I woke to the awful smell of black licorice. I jolted and spotted the girl laughing with the peace of vine candy in her hands. Getting to her knees on the bed she said, "Licorice mustache!" She cackled and rolled onto her back. Her breasts bobbed like fine peaches.

I had just had a nightmare. I had been frozen in a cube of ice under a lake. Then a pickaxe broke me out and the sun thawed me before I spotted that it was the girl on Mars who saved me. I was glad and so was she, but then she collapsed through the ice and turned into an ice cube as well. I would have helped her but the ice was cracking all around beneath my feet. So instead of saving her, I ran for my life. Then I woke up.

"I left her on Mars," I said aloud. My head fell back on the red pillow. The sheets were soft with morning.

The girl lost her smile and might have even developed a touch of jealousy as I could tell when she spoke: If you feel guilty then don't talk about her."

"What will happen to her?" I asked, not hearing her.

She expressed zero sympathy in her answer: "20% of Mars' air freezes during winter. Maybe she'll die." She saw the horror in my face and said, "But least she's alone and it will only happen to her."

I said nothing. Another wave of horror. She could be pregnant.

The space station girl turned her eyes to me and looked pensive. "Do you sympathize with us?" By us she meant artificial humans.

I shrugged. "I don't see the difference between you and me; if the product's the same I don't care how we were made."

She seemed to blush and turned away with a little smile. She wrapped her arms around her legs. That's so nice of him.

Bewildered, I looked up at the starry ceiling and imagined the Martian sea cooling to a bed of ice. But in the solid sea I could imagine the hut would be frozen as well, and the girl and the corpse I had shot with the flare gun were dead underneath the ice, dead as doornails in my imagination. Them and the girl's baby, too.

The green-eyed girl saw him suffering while in thought, and so she grabbed a stick of licorice from her plastic bin and hopped on his stomach. "Vu-hu-uh. Loohk aht yuh vith yoh cuhly vrench muhstache!" Her breasts flopped as she curled the licorice stick on both sides to create a French mustache. It smelled bitter under my nostrils.

"Stop, stop," I said.

She obeyed but only to eat both ends and return a stubby mustache above my lip. She saluted. "Hail, Hitler."

I slapped the licorice away and she gasped playfully. "Don't ever do that impression again," I said.

"I won't," she laughed. Not only was that joke distasteful but it was a terrible impression.

I sighed. I felt her weight on my body. She was warm and laid flat on me. She seemed to enjoy my body as much as I enjoyed hers. I wonder if the enjoyment was feigned or if she was actually experiencing the emotion. "Does your body give off oxytocin?"

"I love oxytocin," she gooed.

"Yes, but do you actually feel it or pretend to feel it?"

"My body is the same mystery as yours," she said, smiling on my chest. She looked at me and again I was mesmerized by those green hypnotic whirlpools. They sucked me in.

"What happens now?" I asked.

"We wait until we reach the station." She sat up and ran her fingernails down my stomach. "In the meantime, I suggest we have as much fun as humanly possible."

I shivered.

As she shifted, she tried to make light conversation because of her friendly nature. "So, how's the human experience treating ya?"

"Awful," I said, honestly.

"Fascinating," she said, losing herself completely when she dipped me into her exquisite oil. "Any parents? I don't know how long human memories are."

Ah, my parents. Yes, I forgot about them. A siege of guilt bled out of me. "Never spent enough time with them."

"Why not?"

Then I remembered why and the guilt fell off me like I'd grown waterproof scales. "My dad loved drinking and my mother didn't know how to count her pills."

The girl, lost in her up-and-down motion, heard me but could only hold my hand as a touch of sympathy. "What does that mean? I don't understand."

"It means I got hit every night after five and my mom overdosed when I was six."

Her eyes popped open and she stopped. She bent down over me and offered those green eyes of comfort. "What? That sounds... awful."

"You guessed it. But I'm okay. I had a good year of therapy when I was in foster care. Although the foster kids and foster mom were no good either. I escaped that place eventually. And so did my sister."

"Wait!" The girl jumped up excitedly and knocked the wind out of my me when she landed. I gave a good umf! as the air blew out my lips. "You had a sister? That's amazing! Like real flesh and blood, same parents, everything? Were you identical?"

"No, we weren't twins," I said, "which is too bad for me because my sister was absolutely beautiful." Then my vision went dark. "That is, she was beautiful. Before my dad really whipped her good when he found out she was letting boys over when she'd babysit me. Funny thing is... she started dating girls years later. She ran away with a artistic, crop-top blonde once our adopted parents told her that was no way to get into heaven. She disagreed. The only thing she believed in was the power of love. She followed her heart. I wish I'd said goodbye knowing she wouldn't be coming back. Then again, I guess she didn't want to see me cry." I'd forgotten about all that. I wasn't choked up. But I remembered her. "I remember that last month with her home. She'd dyed her hair red. Red like a velvet cupcake. You eat cupcakes?"

"Sure," said the green-eyed girl, her eyes watery. "I make cupcakes all the time... for my visitors. They make me eat them sometimes?"

I turned to her because that sounded odd. "What visitors?" I said. "They make you eat them?"

She shrugged. "Not important."

I winced at her. Do robots keep secrets?

She leaned her arm over me so I could taste her neatly shaved armpit to retrieve a fistful of chocolate turtles. She changed the subject. "I like candy."

She bit into the caramel ass of one turtle and tried to feed me the turtle's head with her lips. "No, thank you," I said. She wouldn't take no for an answer.

I nearly choked and obviously this led her to laugh out loud and our turtle kiss turned into a fucking mess. "Okay." I got up and the chocolate slipped into the crevice between our stomachs.

"I'm sorry," she said, still laughing.

"You're not sorry," I said, this time sharing in the smiles. "How old are you?" I asked. "There were no robots when I left earth so you can't even be..."

"It's not polite to ask a woman's age," she snapped. She lifted her chin in a dignified manner. Then she pulled the bits of drooling chocolate out from between our navels and tossed them in her mouth.

"I wasn't sure if you were older than the age of three," I said. "How am I supposed to know if you were born as a baby or as a woman?"

She blushed like I'd just given her the finest compliment she'd ever heard. "Why," she said, feigning a Mary Lou southern belle, "ain't you just the sweetest thang." I looked over her shoulder and considered the cocaine right about now. It wasn't like I'd be drug tested for a job anytime soon. In fact I planned to never need a job ever again because when I got back I planned to sue the company for all it's got. I'd demand a million dollars for every month overtime they'd forced upon me for leaving me at the hut. I'd take a piece from them for every precious second they'd stolen from my life. Digging graves wasn't my only aspiration you know.

"So when you finished school did you just go straight into interstellar grave diggin' or what?" She asked. She was still speaking in that southern belle drawl, which honestly I didn't mind a bit because it gave her that kind of Daisy Duke appeal. Granted, any voice she used would never be able to distract from those deep green eyes of hers.

"My foster parents lived in San Francisco. Palo Alto where Steve Jobs grew up. You know Steve Jobs. He's kind of like your godfather."

She laughed. "Nuh-uh, I've got no Apple blood in me," she chimed.

"I grew up with a bunch of engineers on the block and I wanted to be just like them. They were saving the world as far as I could tell. I went to their garages every weekend and got to see their side projects they were working on. Computers, electrical works, chemical even. Hell, I saw rockets and even got to ride along to 'intern' at companies like SpaceX, Tesla, Facebook, Apple, all those old companies. Admittedly, interning meant getting the tour and eating McDonald's with the CEO's on their lunchbreak. But I was just a kid so they didn't think I'd need a Non-Disclosure Agreement."

The girl raised her eyebrows and had her mouth open the whole time. "No fucking way. You little privileged shit," she said, smiling.

"I know," I said, smiling crimson at the cheeks. "Went to a real fine school, too."

"Then why the heck did you end up digging graves on Mars, then? Why didn't you become the CEO of a company?"

"Well," I found myself gazing at her bellybutton as I flew into my past. "I guess I just wasn't as smart as my education."

"Why do you say that?" she said. She got ready to grab me in case I needed more cheering up, but I wasn't depressed about what I was going to say. I just stated it matter-of-factly.

"I had gone into astrophysics but... believe it or not my line of work got automated. That's the thing, we got so good at automation that the moment an engineer figured something out it was as if we didn't need to do that thing he did ever again. So it was like a gold rush to try to keep being innovative. Then apps came out to help businesses with executive decision-making and all the logistics of interpersonal functions and all that... then came the art. I don't know."

She hugged me. "You're not obsolete," she said. This ironically was less than comforting.

"Do you do any art?" I asked. I felt a knot in my chest.

"Of course," she said. "I paint." She gestured to the walls. I looked over at what I'd assumed to be copies of famous paintings across the entire plains of all four walls of the room. A continuous mural surrounded us where the buildings and rivers of ancient Egypt featured masses of people at work and every Egyptian God at play. They were painted over with a soft brown filter so they were only noticeable when you really looked.

"You painted all this?" I said. This would have taken Michaelangelo a decade.

"Yeah," she shrugged, less than proud of it. "I was just trying to see if I could do it with my left hand."

I covered my face. I am obsolete. What good is a human if the robots learn to be creative?

"You can do this too, you know," she said, laughing at me.

"Uh, no," I said. "Good one."

"Yes, you can. You and I are potentially the same," she said. "All the robots and humans have met in the middle, you see. While the humans used biotechnology to enhance their bodies, engineers added genetic/biological functions to AI to grow human anatomies and physiologies with base materials. You know, sugars, proteins, nucleotides and lipids."

I stared up at her in the face like she was crazy. Did she say, Robots and humans... met in the middle? We're the 'same' now?

"I think you need to lay off the Quaaludes," I said.

"But," she said, playfully, "I love Quaaludes." She laughed again.

I was beginning to realize her favorite jokes were her own.

I couldn't help but admire her laughing out loud like that. For a robot, she seemed so free.

"Alright," she said, when she regained her composure, "so when the evil robots took over your jobs, which is sad because my model hadn't even come out yet so you must have been replaced by some impressively retarded robots," (another laughing interlude) "what did you end up doing with yourself?"

"Well," I said. A flash of deeply suppressed memories foamed in from the depths of my mind. I couldn't help but pause. "After months of depression and lying on the floor to watch the dust float midair by the window, I took up the sport of drinking and tried selling drugs to kids at bars when one kid told my daughter, whom I sure loved a lot but got into too much trouble, who told her mom what I'd been doing to pay the bills and the fights started going and getting worse and one day I don't know I just lost it and used my belt on my wife and she cracked my head open with her jewelry box. I woke up in the hospital and my daughter told me over the phone that her mother and her had taken the car to Las Vegas where her uncle lived. I sold the house out of fury and all of our belongings. Which, might have in hindsight burned any potential for fixing up my marriage had I just gone to rehab." I looked at the stars in the ceiling.

"Thankfully," I said, "my best friend gave me a call one day, and said he'd lost his job. Lost his family, too. His wife had divorced him for a contractor. He said he'd volunteered in Bangladesh to improve their Wi-Fi services. I went with him because, well, I had nothing better to do. Next thing I knew we were traveling the world together, blowing up air balloons that provided Internet connection over developing countries. And next thing I knew, I stopped drinking. I did some more volunteer work to provide computer help and healthcare services in the places like India, and the next thing I knew I was reading self-help books and I ended up calling my wife to tell her I'd turned over a new leaf."

I looked to her but she wasn't saying anything with those deep green eyes besides, Go on, then what happened?

I dropped my head down and felt the bomb tick quietly inside my chest. "But... it just wasn't meant to be." I pursed my lips and felt my throat grow warm. I wouldn't cry about this though. I'd cried enough in the past.

The girl hugged me. "I'm sorry," she said. Great. Now she was crying. "Did you ever see your daughter again?"

"Now and again," I said. That was a lie. Truth was, I'd seen her once. I visited her and found her living with a guy just as abusive as I was. I'd killed him. And that's how I ended up on Mars. My lawyer was teamed up with a good PR person and had done a fine job keeping the whole thing under wraps. My friend who'd introduced me to volunteer work had started work at the company and given me the opportunity to go to Mars for a special project. Little did I know I'd be digging graves and that that would be worse than going to prison. They'd promised me it'd be like house arrest, with all the movies, TV shows, videogames and books I could dream of. I hadn't thought I'd be totally utterly alone. And the end date had way surpassed the agreed upon time.

I was supposed to be digging graves under contract for only one year.