“I feel like you have been telling yourself this for a long time,” Nasir said. “In the hope that repetition will substitute for truth. You’re smarter than that. Just because you can kill doesn’t mean you should, or even want to. The war is over. Yet here you are, playing the part of the soldier still fighting on, trapped in a role of your choosing. Your war is over. You could be anything.”

“Yet I will always be a robot,” the robot said.

Nasir sighed. “I am a policeman because it’s a job,” he said, “yes. I must still work and, yes, in Neom the rich throw the trash and the poor pick it. I hear it’s different on Mars, though not so different on Ganymede and Io. There are always systems of the world. All we can do is move through them. But we still get to choose how to be. Who to be.”

“I feel like you have been telling yourself this for a long time,” the robot said, “in the hope that repetition will substitute for truth.’”

Nasir smiled. His milkshake was finished. He said, “Neom is not an easy town. Not a fair one, either. But it is still my home. Mariam and I grew up here, we don’t know another place. I can smell a scent and know exactly where I am. I can feel the ground change under my feet and walk on blindly. I can pass a corner and remember when I was a boy and walking past it with my mother. These things matter. It is home.”

“Home,” the robot said dubiously; as though it had never heard the word before.

“Yes,” Nasir said.

“It must be nice, believing in one,” the robot said. “But I have lived too long. That corner that you passed? I saw it when it was desert. A wall was built. A boy walked with his mother. The winds blew as they would. The mother died, the boy grew up. He kept the order, for a while. Then he too vanished. In time there will be sand again, and nothing else. All memory forgotten. Nothing to say the boy had ever lived, or died, or walked the earth.’

“That’s nihilistic,” Nasir said. “And if you think like that then your business of revenge is futile, too, for it will come to pass and be forgotten, so why bother? I am alive now. This is home now. What I do now is what matters. Leave my city alone. Do not bring chaos that you can’t control. I will not tell you again.”

“We seem doomed to disagree on certain matters,” the robot said. “Very well. I will bear in mind your warning.”

The robot stared at the empty glasses on the table.

“Milkshake,” it said dubiously. “I do not think I care for it.’

“Maybe try chocolate next time,” Nasir said.

13. The Robot

They studied each other across the table.