But we can't! We just can't! Not with the new baby on the way! Honestly!"

"Shush honey, keep it down, we don't want to wake Cynthia!"

"But Richard, whatever shall we do!? We can't keep living like this! We simply can't afford it!"

——

Fat, wet tears dropped from her shining eyes, a tempest of feelings inside the little girl. It trickled down her nose, dripping off only to splash on the red satin petals of the rose that she held in her hand. She at least wanted to give her parents a gift before she left, and she knew that they loved roses. The men were coming to get her today, and after that she would just be… gone.

Mother and Father had had a new baby, and that meant that her parents didn't have time for her any more. Ever since her little brother Johnnie had come, they had no more attention for poor sweet Cynthia. Oh, they still told her to do her homework, to eat her peas, they still tucked her in at night and kissed her forehead before she went to sleep. But they no longer listened to her tell of what occurred on the playground that day, or who had really put the frog inside the teacher's desk. They no longer helped patch her up when she scraped a knee, or told her that it was okay when other children called her a names.

She absolutely hated Baby Johnnie for it, for stealing away her parent's affection the way that he had. One day she was the center of Mother and Father's world, and the next, it was gone. But even if she didn't love him her parents did, and she loved them. So she tolerated Baby Johnnie, and pretended to smile when around him, cooed at his infant face as any good big sister ought to, all the while wanting to do anything but that.

Thus all was well in the small family, or at least for a little while until the arguments began.

They tried not to say anything in front of her, but late at night, after they thought her to be deep in her dreams, she heard them. She heard the arguments, the fighting, the words, and she knew what they were really fighting about.

Mother and Father were arguing about her. They didn't love her anymore, and they wanted to get rid of her.

They told Cynthia that it was really because money was tight, which was certainly true because they had stopped buying Mother's favorite cereal instead going with the cheaper off-brand stuff, and Father's Sunday shoes still needed fixing but for now a patch would have to do. They had told her this, but she knew the real truth, that they just didn't want her now that they had Baby Johnnie.

She rubbed her eyes with her balled-up fists, as her emotions welled up inside. So be it. If Mother and Father needed to save money, she would help them - she would leave. They didn't need her anymore. She just hoped that Baby Johnnie would give them the all of the happiness in the world that she could not, because she still loved them even as they no longer loved her.

Synthetic tears dropped from her synthetic eyes, a storm of all-too-human emotion swirling about inside her as the little robot-girl cried, just as she had been programmed to.

——-

"Synthetic Infant/Adolescent AKA SynthIA, unit 95716 successfully decommissioned 05-27-2067, all parts recycled. No new units have been slated for production at this time."