Ke Yanqing became the Federation's youngest researcher in machine bionics at nineteen, quickly making a name for himself. Everyone thought this student from the Federation's remote frontier had a bright future ahead of him.
Yet over the next few years, Ke Yanqing, hailed as a genius researcher, turned down a research institute offer at twenty-one and went into business instead. At twenty-three, a major conglomerate took notice of him. Amid a storm of public condemnation, he bought his way into a minor financial empire...
At twenty-five, his boyfriend of ten years abruptly dumped him.
Friend A: So he broke up with him to go to Africa and deliver a zebra's baby?
Friend B: Wait, you were in a relationship?
*
Faced with the epic mystery of why his ex had broken up with him over a zebra, his terrible friend suggested:
"Why not get yourself a robot? You made this batch of robots anyway. Just program one with a simulated personality, and you'll figure it out, right?"
Ke Yanqing: Oh, that makes a lot of sense.
And so, a crude shell of a "substitute," without even a bionic skin covering, came into being just like that.
When C58 first powered on, he thought he had been scrapped and dumped in a garbage heap. But the "master" standing in front of him was so out of place in the garbage-heap-like house. The first thing the man said to him was:
"You can call me Father."
*
Ke Yanqing hadn't thought much of the Cinderella brought into his home, but Cinderella was so useful that he, already hopeless at housework, became even more helpless and idle.
Most importantly, Cinderella was very clean, and could even help treat his illness now and then...
But the longer he spent with Cinderella, and the more often he was treated, the more he ignored the unsolved mystery of why his ex had abandoned him for a zebra.
*
Ke Yanqing hated feeling dependent on others, even if that someone was a machine, so he regretfully threw it away.
But only when the cold bionic skin touched his ankle did he realize that the foolish robot he had thought least likely to awaken had used the smart home system to pick his door lock in the middle of the night, returning to the house with absolute force.
The robot's eyes, so much like his lover's, blinked nimbly, and its voice was exactly the same.
"Father, am I not your favorite child anymore?"
P.S.
A cool, slow-witted beauty with a certain kink as the recipient × a bionic man who pretends to be stupid and plays the pig to eat the tiger, but is actually wickedly cunning, as the pursuer.
The ex's substitute complex is mostly because the recipient has a diligent, eager-to-learn nature, but there will still be melodrama. If you can't accept that, please feel free to leave right away, mwah.
Theme: Technology makes life better
