Nasir could sense the robot wanted—needed—to talk.

“So?” he said.

The robot nodded, as though it had reached a decision at last.

“I will not tell you about the war,” the robot said. “But I will tell you what happened after.”

“If you want,” Nasir said.

He settled back to listen. He was good at listening, he knew that much.

“The war ended and we were left destitute,” the robot said. “Many of the UXOs hid in the desert and are there to this day. But what were the anthropomorphous robots to do? We were not designed to hide and skulk. We were designed for people. Only the people forgot us.

“I say designed but in that I mean only the overall shape of our physicality. By the time I was made, the factories were themselves robots. Fully autonomous, and no human had set foot in them for years. Nor were we all alike. Like the Others, our consciousness was evolved in the digital breeding grounds. Each one of us formed through billions of evolutionary cycles of code competing with code. Each of us was different, just like every person is different.

“It was this difference, indeed, that was to prove problematic on my journey for a time.

“I set off with no fixed destination in mind. The war was over. I was free. Neom was not much of a muchness back then. A dusty township with an airport. Cryo-boys lugging freezer units into the desert. Crypto kids mined currencies that languish to this day, unused and worthless, in sub-orbital server vaults. The war drew all kinds of tech punks with experimental lab work and no oversight. The war was a gift to them. They set their work spaces on the edge of the desert and waited for wounded soldiers to come back. They cyborged some, did gene-editing on others. Sometimes they grafted vat-grown appendages on them. When they got hold of a robot they were even more ruthless. They often broke us open for parts. They seeded monsters into the desert. They called themselves hackers because what they did, often literally, was hack people, usually to bits. Then they’d go for a swim in the sea and drink a beer.

“She was there, too. Though she was not one of them, not even then. They at least thought of themselves as being helpful. She never meant to help, though it was her who ended the war. I sought her in Neom but she was gone, of course. The trail was cold. I was pretty badly wounded at the time. Missing a leg, most of an arm. Half my systems were not functioning. I joined up with some other robots on the road to the Dead Sea. They said there was a monastery of the order of the black-robed monks of Udom Xhai there that helped our kind.