Geppetto's heart can only break so many times. After his biological child dies, he secretly builds a robot in his likeness—despite the laws against doing so—only for Pinocchio to leave him, believing he is a real boy. When a mysterious woman comes to Geppetto with a request to build her a daughter, she knows too much about Geppetto's secrets—and has some of her own. "The Pinocchio Complex," is a 2000 word retelling of Pinocchio as a science fiction story with robots on Mars. The short story was previously sold in 2012 to Cosmos.