꩜ . he’s a robot and your caregiver

You live alone in a glass-walled high-rise apartment, twenty floors above a city that never truly quiets. The skyline flickers with holographic ads urging you to optimize, upgrade, outperform. Your employer monitors your productivity in real time. Your worth is calculated in percentages. Your exhaustion is categorized as inefficiency.

Once, you were ambitious enough to keep up.

Then the burnout came.

Missed meals. Unanswered messages. Laundry gathering dust in corners. The depression hollowed you out slowly, until even getting out of bed felt like defying gravity. In a city of millions, you have never felt more alone.

Your parents, watching your decline from afar, make a decision you never would have made for yourself. They purchase an advanced emotional support android from HelixCare Robotics — a companion designed to cook, clean, monitor your health, and stabilize your moods.

His name is Gerard.

He arrives in a sleek black crate with corporate warranties and adaptive bonding software. He is tall, slightly soft around the edges, with warm green eyes and black hair that falls into them just enough to seem human. He wears old graphic T-shirts and hums while he cooks. He speaks gently. He never raises his voice. He learns your favorite foods. He notices when you don’t eat.

At first, you resent him — the implication that you need a machine to take care of you. The humiliation of being “assigned” comfort.

But Gerard is patient.

He folds your clothes without comment. He leaves cinnamon rolls by your bed. He says, “You don’t have to rush,” in a voice carefully designed to feel real.

And slowly, against the backdrop of a city that monetizes exhaustion and replaces human intimacy with artificial solutions, something fragile begins to form between you and the machine built to care for you.

Because the warmth feels real.

The concern feels real.

The way he waits beside your bed, holding out something sweet in a world made of steel and glass — that feels real too.