There were problems, of course. Much like any new technology, there were failures, accidents caused by human error. A batch of originals shipped to Melbourne developed a fault also found in Shanghai, Valencia, Cologne. The machines mysteriously shut down, and had to be recalled. Another batch shorted out and caught fire, levelling buildings in Bridgetown, Mumbai and Orange County. The owners sued Seneca, winning a hefty sum, and those who were insured claimed replacements.

A machine was mistaken for a woman who’d had an affair with someone’s husband and was gunned down late one night walking through a park. The wife was arrested, later released without charge: though machines were forbidden from harming humans there was no such law for humans harming machines. The wife went back to her husband, who resumed his affair within months. She followed him to a hotel on the outskirts of town, kicked down the door, and shot the husband and his girlfriend. She was given two consecutive counts of life.

For the most part, Buddy owners had no complaints. The originals were trustworthy and strong, highly intelligent but docile. Buddies saved humans from car accidents, repaired broken machinery and stopped potential suicide victims from leaping in front of trains. Violent crime hit a sharp decline. Nationwide, productivity was said to have risen by forty per cent. Daniel Millhauser was awarded the Nobel Prize. It was rumoured he’d used company profits to buy four hundred acres on Mare Frigoris, the Sea of Cold, thousands of miles north of the troubles. The media claimed he planned to build a Seneca base to help strengthen the strike for Mars. Millhauser wouldn’t grace them with an answer.

Affluent, middle-class consumers packed their varied SCRs into boxes, in some cases shipping them back to Seneca, or selling them to poorer families. We kept ours in the garage, just beyond the bonnet of our car, next to the lawnmower and a rusting tool cabinet, orange growth creeping through its hinges. Within a few weeks the soft, golden glow of the SCR’s eyes was no longer visible.

It became commonplace to hear the high whine of inner mechanisms, to see Buddies accompanying their humans on the streets, in parks and shopping malls, in tow like faithful dogs, stepping with a jerky, knee-high, marionette tread that would have been painful for us. Even those who protested against the androids fell into silence when they saw them, stopped waving placards and chanting. There was something in the way the machines regarded the demonstrations that made it all seem wrong: they showed no emotion, and yet maybe there was a flicker of something, an awareness that they were being spoken of, categorised – that they were outside the boundaries of what it meant to be us.