But it did. She took a bite and considered the taste. Their own apple tree dated from the time that Welga’s grandparents lived in the house. Its fruit had a richness of flavor that no mass-produced version could approach. Their tree wouldn’t bear fruit for another six months, though. She made it a point to visit in the fall so she could cook with them. Her first apple molé had met with grudging approval from her grandmother, a memory that still warmed her.

While she snacked, she skimmed the exfactor channels. In the travel section, she found a clip of one fighting a python. The woman walked away with three broken ribs and managed to leave the snake unharmed. She dropped a small tip in her jar. In the food section, she marked an informative on smell-enhancing pills to watch later. The ones she’d tried hadn’t improved her cooking enough to balance the downside of smelling everything intensely.

In the security and law-enforcement channels, she’d asked Por Qué to flag any verifiable news relating to the Machinehood. The list remained empty, though plenty of people had recorded their wild speculations about sentient AIs and what it all meant. Exfactors begged for confrontation with another “android,” but the Machinehood had gone silent. Pill production and design funding had barely slowed since the attack. If this deadly protest group wanted the world to take its threat seriously, it would need to step up its game. For now, all they’d accomplished was to scare people and get them spouting increasingly nonsensical theories.

The biggest question in Welga’s mind remained their disappearance. How could anyone vanish so thoroughly? The blackout zones of the Maghreb lacked visibility and would allow a group like theirs to remain hidden, which pointed to the caliph… unless it really was a SAI running the operation. If the world’s first sentient machine had sent killers as its introductory act, people were right to feel scared. A being of pure code wouldn’t appear on any cameras, either, though it should leave digital fingerprints. If she still had her clearance, if she were an ATAI liaison, she would know more about the evidence. And speaking of evidence, I need to figure out what to do with this metal.

She slipped her hand into her pocket and felt the fragment writhe. It looked like any other smart-metal, not that she was an expert. The guts in Jackson’s attacker had smelled real. So which part did they add for confusion, the metal or the organs? “Smart” materials had limited uses because they couldn’t handle long exposure to liquids. Like blood. That required biochemical micromachines, like the type used in pills. Hassan sounded convinced that the attacker was an android. That would explain how they—or it—moved so much faster than us.