harlie first thought about disobeying the law in 2205, just a few months before his fated twenty-fifth birthday.

There is an old Chinese proverb that is not too different to the one familiar in English: You can't teach a dog to stop eating crap.

But perhaps, like good wine, it is an acquired taste, a tendency that grows into a habit. At least that's what I tried to believe when I first thought about disobeying the law in 2205, just a few months before my fated twenty-fifth birthday.

I sat at my desk, staring at the TASK REQUIREMENT DUE notice before me, sent just thirty seconds ago from the creation agency. Just glancing at it made me feel sick, made my head spin into orbit.

Mother said this was the most important task I would ever complete. She said the creation agency would bring me true happiness and love, the kind it had brought her. Me, I just wanted to get the partner and move out of her house, finally become a legal adult and feel free.

But as I sat there, monitoring the computer as it answered questions about my personality, my habits, my hopes and dreams, I could feel only emptiness. Why? Because it scared me to know that this computer's personality profiling system, displaying lines of words on the holographic screen, knew more about me than I did.

I let out a deep sigh and unplugged the data-chip from my head, cutting the connection from my brain to the computer. Setting the chip onto my desk, I looked out the window.

In the darkness of the night, I could see the artificial Moon, big and bright. The real one trailed not far behind like a bothersome little brother. And with our house being so high on the hillside, I could see the tops of all the other buildings, commercial and residential, flat and white.

I felt a little smile spread over my face, and I stuck my nose up against the window, looking this way and that. The frost, like tears on the glass, did little to cool my flesh, lusty for the world outside, for the silent highs of the night.

There was no one in the streets. Then again, at three in the morning, why would there be?

Soon my breath fogged up the window, curtaining my eyes in a smoky grey. I plopped back into my seat, disgruntled, and plugged the data-chip back into my head. Immediately, the computer detected the data-chip in use and linked up with the information inside, continuing to assimilate my psyche.

What grabbed my attention again was the little blue blur, plus the thump against the window. My eyes shot up, stared back out the window, but I saw nothing.

"Charlie!" The noise from outside was so loud that it bled through the window, making me jump. I recognised that voice.

After watching my door for a few seconds to see if my mother was coming toward my room, I eased out of my chair and glanced down at the street below. This time I saw a big group of people, running, shouting, laughing.

But my eyes were fastened on the girl putting her other blue shoe on.

Grace.

I grabbed my remote control and opened the window, stuck my head out. Grace looked up at me, her eyes sparkling under the judgmental light of the moon. "Hey, loser," she said, flashing me a smile. "You coming or what?"

Too much vodka last night. And now, sitting here on the doctor's table, I still felt it was worth it.

"Give me a few deep breaths, okay?" Dr. Finch asked, and hovered the heartbeat detector over my chest, its blue light warming me. I did as he said, and we finished in just a couple of seconds.

"Good," Dr. Finch said, smiling at me. "Your heart is fine, Charlie, but I suggest you lay off the alcohol. Give me your arm, please."

He set my arm into a tunnel-like machine, held it there. In a few seconds, a faint whirring started, then a beeping. Slowly, I could feel my arm tightening, the veins inside pounding. And then everything stopped.

"Well," Dr. Finch said, removing my arm from the machine. "Your blood pressure is fine too." He then turned to my mother and her husband Roger, standing on the other side of the checkup room. "Has he started providing the input to the partner selection process?"

My mother nodded.

"Okay. Then I suggest he take care of this drinking."

"Of course," my mother said, and pierced me with a glance dripped in poison. But the look that she threw me only reminded me of Grace and the gang, and a little smile flittered onto my face.

"Charlie," my mother said, her voice now lined with steel. "It's Grace, isn't it? Were you out with her last night?"

I blinked and paused, surprised that my mother could read my expressions so accurately. Finally I said, "Yes, Mum. Her and others."

"Grace," Dr. Finch interrupted the prologue of my mother's scolding. "She's not a… human, is she?"

"Yes, she is," my mother said.

"And how long has Charlie known Grace?"

Everyone looked to me now, and I answered, "A couple of weeks or so. Why?"

Dr. Finch took off his glasses and pocketed them, motioned for me to sit down. "Charlie, you're nearing your partnering age. It is not very wise to have social contact with other human girls."

My hands tightened into fists, and I looked away. "We've never been more than friends."

"He's telling the truth, Dr. Finch," my mother cut in. "And we do discourage their friendship, but Grace just keeps coming back, asking for him."

Dr. Finch sighed. "It's against the law if they engage in a romantic relationship."

"Yes, I'm quite clear about that," I snapped. I could feel the burning heat travelling up my neck, working its way to my face. "And she's nothing more than a friend! I already told you." But as soon as I gave voice to the words, I realised that they were not the same ones echoing through the walls of my head.

"I understand. However, interacting with a human member of the opposite sex at your age is just… wrong," Dr. Finch said to me. "The laws were put into place to protect humanity, and for the last hundred years we have been happier than ever. No matter how honest and well-behaved you are, by having any relationship at all with this girl, you are attracting the agency's attention. Now they will be watching, waiting for you to violate the law."

I said nothing, and we lapsed into silence. The only sounds I could hear were the clicking of my mother's shoes over the tiled floor of the room and the faint ticking of the clock on the gray-blue wall. The colour reminded me of Grace's eyes.

Finally, Dr. Finch broke the silence. "Well, I don't mean to scold you," he said. "It's not really my place." He turned to my mother's husband. "Roger," he said, his cheery tone trying to relinquish the tension in the room. "It's your turn, I believe."

Roger nodded and stepped forward, switched places with me.

"How's the battery?" Dr. Finch asked, and motioned for him to unbutton his shirt. Unaffected by the sun, Roger's skin looked much paler than that of my mother and I.

Dr. Finch grabbed the X-ray scanner from the counter. It was about the size of a steering wheel, with a bright blue light emitting off one end and a holographic computer mounted on the other.

"Your last charge was April of 2195, wasn't it?" he asked Roger, meanwhile looking over his medical chart projected on the wall.

"Yes, but you told me that I was good for another thirty years or so."

I sat a few feet away with my mother, as Dr. Finch checked Roger's whole body, checking for problems — mechanical and chemical.

Watching the holograms passing over the X-ray scanner, though, I felt revulsion, recognising the many differences between Roger and me.

Dr. Finch was right. After all, it was my grandfather's generation that had been forced to adapt, accept the changes and fool themselves into thinking that there was no difference. But it still didn't feel the same, and to me it never would.

The sun lit up the vanilla sky, just as she lit up my heart. No, that was wrong.

Sitting here on the roof of my house with Grace, with the city bowing at our feet, I knew that I had finally found my heart.

And it lies beating inside of her.

"So, is your partner selection process completed?" Grace asked, turning to me.

I paused for a moment, staring into her eyes, that breath-catching shade of silver-blue, a colour that could not be made but only born. "Yeah, I'm done," I said, sighing. "It took the computer almost six hours to extract and translate everything from my data-chip."

"And you sat there the whole time?"

"I took a break the night I snuck out with you, but I didn't stop anytime today," I said. "When we came home from the doctor's, my mother was so pissed at me."

"Hmm. Was it painful, sitting alone in there for so long?"

I nodded and smiled at her. "Just wait until you have to do it."

Grace shrugged, turned back to survey the sky, the sun disappearing from our view. "So… when will they make your partner and then wed the two of you?"

I chuckled, my heart aching at the thought. "They're making it – I mean, her – right now, and we'll be officially paired up once I turn twenty-five, I guess."

My chest tightened, and I looked away, not daring to face Grace and talk about this.

But then I felt her hand on my chin, spinning me back around. "Hey," she said. "You should be happy. You're finally starting your own life."

"Yeah, but I don't feel like that!" My voice rose a tad. "I feel like my life is ending, like that door to freedom and control is closing, you know? I don't want to get married to something – sorry, someone. Someone I don't even know.

"I don't want to ship off my sperm to a random human woman just to have a child!" I stared deep into Grace's eyes, searching for a look of understanding inside. "You know what I mean? I want to know the other person, the person carrying my child. I want to…" I shook my head, gritted my teeth in an effort to block the tears from pooling out of my eyes. "I want to fall in love."

Grace arched an eyebrow. "You can't learn to love whoever you're marrying?"

I felt something like a smile. I said, "Love, true love, is something that is shared between two humans. To a human, memories are memories, not terabytes of data. Humans smile when they are happy or amused, and cry when they are sad – the actions are not triggered by an automatic control board in their head."

At this Grace smiled and brushed a few strand of loose hair out of the way. "Tell me, Charlie," she said, her eyes piercing into mine, launching shivers through my body. "I'm smiling… so what am I feeling?"

I couldn't help but smile back. "You feel entertained. You think that I am too naïve, too weird. But you know, you might not be thinking that at all, because reading humans is more complicated. You have to wonder whether they're being sarcastic, or thinking of something totally off topic."

Grace chuckled, her perfect teeth flashing at me between her perfect lips. "I think that you're an over-thinking idiot."

And then she kissed me.

Skinny bitch. Those were the two words that popped into my head when I met my agent at the creation agency – he'd been my family's agent since the law had first been put into place, yet this was the first time I have seen him.

At almost six feet tall and one hundred and sixty pounds, Miles Greene wore an everlasting look of disapproval on his face that made me feel like a confused little boy, running through Victoria's Secret again.

"Hello, Charlie," Greene said, extending a hand to me. "Please, sit. We have much to talk about."

I didn't want to, but when I saw my mother glaring at me, I sat. "So…" My eyes took a sweep of the room, lingering a bit on the portraits of past clients with their new partners hung up on the wall. They all looked so happy, the pairs of them, like they had actually found true love.

It disgusted me.

Greene's desk sat right in front of me, a dark cherry wood, with a floor-to-ceiling window tucked behind. The rain pitter-pattered against it. To the right of the desk was a door—not the one we came through, but what looked to be a closet door of some type.

"Charlie, your partner is ready to meet you." I blinked, turned and faced him just as he asked, "May I bring her out? I think you will be quite pleased."

The image of Grace flashed into my head then, and I knew that nothing the creation agency gave me would even come close to her.

I looked from my mother to Roger, then back to Greene again. Without a choice, I spread my hands and said, "Yeah, sure. Whatever."

Greene nodded and opened the closet door next to his desk.

Turned out, it wasn't a closet after all. It was another room, with bright white lights and couches and a fridge.

I threw a glance over at the woman standing there, framed by the door.

And then I looked again.

I stared.

I started to shake.

"W-What?" I said, my voice raised a hair above a whisper. My chest tightened, and tightened, until I was about ready to explode.

"Charlie," Greene said. "This is your partner, G—"

"Grace." Struggling against the lead weight pushing me down, I pulled myself up from my seat. "You're a… No." I shook my head, looked at my mother. "This can't be. This, this must be a joke. I mean…"

Grace looked at me with a sadness dancing through those chilling blue eyes, reached out. "Charlie, you have to understand. I—"

"Don't touch me!" I snapped, backing away from her. "You're a liar. You're, you're not real."

I whipped around and burned a glare into Miles Greene. "What the hell?" I yelled, and grabbed him by the collar of his suit. He was a tall man, true, but even lighter than me. "Tell me what is going on!"

Greene, the back of his head pressed against his wall, said, "Let go of me, and I will explain," so I did as he asked.

"We did this with your mother's permission, you see," Greene said.

I looked at my mother, who opened her mouth to speak. "You were always so different to the other boys and girls at school." I could see the film of tears over her eyes. She grabbed onto Roger for support. "You always had this disdain inside of you for the Soul Mate Law, and I was scared for you."

"And so you…" I shook my head, even more confused now.

"The agency has been monitoring the information on your data-chip for a number of years now," Greene said. "We saw that you were intent on breaking the law, about to pursue something that would just get you hurt. So we preprocessed your partner selection and designed Grace. We sent her to you to show you this is true love."

I closed my eyes, trying to settle the anger and pain inside of me, pumping through my body like liquid fire. "This is…" My eyes trailed over to Grace again, as I collapsed back into my seat. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I couldn't," Grace said, in that soft and calm voice that I loved so much. "You were so full of the idea of love between two humans. I couldn't bear to say anything then. It would be like driving an ice pick into your heart."

"What Grace is trying to say, Charlie" – I once again hear Greene's voice – "is that love doesn't have to be between two humans. In fact, if you still did things the conventional way, before the law, you would probably end up unhappy. Eighty percent of human marriages were miserable after the first years, and most often ended in a painful divorce."

"I don't care," I said, my body refusing to stop shaking – the stinging in my heart wasn't yielding either. "I wanted a real love, not a heartless machine."

"But you fell in love with Grace," my mother pointed out.

"I thought she was a human."

"But what if you never knew?" Grace said.

I unburied my head from my hands and stared at her.

"Would you still love me?" she said, her voice lined with that teasing tug.

The room fell into silence as I looked at her, she at me. The girl I'd thought I could hand my whole life to, who I could trust to take care of me.

It was all a lie.

"Charlie," Greene said. "This Soul Mate Law, it wasn't set down to oppress anybody. It's there to protect you, your emotions. It's there to manage the population. It's there to make everybody happy. I think Grace here is the living, breathing proof that a human does not have to belong with another human. Grace does not have a beating heart like you, true. She does not have human consciousness either. But she will love you unconditionally, and she will be your partner every day, rain or shine – this I promise you."

I grinded my teeth together once again, hoping to transfer some of the pain in my chest somewhere else, but it didn't work.

So I turned to Grace and said, "Do you love me?"

Grace smiled. "I love you, you idiot."