I have seen butterflies before, darting between the blooms in Gina’s backyard. This creature is similar, with twitching antennae and pearly wings of deep purple and yellow. This is all standard. But this butterfly also has little glowing red lights running down its back. This is not standard.

“It is mechanical,” I observe.

“You got it. It’s a biomaton, a robot modeled after a natural creature.”

“Humans are natural creatures,” I say.

Nathan nods. “True enough.”

“That makes me a biomaton.”

He seems surprised. “Well, yeah. Didn’t Gina ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“What did she call you, then?”

“She called me Cog.”

“Let’s see some other biomatons, and you can decide for yourself if being a biomaton is a cool thing to be.”

He shows me a glass box the size of a refrigerator laid on its side. Inside, a glimmering, jittery mass moves around rocks. When I lean in closer I see that the mass is made up of tiny silver bits, like little crawling pills with legs.

“They look like ants.”

Nathan joins me at the box. “That’s what they are. Autonomous Nature Technology. ANTs, for short. I came up with that.” He laughs and waits for a response, but I do not know what response is standard, so I remain silent. He clears his throat. “‘Autonomous’ means they function on their own without needing instructions from anyone. ‘Nature’ is because they mimic creatures from nature. And ‘Technology,’ because . . . well, technology.”

The ANTs swarm across a bridge between two rocks.

“We didn’t program them with knowledge of how to build a bridge. We didn’t even give them the materials. They figured it all out on their own.”

“What did they build it out of?” I ask.

“Look for yourself.”

I step closer, putting my nose to the glass. I do not see it at first. It is like one of those smudgy paintings that you have to stare at a long time before you can tell what it is depicting, and I have learned that looking at something a long time is often the only way you ever actually know what you are looking at. So that is what I do.

Finally, I see it. The bridge is made out of the legs of other ANTs.

I watch as three of the ANTs pull the legs off a fourth ANT. When the legs are removed, they push its body over the rock’s edge, where it joins a growing pile of other legless ANTs.

“Pretty clever, isn’t it?”

“Clever,” I say, remembering that I, too, am an autonomous piece of technology based upon another creature. I rub my knee and follow Nathan to another lab. uniMIND workers tap things into tablets and work at computers and say things on phones. They all dress very much like Nathan in light-colored polo shirts.