Category: issue 1

Dear sir, This is a matter of utmost urgency and I do hope you can help me.

In retrospect, ‘I’m dying’ was a bad pick-up line.

Minako plucked a particularly lucky prime number from her garden to ensure the robot exhibition wouldn’t be too crowded. She had been planning the excursion to Universal Studios Japan for months and everything had to be perfect.

I can’t stay long at the Sea Palace. I have little enough funds, despite having taken a couple of reading jobs. Still, it’s good to have a bed and a door that locks after fleeing the Amber City, so I sit on the deck, eating lightly fried, gently spiced seaweed, feeling the warmth of the rising sun on my skin.

Henrietta’s mother is an engine driver and wants her daughter to become one too, but Henrietta prefers the buffet car. She can see her future self there, all grown up in a waistcoat with her hair cropped short, smiling as she dispenses tea and spoonfuls of powdered milk.

There are two types of androids available in the market. Organic robots, made for couples who want to see their artificial babies grow, and static ones, made for commercial use, always stuck with the same original appearance. Soriano is the later, and his middle-aged exterior has intrigued me since the first day we met: outstanding blue eyes, a receding gray hairline, a hooked nose, a face full of lines.

The light from the Weaver’s aurora illuminated the dirty smoke rising from Chinatown; the snaps of the dhobis slapping linen against river banks cut through the early morning mist like rifleshots.

The train car stunk. Lakeishanna crinkled her nose at the scent of urine and someone who hadn’t seen a bar of soap in a month of Sundays.

I approach the painting like I have a thousand times before, curving my spine down so that my aperture views it from the correct height. Everything about the piece makes me quiet, all but the low, internal humming of my parts as they phase in and out of sync. Complex processing slows to a halt, only basic operations and system necessities chirring along.

When she is old enough that she’s allowed to use her mother’s tablet, Emma watches old news footage of the first battle between a gargantuan alien monster and Mondo, the monster that protects the Earth.