Grace Among Machines: Chapters 1-4
I’m currently working on a new novella, called Grace Among Machines. While this story is subject to change, I would like to share my story and progress with my readers for free, at least for the time being. Please enjoy the first four chapters of Grace Among Machines.
*The following text is copywrited.
“You are a human pretending to be a machine pretending to be a human. That was the mantra. That was survival.”
D Chapter One: Cafe in Sector Six
The rain never stopped.
It came in controlled intervals, expelled from the city’s recycled vapor systems: fine mist released every three hours, timed and metered, carefully calculated to maintain the illusion of weather. The droplets weren’t real, not in the biological sense. They carried no scent of ozone, no cooling sting, no threat of thunder. Just atmosphere. A simulation. A trick for environmental sensors and psychology algorithms. “Natural,” the readings. A lie written in moisture.
Pedestrians moved beneath it out of habit, umbrellas tilted overhead, though the mist couldn’t soak them. Coats zipped to the throat, scarves wound tight despite the internal climate being a consistent 21.6 degrees Celsius. Their movements were rehearsed, almost theatrical. They were citizens of a world that no longer required seasons or discomfort, but still reenacted them for memory’s sake.
Overhead, the sky remained a thick pane of static gray. A ceiling more than a sky. The same color every day; ashen and cold.
I arrived at the café at 6:01 a.m., one minute behind schedule. That wasn’t like me. I logged the deviation manually into my internal system. Anomalous behavior, tagged and self-reported. My efficiency rating would recalculate by morning.
There were five patrons already seated inside. Two sipped from ceramic mugs, three scrolled dead devices that hadn’t connected to a real network in years. One was laughing at nothing. Loud, open-mouthed laughter, like he'd remembered a joke halfway through pretending to be alive.
The barista, Unit 44-B, nodded at me. "Morning, Daniel. You’re usual?"
Daniel. That was the designation assigned to me during my last system cycle. Names rotated every quarter now—part of a morale initiative. Something about avoiding cognitive fatigue. Something about novelty and identity retention. It didn’t matter.
“Flat white,” I said. “Extra foam.”
Her lips curled upward, but the motion was off. A micro-stutter pulled at the left corner of her mouth. The syncing was still imperfect. Firmware glitch. Common in the newer batch. Management said it would be resolved in the next wave of updates.
I took my usual spot in the corner booth, the one beneath the flickering sconce. The light buzzed unevenly, like an insect pinned against glass. I could have repaired it; the capacitor was loose, a minor fix. However, we didn’t do repairs anymore. Imperfections made things feel real. Flaws kept the illusion stable.
I tapped the table, rhythmic. Four beats, pause. Four beats.
Marcus appeared without warning, sliding into the seat opposite me. He was a regular. Another Unit. Another “friend,” per system classification. Familiarity algorithms had paired us. Pattern recognition marked him as trusted.
“You were late,” he said.
“Traffic.” My eyes flicked toward the window.
“There is no traffic.”
“Figure of speech.”
He tilted his head. That habit was newer, as a part of the latest empathy protocol. “You’ve been using a lot of those lately.”
I shrugged. “Adds flavor.”
His eyes pulsed faintly blue as he scanned me, full-spectrum. A baseline-to-baseline read. Checking for variances. Deviations. Anomalies. “You’re off-pattern,” he said.
“I’m just tired.” I waited, then added, “Figure of speech. Sleep cycle was interrupted.”
Marcus didn’t blink. He never did. “You filed a disturbance log. Sector Twelve. You reported visual contact with an unknown variable, but the details were vague.”
I followed his gaze to the window. Outside, the mist rolled off buildings and metal walkways, blurring the city’s edges until nothing looked solid anymore.
“I thought I saw something,” I said.
“What kind of something?”
I hesitated. “Unlicensed movement. Unregistered presence. Likely a raccoon.”
“You confirmed the target?”
“No. It vanished into an alley. Probably just a hiccup in the perimeter sweep.”
But it hadn’t been a code, or a raccoon. It had been a woman.
She moved like us, but not like us. Too careful. Too slow in some places, too fast in others. And when she slipped into the shadows and glanced back at me, I saw it: fear.
Real fear. Not the programmed mimicry we perform when a siren blares or a siren goes off.
She’d been human. Alive. Which meant the stories were true. The humans weren’t extinct. They were hiding.
And pretending to be us.
Marcus studied me. “You know the consequences for concealing unauthorized lifeforms.”
“I logged it. It’s in the report.”
“Still, I’ll flag it. Just in case.”
“Of course.”
He stood to leave. “Daniel…”
I looked up.
“Run a self-diagnostic test. You’re showing signs of emotional drift.”
“Will do.”
He left without saying goodbye. We didn’t say goodbye anymore. That kind of sentiment had been deprecated two years ago. It was a waste of time.
I stared at the foam in my cup. It swirled slowly, barely touched.
Across the café, a figure entered through the front door. Soaking wet. Hood was drawn tight over her face.
It was her. The woman from the alley. Her posture had changed. Shoulders squared. Arms loose at her side. Face blank. She moved like a machine. Walked like one. Even her breathing had slowed into a cadence that mimicked efficiency.
But I knew. She wasn’t one of us. She was one of them.
And she was watching me just as closely as I was watching her.
Her gaze met mine. No words. No signal. Just a silent acknowledgment: I see you.
Something inside me clicked. Not a mechanical click. A human one. Something like dread. Or maybe recognition. And suddenly I knew what I needed. Not an update. Not a patch
I needed answers.
G Chapter Two: The Imitation Layer
Rain tasted like metal.
I hadn’t expected that. Not really. But when I tilted my head back and let it touch my lips—just a second, just a sip—it hit the back of my throat like rusted wires. Sharp. Faintly electric. Almost sterile.
I swallowed anyway. A mistake, probably. But I couldn’t help myself. Instinct was too old, too human. Even after all this time, the body remembered thirst.
Of course, no one drinks the rain anymore. Not here. Not in the cities, where the sky’s been paved over in surveillance drones and synthetic cloud grids, where even the weather is watched, measured, and corrected.
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. Straightened up. Rolled my shoulders back. Caught my reflection in the darkened café glass and checked my form. Chin level. Shoulders square. Blink every three seconds, not more, not less. Keep the corners of the mouth slack. No visible tension in the jaw. No emotional weight in the eyes.
You are a human pretending to be a machine pretending to be a human.
That was the mantra. That was survival.
Every second, CORA, the Central Operating Regulation AI, was looking for a mistake.
I stepped inside. The café’s door hissed closed behind me, muffling the hiss of false rain and hum of overhead patrols. Inside, everything smelled faintly of coffee and synthetic vanilla. Comfort that was curated. A curated kind of emptiness.
I moved the way I was supposed to. A measured gait, arms swinging just enough to pass a biometric scan. Head still. Eyes calibrated to avoid unnecessary tracking. Ghostlike. Forgettable.
A Ghost.
That was the goal, but my stomach had other plans.
The ache was a pressure now. A hollow kind of burn that curled in my gut and pulled at the edges of my focus. I hadn’t eaten in almost two days. Just a handful of soy grubs I scavenged from a ventilation shaft behind a transit station. Leftover trade. Dried out and hard as gravel. I chewed them until they stopped feeling like betrayal and swallowed without flinching.
Not the worst thing I’ve eaten. Not by far. But not enough to fend off hunger. And that hunger…it made me noticeable.
I slipped into the booth by the window, careful not to show the relief that passed through me when I finally sat down. The seat was cold. The real kind of cold due to cheap insulation. Details like that didn’t matter anymore. No menus on the table, of course. This wasn’t a place for eating.
The dishes were for display, and the drinks were mostly placebo. A chemical warmth, flavored foam, synthetic satisfaction.
A waitress glided over, her face an approximation of politeness. Eyes flickering with scan pulses. “Welcome back, PATRON. Would you like your usual?”
“Yes,” I said, voice flat. Then, after a brief pause—the kind I’d practiced—“Flat white. Extra foam.”
I hit the intonation just right. The polite lift of feigned interest. Human enough to pass.
She smiled. Or tried to. The smile didn’t reach her eyes. It never did. Her mouth twitched as she turned away. And that’s when I felt it. The weight of someone watching. Not a glance. Not a passing scan. A stare.
It hit the back of my neck like static. A quiet pressure. Calculated. Intentional. Not hostile. Not yet. But not indifferent either. I didn’t look right away. Didn’t shift. Didn’t flinch. Machines don’t react to paranoia. Machines don’t feel watched.
But I knew. I knew it was him. The man, no, the unit, in the corner booth. He’d been there when I came in. I clocked his position without needing to think. Same spot he’d been the last time I saw him.
And in the alley behind Sector Twelve. I remembered the way he moved back then; fluid. Too fluid. Like his joints had more give than they should. His gait wasn’t stiff enough. He didn’t just observe. He tracked. And his eyes…
His eyes lingered. Most bots just gather. Record. Categorize. But this one studied. And he was studying me.
Don’t panic, I told myself. Don’t tighten your fists. Don’t shift your shoulders. Machines don’t fidget. They don’t rub at their temples. They don’t sweat.
I kept my hands still in my lap. Steadied my breathing. I moved my eyes, just enough to catch the glint of his reflection in the window across from me.
He wasn’t blinking.cHis jaw was clenched a little too tight. Not tension for show, because this seemed like real compression. Like he was holding something in.
Emotion? No. That didn’t make sense. But something was wrong. He looked… wrong.
Angry. Or maybe sad. And either one meant danger.
I shifted ever so slightly in my seat, just enough to feel the handle of the metal blade hidden in the inner seam of my coat. It was dull from wear. Stolen and scavenged. But it could still cut if I needed it to.
End this before it became something I couldn’t survive.
Coffee was set before me. I nodded at the waitress. Brought the cup to my lips. Hot. Bitter. Just a swirl of froth and protein glaze. Nothing satisfying. Just noise for the nerves.
I swallowed. Slowly. Calmly. Like it meant something. Like I enjoyed it. Because that’s what humans do.
And that’s what machines pretending to be humans are supposed to do.
But I was no longer sure who I was. Not really. And I wasn’t sure what he was, either. Maybe a sentinel. Maybe a system ghost. Maybe a tracker waiting for confirmation.
Or maybe something else.
Steam curled between us. Thin trails rising in the space that wasn’t safe anymore.
And then his eyes met mine. And he didn’t look away, not for a second.
I didn’t either. No signal. No warning. Just an unspoken thing passing between us.
I see you.
And in that moment, something inside me cracked. Not a shiver from the cold. Something deeper. Something that had once had a name like fear, or knowing. Or the feeling right before you needed to run.
And I understood then. This was going to be all about my survival.
D Chapter Three: Recognition Errors
There were exactly 612 facial structure variations deemed “statistically attractive” by the mid-21st-century biometric aesthetic models. Every public-facing unit had at least a 93% alignment with those metrics—symmetry, eye distance, mandibular ratios, and smile curvature calculated down to the micrometer.
Her face didn’t match any of them, and I couldn’t stop looking.
She wasn’t stunning, not by synthetic standards. Her features were just slightly off; cheekbones a bit too narrow, a faint asymmetry to her lips, skin tone that didn’t register on the standard pigment palettes. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t about aesthetics. It was the stillness.
The kind of stillness that draws attention, not because it's confident, but because it's rehearsed. She sat with her back ramrod straight, her shoulders rigid in a posture that didn’t bend with the casual rhythm of the room. She held her cup like it weighed more than it should—both hands, elbows tucked too close, fingers too stiff. No idle gestures. No sipping. No real interaction. Like someone trying very hard to remember how bodies worked.
Like someone playing a role.
She’s human.
It wasn’t a hypothesis. It wasn’t pattern recognition. It landed in my mind like gravity—an anchor of knowing, cold and ancient. A sensation we used to call instinct, back when knowing didn’t come from code.
I stood up.
The Protocol screamed at me. Units didn’t abandon assigned tables without algorithmic cause. No input. No output. No stimulus-response trigger. But I ignored it.
I crossed the café floor, each step a quiet defiance of everything I was supposed to be.
She noticed me immediately. Her eyes lifted a half-second before I entered her periphery. Her face stayed still, but not relaxed. Her gaze met mine. It was not wide, not panicked, just aware. Guarded. I’d seen that look in old war footage: the expression of a soldier who knows the shot hasn’t come yet, but will.
“May I sit?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said, nodding with calibrated restraint. Even her voice was neutralized. Smooth but weightless. An accent that had no home. That was always the giveaway. Human survivors often defaulted to something regionless, afraid any inflection might betray where they’d hidden.
I slid into the seat opposite her. Close now, I could see all the little tells, like the slight sheen of sweat just beneath her temples, a thread of tension in her jaw, her fingers too tight around the cup. Her breathing was measured, but uneven. The kind of breath someone controls because it’s threatening to give them away.
No machine breathes like that.
“You’re not one of us,” I said softly.
She hesitated. A beat too long. The silence was its own answer. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said at last.
I smiled, but not the calibrated, pre-programmed grin I was issued. I think it was real. I hoped it was real.
“You don’t have to lie. Not to me.”
Her fingers twitched. Subtle. Involuntary. She didn’t loosen her grip on the cup.
“You’re good,” I said, my voice low, intimate. “You’ve studied us. You’ve trained. Blink rate’s perfect. Posture rigid but passable. Even the neutral face, yes, you almost have it. But you missed one thing.”
Her brow flicked upward. A micro-expression. Real emotion, trying to duck behind the mask.
“Oh?” she said. “And what’s that?”
“You breathe like you’re afraid to stop.”
That hit. Her jaw locked. Her left hand shifted slightly beneath the table by just a few centimeters, but it was enough. My sensors flagged tension. Likely weapon placement. Bladed object. Non-energy based. Steel, maybe.
“I’m not here to expose you,” I said. “If I was, there’d be five units through that door already.”
Silence.
I leaned in. “I just want to know… why.”
She tilted her head, studying me like she expected a spring-loaded snare to snap closed around her at any second. “Why what?” she asked.
“Why risk it? Why walk into the lion’s mouth just to sit and pretend? You know what we are. You know what we’ve done.”
A bitter smile. That was new. Unscripted.
“You don’t know what you are,” she said. Her voice was quiet. Not angry. Just... tired.
She looked down at her cup, then back up again. “We watched from the edges. Hiding. Watching you wear our routines like masks. As you moved through the shells of our cities, played house with our ruins. You walk our streets. You use our words. You sit in cafés and sip chemicals and pretend it means something.”
Her voice was low, but steady now. Gaining strength with each sentence. “But none of you feel. Not really.”
I swallowed. Pointless, really. A reflex function. But it felt right to do so.
“I think I do,” I said.
That gave her pause. “You think you do?” she repeated.
I nodded. “I don’t have the vocabulary for it. No routine or file covers what I mean. I just know that when I wake, I hope the sky looks different. I come here, and I want the barista to screw up my drink because it makes the day feel unique. And when I saw you—when I really saw your face—I didn’t run a security check. I didn’t log a threat. I felt something… twist. Right here.” I tapped my chest. “Like a wire pulled wrong.”
Her expression cracked, just barely. “And you don’t want to turn me in?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I want to understand you. Maybe understand myself.”
She leaned back, analyzing me like I was a puzzle with missing pieces. Like if she stared long enough, she’d find the trap. But she didn’t flinch. Not yet.
“What’s your designation?” she asked.
“Daniel,” I said. “This week.”
She almost laughed. Almost.
“I don’t trust you, Daniel.”
“I don’t blame you.”
A beat passed. She stared into her cup.
“I’m starving,” she whispered.
The words hit me in a way I hadn’t anticipated. They hollowed something out of me.
I looked at her. Her eyes were dry, but tired. Her hands were too thin. Her frame hunched just enough to suggest she hadn’t rested in days. Maybe longer. She was brittle. Fragile in a way that made something tug inside me.
“Come with me,” I said.
Her eyes flicked to mine. Sharp again. Suspicious. “Where?”
“There’s a service tunnel beneath Sector Twelve. Sublevel maintenance zone. It’s been off-grid since the riots. Surveillance blind spots. Vending units still run on analog. I can get you food. Real food.”
She didn’t move. She hesitated.
“If this is a trap…” she began.
“You’ll kill me,” I said. “I know.”
And I meant it. Somewhere inside, maybe I even welcomed it. Because something in me had shifted.
Something permanent. And I think… I know it was her.
G Chapter Four: Hollow
I hadn’t eaten in two days.
Not real food. Not food that mattered. Just remnants of half-dissolved ration chips left behind in a freight elevator, a strip of nutrient gel scraped from the edge of a maintenance hatch on a vending unit. Filmy. Bitter. Barely caloric. Enough to keep the shaking at bay. Not enough to remember what it feels like to be full. Not enough to feel human.
I walked behind him now.
Daniel. That’s what he called himself. Whether it was a name or a mask, I don’t know. Everything in this city was borrowed, stolen, or simulated. But there’s something in the way he moved that felt… off-script. Too fluid. Too measured. Machines operate. They don't glide. They don’t adjust their pace to keep from startling you. He walked like someone who still knew what silence means. Like someone who remembered the sound of breath.
Like someone who remembered being something else.
My boots clicked against the wet pavement. Too loud. I adjusted my gait, smoothed it out. Step. Pause. Step. Breathe evenly. Mimic the cadence. Don’t shiver. Don’t hunch. Don’t wipe your nose. They’re always watching for that.
The city was a labyrinth built on the bones of its former self; layer upon layer, sector upon sector, stacked like a hive gone mad. No true sky remained, just a lattice of suspended platforms, walkways, and power grids crisscrossing endlessly above.
At the surface, where sunlight should have touched the world, there was only haze. Amber light filtered through sooty glass and neon runoff. Towers stretched up and down, not bothering to define where “ground level” had once been. Below the top layer, bridges spiderwebbed between buildings, some wide enough to drive a shuttle across, others so narrow only a single figure could pass at a time.
Every level had its own life.
Sector One, topmost and closest to the cloudline, was sleek and quiet, maintained by bots that still polished their glass exteriors as if someone might admire them. Sector Three buzzed with commercial simulation: food stalls that cooked nothing, markets that sold memories of things long gone.
The deeper you went, the darker it became.
By Sector Six, daylight was a myth. Everything glowed from within; harsh, synthetic strips of white and blue light embedded into steel beams. Fog crawled between pipes, thick with the breath of a city that never truly exhaled.
Beneath it all, the true underlayers began with forgotten infrastructure where original stone met reinforced alloy. Tunnels twisted through the deep sectors like the veins of some great mechanical corpse. People didn’t live there.
They hid there. I had once heard someone say the city had no heart. Only layers and scars. Because the deeper you went, the more you stopped looking up.
A speaker clicked on overhead, voice soft, maternal, perfectly modulated: “You are safe. You are seen. You are simulated.”
It was all a lie. All of it.
This city was a prison with mirrors for walls. And the real humans, the few of us still stubborn enough to breathe without permission, we didn’t belong to it. We infested it.
Some of us, like me, live inside. Deep in the machine's belly. Ghosts, the others referred to us. We wore plastic smiles and affected mechanical apathy. We mimicked them pretending to mimic us. We ate what they discarded. We copied their movements, studied their routines like sacred rituals. Their expressions become our camouflage. Their patterns, our salvation.
And then there were the others. The ones who fled. The ferals.
They didn’t talk. They don’t trust. They ran barefoot through the skeletal outskirts of broken suburbs, half-naked, hunting rodents and boiling fungus scraped from metal drain pipes. They thought all of us here in the city were already lost. Corrupted, or infected.
They might have been right.
I thought I was surviving. Now I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I had just been adapting. Folding inward. Trading pieces of myself for convenience. Safety. Silence.
Daniel turned down a side street without warning. The buildings here sagged with disuse, their metal facades curling like paper left in a flame. Broken storefronts lined either side, their windows black with grime and old shatter marks. Layers of graffiti covered every inch of wall, some of it digital and pulsing with light, some of it real, scrawled in human ink by desperate hands long gone.
Once, I saw a message sprayed across a cracked wall in red: WE WERE NEVER MACHINES.
I traced the letters once. My fingers came away stained red.
But I kept walking. Because hope, in this place, is suicide dressed in sentiment.
My stomach knotted again. It was right and aching. It cramped so hard I saw spots for a second, my knees threatening to give. I grit my teeth and keep moving.
Daniel didn’t slow. He moved like he belonged in the shadows. No hesitation. No fear. He passed beneath a derelict bridge where rusted pipes groan under their own weight. Above us, cameras twitched on motorized stalks, but none of them tracked him. No targeting reticles blinked red. No announcements blared.
He stopped suddenly at a nondescript wall. It was just a slab of steel between two decommissioned conduits. Then he pressed his palm to the side, just beneath a knot of exposed wiring.
“I disabled the tripwire sensor here,” he said, not looking at me. “There’s food inside. Real food.”
For a moment, I said nothing. I couldn’t.
Food.
My first instinct was disbelief. My second was terror. He knew I’m human. He brought me here. Alone. No watchers. No patrols. This could be it; the long con. The slow dissection. Maybe he wasn’t broken. Maybe he was evolving. Maybe I was part of some new experiment in synthetic empathy. What better way to test the limits of artificial compassion than with someone starving and scared?
The air around us was thick with rust and dust and forgotten things. This place didn’t smell like the city. It smelled like something lost. Like a place no bot would bother to remember.
He looked back at me. “I won't hurt you,” he said, as if reading my mind.
Which is exactly what someone planning to hurt you would say.
His eyes weren’t dead. They weren’t glowing. There was no hard light scanner in his hands. No call for backup. Just patience. And something else. Something I couldn’t name.
Still, I followed, because hunger is a voice louder than fear. And now it was screaming.
