Ángel Mendoza

Angel was just a regular guy, until he wasn’t. He was a Beaumont Robotics factory worker who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and overheard things he shouldn’t have - most notably, that Beaumont was conducting illegal experiments on humans, and that people were dying because of it. He thought he’d gotten off the hook when nothing happened for several days, instead fretting about what to do with this information, and whether it was worth the personal risk to report it to the authorities.

Two weeks later, just when he’d decided blowing the whistle was the right thing to do, there was an “accident” with factory equipment. The hit didn’t go exactly as planned, however; Angel lost his left arm in the accident, but survived. Fortunately for him, the trauma of the accident was enough to erase enough key incriminating facts from his memory, allowing Beaumont to back off and let him live. They publicly accepted full responsibility for the accident and compensated him with a prosthetic arm and assistance robot free of charge.

Having lost his job and so much more, Angel falls into a state of depression, becoming more irritable and lashing out. His assistance robot Milo, which he wasn’t thrilled to have in the first place, receives the brunt of it. Angel was always creeped out by the more humanoid robots and had a hard time trusting them even to deliver food he ordered, as though they would be the one to turn on him and start the robot uprising; now his daily life in many ways depended on one.

And no ordinary one, at that. As Milo’s self-awareness creeps in, Angel becomes increasingly suspicious of his abnormal behavior. This time his paranoia turns into denial. Some part of him immediately recognizes it, but he refuses to outwardly admit it long after Milo has reestablished himself as a sentient person, as though it can’t be true until he says it out loud. When Milo confesses his attraction to him, part of him is disgusted, but another, deeper part is desperate. He gets the idea to use Milo for his physical needs, but it’s clear he views it as masturbation with a toy, not sex with a partner. It’s not until he realizes that Milo is just as caring, fragile, curious, and unflinchingly loyal as any organic being he’d ever met that Angel begins to treat him as an equal rather than a servant, and eventually open up to a relationship with him (following a rather harrowing gay panic).