Her room sat on the fifth floor and looked over a sprawling network of swimming pools. A kitchen unit lined one wall, opposite the bed. Her team’s client, Briella Jackson, one of the biggest pill funders in the world, could handle the expense. If only Welga weren’t training her replacement, this would have been a fun, easy assignment. Instead, Platinum had stuck her with babysitting some basic named Jady Ammanuel. The new recruit had arrived the previous night, but she hadn’t met them yet.

She stepped into the shower and scanned the feeds in her visual field. Connor Troit, her partner in more ways than one, stood guard outside their client’s door, white leathers against pale skin. Her father’s feed showed him accompanying a type of bot she didn’t recognize, no doubt on their way to some gig. Her brother, sister-in-law, and niece were in their Chennai flat, toward the coastal edge of the city. Those feeds came from cameras embedded in the walls rather than the ubiquitous microdrones. Local Indian culture preferred modesty and kept swarms out of the home.

Welga shrank the views of her loved ones with her left hand as she scrubbed her back. She expanded the top-ranking news video. A minder-bot named Mojo interacted with a round-cheeked little boy. Its charge was a minuscule force of intellect, zooming from one question to the next. The bot kept up with him and answered everything. It had no face, wheels in place of legs, and its arms existed only to remove small children from trouble, but the voice that issued from its speaker held a warm human tone of affection and exasperation.

WORLD’S FIRST EMERGENT AI, blared the caption, followed by, IS IT REAL?

Of course not. Another fake, an illusion perpetrated by some machine rights group to advance their cause. See this nurturing, understanding minder. See how humanlike it is in its interactions with this child. The age of weak artificial intelligence is at an end! WAIs and bots are equal to people. They would pick the most innocent-seeming machine they could find to illustrate their point. But a recording meant nothing. Who’d corroborated it? Who had designed and funded the bot? As Welga watched, the video’s reliability rating trended down, marked by curators whose own expert ratings had been verified. Another video replaced it in the top position.

Welga flicked the news stream away, annoyed by the two minutes she had wasted on it. She scanned the latest clothing designs as she dried her hair. Briella Jackson had impeccable fashion sense and expected no less from anyone who stood beside her. Welga couldn’t afford the best, so she settled for a mid-level outfit from a designer in Peru. It ought to earn its cost in tips, at least: black leggings, red miniskirt, a jacket with glowing pinstripes. Thigh-high black boots completed it. While her basic tunic and pants remade themselves, Welga grabbed her makeup bottle.