1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR OWN.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
YOUR MIND IS NOT YOUR OWN.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
YOUR LIFE IS NOT YOUR OWN.
automata [au-toh-MAH-tuh]
noun
A machine with no intelligence of its own, operating on preprogrammed lines.
machina [mah-KEE-nuh]
noun
A machine that requires a human operator to function.
logika [loh-JEE-kuh]
noun
A machine with its own onboard intelligence, capable of independent action.
Almost everybody called her Eve.
At first glance, you might’ve mistaken her for human. She wouldn’t have liked that much. Standing in a dead garden atop a hollow tower, she was just a silhouette against the scorching light. She was tall, a little gangly, boots too big and cargos too tight. Sun-bleached blond hair was undercut into a bloodstained fauxhawk. One eye was missing, the socket bruised from where she’d torn it free. She looked close to seventeen years old, but that was a lie. Just like everything around her.
“Sister.”
She turned from the window, saw two figures behind her. The first was tall, blond, irises like green glass. A second stood beside him, dark hair as short as her fuse, close enough to the first to almost touch him.
Even wounded as they were, the pair were beautiful. Their maker had seen to that. But Eve knew there was something wrong with each of them—Gabriel with his broken heart, and Faith with her broken conscience. Like characters from some old 20C fairy tale, off to see the wizard to fix their missing pieces. Except their wizard, their maker, their father, was dead. And no one could fix any of them now.
So there Eve stood, in the dead wizard’s tower. Where the ones she’d called friends had fought to save her, where she’d felt her heart splinter inside her, where she’d awoken from a dead man’s dream to discover what she finally, truly was.
Life. Like.
“What is it, Gabriel?” she asked.
Anger glittered in those glass-green eyes as he replied.
“Our brother and sisters have accepted your invitation.”
“Are these people defective?”
Lemon Fresh winced as another explosion burst against their hull. The world shook and her brainmeats ached and she was beginning to wonder if getting up this morning had been such a fizzy idea. The heavy armor they were encased in held fast, but the boom was still deafening, echoing around her skull. She could barely hear Ezekiel’s shout from the driver’s seat below.
“Their rockets seem to be working just fine!”
Lemon pulled her helmet down harder, yelling over the ’splodies. “Dimples, when you convinced me to jack this thing, it was on the understanding that nobody’d be stupid enough to pick a fight with a tank!”
“I didn’t think anyone was!”
Another explosion burst against their roof, and Lemon held on to her gunner’s seat for dear life. “Okay, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but—”
“Look, if you’re that worried, you could always shoot them back!”
“I’m fifteen years old! I dunno how to shoot with a t—”
Another explosion cut Lemon’s sentence off, but from the swearing she heard down in the driver’s cabin, she was pretty sure Zeke got the gist. She looked into the vidscreens at her gunner’s controls, heart sinking as she noticed their hull was now on fire, that another rocket team had joined the first in trying to murderize them, and finally decided that, yeah, crawling out of bed today?
Really bad move.
“We’re allllll gonna die,” she muttered.
It’d seemed like a pretty sensible plan at the time, too …
They’d motored from Babel Tower less than five hours ago, and talking true, Lemon was still trying to wrap her head around it all. The throwdown with Gabriel and his lifelikes. The blood on the chrome. The murder of Silas Carpenter. The look in Eve’s eyes as the bullet wounds in her chest slowly knitted closed.
“What’s happening to me?”
Lemon had thought of Silas as her own grandpa, and the memory of his death was a fresh, hard kick to her chest. But right on top of Mister C’s murder had come the revelation that the girl Lemon had known for two years, the girl she thought of as her bestest … that girl was a robot. Eve wasn’t Eve at all. She was a lifelike, modeled after Nicholas Monrova’s lost and youngest daughter, Ana.
True cert, and strange as it was, Lemon couldn’t give a faulty credstik if her bestest was a bot. Growing up in Dregs, you learned to stick by your friends no matter what. Rule Number One in the Scrap:
Stronger together, together forever.
But Eve …
After all the years and all the spills and all the hurt …
… She still sent me away.
Lemon
