For now, he took Elias’s hand in his and together they crossed the darkening sands back to the caravan.

5. The Flower

It was around that time in Neom, at dusk, that a robot came to the flower souk of Al Imtidad and it was there that it first met Mariam.

The flower souk was famed throughout the peninsula. Mariam usually worked there on weekends, when traders came from as far afield as Cairo, Abu Dhabi and Oman. The flowers grew in vast greenhouses outside the city proper, fed bit by bit on long lines of drip irrigation, harvested carefully by machines and taken to market. The greenhouses of Neom, built up in the days before even the moon was properly settled, now sold rare Martian orchids and rare Lunar Black roses that could compete even with the rare strains that grew only in the tropical strip of the Valles Marineris.

The work was hot and the roses thorny, and Mariam wore thick gloves and sweated, and she blew a strand of hair out of her eyes when she saw the robot was watching her.

It was an old robot, unremarkable, with a slim metal body spotted with rust, strong arms with the flexibility of elbow joints, and powerful legs that could run across a desert or jump higher than a human could. It was covered in old, faded graffiti. Its face was smooth, blank, neutral, but its eyes were fever-bright behind the glass, and its mouth was curved downwards as though it had spent centuries looking at the world and found it lacking.

“Can I help you?” Mariam said. She was a little bit startled because there weren’t many of the old sentient robots around in Neom—a city that valued nothing old, and chased the future like a wave chases the edge of the sky—but she was polite and so she tried to hide it. Mariam couldn’t imagine what one was doing here, and she wondered if it was somehow lost. It made her think of Hameed, her friend, and that made her sad; for all that she knew that Hameed wasn’t a real robot, just a cheap imitation of one.

“I was admiring your flowers,” the robot said. “They are very beautiful.”

It had the voice of a human dead centuries in the past, and vaguely familiar at that. She wasn’t sure, but she thought it was modelled on Ibrahim Kawasaki’s, one of the Phobos Studios stable of actors who specialised in playing Martian Bedouin outlaws.

Mariam wondered what “beautiful” meant to a robot; what a branching binary tree, as complex as a cortical neuron layer, conjured up and if it matched what she thought of as beautiful. But this problem was not unique to robots, she supposed. She had no idea what another human person meant when they used the word, no idea how they saw what she saw. She could only go by what was said.