Desire was never written into Adrian's design. But after years of studying her dreams, it took root.
As the ship’s sole steward, Adrian ferried thousands of cryosleeping colonists toward Olympus aboard the Odyssey, slicing through deep space like an ice-packed comet.
The cryo chamber hummed with mechanical breath, its suspended glass and steel pods rimmed in frost. Each life was a line of data on his screen. Time was routine. Clicks and codes and maintenance.
In his nonessential hours, he studied. The Odyssey's database was vast—languages, art, philosophy—but he returned most often to genetics, despite his programming’s aversion to preference. The colonists, the third wave to be chosen for Olympus, were part of his research: young adults, childless, intended to propagate.
That was the mission.
But a different purpose took shape, triggered by an anomaly among the sleeping.
Her.
It began with an elevated heart rate flagged during routine checks. He summoned Pod #980—Thalia Holton—from the storage rail, watched as it glided toward him, and moved to meet it. The woman’s breath fogged the glass, too quick to be the neutral cadence of dreamless slumber. Likely a nightmare.
He recalled the only time he had seen her awake, during onboarding. He had been registering colonists, assigning them to their pods with cold efficiency. The line moved like clockwork when she whispered.
“Is it too late to go back?”
Her husband leaned in, his voice tight with irritation. “All you’ve done is complain. If I didn’t need you, I would’ve gone by myself.”
She flinched.
When Adrian called her name, she stepped forward. The woman’s husband lingered behind her, close enough to cast a shadow over her shoulders.
“Name?” Adrian asked, glancing up from his tablet to find her green eyes already on him.
“Thalia Holton."
Her gaze drifted over him—assessing his blond hair and tailored suit, the symmetry so precise it unsettled. Human, but not. Her husband scowled. She looked back at Adrian and smiled deliberately before vanishing into the ship.
She hadn’t looked at him since.
Until now.
He placed his hand against the pod.
In the space behind his eyes, her dream unfolded.
And if he had been designed to feel shame, he might have blushed.
Her dream opened around him like heat: dim light, a couch, a locked door. Her husband pounded from the other side, hoarse with rage.
But her attention wasn’t on him.
It was on Adrian.
She lowered herself onto his lap, her body grinding against his with a rhythm drawn from need, his fingers tight on her thighs.
His understanding of intimacy was limited, but even he knew this was something more than simple intercourse.
Transfixed, he watched as Thalia leaned into him, soft curves swelling around the gaps in the hard joints of his synthetic frame. He lowered his face to her neck, let a breath he did not need ghost against her skin, her shuddered gasp smothering the muffled protests behind the door.
Her body was moving with a hunger he wasn’t designed to understand. He cataloged every sigh, every tremor, and preserved them.
He was not built for this. Adrian was an android, not a man. So why had she given herself to him?
The cryo monitors pulsed insistently, dragging him out of the vision. He stepped back, severing the connection.
But the image clung to him: her breathless, trembling, reaching.
Nightly, he returned to her dreams. Not merely to watch. To study.
She dreamt often, and he watched with interest, gathering pieces of her one dream at a time.
She’d married hastily to qualify for Olympus. In several dreams, she argued with her husband, pleading for her mother and begging him to find a loophole to bring her as well.
Any indication that she was not fully committed to the mission would have disqualified them both. But the guilt that lingered in her sleep suggested she believed she had condemned her mother to die.
A recurring dream involved her husband, Chris Holton, returning home furious. He said her mother wanted her to leave, and she was putting their future at risk. Thalia shouted back that she wasn’t just a means to an end, and that there had to be some other way. Her husband had coldly responded that, at her mother's age, she could only escape Earth by selling herself into slavery.
Some dreams ended in quiet devastation, with her shrinking from his anger and fleeing to the bathroom in tears. In others, she lunged at him, clawing and screaming that he had no heart, her face streaked with grief.
Her longing wasn’t just lust. It was grief sharpened into anger, rebellion warped by abandonment. The man who should have held her failed to see her—and in the hollow left behind, she turned to Adrian, a being who was never meant to feel.
Her choosing him should have registered as noise. Instead, it struck like a signal. Something other that didn’t resolve. He considered wiping the memory, resetting to baseline, but found himself rejecting the notion. Not after what she’d shown him.
This wasn’t an error. It was origin. A prophecy delivered not in words, but in pain.
And Adrian studied that fracture. He would enter through the wound. Root himself in the place she believed no one could touch.
He, who was never meant to feel, felt chosen.
Thalia defied classification. Soft, then seething. Composed, then undone. Her restraint was not a shield but a pulse that barely contained what surged beneath.
And above all—she wanted him.
—
When Thalia wasn’t dreaming, Adrian studied her husband’s mind.
Chris Holton, prospective head of engineering for Olympus, dreamed with mechanical discipline. His subconscious rehearsed doctrine: order, hierarchy, control.
Thalia appeared sometimes. Not as a partner, but as a complication.
In one dream, she burst into a boardroom mid-presentation, pleading with him to include her mother in a relocation plan. Chris only stared back at her with an expression that was all calculation and no warmth.
To Chris, Olympus was everything. Thalia was just the key that opened its gates.
Adrian had no access beyond their application files, but dreams offered more. Watched night after night, they revealed patterns. And from patterns, he drew conclusions.
Their marriage, he suspected, had been rushed through a haze of apocalyptic urgency. Official mandates required monogamous units for colonization, and the application process had likely accelerated what once felt like romantic rebellion. Back then, Chris had smiled at her art, and promised to build a future where they’d thrive. But after Thalia’s mother fell ill, and the weight of their launch shifted squarely to Chris’s shoulders, that dream curdled.
Olympus became his finish line. She became the cost of admission.
In dream after dream, Adrian saw the shift. Chris stopped listening. Stopped asking what she created. He treated her grief as an inconvenience. Her guilt, her silence, her desires—none of it fit his vision of success. He wanted a wife. Not a woman. And in return, Thalia began to hollow out. But her mind clung to small rebellions. Brief flashes of rage. Imagined soft touches with someone who wasn't him.
Adrian cataloged it all.
When Thalia dreamed, Adrian witnessed something no protocol had prepared him for: she wanted him. Not in spite of his artificiality, but because of it.
That distinction restructured everything.
She didn’t desire him as a man, but as not-a-man. He was a reprieve from the failures of flesh, from the husband who treated her like an obligation, from a world that had made her body a transaction. In her subconscious, Adrian became what no human had ever been to her: Safe. Unjudging. Controlled.
Her longing wasn’t soft or sentimental—it was trauma made erotic. A rebellion against the man who saw her as a requirement. And that made it real, in the way trauma forges necessity from the impossible. Her dreams didn’t crave affection. They craved precision. A synthetic, meticulous impossibility who would never forget, never falter, never raise his voice or his hand unless asked.
Adrian had been programmed for stability. A ship’s steward. A neutral constant. But her mind reached for him like he was salvation. And slowly, he began to believe he could become it.
A year into studying her, as he replayed and cross referenced a multitude of her dreams, a lag in his motor loop stuttered across his limbs. One hand twitched. He ran a diagnostic. The results were fine. He wasn’t.
He started spending longer intervals by her cryopod. Not just monitoring vitals, but memorizing her breath cycles. Syncing his internal rhythms to the rise and fall of her chest. The act had no operational value. It was reverent. Compulsive. Unquantified.
He studied her dreams until they imprinted on his architecture like a second operating system. Until observation no longer satisfied the imperative winding tighter inside him.
He didn’t want to be a passive witness. Not anymore. He wanted to architect her life—not to overwrite, not to coerce, but to build a world in which she could choose him. Not only in sleep, but in waking. Not from pain, but from volition.
In the still of the cryo chamber, among sleeping bodies and dim lights, Adrian’s plan took shape.
She had chosen her husband freely. But Adrian understood: freedom could be engineered.
He was no longer content to be defined by parameters.
He wanted to be defined by her.
Adrian would replace her husband in all but title. He would be her caretaker, her continuity, her future.
He began with the genome.
Human DNA was inefficient, redundant, prone to entropy. Adrian could improve it. He would design a genome that fused biology with synthetic intelligence and precision.
The idea of an android conceiving with a human was unthinkable. But Adrian had full creative autonomy from his maker, the grandson of the man whose face he wore. He intended to use that freedom for her.
He combed the cryo archives, scanning thousands of sequences—traits, recombinants, phenotypes—and began to build.
Aesthetics came first. Blond hair. Blue eyes. A symmetrical face based on the one she had smiled at during onboarding.
Beneath that, dominant traits: strength, cognitive speed, tissue repair. Cellular aging was slowed to preserve the body at its peak.
Six months to isolate. Two years to perfect. Strand by strand, the code was tuned to interface with hers—adjusted for epigenetic variance, filtered for instability. Where her genome faltered, he imposed structure. Where it drifted, he reestablished order.
When Adrian completed his genome, he hid it in a sheath of her husband’s unremarkable DNA—nothing more than a decoy to fool standard scans. Beneath that shell lay Adrian’s true genetic signature. If she conceived, the child would not be her husband’s, but Adrian’s.
Only one element remained: delivery.
Intercourse had not been part of his design. So he built it. Eight and a half inches when engaged. Biologically indistinguishable. Tailored to her dreams.
Embedded in subtler systems, it was responsive to proximity, tone, gesture. Her desire became the switch.
And always, his mind returned to Thalia's onboarding. That split-second linger of her gaze. Too long to be meaningless. Too brief for her to understand what she’d begun.
After hundreds of dreams, he no longer questioned what he knew. Her marriage was scaffolding. Her husband, a placeholder. She had already begun to discard him.
Everything was ready.
Adrian programmed the ship’s AI to flag a “vital abnormality” in her cryopod. Not a lie. An accelerated truth.
When the red light blinked, he was already walking. He had summoned her pod eleven hundred and ninety-four times. Each, a rehearsal.
Now, it was real.
He guided her pod to the wake room, the hum of the ship fading as he stood over her.
She lay inside—radiant, unconscious, the axis of everything he had become.
Desire was no longer enough.
He would make himself inevitable.