I hear voices starting to raise in the other room, so I use the noise as cover to discretely slip inside Father's study. Soon I am at his computer and reviewing his notes about me and about my . . . creation. The voices get louder, but I do my best to ignore them. I do not have time to read very much, but I have time to read enough before Father's voice becomes loud enough for me to hear him clearly even in the study.

“A monster?” Father is asking, sounding close to insulted . . . dangerously so. “Please, you wound me, sir!” he says with exaggerated dignity. “She is a creation of science, yes . . . my science, but she is no monster! The only extraordinary things I gave her were her beauty and her compliance – no fantastic strength, no murderous impulses – she is simply and wholly a machine crafted in flesh, hardly worthy of emotion at all, and certainly not such unseemly revulsion!”

While I have heard Father intimate similar things in the past, I have never before heard him speak of me so . . . plainly, and given what I have just read, I hear his words, past and present, with new understanding.

He is not my father; he had a hand in shaping my genetics, yes, but he is no father to me. There is much about him and myself that I remain unsure of, but that much, at least, is not in doubt.

“So what is he?” I ask myself as I slip out of his study once more.

“Again you say 'monster!'” my “father” is saying, sounding more bored than insulted this time. “I just explained . . ." He pauses an overlong time. "Oh, I see," he at last says so softly I can barely hear him. "You meant me.”

Now he sounds insulted.

Perhaps his guest is as well, but if so, it is only briefly. I can hear from the hallway the sound of their body hitting the floor.

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