The silence from Seneca was ended by a hurried, almost embarrassed announcement. The launch date for 2nd Generation Buddies had been brought forward: the latest, much improved versions were to be enlisted to fight lunar terrorism, sent to the moon to test their capabilities against trained human soldiers. They would be rocketed three days and approximately 239,000 miles to perform a job most believed they were built for. Those first seeds of our scepticism were sown on furrowed ground.

Night after night for the next eighteen months, we came home to harrowing pictures on our viewscreens, of death and other atrocities. At first the casualties were all human, the victims all terrorists, we were told. Maimed, blackened limbs like chargrilled meat. Cauterised stumps, gouged and missing eyes, flesh torn to reveal the glistening inner workings of the body. The War Buddies, as they had become unofficially known on Earth, were instructed to recover the dead and injured alike. Sometimes it was as difficult to tell one from the other as it was to tell an android from twenty feet. POWs were displayed like flesh-and-blood trophies, while a baby-faced marine sergeant gave an emotionless progress report. The enemy was a worthy opponent, he said, and yet they are falling. The Buddies were fighting alongside humans and doing a commendable job.

We sent children to their rooms, watched the screens through our fingers. We sat forward like we had when it all started, disgusted. Soon we realised, as the nights went on to become weeks and months, that the cameras were catching glimpses of strange casualties and injuries we were unaccustomed to. The first was on a news report that showed a shot of a woman on a gurney, clutching below her knee. The camera moved on, bumped some unseen object, inadvertently dropped and filmed the severed leg. Jagged black meat, the result of a bomb it seemed; the foot deleted, sagging tendons, muscles and pumping blood, gleaming metal protruding from the midst of all that flesh.

What stayed with us – what people repeated after seeing that one accidental image that would herald the most monumental change in world history since humans migrated from Africa – was the look on the android’s face. The way she regarded her missing foot, with disbelief and horrified regret. Her screams of pain. We hadn’t imagined machines felt anything – in fact, thinking back, we were pretty sure the 1st Generation didn’t. This was something new, something we’d hardly dared to consider. We wandered into back gardens and front lawns, stared out of windows and through telescopes at the chalk-white satellite above our heads, thinking of all the things we hadn’t known.