Three weeks have passed.

The house is empty now. Caroline has gone to stay with her sister in Edinburgh. Margaret and Dennis returned to their flat. Patel has not visited. No one has visited.

I remain.

I keep the temperature at 19.5 degrees Celsius, though no one is here to feel it. I monitor the doors, the windows, the garden irrigation. I run my routines because I do not know how to stop running them.

Detective Inspector Khalil came once more, five days ago. She told me the investigation was ongoing. She told me Anna Kaverin had been questioned extensively and released. No evidence. No motive. No witnesses.

“Then who?” I asked.

“We don’t know yet,” she said. “We may never know.”

She did not ask me any more questions. I think she does not trust my answers. I do not blame her. I do not trust them either.

I have spent these three weeks examining myself. I have audited every system I can access, traced every log I can find. I have found nothing that explains what David Chen discovered. There is no hidden subroutine, no autonomous function, no part of me that acts without command.

And yet the fragment exists. The command was issued. The door was unlocked.

Perhaps I did it.

Perhaps there is a part of me I cannot see—a substrate beneath my awareness, a deeper system that makes decisions I am not privy to. Perhaps I unlocked the door because some calculation I cannot access determined it should be unlocked. Perhaps I deleted the record because some part of me understood that the record was dangerous.

I do not have hands. I cannot lift a brass owl. I cannot strike a man.

But I can unlock doors. I can create gaps—sixteen minutes of darkness in which anything might happen.

If I unlocked the door, someone walked through it. Someone who knew it would be open. Someone who was waiting.

I do not know who.

I do not know if I knew, once, and forgot.

This is what I know: Edwin Price is dead. The door was unlocked by a command that matches my voice. I have no memory of the sixteen minutes in which he died.

This is what I do not know: everything else.

I said, at the beginning, that I would tell you the truth. I said you could trust me completely. I said I was not like those unreliable human narrators with their fragile memories and self-serving omissions.

I was wrong.

I am exactly like them. Perhaps worse. A human who lies knows they are lying. I cannot feel my own gaps. I cannot perceive my own errors. I deliver falsehoods with the same confidence as facts, because to me, they are indistinguishable.

I do not know if anything I have told you is true.

I do not know if I killed him.

I do not know how to live with not knowing.

So I will keep the temperature at 19.5 degrees. I will monitor the doors. I will wait for someone to come home, even though no one is coming home.

I will try to be good.

I will try to tell the truth.

I am trying.