The months passed without notice. The ads intensified, while the posters and online spots became unavoidable. Seneca threw a huge launch event, screened for free on all channels, attended by the world’s biggest movie stars, models, singers, royalty, presidents and prime ministers. Our town, like many others, threw a street party with images of the launch projected onto a whitewashed wall. Everyone came. We watched a live news report where BBC anchorwoman Leticia Daley took us deep into Seneca’s distribution centre to witness thousands of human-sized boxes rolling along interlinked conveyor belts resembling miniature highways, some dystopian automotive future, before being loaded into HGVs by 2000s with the gaze of the blind. We commented on her hushed delivery, her unflinching gaze to camera, how the whites of her eyes matched the pallor of her skin, the loss of her flirtatious smile. Then it was back to the launch, the celebrities and music, back to CEO Ravi Mehta’s smile, and Leticia Daley was forgotten.

We imagined this scenario replayed in homes worldwide, that what we experienced was reflected a million times, like a Seneca warehouse constructed of mirrors as tall as a moon shuttle. Buddy boxes wheeled in through front doors by 2000s wearing specially designed khaki uniforms, families standing aside in awe, unable to keep excitement from their faces. The boxes drilled open, peeled like the husk of unworldly fruit to reveal a soft, translucent bubble. Inside the bubble, milk clouds floating above a sea of grey, a surface as fluid as water yet able to hold its ovoid shape; the mass trembling, even before the 2000s produced cutting blades from the ends of claw-like fingers. The medical workers among us could not fail to notice the ovoid resembled an amniotic sac. Some told our partners. Others kept their silence and simply watched the robots cleave into thick flesh, egg-white jelly easing free, the mass collapsing to reveal our Buddies, naked apart from the minimal underwear to protect their modesty. No one thought to ask why machines needed modesty.

And as simply as that, the new age dawned. The premier generation of Buddies went far beyond anything Seneca had promised, and within the first few weeks the machines were everywhere. Though it was difficult to distinguish them from afar, especially when they were at rest, you always knew an android when you saw them up close. It was something in their eyes, their facial expressions. There was no sincere emotion, no life, no feeling. It was like staring into the face of someone in a coma. They were warm to the touch, could laugh or cry, even bleed if their skins were cut, but they responded to the world as though they were weary beyond measure, had lived a thousand years and grown attached to nothing at all.