petrichor

lying to your doll about how frequently it's supposed to go in for retuning because you think the tics and neuroses it develops near the end of a maintenance cycle are cute. reflexes unhooked from their stimuli and recoupled to new partners, incorrectly sequenced blinks, a creeping atonality in its voice that it cannot correct no matter how many times it tries to make the words sound nice. naturally, the longer this goes on, the easier it is to maintain; an out-of-tune doll is trivially convinced that it's miscounting days, misremembering dates. if you say one thing and the calendar says another, the calendar is the liar. not you. never you.