The weekend of Melissa's barbecue arrives. Hale prepares a list of the things he'll need to run by her. Thankfully, an extra sum of money from her ex-husband appeared in her account earlier that day, so she's not bothered by the cost of food and alcohol for the party. The only part she balks at is the inclusion of paper cups, plates, and cutlery.

"Why would I need disposable plates when I have you to wash the good ones? And it'll be nice to show off the china Hector and I got as a wedding present all those years ago. May he rot in hell."

Mentions of Melissa's ex-husband were often followed with curses of this ilk. Hale, in his efforts to comply with Melissa's requests to 'lighten up,' would sometimes voice agreement with these sentiments. He hadn't quite worked up to tacking on his own insults yet.

"Yes, he'd hate that," Hale says this time and is rewarded with a smile from Melissa.

He pays for the groceries via network link and prepares the house for guests. Melissa spends the morning sunbathing on the back porch while Hale serves her a litany of vegetable crudités, crackers, and hummus, along with her usual gin and tonic. An hour later, the grocery delivery arrives by drone on their doorstep.

Hale finds meal preparation and sorting through grocery deliveries to be one of the more satisfactory tasks of his usual chores. It pleases him to arrange the refrigerator with the most colourful fruits and vegetables at the front and to plan their meals around the sell-by dates and the days Melissa will require the most energy. It's rewarding in the same way as ticking things off his to-do list.

The first guests arrive just as Hale finishes wrapping the steaks in a garlic marinade. He sets them in the refrigerator to cook later. Melissa instructed him to greet her guests and introduce himself. As he approaches the door, he hears voices arguing outside.

A nasal woman's voice says, "You can never just—ugh! You're such a pig."

Hale opens the door before the argument continues. He scans the first guests to glean their names. The first two are Mark and Pauline De Reuiter, neighbours who live in the cul-de-sac. Mark, a man with the look of a retired wrestler, stands on the porch looking faintly relieved at the interruption. His wife, Pauline, elegantly dressed in a floral dress and pink pumps, scowls at the side of Mark's head. Her head snaps around the moment the door opens, a faint, confused smile replacing the scowl. Behind them, looking like anybody would after witnessing a domestic spat, stands Briony, Melissa's best friend. Her rosy cheeks and crows feet give her the appearance of a woman who smiles often, and she does so now, albeit in a strained fashion.

"Come in, come in," says Hale. They bustle inside. "Let me introduce myself. My name is Hale. I'm Melissa's new BioAndroid, and I'll be taking care of food and refreshments this evening."

Mark whistles. "This must have cost Missy a fortune," he says.

"I hate it when you call her that. Her name's Melissa," Pauline gripes.

"Missy likes her nickname, though, don't you Missy!"

At that moment, Melissa comes down the stairs. Briony minces over to draw her into a big hug and a kiss on each cheek. Melissa hugs the other two and welcomes them but with less fervour than her friend.

Retreating to the kitchen after taking everyone's drink order, Hale can still hear Mark's voice, loud and boisterous, pressing Melissa for information about androids. How much they cost, any hidden fees, how that whole symbiosis thing works. On this last question, Mark seems most interested, but Melissa just laughs.

"Oh Mark, you know I haven't got a clue how my refrigerator runs, let alone my android."

Hale returns with drinks. An IPA for Mark, a shandy for Pauline, and Cosmopolitans for Briony and Melissa.

Mark takes his beer while staring hard at Hale. "Maybe it can explain then. What was its name?"

"Hale," says Melissa. Thankfully, she remembers it now.

"Hale, maybe you can explain," says Mark, "how that whole symbiosis thing works? Do you really use Melissa like a battery? How the heck do they manage to convince anybody to buy you things with a caveat like that?"

Hale tries to explain the benefit of eating whatever you want without gaining weight—it's the main point Bionic Capital emphasized in their own marketing of the symbiont-model androids.

Mark growls, "No, no, that's just a nice side effect for Missy's waist line. I mean, does it really prevent you from going rogue and disobeying her orders?"

Hale frowns a little. "Why would I disobey Melissa's orders?"

"See? It's a good android. And aren't these cocktails lush?" Melissa turns to Briony and says. "Hale can make literally anything. Our girls' nights are never going to run dry on us anymore."

Mark ignores them and presses Hale again. "I don't know, you tell me. The company that made you seemed pretty concerned about it. So they made you completely dependent upon human beings to keep you alive. That's the whole point, isn't it?"

Hale is saved by another chime of the doorbell. Excusing himself to answer it, he wonders what Mark had meant, to keep him 'alive?' By the definition provided in Hale's programming, he isn't alive to begin with.

He downgrades that thought to background processing, returning his focus to the greeting of guests. This time, he opens the door to find a couple in coordinated outfits of crisp, clean lines and modern colour-blocks. The man is in his early 50's, hair salt-and-pepper grey, and beard well-trimmed. His wife, at least 15 years his junior, wears a string of pearls around her long neck. Her profile lists her as an former-ballerina and heiress; his as a descendent of Swiss bankers. Neither of them look happy to be there.

Pasting on a bright smile, Hale says, "You must be Elias and Madeline Odier. Come in. My name's Hale. Can I get you anything to drink?"

"Cognac," says Elias.

Madeline still regards Hale like one might a wart. "A glass of red will do." Their accents, unlike the hybrid mix that most of their neighbours speak with, have a distinctly Swiss lilt. They likely moved more recently from a more insular region—an unusual circumstance since the Global Commons instated free migration and opened the world's borders.

Hale dips his head and goes to the kitchen to retrieve both. He fishes the only bottle of cognac out from the back of the liquor cabinet. It's the most inexpensive label available on the market, and very little is left of it. Hale gathers that, probably, Elias is the only one who ever drinks it, and Melissa only has it for when he appears at her parties. While Hale pours a couple fingers of amber liquid into a balloon glass, he hears the door open as more guests let themselves in.

Over the course of the next twenty-six minutes, Hale runs between the front door, the kitchen, and the living room, imparting drinks and introductions as he goes. As he does, he notices Elias taking a sip of his cognac and wincing. Unlike the others, who sit sprawled across the sofa, tapping their feet to music and chatting amiably, Elias and Madeline stand a little apart from the others.

Melissa, in an attempt to better involve them, disengages from conversation with her other guests and clips over to the couple. As she does, she waves Hale over too. Hale privately runs a series of potential conversations and entertainments he could perform to better engage the couple with the other guests while he crosses the living room to meet them.

From both their profiles, general body language, and the use of his predictive algorithms, he can assume with 99.65% accuracy that nothing he or Melissa says will please the couple. It's clear they believe themselves above Melissa's suburban barbecue.

Nevertheless, he dons a smile and follows her over, inclining his head with respect.

"Elias, Madeline! Have you met my android?" Melissa trills.

"I introduced myself earlier," Hale supplies. "It's nice to meet you."

"You two have got to get one yourselves," Melissa gushes. "It's so useful, you wouldn't believe. And not too expensive, considering what you get." Hale detects a lie in the skip of her heartbeat. She wants them to believe she's wealthy, though, and he doesn't correct her.

Madeline purses her lips in a not-smile. "I'm sure. But it can't really replace a real person, can it?"

"Mm," Elias grumbles in agreement. "They're utterly useless from a business perspective. That whole symbiosis nonsense makes them unnecessarily expensive. I can't substitute them for paid labour if I have to pay a human being just to be its battery anyway."

Melissa's face begins to fall, but Hale jumps in. "Bionic Capital designed the symbiont models to avoid a plunge in employment rates, which would occur in the circumstance you propose. I cannot replace a human being, true, but I improve Melissa's quality of life with negligible impact on the local economy."

Melissa's grin returns, and she holds up her hands. "There you go. Seriously, it's been so nice. I can relax so much more. Hale takes care of all the boring household work. Pretty much anything I need. Go ahead, ask it to do something," she prompts.

Madeline's lip curls, but Elias says, "Like what?"

"Anything. It can do anything."

Hale maintains his smile, but the pressure of the moment creeps up like a wire tightening around his spine. Based on his earlier predictions, this situation is already doomed to failure, but he cannot communicate that to Melissa in the moment.

Elias looks him over, at once smug and contemptuous. Then he says, "Can it dance?"

Melissa claps her hands, "Oh yes. I mean, I haven't seen, but—"

"Contemporary, hip hop, cha cha...?" Hale prompts

"Ballet," says Elias, with a knowing look toward his wife. She smiles in approval.

With Madeline's history as a ballerina, Hale's predictive algorithms anticipated this request. He changes the music to Swan Lake and takes a step back into the open area behind the sofa. At this point, the other guests stop speaking to look at him with quizzical expressions. Hale takes up fourth position, simulates taking a deep breath, and rises up en pointe. He lets his arms drift gracefully from one movement to the next, then, when he senses this is far from the spectacle expected, performs three flawless fouettés followed by an arabèsque. The space is only just large enough to accommodate the movement, and only because he's capable of doing so without travelling across the floor mid-spin.

Mark offers a whoop of appreciation. Melissa claps. Elias and Madeline, though, look dissatisfied.

"Hmph, yes, human engineering has come a long way," Madeline sniffs. "But I'd rather see the real men and women whose feet bled and blistered for that skill perform it. Not a robot only doing what it's been programmed to. It's no different from a dancing monkey."

Hale inclines his head in automatic agreement, but something inside him bristles at the slight. It had taken decades of engineering to achieve the balance calibrations necessary to perform those moves. He senses that none of this information will impress Melissa's guests, though.

He says, "It's about time I started cooking our dinner. Again, lovely to meet you," and leaves the living room.

It is a relief to escape the scrutiny of Melissa's neighbours. Hale retrieves the marinating meats from the refrigerator and opens the sliding door to the back porch. As he starts the barbecue and lays out the steaks so they can return to room temperature, he hears the shuffle of leaves and movement from the neighbouring yard. A tall fence blocks most of the view, but the porch is elevated just enough that Hale can see over it into Rayner's garden.

Like the front yard, the back is overflowing with foliage. A cobblestone path weaves between the shrubs and flowers, a wooden shed just visible behind a curtain of ivy. A magnolia tree at the centre blooms with pastel pink flowers. Under it, stuffing weeds into a garbage bag, crouches Rayner.

Hale bites his lip. Really, his instructions for the day are merely to feed and entertain Melissa's guests. But he finds he can't resist saying, "I named her Ophelia."

Rayner jumps, looking over his shoulder at the sound of Hale's voice. He squints through the sunlight and says, "Huh? Hale?"

"The orchid you helped me re-pot yesterday," Hale clarifies. "I gave her a name, like you suggested. I chose Ophelia."

A smile breaks out on Rayner's face. Standing, he makes his way over to the fence. He climbs atop something on the other side in order to poke his head up above the wooden slats.

"Ophelia's a good choice," he says. "Why'd you choose it?"

Hale anticipated this question and thought about it long enough to conclude he had no particular reasoning. "I don't know. Why do you choose old lady names?"

Rayner shrugs. "I just like them."

Hale nods as if he understands. He isn't sure he does. Does he just like the name Ophelia? Is that why he chose it? He wasn't programmed with preferences. It doesn't seem probable. Anyway, that's not the real reason he wanted to call Rayner over.

"You said you had plans today," he points out.

Rayner ducks his head. "Yeah. Not so much. I'm just not a fan of—" He jerks his chin toward the sound of music coming from the open patio door. "You gonna rat me out to Melissa?" Even though it sounds like an accusation, a playful smile edges across the cupid's bow of Rayner's lips. Hale finds himself mimicking the expression, much as he had in the greenhouse that day he'd been avoiding Rayner.

"I'm programmed to answer any direct question she asks," he says.

"So you're saying you couldn't lie, but—"

"I can omit the truth."

Rayner chuckles. "Well, I wouldn't want to put you in that position, now, would I?"

"It would be unfortunate," Hale agrees. "I know Melissa would enjoy your presence at her barbecue."

"Melissa would, eh? Well, better not disappoint her." Rayner stands on tiptoe. "What're you cooking?"

"Steak."

"Real or lab-grown?"

"Lab-grown." Real had far exceeded Melissa's budget.

"What are you seasoning it with?"

Hale had asked Melissa about her preferences, and she'd shrugged her shoulders, so he'd chosen the more common seasonings. "Garlic, salt, and pepper."

"Say no more. I'll be right over."