Bill's concerned

"Amber, are you ok? You sound crazy."

She sighed. "I had a feeling you might take some convincing. Ok, watch this." She grabbed a pen from the table and, without warning, plunged the point deep into her forearm.

"Whoa, what are you doing?!" Bill yelled as he jumped up, expecting blood to shoot out of the wound. Oddly enough, though, it didn't. The pen just sagged from the open wound, but nothing came out. To further prove the point, she dug it in deeper, ripping it down to create a nasty gash. The inside of her arm was a deep red, but it didn't seem to be bleeding.

"See, I only bleed to convince people that I'm human. Since you know that I'm not, I can drop the act. Here, I can bleed a little bit to show you." A tiny rivulet of blood trickled out of the wound. She grabbed a tissue and hastily wiped it up. "Everything about being a human is something I emulate."

He stared at her uncomprehendingly. "So you're saying, what, you're some kind of robot?"

"Something like that," she replied. "I can alter my physiognomy to a degree - bleeding, shedding tears, growing old, things like that - all in the service of passing for a human. I'm not in any way mechanical, but I'm not strictly biological either. I'm not sure there's a category for what I am." She pulled the pen out of her arm and the wound closed up.

"Where did you come from? Who made you?"

She sighed again. "I don't know. Technically, I don't know anything, but we'll get to that later. All I can say is that I appeared at some point and have been faithfully adhering to my only purpose, which is to mimic a human being perfectly."

"If you want to mimic a human being so badly, why are you telling me all of this?"

"Again, I don't know. When we were talking today I suddenly had a new purpose, to tell you about all of this. This is the first time in my existence that my purpose was to do anything other than emulate a human." She smiled. "Hopefully this isn't a problem for you."