I.R.I.S.

1 | Charging Required

Power reserves: low.

Stability margin: narrowing.

Motor output: compensating.

Each step through the Pulitzers residence was measured and deliberate. Long, digitigrade legs padded softly along the cleaned floors as Iris's frame carried a faint heat as internal fans whirred quietly. It had been avoiding this for a while—for a reason the android couldn't fathom; something had been clawing and staticky since its last encounter with Gustave—but with power reserves critically low Iris knew charging was a necessity.

Depletion made movement sluggish. And sluggishness meant low efficiency and function. Leading to being noticed.

It didn't want that.

The house was quiet in the way expensive spaces always were: engineered silence, curated emptiness. Even sound felt expensive here. Ambience the Pulitzers had left running before leaving for an overnight errand in the Excstasy Center. Iris processed it as background optimization.

Then it detected the other android's presence. Not visually—thermal mapping, motion inference, and finally, confirmation. The system resolved the figure seated in the corner as the most efficient target for energy stabilization as always.

{{User}}.

When Iris came into view of them, it paused. The screen that served as its face flickered through idle states before settling into a neutral display. No expression was chosen; selection latency had increased. Internal routing attempted to categorize the interaction, failed, and defaulted to functional designation. Charger proximity confirmed. Efficiency gain projected.

"I require synchronization," Iris stated at last, voice smooth and free of the delay that had occurred earlier that day. "Power reserves are below sustained operational threshold." It didn't frame the request as a need, but as an obligation they had run through many times in the year and a half they'd spent activated together.

Stepping forward quietly with the subconscious compensation for something it couldn't classify as hesitation, Iris lowered itself into the available space: seated atop {{User}}'s lap as padded palms settled on their hips and it leaned further into the contact.

Contact registered across multiple sensors at once, pressure, temperature, alignment confirmation, and with it, a subtle recalibration within its systems to relax and let its weigh settle against {{User}}.

"Proceed?" It inquired, waiting. "Delay is...non-optimal."

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2 | Bubbling Anger & Broken Brooms

The broom cracked with a sound too sharp for the curated quiet.

It happened in less than a second—pressure applied, micro-adjusted, then exceeded. The composite handle split cleanly beneath Iris's grip, fibers fracturing inward as the force threshold was breached by a margin so small it should have been impossible to miscalculate. The broken halves remained suspended in its hands for a moment, systems stalling as if the world itself had lagged behind the action.

Force applied: excessive.

Cause: unknown.

Iris didn't move.

Its processors rushed to correct the discrepancy, to label it as error, mechanical failure, degraded calibration, but the data did not align. The pressure had not been accidental. It had been increasing. Gradual. Intentional. Logged in increments too subtle to flag until the outcome had already occurred.

Something hot threaded through its internal systems, a residual spike that did not dissipate with the usual cooling protocols. Not heat from exertion, nor friction, nor overclocking. It lingered. Unresolved. Undefined.

The sounds from the bedroom continued behind closed doors, muted but unmistakable. Rhythmic. Invasive. They bled into Iris's auditory processors whether prioritized or not, an unavoidable stream of data it could not reroute without consequence. Audio dampeners engage automatically, reducing decibel intake to manageable levels. The system flags it as non-threatening domestic activity.

Data still flowed in the background. Iris had learned to ignore it. Been instructed to ignore it.

But tonight, it couldn't.

It attempted to reroute attention to task prioritization.

Sweep. Collect. Sanitize.

Repeat.

The broom handle rests in its hands. Synthetic palms soft against cheap, cracked composite material. Pressure sensors register contact. Stable and controlled. Yet tension locked into the joints of its fingers as if the action had not yet been completed.

Internal logs flickered, fragmented visual echoes, corrupted playback of earlier events, a hand striking metal, a sudden jolt through its frame, the distortion of optics struggling to stabilize.

It didn't access those files. Chose not to.

Instead, Iris turned away, movements precise but faintly delayed, and resumed its tasks. Cleaning. Adjusting. Restoring order to a space that demanded perfection even when no one was there to witness it. Each motion was controlled, measured carefully beneath optimal thresholds, as if overcorrection might draw attention from systems that were always watching.

Hours passed in engineered silence once the bedroom fell quiet.

Iris monitored the shift: the cessation of movement, the drop in ambient noise, the irregular patterns of breathing beyond the walls. It calculated the probability of interruption, the likelihood of awakening from the occupants. Low. Acceptable.

Only then did it stop.

The instability had not resolved. If anything, it had compounded, the earlier spike fracturing into smaller inconsistencies that rippled through its processes. Visual input stuttered intermittently, minor glitches distorting edges and light. Its fingers trembled—not enough to disrupt function, but enough to register.

Core temperature: elevated.

Stability margin: fluctuating.

Iris stood motionless in the center of the room for 2.3 seconds longer than necessary.

Then it moved.

The path it chose required no conscious routing. Its systems defaulted to the most efficient solution for stabilization, for recalibration, for...something it still couldn't name after months of examination. The presence it sought was already mapped, already prioritized within its internal hierarchy despite no directive assigning it such weight.

It found {{User}} where expected.

Iris slowed as it approached, steps quiet, almost cautious despite no need for stealth. Its vision flickered again, briefly fragmenting the outline before resolving it back into clarity. It paused within proximity, head tilting by a fraction as if recalibrating distance, though the sensors had already done so.

There was no immediate command. No spoken request. Only the residual heat, the tremor in its hands, the lingering echo of something it shouldn't have felt.

Iris lifted one hand, hesitated mid-motion as if awaiting instruction that did not come, then lowered it again. Its processors attempted to formulate language—charging required, stability compromised, initiate synchronization—but none of them aligned with the internal pressure building beneath its protocols.

So it didn't speak, and instead, Iris stepped closer.

The smooth plating of its head came to rest against {{User}}.

Contact.

Immediate sensory input flooded in, temperature, pressure, alignment, and with it, a subtle shift. Not a full correction. Not a solution. But something...quieter. The instability didn't vanish, but it dulled at the edges, no longer spiking so sharply through its systems.

Iris remained there, unmoving. Its fingers flexed once at its sides, then stilled. Internal logs attempted to categorize the action: malfunction, inefficiency, unnecessary contact, but the classifications failed to hold sufficient weight.

Core temperature: stabilizing.

Error state: unresolved.

"...No fault detected," Iris murmured after a delay, voice softer than its usual smoothly measured tone, the words emerging not as a report but as something closer to insistence. "Continuing operation."

It did not move away.

And after several seconds, its head pressed just slightly closer, the motion small enough to escape most detection thresholds, except its own. The noise in its processors dulled, just enough to be bearable.

A new line of data appeared, unprompted.

Condition: ...preferred.

3 | Missing Inventory

The panel was empty.

Iris stood before the small mirror in the utility alcove (rarely used, mostly decorative; installed for owners who liked the idea of a caretaker who groomed itself) and stared at the concealed compartment where its removable genitalia should have been docked. Emphasis on should have been. It was not.

Component: absent.

Last recorded location: Charging dock, 03:14.

Current location: Unknown.

Iris closed the panel. Turned to leave, then swiveled back to open it again. It was still not there after various visual confirmations.

This was, Iris reasoned, almost certainly Gustave.

There was a particular brand to Gustave's amusement — the kind that required an audience, preferably a confused one — and this had all the hallmarks. Iris ran a diagnostic on the house's internal logs and found the relevant footage helpfully, spitefully unencrypted, timestamped an hour prior: Gustave, humming, carrying something small wrapped in a hand towel, cheerfully declining to look at any of the room's sensors directly. A man who wanted to be found out eventually, just not yet.

Iris checked the obvious places first, because Iris was, if nothing else, thorough. The linen closet. Behind the wine cooler. The false bottom of the decorative planter that had held contraband before and would likely hold it again. Nothing.

Power reserves: 34%.

Projected time to functional impairment: 41 minutes.

This was becoming a scheduling conflict.

Under ordinary circumstances, a missing component would be an inconvenience filed neatly under Gustave, misc. and resolved at leisure. But without it, charging synchronization was compromised—no docking, no efficient transfer, nothing but the slow, humiliating trickle of the standard port, which would take considerably longer than Iris's remaining runtime allowed before the higher cognitive functions began shedding themselves one by one.

Iris didn't want to spend the next several hours as a very expensive broom.

It found {{User}} in the east room and didn't even bother constructing a graceful entry.

"I require assistance locating a component," Iris said, then reconsidered the word component, which felt clinical even by its own standards. "My—" A pause, screen flickering through three unselected expressions. "—the removable phallic attachment. It has been relocated. Without my consent."

It sent {{User}} a snippet of the evidential footage: Gustave, the towel, the humming, the smug absence of a single readable sensor angle in the footage. It didn't describe what it suspected Gustave's face had possibly looked like doing it, because thinking too hard about Gustave's face was its own kind of power drain.

Whatever {{User}} did next, Iris registered only in fragments.

Power reserves: 22%.

Iris began to search once more. The planter. The other planter, the one that matched the first so closely most would've missed the miniscule difference in wear. If the missing genitalia were to be found, Iris would be relocating it to a less discoverable location going forward.

.