01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00101101 01110011 01101000 01100001 01110000 01100101 01100100 00001101 00001010 [Love-Shaped]

Around four o'clock, we left the beach, for what Zima deemed Phase Two of our mini-vacation. When humans came to the beach, he said, it was traditional to spend at least some time on the boardwalk – playing arcade games, riding theme park rides, buying all manner of confections from stalls reeking of grease. And if Data Indicated it, we had to do it.

Thus, we found ourselves on the boardwalk, after changing into our respective sets of boardwalk-appropriate clothes. Ever prepared, Zima had brought those too, and we slipped into the same bathroom – now packed with squalling toddlers, frazzled parents, and kids flinging streamers of toilet paper over stall doors – to change. My shoes for the day were black gladiator sandals, studded with faux-steel grommets and buckles. The clothes themselves were a black denim skirt, about the same length as my costume's shorts, and a form-fitting T-shirt that was, at first glance, white.

Then, I turned it around. Emblazoned across the back were a pair of black angel's wings, sprinkled with silver glitter and rhinestones. Had he been there, I would've glared daggers at him – that, or flushed redder than cherry sweet ice. Probably both. Since he wasn't, all I could do was groan to myself, and – being as it was my only choice – pull on the shirt.

"Well, aren't you a gigabyte of gorgeous?" he greeted me outside the bathroom, in an outfit not much different than what he'd worn on the beach. Just another black T-shirt – it had a logo on the front, though for what I wasn't sure – and a pair of black jeans with sneakers. I didn't know if he knew how it comforted me, him sticking to his color like that, but I was grateful for it regardless. "What'd you think of the new gear?"

"I think you know very well what I thought," I answered, just barely keeping a lid on the blush brewing under my skin. "So tell me this. If we're not being our jobs today, why do I have to wear mine on my back?"

We began heading down the boardwalk towards the arcade, amid a crowd of stringy-haired, sunburnt humans dragging themselves up from the beach. As we walked, he slung an arm around my shoulders. "Hey, it's only fair. If you're such a good little guardian that you can't even let me swim, you ought to own it, right?"

"That wasn't my—"

"Besides," he cut me off with a grin, squeezing me close to him, "guardian or not, you're my angel all the time."

Inside, the arcade was cool and dark, a den of blinking screens and flickering lights. There weren't many people there, aside from the kid staffing the prize counter – which amounted to a register and a series of shelves and hooks, dripping with tatty stuffed animals – and that was fine with me. If we had to waste our time on ridiculous human rituals, I much preferred that we do so in peace.

Producing more of his mysteriously-acquired cash, Zima fed a few bills to a contraption wedged into one corner, and it spat out a handful of glistening, gold-painted coins. "So it's pretty simple," he said as he dumped them into a pocket of his bag. "You find a machine you like, you feed it a coin, you play the game. Easy as falling off an analog."

"And I want to do this why?"

"Because it's fun!" he said blithely. "And because if you win, you get tickets, and if you get enough tickets you get a prize."

I wrinkled my nose. "That crap we saw when we came in? You couldn't pay me to drag one of those things around with me. Why would I want to spend money to win one?"

"Must I tell you again? It's the—"

"—experience, love." Before he could say them, I stole the words from his mouth, pet name and all. He smiled, and I sighed. "I shouldn't have asked."

I had known what an arcade was, basically. I'd seen them from the outside before. But I'd never realized the sheer volume of an arcade before, in terms of wailing, flashing, intensely obnoxious machines per square foot; I found it hard to imagine someone having come up with all of those games, much less physically built them. There were fighting games, and racing games, and gambling games, to scratch the surface. There were games that took place on a city street one minute, and in outer space the next – games that let you play as a warlock or a mercenary, or a lion prowling the savanna. Games that had you flying helicopters and wielding laser guns, and mauling monsters with graphics so sharp they made me shudder.

Some were hard to win. Others were easier. There were probably 'coms out there programmed to understand those games, to know their ins and outs and work them over like I did a hacker, but I wasn't one of them – in other words, for the most part I lost. Repeatedly. Frustratingly. My prey escaped, or my helicopter crashed, or the monster swallowed me whole. In racing games I made all the wrong turns, and in gambling games I made all the wrong bets. I just wasn't good at arcade games, I was eventually forced to conclude; I wasn't designed to think hypothetically, to ask myself what if I were the captain of a pirate ship? or what if I were hunting aliens on the moon? and act accordingly. I was used to facing real threats. I was used to something real being at stake.

And I seemed to have rotten luck, to boot. Having given up entirely on anything with a joystick or a plastic gun, I had retired at one point to one of several gambling games, a great black hulk of a console with a massive screen and a built-in stool. Climbing up onto said stool, I dropped in a coin and watched the screen blip to life. On it appeared a CGI model of a wheel, spangled in a rainbow of colors; the object of the game, simply enough, was to smack a button and stop the wheel as it spun. Each coin gave you three tries, and if the needle landed on the same color all three times, your prize was a windfall of tickets. Two of the same color and you'd net about half that. Three different colors got you zip.

"Damn it!" Down to my last coin, I slammed a fist into the console. He'd been absorbed in some dumb fishing game, for an inordinate amount of time, but when he heard me Zima appeared out of nowhere – before I could so much as turn to look for him. "This thing hates me," I explained to him, feeding it the lonely coin in my palm. "Watch."

The wheel on the screen began spinning lightning-fast, each color blazing by the needle six hundred times a second. I may not have been designed to think hypothetically, but I should, at least, have had decent reflexes – should have been able to catch those colors, when they were where I wanted them to be. Should have beat that stupid game by then. But victory slipped through my fingers, again and again, coin after coin. I always seemed to hit that button too late. And it wasn't that I cared or anything, it wasn't that it mattered—it was just that it pissed me off.

"See?" I griped as the screen irised out, leaving us with a last glimpse of my final score – red, blue and yellow. Not a match in the bunch. "I haven't won once. You call this fun?"

He raised an eyebrow. "How long have you been playing?"

"Long enough to use up all those coins you gave me."

At that, he let out a long, low whistle, as if my failure were so exceptional it impressed him. I answered his smirk with a scowl. "Well, it doesn't make sense," he amended, studying the machine. "These things aren't random, you know. They're supposed to look that way, but they're not; all these gambling games are rigged. The needle doesn't hit the color nearest it when you punch the button – it hits the color its algorithm tells it to hit."

"So what? It's impossible to win?"

"Not impossible. The odds are weighted in the house's favor, so the chances are less than what ought to be probable, but it's certainly not impossible to win; in fact, it's designed to let you win, a preset percentage of the time. If it didn't, no one would ever play." He shook his head. "Either this thing's window of opportunity is ridiculously slim," he decided, "or it's glitching. I mean, I must've given you a metric assload of coins."

I frowned. "As deeply scientific as your units of measure are," I told him, "and as sure as I am that you think you know what you're talking about, I know a thing or two about glitchy computers, and this thing doesn't seem broken to me. I'm pretty sure it just hates me."

Arms folded in thought, he tilted his head and blinked at the console. Immersed as he was in the infinitely intriguing mystery of why I couldn't win a damn arcade game, I didn't think he'd even heard what I said. "That's right. This thing is a computer, isn't it?"

"Duh." I sat back in the stool and snorted. "It's our great-grandfather. Pay your respects."

"I'm just saying, we speak the same language. Maybe I can…sweet-talk it, if you know what I mean." He flashed me a grin as he popped an ear open, twirling a cable around one finger. "Convince it to ease up."

My jaw nearly hit the floor. "Zima!" Ignoring me, he drifted away to circle the machine, presumably on the hunt for a connection port. I tried to keep my voice low, so the prize counter kid wouldn't come back to investigate; having had about as much humiliation as I could take the day before, I was not going to be thrown out of a seedy beach arcade for trying to cheat at a gambling game. I didn't think what was left of my pride could bear it. But by that point, his stupidity bordered on belligerent, and it took everything I had not to ream him out. "Get back here! You are not going to try to hack an arcade game!"

"Not hack, love," he said sweetly, bending to pry open the machine's maintenance hatch. "I'm just going to negotiate with it, that's all."

"Like that custom unit tried to negotiate with you?"

He made a noise like the sucking in of breath through clenched teeth, clapping a hand to his chest in mock offense. "Ouch. Low blow."

"I'm just saying," I threw his words back at him, "I would think you'd have more sympathy."

"And yet shockingly, I don't. I'm a cold-hearted bastard, aren't I?"

With that, he disappeared behind the console, to proceed with his negotiation. There was nothing I could do but sit there and fume. "I swear to God, Zima," I hissed, "if that kid comes back here and kicks us out, I'm never going to forgive you."

"I'd expect as much."

"And if you fry your systems poking around that piece of junk, I'm not going to fix you."

"Duly noted."

"And I—" Suddenly, I found myself cut off by a trumpet-blast from the machine's speakers, the leitmotif for every round of the game. Unbidden by a coin, the wheel assembled itself onscreen, in an animation already burned into my eyes – a thousand slivers of color sprouting like sharks' teeth from all corners, and converging in a flurry of pixellated stars and hearts. "Wow," I said as the wheel began to spin, just slightly dumbfounded at his success. "It worked."

"Of course it worked." Zima emerged wearing a satisfied smile, his cable zipping back into its port. "Try it out."

So I hit the big red button on the console, sending the wheel screeching to a halt. It landed on purple, and a little window in one corner of the screen bleeped and turned purple, too. When it kicked up again, I waited five seconds and then smacked the button again – earning myself, for the first time in five quillion tries, a matching second square. A second and then a third, on my last shot. All three windows lit up purple, and began blinking, and I'd have been lying if I said it wasn't a rush. "Hey, what do you know?" I marvelled as the speakers sang, a slot on the console churning out a paper ribbon of tickets. "That must have been some negotiation."

"Well, you know me," Zima said, with a wink at the monitor. "I can be very persuasive."

At the counter, I got to choose my prize, even though it was technically Zima who'd "won" the game. All I'd really done was punch a button. But he insisted, because apparently that was a human custom as well; it was traditional, he said, for the male half of a couple to win a prize for the female, and data not only indicated but demanded that I pick a cheap stuffed animal to prove his mastery of the arcade. So I decided on a panda, plump and button-eyed and with only a few seams coming loose. With it in tow, we left the arcade to explore the rest of the boardwalk, and tick off what remained on Zima's list.

We had our hands stamped at the theme park, a rust-coated wonderland of rickety rides and overpriced games. There, we waited in long lines of loud, sweaty humans, to climb aboard these light-up deathtraps Zima kept saying would be fun. And the carousel was harmless, if undignified; the ferris wheel, I could stand. But the teacups were the last straw. After that, I put my foot down – metaphorically, of course, since the damn thing left me so dizzy I hardly knew where my feet were – and we left, which was fine with him anyway, since he'd decided it was high time he bought more food we couldn't eat. This time, it was a bundle of skewers from a street stall, stacked with some kind of spicy-smelling meat. Cheerful as could be, he stood there on the boardwalk handing them out like tissues, while I pretended not to know him.

Afternoon faded slowly into evening, and the sun went down in flames over the sea. In the humid dusk, we wove in and out of little boardwalk shops, crammed with souvenirs that cost five yen to churn out and fifteen hundred to buy – oysters with googly eyes glued to their shells, T-shirts with "clever" phrases ironed on, shotglasses printed with the name of the town. Often, I was asked what model my 'com was, and where I'd bought him. Even more often – usually when Zima had wandered off – I was approached by a human boy and asked a question that didn't make any sense, which according to Zima was called a pick-up line. He seemed to find the whole thing hilarious.

"Let's go back to the beach," he said after awhile, when the last lick of sun had fizzled out in the ocean. By then, the crowds had begun to thin, and there were more stars out than people.

"Why? You want to swim in the dark?"

"No." He turned his gaze to the sky, a watercolor in marbled blue and back. "I want to look at the stars."

That late at night, the beach was empty. The trashcans were overflowing, and a few half-melted castles dotted the sand, but the humans had packed up their towels and gone home; it was just us and the endless ocean, the waves crashing onto the shore. The sand cool under our feet, our shoes having been shucked on the dunes. The gentle breeze playing with my ponytail.

"It's nice out here," I said quietly, aware that to speak too loudly would be to break the spell. "Without all the people."

"Yeah." He sat down a few feet from the surf, and lay back in the sand. After a moment's thought, I lay next to him. "Peaceful."

Silence settled on us like a blanket, thick and soft. Broken only by the whisper of waves. Overhead, the sky was a velvet drape, encrusted in jewels; out here away from the shops' lights, we could see every star sharp as cut glass, and there was barely an inch of blue between each. It seemed they'd been painted on in glittering clumps. At night, the sky became the sea, and the sea the sky – both, I saw, were the rich blue-black of ink, both sprinkled with stars. Either real stars or their reflections, sparkling on the water, washing to shore with the tides.

Sometimes, a star would start to drift, and I'd realize it was a satellite. Tricky things, satellites. Hard to catch. To the stars, they were both sisters and strangers, near-identical and yet far from alike; stars were born and stars could die, and most of all stars lived. Stars breathed. Not oxygen, but heat and light, flowing from bright mouths in solar sighs. And satellites—were floating hunks of metal, heavenbound but man-made. Blinking gnats, next to the stars. They paled in comparison.

"What are you thinking about?"

Zima's voice woke me from the trance of silence, snapped the sky's hold on my gaze. I glanced over at him. "Not much," I answered, shrugging against the sand. "Just trying to figure out which ones are stars, and which are satellites."

"Does it matter?" A half-smile flicked at one corner of his mouth. Even though the sun had gone down – even though there was only a shard of moon – the starlight left no shadows on his face. "They're both beautiful."

I felt my cheeks warm, for no reason I could discern. Maybe because of the way he was looking at me. That night, his eyes smoldered, like a gas flame kept on low; that night, his eyes reminded me of an oil painting, a shade of red so rich it seemed daubed on with a brush. "Come here," he said after a second, that half-smile leavening his tone.

He slid his arm around me, pulled me into him, and I curled up against his side. Then, he did something he'd never done before. He pushed a hand up the back of my T-shirt, unsticking it from my skin, scratching between my shoulder blades and down my spine; it was an alien sensation, but not a bad one. Far from it, actually. Before I could stiffen, or squirm, or ask him what the hell he was doing, I felt tingles bloom in the wake of his fingers. I felt my limbs slacken of their own accord. Like I had when he'd kissed me in the maintenance bay, I felt flutters underneath my skin, and gooseflesh stippling its surface – never mind that I shouldn't have been able to get goosebumps, just like I shouldn't have been able to blush. As though bidden by his touch, they appeared anyway.

So I lay still and let him rub my back, for a stretch of time that was as close to bliss as I thought I'd ever come. I spaced out, shut my eyes. With my face nestled into his chest – for once without the cushion of his coat – his scent seeped through me, different than usual. Salt and sand, mostly. The earthy, sun-baked smell of the beach. The starched cotton in his shirt. It wasn't familiar, but it was still Zima; beneath the fingerprints of the day, something I knew lingered in his skin.

I almost didn't hear him when he finally spoke. "You know, Dita," he said, sliding his fingers in slow circles over the small of my back, "aside from the day I met you, I think this might have been the best day of my life."

"Why? Because you got to win me a crappy stuffed animal, ride those horrible teacups, and hand out tanizaki—"

"Yakitori, love."

"—yakitori to strangers on the boardwalk?"

"Not quite." He sort of chuckled, not much spirit behind the sound. Even without looking up – without getting a glimpse of his face, or his eyes swallowing the stars – I could tell his thoughts had thickened. "Or—in a sense. I know you don't much care for them, but I think it's good to have those experiences. They open your eyes, a little bit at a time. Broaden your mind. I learned more today than I have in years."

"You know everything. What's left to learn?"

"A better question would be what's knowing, anyway? If I have a thousand images on file for the white-sand beaches of Makalawena, is that the same as having seen them? If I have a thousand megs of data on horseback riding in the Andes, is that the same as having done it?" He sighed. "If there's one thing I do know, it's that knowledge without experience is useless. Knowing everything hasn't made me any happier, or my life any fuller; it's only made me want what I can't have." The faintest smile slid back into his voice, diluting its vinegar. "But days like this—they make me feel alive."

Suddenly, I was ashamed of myself, for being so difficult about—well, everything. I didn't know it meant that much. "Zima—"

"There's so much to the world, Dita. So much more than rooftops and telephone poles. Our little universe gets smaller every day, and we're stuck inside it missing out on what's real." The earth seemed to shift as he sat up, bringing me with him. He slipped his hand out of my shirt and his arm around my waist – held me against him, but didn't look at me, his gaze still lost in the sky. "I don't care about knowing things; I want the chance to do them. I want to see things, hear things—feel things—you can't feel data, you know? It's just numbers. And maybe it's more than a persocom should hope for, but I want a life that's more than that."

I wouldn't say it was bitter, the way he spoke that night. More like wistful. More like sad. And there was nothing I could do, as much as it hurt to hear it; if you're sitting in a tree, and it says I don't want to be a tree, what are you supposed to tell it? If you're looking at the sun, and it says I don't want to be the sun, what are you supposed to say? It is what it is. You are what you are.

"It doesn't matter what we want."

"It could." At last, his eyes left the stars to look at me. They weren't quite sad, in that moment, but they weren't quite happy, either. Fixed on mine, they hung in a sort of limbo, between the smile I knew so well and…something I didn't know at all. "If things were different, it could. Every day could be like this, if we were—"

"Human?"

"No." He kissed my forehead. "If we were free."

Freedom. I'd never let the thought enter my mind.

He got up and wandered down to the tidepools, his silhouette screening the starlight. The wind, rolling in with the surf, tossed his ponytail; his skin, against the dark sky, glowed ice-pale. It wasn't long I could sit there watching him, even just feet away, before the stayclosetome pulled me to his side.

"Listen, Zima," I said, taking him by the arm, trying to catch his gaze, "I know I can be contrary, sometimes. I know I'm not always—good about stuff like this, and—what I'm trying to say is, I didn't know it meant so much to you. I'm sorry if…if I spoiled it."

It wasn't something I did often – apologizing, I mean. Not to Zima. Not to anyone. But I thought I would have said anything, if it would bring the light back to his eyes. "Dita, love," he answered, a smile breaking over his face like the waves over our feet, "there's only one thing you could have done to spoil this day." He leaned down and kissed me on the mouth. "When I said follow me," he murmured against my lips, "you could've said no."

Zima, I wanted to say to him, I would follow you anywhere.

But I didn't say it. I couldn't. I wanted to tell him I loved him, that night, but the words wouldn't pass my lips; all I could do was smile, a little weakly, and let him put his arm around my shoulders, and walk with him down the beach. I would make the sun not the sun for you, I wanted to tell him, if I could. If it would make you happy. Is that what love is? I felt sure he would know that, at least. He may not have known what knowing was, but he had to know that. Is it love if I get goosebumps when you touch me? Is it love if I would do anything to see you smile?

Or is it just a program? If he's just a boy-shaped thing, something inside of me whispered, even with his arm warm around me, and you're just a girl-shaped thing, could it ever be more than just…a love-shaped thing?