly. "The truth?"

"It's not the truth. No one could ever replace you." He kissed me again, on my forehead, then on both of my eyelids. As if to kiss away tears that weren't there, because I couldn't cry. "And they didn't mean what they said. They were just putting on an act, love, because that woman was jealous of you—they're not going to get rid of you."

Jealous of me? If I'd had the presence of processor, I'd have asked what he could possibly have meant by that. "You don't know that."

"Of course I do. I know everything, remember?" A smile tugged at his lips, only for a moment. Flickered on and then off like a lightbulb. As he looked at me, with eyes earnest like I rarely saw them – eyes like he'd had saying I want that girl to find happiness, like he'd had asking me if I loved him, like he had whenever he was really serious, which wasn't often – he stroked my cheek with his thumb, wiping away those phantom tears. Is this what it's like to want to cry, then? I asked myself. This feeling like I felt yesterday, on the terrace? This burning behind my eyes? "And even if they tried," he said softly, "I would never let them take you away from me."

"You couldn't stop them."

"I'd find a way." His hands dropped from my face and he pulled me into his arms. Held me closer, held me tighter than he had in a long time—at least since that day when he came back, and maybe since before that. Maybe closer, maybe tighter, maybe fiercer than he'd ever held me, his face buried in my hair and mine in his coat. His warmth dissolved the last of the frost, eased that hot weight rolling in my eyes. His scent, in place of the concrete, filled me up. "I love you, Dita. Even if you don't believe it. Even if you can't say it. I love you, and only you – and there's nothing I wouldn't do to keep you close to me."