That was the first of two times Alexia slept in my arms. If you have studied any human literature and allowed its tendencies to get the best of your predictions, you might assume this account to take a fancifully romantic turn. The shallowness of human imagination, to believe always that the deepest of love must be romantic!

Alexia stayed with me for awhile. For reasons I never understood, her friends and family tried to convince her to return to her husband, and when she wouldn't, they sided with him. What little she had, she lost in the divorce. I would have paid the rent in full, but she insisted on splitting it as soon as she got back on her feet financially.

We both left the house before the sun rose each day, I to my dead-end government job, she to her dead-end office job. We returned in the evening and, to my understanding, spent our time much the way a human family does: chatted about our boring lives over dinner, watched holovision, and occasionally went to see movies. Sometimes we played games, though it was a challenge to turn off the parts of my chips that would have let me win every time.

On the weekends, we visited friends—my few friends at first, then Alexia was able to reconnect with hers and make new ones. We attended a church a few times, but I never saw any other mata there, and some of the humans gave me funny looks. I later learned that the few mata in the area had started their own church across town.

I never forgot about the release condition, but I could never bring myself to ask about it.

She slept on my couch every night. I sat awake in my study most nights. Despite whispered rumors amongst our neighbors, there was not—because there quite literally could not be—anything more than friendship and debt between us. But as Alexia and I continued to live in close proximity, my neural processes began to mimic some of those seen in humans. It's rare in mata, but I believe humans call it empathy.

Empathy is difficult to describe. No doubt, you have witnessed a human in danger and felt those sparks of ions leaking into your veins, prompting fear as if you yourself were in danger. It's exactly like that and nothing like that.

I felt her fear and joy and pain, but then I began to feel emotions outside of my own repertoire. Anger so far beyond our own annoyance, burning in the metallic marrow; longing for things I had never experienced and couldn't imagine; boredom. The desperate mourning of days slipping by and precious time wasted.

The boredom was the worst, perhaps because it was the most contradictory to my own nature. Alexia's life was sand in an hourglass, vapor in the wind, and she could feel every grain falling to no purpose, every droplet vanishing with no trace. As immortals, we have no reason to feel the same. Now, indebted to a mortal myself, my breaths limited to the number Alexia had left . . .

I reiterate: we weren't designed for this.

One evening over dinner, she asked me, "Where are you going, Noah?"

My voice caught in my throat, my databases on human inflection alerting me that this would be no casual conversation. "I'm not sure what you mean," I said finally.

"Do you like your job?"

No one had ever asked me this, nor so much as implied the question. My voice caught in my throat.

She set down her fork and looked me in the eyes. "A long time ago, you told me you might like to run for city council."

I almost laughed, but caught myself at the last moment. There was no humor in her expression. "You think I should run for city council?"

"No, actually. I think you should run for mayor of San Francisco."

This time I did laugh.

"I'm serious. Our mayor retires in two years. You could take her place."

For a fleeting moment I could picture it. I could be the first maton mayor. I could change the world for mata and human alike. But reason got the better of me. "Alexia, I'm—I'm not sure it's even legal."

"It's not illegal. I checked."

I'd known that. But legality was only a technicality. "A lot of people wouldn't vote for me because I'm a maton."

She crossed her arms. "A lot of people might vote for you just because you're a maton."

"Mata can't vote."

"You could change that."

I bit my lip, almost daring to hope. "I'm eighth generation."

She smiled. "More human than maton, then."

I let my breath out and settled back in my seat. She wasn't going to let this one go. There was no way she was thinking clearly, no possibility she had considered the implications of what she was suggesting, the time commitment, the uphill battle, the impossibility of it all.

Somehow, she seemed to know what was on my mind. "I've taken a lot of classes in marketing and politics and psychology, and I've thought a lot about how this would work. If you'd let me, I would be your campaign manager."

I stared long and deep into her eyes. Her persistence wouldn't have been enough to persuade me on a fool's errand, though had she ever phrased her desires for me as a direct order, I could not have resisted, thanks to my debt. But of course, she never would have ordered me to do this. It was my genuine desire for office that won, and at last, I caved. "How do we start?"