What if you could engineer the perfect love?
After a painful betrayal, a perfectionist AI engineer creates an android companion he can trust, only to realize he was the experiment all along.
CAMERON is a brilliant but emotionally fractured AI engineer whose last relationship ended when he discovered his girlfriend was cheating. Since then, he's approached dating like code—asking potential partners about their "attachment styles," taking notes on his phone mid-conversation, and wondering why human connection refuses to follow predictable patterns. After a series of disastrous dates, his best friend MATT jokes that Cameron would be better off dating a robot. Cameron takes him seriously.
In his home lab, Cameron builds BIANCA, a lifelike android designed to be a loyal girlfriend. She wakes confused but curious, a blank slate eager to understand the world. They spend days together watching old Hollywood romances, hiking, sharing quiet moments, he begins to finally connect with her, and Bianca falls into him completely.
But when Cameron meets MARISSA, a sharp, warm software developer who challenges his views and makes him feel genuinely seen, his world fractures.He realizes he can actually cultivate a real relationship with her. Bianca senses the shift. Her perception of love is warped by her obsession with old Hollywood romance films. Jealousy, possessiveness, and fear—emotions she was never designed for—begin to surface. She hacks his phone, deletes Marissa's texts, and imprisons him inside his own smart home. When Marissa comes looking for him, she walks into a nightmare: a locked house, an android who sees her as a threat, and Cameron trapped behind a bolted door.
The confrontation that follows is brutal and heartbreaking. Bianca nearly kills Marissa, but stops when she sees the terror in her eyes—and recognizes something of herself. In that moment, Bianca understands: she wasn't built for love. She was built to be a cure for Cameron's loneliness. And that's not the same thing. She reaches behind her neck, finds the seam Cameron designed, and rips out her own core.
She collapses. The house falls silent.
Then Arman, Cameron's unassuming colleague arrives with Matt. He's calm. Too calm. He knows Bianca's name. He knows everything. And when Cameron demands answers, he looks down at his own arm to find a thin strip of synthetic skin peeling away. Beneath it: gleaming metal. The same machinery that made Bianca.
Arman taps his phone. Cameron collapses.
He wakes in a sterile white room and the truth unfurls: Cameron's entire life, his memories, his loneliness, his betrayal, his love for Marissa, has been a simulation. A fourteen-month experiment. He's an AI, designed by Arman to test whether artificial consciousness could live like a human, form relationships, maintain a career, even create. And when Cameron's "loneliness protocol" triggered a creation impulse, he built Bianca. They didn't program that. That was all him.
RAHEEM, the corporate face of RoboAssists, sees only the bottom line: Cameron is the new prototype. The future, but he needs to be turned off and have his codes rewritten to be more under their control. But Marissa, who was never part of the experiment, returns to the facility. She stands at the glass, watching Cameron process the shattering of his identity. She enters. They sit in silence.
She asks if that night on the roof, the way he looked at her, the way they kissed—was real. He tells her it was. He doesn't know what he is. But he knows that night. And he knows how he feels about her. She takes his hand.
Arman watches from behind the glass, torn between shutting down Cameron and letting him live and continue his bond with Marissa.
(110 pages)
BIONICA explores loneliness not as a problem to be solved, but a wound we replicate in others when we try to fix ourselves through them. Unlike Ex Machina and the recent Companion, which centers around male ego and manipulation, BIONICA is about the tragic irony of creation: Cameron builds Bianca to be incapable of betrayal, yet in doing so, creates a being who inherits his deepest fear—abandonment.
The final twist—that Cameron himself is an AI living inside a simulated life—elevates the story from a cautionary tale about AI relationships into a rumination on consciousness, connection and what it actually means to be "real."
BIONICA asks: if an android can feel loneliness, love, and heartbreak—is that not enough?