Machina Viva by Nathaniel Hicklin Page B

shafts of light wove through the faint haze at the top of the room. The couches and tables around the perimeter were filled with young couples enjoying drinks, incense, and other amusements of their own making. The floor was packed with more people bumping and writhing in a way that was fueled partly by music and mostly by enjoyment.
    At an elevated table at one end of the room, a girl stood at a control board operating the sliders, dials, and switches that governed the lights and music, and at the other end an identical girl stood behind the bar and filled orders from the wait staff. Eve could just make out Will standing by the control board. As the music wound down, the girl at the board triggered the next song and stepped down to join Will, where they danced in each other’s arms.
    Eve took a quick subdermal look at the crowd, and the majority of them were robots, as she had expected. The club was in the same building as an extremely well furnished robot community, after all. However, there were plenty of humans mixed in with the crowd, and without a subdermal scan, she wouldn’t have been able to tell which were which. Robots were usually so easy to distinguish. Most of them just acted like machines, with the bare minimum of personality to qualify them as people. A robot that exhibited any of the quirks of humanity was as likely to be mentally maladjusted as genuinely personable. These robots, though, were outwardly indistinguishable from any other ordinary person. Furthermore, she now noticed that the people at the periphery of the room who were making their own fun were as much of a mix. There were a few human couples, but most of them were either both robots or one of each.
    “Shall we find a table?” said Lucy. “From the look on your face, it looks like we should have a chat.”
    “What? Yes, yes, let’s have a seat,” said Eve. They found a vacant table.
    “So,” said Lucy, “you’ve had a look around the room, I imagine.”
    “Yes. So, that was Linn up at the end of the room there?”
    “That’s her. Her sister Tamsin keeps the bar.”
    “Sister? But they’re both robots!”
    “So? They both started out at the same place, from the same parents, as it were. And you can’t deny the resemblance. There’s more to sisterhood than DNA.”
    “How is there a resemblance, anyway?”
    “They were commissioned as fashion models by a Fullerton designer who came up here for the cheap help. After their contracts were up, they started working here. Eventually, they saved up enough to buy the club outright. It’s their place now.”
    “I noticed Will and Linn dancing. Is that what Will came here for?”
    “Sure. He likes dancing with his girlfriend.”
    “Girlfriend?” Eve was shocked. She had never heard of a robot having a romantic relationship before. No one had. Ever.
    “Of course. Why not? That’s why Dr. Abrams conceived of Crownstone in the first place.”
    “He wanted to teach robots to be like humans?”
    “No, there’d be no need for that. Robots are not humans, and they never could be. Not without a lot of extra meat and water, anyway. No, Crownstone exists as a place to teach robots how to act like people, instead of just machines for doing work. That’s what it means, in fact. The Cooperative Reinforcement of Wellness Neighborhood for the Social Training of Non-biological Entities. Most robots probably don’t really know about this place yet, but they will one day.”
    “But boyfriends and girlfriends, though? Romance? How can robots learn that just from watching each other? Some of the ones in here look like any ordinary kids on a night out.”
    Lucy chuckled and stared wistfully out into the room. “I never told you how I worked through my contract, did I?”
    Eve settled back in her chair, sensing the approach of a lengthy anecdote. “No, you didn’t.”
    “I was contracted as a domestic. I worked for some big executive, the head of some company. I never really found out which