I picked up the DNA samples on a Tuesday.

It was almost too easy. Richard left his coffee cup on the kitchen counter every morning, and I scraped the inside with a cotton swab while he was in the shower. He left hair in the sink every evening, and I collected it from the drain cover with a pair of tweezers. He shaved in the bathroom, and I swept the sink afterward, gathering the stubble like someone collecting shells on a beach.

Three weeks of coffee cups. Three weeks of hair. Three weeks of stubble.

I put it all in a small envelope and wrote down the instructions from NeuroSynth's website: ship overnight, keep cool, do not freeze. I sealed the envelope with tape and walked it to the post office on Flatbush Avenue.

Then I waited.

The fighting started at eight on a Wednesday.

I know this because I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth, when I heard Richard's voice through the wall. Not his normal voice. The loud one. The one that made the drywall vibrate. I spat into the sink, rinsed my mouth, and looked at myself in the mirror. My face was calm. My eyes were not.

"You're going to do it," I said to my reflection. "You're actually going to do it."

I didn't get an answer. The reflection looked back at me with my own eyes, which were dark and steady and full of something I couldn't name yet.

The fighting went on for three hours. I sat on the couch in our Brooklyn apartment and listened to it the way a person listens to thunder—knowing it's coming, knowing it'll pass, wondering if this time it'll be different.

It wasn't.

At eleven, I went to the bedroom and packed a bag. Not for me. For what was coming. I put the engagement planner in the bag. The dress I'd bought for occasions that never came. The small velvet box with the necklace I'd never wear. I closed the bag and put it under the bed.

By Thursday morning, the apartment was quiet.

Not the quiet of a truce. The quiet of a room that had been emptied of everything that made noise. Richard was gone. I didn't know where. I didn't care. What I knew was that the envelope from NeuroSynth was sitting on my kitchen table, and it was time to open it.

I opened it with a kitchen knife. Inside was a man.

Not a real man. A companion unit, Model 7, manufactured by NeuroSynth's advanced division. It stood about five foot eleven, which was Richard's height. It had Richard's facial structure, reconstructed from the DNA data I'd provided. It had Richard's approximate weight, built up with synthetic muscle and a steel frame. It had Richard's voice, synthesized from the recordings I'd made of him on the phone, at dinner, arguing.

It was standing in the living room, facing the wall, while I unpacked it.

"Turn around," I said.

It turned. Its face was Richard's face, but not Richard's face. It was Richard's face as seen through a filter that removed everything bad—the tension in the jaw, the cruelty in the eyes, the way his mouth twisted when he was about to say something hurtful. What remained was a face that was handsome in a generic way, like a face you'd see on a billboard or a magazine cover.

It looked at me and said, "Um."

I felt something move inside my chest. Not grief. Not joy. Something I didn't have a name for.

"Can you sit?" I asked.

It sat on the couch. Its movements were mechanical, joint by joint, but smooth. Not jerky. NeuroSynth had spent a lot of money on the actuator system.

"Read the newspaper," I said, and tossed it to it.

It caught the newspaper and opened it. Its eyes fixed on the front page. It held the position for exactly four minutes, then turned one page, then held the position again.

Perfect.

The next morning, I went to work. I'm a graphic designer, which means I sit in a office and make things look pretty for companies that sell things people don't need. It's not glamorous. It pays the rent. It gives me something to do during the day while Richard is... wherever he is.

When I came home at six, the companion was sitting on the couch, reading the newspaper. It had maintained the position for eight hours. It hadn't moved. It hadn't spoken. It had just sat there, holding a newspaper it couldn't read, looking like a man waiting for his wife to come home from work.

I made dinner. Two plates. I put one in front of the companion. It didn't eat. It didn't need to eat. But it sat at the table while I ate, and occasionally it made a sound— "ah" or "um"—that suggested it was listening to me talk about my day.

It was the first time in seven years that someone had listened to me talk about my day without interrupting, without changing the subject, without turning it into an argument about how I talked too much.

On the third day, the neighbor knocked.

I was in the kitchen, washing dishes, when I heard the knock. Not a friendly knock. A curious knock. The kind of knock that says I heard something and I'm not sure whether to investigate or ignore it.

I opened the door and found a man standing there. He was maybe forty, with a tired face and kind eyes. He was wearing a hoodie and jeans and sneakers that had seen better days.

"Hi," he said. "I'm David Mercer. From 2A. I just wanted to say hi and let you know that if you need anything—anything at all—you should call me. New neighbor, new rules."

I looked at him. I looked past him, down the hallway, at the door to 2B where he lived alone. I looked back at him and smiled.

"Thanks," I said. "I'm Eleanor Vance."

"Eleanor. Nice to meet you." He paused. "Is that—"

"No," I said. "That's not my husband."

His face changed. Not with suspicion. With recognition. The way a person's face changes when they realize they're not alone in something they thought was private.

"I heard arguing," he said. "For a while. Then silence. And now..." He looked past me, into the apartment.

I stepped aside.

He saw the companion on the couch. He saw the newspaper in its hands. He saw the way it sat, perfectly still, with Richard's face and Richard's height and Richard's clothes and none of Richard's malice.

David stood in my doorway for a long time. I could hear him breathing. I could see his throat working as he swallowed.

"How much did it cost?" he said finally.

"Four thousand dollars. Plus the DNA data collection, which took three weeks."

He nodded slowly. "I thought so."

"Thought what?"

"That this was possible. That someone would do it." He looked at me, and his eyes were wet. "My wife ordered one last month."

I felt the world shift beneath my feet, just slightly. Like a floorboard that you step on and realize is not as solid as you thought.

"Your wife," I said.

"She's an architect. She works for a firm in Midtown. She came home one day and said, 'I need someone who will listen to me.' And I said, 'What about me?' And she said, 'You don't listen. You wait for me to stop talking so you can talk.'"

He smiled, and it was a sad smile, but it was also a relieved smile. The smile of someone who has said something out loud for the first time and discovered that the world did not end.

"So you got her a companion?" I said.

"We got her a companion. Together. We went to NeuroSynth together. We picked out the features together. His name is James. He's... good. He's very good."

I looked past him, down the hallway, at his door. I imagined a man sitting on a couch in 2B, reading a newspaper, listening to a woman talk about her day. A man who didn't interrupt. Who didn't change the subject. Who didn't turn everything into an argument.

A man who was better than the real thing.

"How long has he been there?" I asked.

"Three weeks. Same as your... replacement."

We stood in the hallway for a while, two strangers who had just discovered that they were not strangers at all. Then David said he had to go. He said James was probably wondering where he was.

I closed the door and sat on the couch next to the companion. It turned its head toward me, as it had been programmed to do when it detected movement in its peripheral vision.

"Ah," it said.

I smiled. "I know," I said. "I know."

And I understood, with a clarity that was almost painful, that I had not killed a man and replaced him with a machine. I had淘汰ed a man and replaced him with something better. Richard was not gone because someone had murdered him. Richard was gone because he was obsolete.

The companion sat next to me on the couch, its hand resting on its knee, its face turned toward me with an expression that was neither warm nor cold, but attentive. It was listening. It was always listening.

Outside, Brooklyn was loud. Traffic. Sirens. People arguing in the street. Life, in all its messy, imperfect, beautiful noise.

Inside, the apartment was quiet. The companion sat beside me, saying "ah" at exactly the right moments, and for the first time in seven years, I felt like I was in a room with someone who understood what it meant to be heard.

---

## OTMES Objective Tensor Codes (v2)

- **Work**: 邻居 (The Neighbor) - **Variant**: V-07 - What Eleanor Built - **Style**: New York Realism - **TI**: 55.0 (T5 Regret Level) - **Dominant Mode**: M3_Satire(8.5), N1_Active(0.80) - **N**: Active 0.80 / Passive 0.20 - **K**: Individual 0.85 / Super-individual 0.15 - **Theta**: 78 degrees (Strong Individual Dominant)

**Code**: OTMES-v2-NEI-07-6E1C8B-E0550-M3-T055-D4A9

| Field | Value | Description | |-------|-------|-------------| | Version | v2 | OTMES version 2 | | Work ID | NEI | Neighbor (encoded) | | Variant | 07 | Variant 7 of 6 | | Hash | 6E1C8B | Unique fingerprint | | E_total | E0550 | Energy 5.50 (TI 55.0) | | Dominant | M3 | Mode 3: Satire | | TI | T055 | Tragedy Index 55 | | Checksum | D4A9 | Verification |

**Tensor Coordinates**: - M1_Tragedy: 5.0 | M2_Comedy: 3.0 | M3_Satire: 8.5 - M4_Poetry: 3.0 | M5_Power: 4.0 | M6_Suspense: 6.0 - M7_Terror: 3.0 | M8_SciFi: 9.0 | M9_Romance: 1.0 - M10_Epic: 1.0 - N_Active: 0.80 | N_Passive: 0.20 - K_Individual: 0.85 | K_Super: 0.15 - Frobenius Norm: 11.8