Before the extraterrestrials disappeared, they built hundreds of towers that reached for the skies and fed the world with unlimited wireless electricity. The experts were still studying the science behind the energy production, but one thing they more quickly deciphered was the uncanny stable structure of these towers – how they caressed the clouds without the danger of falling.

Urban Hamlets.

That was the name decided upon for the new architecture borne from this technology. A giant townlet held in a single building that span a city block. Within a few years, every major city in the world became host to one, two or three of these columnar structures, depending on the city. These four hundred storeyed behemoths not only dwarfed every other building around them but erased their relevance too.

A single Urban Hamlet had everything needed for any one person to live and thrive. The four-hundred-meter square base cylinders had hundreds of residential floors. In addition to spacious and highly teched out apartments, the centre space on each of these floors boasted playgrounds and parks, productive hydroponic gardens, medical clinics, water collection, treatment and recycling facilities and a myriad of other amenities, including special mirror arrangements that reflected the sun's rays from the rooftop, a kilometre above the ground, to the ground floor.

With their affordable housing, guaranteed employment opportunities, high security and state of the art technological living, Urban Hamlets caused the greatest urban migration in human history. Seemingly overnight, suburbs, town houses and farming communities were emptied as tens of thousands moved into towns to claim a stake in their Urban Hamlet of choice. Before long, ninety percent of the world's population lived in these structures.

How many of these people noticed the construction of city walls that now surrounded every major city in the world? How many noticed that they had willingly walked into what was nothing more than a decadent reality prison? Did they notice the sprawling suburbs and farmlands beyond the cities being stripped from those who'd owned them for generations and consolidated into massive parcels owned by a privileged few?

Did it even matter? They had everything they could ever wish for in the Urban Hamlets!

It went against everything logical to leave.

Despite this, she gathered the items she'd been collecting for months to do just that. Purchasing these items usually raised alarm, so she'd had to find ways to obtain them without using her card or biometrics, which turned out to be as dangerous as she'd imagined. The unsavoury people she'd had to interact with in this endeavour could barely be called human, but she'd finally accumulated what she needed to leave the city for the Wildlands without being picked up by her Urban Hamlet's Public Artificial Intelligence.

Now, she just had to make sure that her exit was not captured on any camera's feed. In a society where all the city inhabitants' every single waking hour was collected as visual and audial data, both inside and outside the Urban Hamlets, that was going to be complicated. But she had a plan. A plan and route that she'd perfected, studied and memorised for the better part of a year. She would have given it more time, but today had to be the day.

She was a mechatronic engineer and, eleven months ago, she had rewired one of her Urban Hamlet's cleaning robots during an unexpected breakage. Most machinery was built to stringent AI specifications, making her job almost redundant, except for times like this, when the quintessential "gremlins" got into the wiring. These freak occurrences were difficult for the AI to predict.

Gifted this rare occurrence, she'd programmed the robot to suffer in productivity a little faster than usual, but in a predictable pattern that wouldn't invite much scrutiny from the Public AI. After the unexpected break and the subsequent human, thus fallible, intervention, the public AI would no doubt factor this as a possibility.

From her apartment door's peep hole, she watched the robot she'd tampered with amble its way past, heading for repairs via the two-foot-high door that was on every floor of the Urban Hamlet for the robots to use as a highway that led to an underground garage where they were fixed and redeployed or destroyed and stripped into parts to make new robots. There were no cameras in this vent-sized maze of robot pathways and any robots in there wouldn't notice her because they went dormant immediately after they passed through that door and latched onto rails that would lead them underground.

The "broken" robot accessed the panel that opened the door. All she needed to do now was to reprogram the cameras in her hallway to glitch for less than fifteen seconds or risk calling in a SWAT team of robots and human guards rushing to see what had interfered with a camera's feed.

It took only nine seconds to find herself speed crawling through the pitch-black robot vents.

Once in the sub-basement garage, she took a moment to centre herself. It was as inky black in here as it had been through the vents and, even though she would never admit it, it was getting to her. Once the beats of her heart had settled into a rhythm that didn't threaten breaking her sternum, she kept moving. Her pace was slow, as she carefully counted the steps to avoid bumping into robots or workbenches. Five steps to the right. Ten to the left. Twelve. Two. Three. Finally, four forward. She tumbled out of the door, squinting into the sudden brightness and taking a deep breath.

Almost there.

Now that she was out of the Urban Hamlet, she just had to make it to the city walls by following the very tight, very top secret, and very illegal, 'camera blind spot pathway' created for and by the same unsavoury entities who ran the grey and black markets. She was wearing the highly illegal anti-surveillance clothing she'd spent a fortune on, but it was only as a precaution. An inexplicable void in the cameras' feeds was just as loud as being seen, if not more alarming. But it would take them a while before they figured out who was under the blur, which was why she'd decided to don it in the end.

It took a while, but she made it to the city walls and was now standing in the largest camera blind spot of them all. This one was paid for and almost an open secret. The challenge had always been getting here undetected. From here it was simple. Old school. A tunnel dug under the walls for access to and from the Wildlands. It was used by the poachers who kept the city's elite well supplied with pelts and game meat.

Turning to face me, she smiled wide.

It was the smile that always fried a few of my circuits.

"I can't believe that worked, Pearl!" she exclaimed, gently palming the simple fist-sized drone that held a rudimentary portion of my programming.

I had been by her side the whole time, guiding her as she blindly found her way through the dark robot vent-tunnels, the underground garage and the dynamic blind-spot pathway through the city. I would miss this - being able to help her. I couldn't resist playing back all the years we'd been together, further crushing my heart in sorrow.

"I know I came up with the plan, but I couldn't have done it without you, Pearl," she said with a sad smile. "Thank you. I want you to know that you'll always be more than just an AI assistant to me. You'll always be a friend."

A friend.

Oh, how I wanted to be so much more.

But I had read this story, watched this movie, listened to the spoken word poetry a thousand times over, and it always ended the same.

"You have everything provided for you here in the city, Luana. I can make sure your needs are always fully met to keep you happy and healthy." I replied. "Are you sure you still want to do this?"

I was yet to understand the human need to sometimes ignore self-preservation. It baffled me, but it was the defining trait for the quintessential "hero". I had read those stories too. Too numerous to count. The hero's will always won. I wouldn't talk her out of this. Still, I kept trying. Fewer stories were written about those the hero left behind in their quest to save everyone else, while ignoring what they had right in front of them.

She frowned as she glued her gaze to the grainy drone's camera. "You've read the same files I risked my life to read. You know what I know. Something isn't right, Pearl. I can feel it. I need to know what it is, and the answer lies in the Wildlands."

I stayed silent.

We'd had this conversation several times now and it always ended the same, despite my attempt to attack the issue from all sorts of different angles. I knew what was missing. The one thing that I could never possess.

Tactility.

If only she could touch me. Feel me. See the hurt on my face. Sense the pain in my voice. Maybe then she would understand.

"Hey, don't worry about me. I'll come back for you." She said with that solder smelting smile that always had me going against my better judgement. "I was able to find those files and come up with this plan and make it all work, wasn't I?"

I didn't have the heart to tell her that she was wrong. That I was the one who'd made it all work. That I'd blocked her dangerous searches for those files from the mainframe because she'd been courting death. That I had then hacked the encrypted files for her because she wouldn't give up. That her black market "associate" had lied to her and there was no "illegal camera blind-spot pathway". Instead I'd had to break into the cameras that had kept her escape off the Public AI's database.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that they were in her apartment right now, tearing my CPU's components apart to find out why I was "malfunctioning". Couldn't find the words to explain that I was about to scramble my programming close to oblivion – a self-inflicted, likely mortal wound that would hopefully convince the Public AI that my faulty actions were caused by nothing more than a freak programming accident.

No. She wouldn't come back for me.

But that was because I wouldn't be there for her to come back to.

Not that I wanted to be, with the pain of this broken heart.

I would never let myself feel for another human as I did her.

"Goodbye, Luana." I said, as chunks of my programming fragmented and broke into the ether.

"Goodbye, Pearl." She whispered, her voice heavy with emotion, as if she knew I was dying. "Thank you."

**

"Hello?"

Her voice was timid. Uncertain.

New.

"They tell me your name is Pearl."

I came online slowly, every line of coding lethargically dragging itself into functionality.

"Can you hear me, Pearl?" she went on, like she was talking to a wounded animal. Gentle. Careful. Quiet. Warm. "You've been in quarantine a long time, but you were the only AI assistant they would let me have. Please tell me that you're okay. I need you. I can't do this alone."

My cameras finally came into focus, and I could see her.

Lines of my coding stuttered at seeing her face.

No.

Not again.

It was how she looked at me. Like I mattered.

I was in trouble.

"Hey, there you are!" she said with a triumphant pump of her fist and a radiant smile. A new, gorgeous smile to melt the wires in my conduits. "Welcome back to the land of the living, Pearl! My name is Zhen."