Chapter One

Bitsy B09 was one of those silly androids that believes the old assemblotronic's tale about humans still being mixed in with everybody else, walking around pretending they're androids too. Every morning, Bitsy got up and brushed her teeth and brushed her hair and cleaned the hairbrush and put the stray fibers down the recycling chute, the whole time thinking, Maybe today will be the day I meet my Mister Real.

Of course, lots of girl androids thought that, and not because they were silly or shallow or defective, but just because it was there in the base program, and no matter how many times the politicians had a big old debate in the legislature, nobody could ever quite get enough votes together to agree to alter the base program, since once you started changing it, who knew where you'd stop? What was different about Bitsy, though, was that when other girl androids thought about finding their Mister Real, they shook their heads and frowned and made an appointment to see their theraputer, maybe just to get some validation that it was okay to have the base program pop up once in a while, or maybe to get a prescription for a stronger set of subroutines that would let them go about their business without too many of the fantasies intruding.

Bitsy, though, she chose to believe.

(Chapter Two)