Ventura rubbed her arm nervously on her ride aboard the express ship to Earth. The shuttle was filled with passengers going to Los Angeles, California. A man with red spikes in his hair took notice that she was digging her nails into her arm and leaned close, concern painted over him. "Everything alright with you ma'am?"

She turned with a wise, cynical shade of gray in those eyes of hers. "Do I look alright to you?"

The man reviewed her profile. Nodded. "You look good enough for any man to fall in love, I'm sure. I'm just seeing your arm ain't looking too good under that abuse you're giving it."

He nodded at her arm above the elbow where her acrylic nails had been digging. She looked. A trickle of blood spilled down the bit of skin her fingers had chewed up. Jumping at this she immediately pulled for the napkin on her tray beside her complimentary bagel and cream cheese and smothered her wound to soak up the blood. She shot the man a look of embarrassment.

"It's alright," he said, smiling slightly for comfort. "I bite my nails. Have a nervous tick now and then. Grit my teeth when I sleep. All part of the stressful engineering life, loads of deadlines. I guess I'm not perfect either." He shrugged. Looking off into his lap, seeing his fingernails, a touch of shame. "I guess I'm only human."

That last sentence raised Ventura's spirits higher than the man could have thought. Red roses bloomed in her cheeks and she said, "Being human is good." She thought of herself as growing more human by the second.

Because of her sudden uplifted mood, he lifted his face to meet hers. A surprised smile spread over him, too. "You think so?"

The humanoid laughed. "You kidding? I'd pick human over anything else, any day."

This comment lighted his eyes. "Really? I've been saving money for years while working at the engineering house I'm at so I could purchase new hands that don't wrinkle..."

Ventura reviewed his hands and saw the valleys of cracks lining his palms and compared them to hers—not a crack in them. This made her sad. "I think your hands are beautiful."

This sent the man's heavy eyelids lifted wide. He was over the moon. "Wait. You do?"

Ventura laced her bright green irises at his glinting grays reflecting back at her. "Yes. So, so much." Her voice seemed passionate and devastatingly sad from longing, which made him go awestruck.

He soaked in the moment. "Really? My wife—she hates my hands. Absolutely hates them. Every crack in my skin is just a migraine waiting to happen in her OCD head." His palms rolled up as his hands clenched into fists. His face turned to pure hatred. "And she wants me to pay heavy on the dollar for surgery so I can never bite my nails without an electric shock going straight through my mouth. She doesn't care how painful that is. Plus, surgery to stop my eyebrows from ever growing out of position. It's sick. I can't stand it." He shook with hurt and aggravation.

Ventura studied his frustration, admiring his emotions. He was so fascinating to her. So human. She could tell his ears were implants, his nose was too perfect to be anything other than an implant that reduces snot and stops pollen entry. But he was definitely whipped. His wife had him by the tail. And he loathed her for it.

"Amazing," said Ventura, accidentally. She had been staring at him both like a wondrous lab specimen and like a golden statue worthy of idolatry.

The man had been staring at his hands throughout his angry speech and looked up at her all of a sudden.

"What's amazing?"

She almost felt like laughing at him. She shook her head, a perfectly symmetrical smile spreading over her face. He didn't know how beautiful he was. So, organic. A direct creation of nature. Unlike her, her smile faded slightly, she was only an indirect creation, made by others.

But then he smiled at her, one of his bottom teeth was misaligned and his lips were chapped and crackling white. He nodded at her, dreaming. Looking over all her wildly perfect symmetry, probably thinking she must come from money and had more than enough technological implants to keep her looking young for the next decade.

He doesn't know, she thought. I'm a humanoid.

While her smile was fading as she pondered her existence in the universe, his words swam through her ears like a tickling feather, making her smile and blush harder than she had for years.

The human raised her up on a towering pedestal, and almost seemed to idolize her, too, when he said, "Someday, I want to be like you."

Ventura was shocked. Ear to ear her lips spread. She couldn't help it. Her eyes misted. "That's impossible," she said. And she meant it, for he didn't know what she was.

He laughed. "Why the blazes not?"

She laughed in tune. Laughed so loud in fact the people around her shot hot glares at her which they both ignored and which made them laugh even harder.

Finally, she caught her breath. And they both looked at each other like the oldest of friends before she said the words to answer his question about how on Earth somebody like she couldn't be the apple of any human's eye—why this man could not in heaven's name want, to be just like her... "Because," she said, "someday," her voice raspy with hopeless comedy, "I want to be like you."

Before the plane landed, the man asked to trade numbers. She accepted. But she would never call him, nor would she answer his call. She'd like to leave their little memory on that little public shuttle. She would think of him, and all the things he said, now and again as she cradled up to sleep, but she would never pursue this further. The potential heartache he could induce if he rejected her once he learned the truth about her origin, would only devastate her. After all, no human nor cyborg want a humanoid. Barely either does a humanoid want themselves a humanoid. A humanoid is merely a sad try at God's masterwork. A fatal attempt to sculpt something true. But artificial can never become real. It's in the definition. Looking at herself in the cab window as she left the station down to Earth, she saw her face streaming with the water droplets of a dark storm flooding over the rich forests and monumental skyscrapers of the blue planet.

Take it as it is, she thought. That's all it is for now.

A jazz song from the American 1950's went on the station of her private cab. She released a therapeutic sigh and watched the towering trees and skyscrapers fly up in the dark rainy night before she plummeted straight down into the ground, curved down a slide like a skate, and reappeared in a vast network of transport running through interweaving underground roads. She zipped at 200 miles an hour on an automatic skate, and appeared in her Santa Monica residence within the next three minutes.

The skate lifted her cab to a garage, where her cab disconnected from the skate and zipped up the lot to leave her at the lobby. She stepped out, and went across the humanoid backway separate from the human/cyborg master stairway to her room. She walked up the busy crowded stairs, the windows a dark black while the storm could be heard, water splattering down. She looked around at the other humanoids in passing. But everyone seemed to have their head down. Either in deep thought or antisocial gloom. She followed suit. However, coming close to her residential floor, she did lift her eyes and darted them through the crowd just to catch someone's eye.

Almost to the top, she did catch someone's eye. Another woman's. The humanoid had lifted her eyes curious if anyone was looking for connection as well. The moment they caught eyes felt like they were submerged in deep water. Everyone's steps up and down the red stairway slowed in an aqueous struggle. A heartfelt smile was traded between the two of them in that surprising passing. And when the stairs emerged from that deep-sea dive and they continued walking out of sight of each other, and everyone walked faster about their business, Ventura's heart felt a little lighter, and a little giggle passed through her confident lips. She exited the stairwell to her floor and walked down the landing to her room at the end of the hall. She took a breath. Spotted the mirror and propped her hair for her boyfriend. Took a heavier breath when she was ready, prepared her smile, and entered the room. She couldn't wait to see her boyfriend again. He would be so happy to see her.

Their place was the size of a toaster. A kitchen the length of one's waist, the living room and dining room were one entity with a table and two chairs, and the bedroom and bathroom connected through a hall the size of a side closet. Inside the bedroom was a square blanket on the floor and a square window. A pole overhead for clothes. That was it. No floor space beyond the square blanket. She walked through the entire place in three seconds.

And Diego was nowhere to be found.

However, he did leave a note on the bedroom blanket. It was a yellow sticky note. Her heart fluttered and she danced over to pick it up. She carried it over to the dining/living room where the only source of light was an overhead bulb. She pulled it and red it.

The note read:

Dear Ventura,

I seek love which is true. Your absence is voice enough. I will insult myself no more. I have met someone else.

Enjoy your men.

With All The Little Love I Have Left,

Diego

Her delight shattered. She read it three times. Wondering if she had misinterpreted it. But the meaning never changed. And the worst sentence of all-- Enjoy your men-- burned at her stomach. She clenched her fist and looked around the house frantically, as if he'd gone invisible against a wall. She crumpled the note and tossed it out the front door. She ran to her room in fury, shaking.

How could he? He had no sympathy for her, she decided, no sympathy in his whole system. It was her job. He was wrong to judge her.

Her eyes were too dry to cry. She was in disbelief. She cradled her legs and sat in the corner of her dark bedroom. The shadows of the rain brushed like hordes of running spiders down the walls and across the floor. She sat there thinking and not thinking, just feeling her blood boil, staring at the spiders. Eventually emotional exhaustion pulled her body down and laid her in the fetal position on the floor. She lay on that blanket for hours by herself before her lonely eyes finally closed.

And then, came the tears. Thoughts of him, of the future she was looking for. They were gone. But what is a humanoid anyway? Especially a humanoid girl like her. Just something to be used. Not to be loved. Not to be lived with hand in hand. She was built to be desired, did, then deserted.

And worst came when her next thought argued she may be the culprit. It was her own fault. She was to blame.

But of course, it was in her birth. She could blame no one. Not even herself for being alone. And unlovable. She thought about those comforting forces humans had when they were upset. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends... how she could use one.

A ringing came from ears. A sunny tune. She opened her eyes and looked in the dark at her arm, spiders racing over it. Francisco Calling... her arm read in neon pink letters over her skin. She remembered the nice man with red hair tips. In her loneliness, she decided to answer it. He and she talked for ten nice minutes. It was nice meeting each other. They would like to get coffee. Yes, coffee would be nice. They hung up. She closed her eyes feeling slightly better. But the thought of her long-time long-distance partner Diego crept back into mind. He had left her for someone else. If it were for some other humanoid like her, that would crush her. But if Diego had left for a human or cyborg instead... that would crush her even worse. Rip out her heart, cut it to bits, and kill her completely.

She had only slept an hour when the morning sun jumped up.