From time to time someone would publish an article, there was a small group of scholars who made it their niche. There was that Phobos Studios production, of course, but it was about Rohini, and more than a century back. If you asked anyone respectable about it they’d shrug or make a face or just pretend they didn’t hear you.

It wasn’t really high art.

Which was sort of the point originally, of course. It was visceral art, in the literal sense. It was blood running down palace walls, like in Blake. There had been one of their movement, she worked in custom plagues. Died from one herself, apparently, at least that was the story.

The point was, even then nobody really cared.

Would they care now? Would she be rediscovered, her work revaluated for a new generation? Would she be celebrated for “Golden Man, mixed metal and digital media, by Nasu [undated]”?

She couldn’t even remember where the idea came from. A messiah for the robots. It was the war, which wasn’t really a war but a series of them. She lived with her mother and father in the dust of Neom, in the ruins of futurity, and the robots, serving one side or the other, battled it out in the desert, endlessly.

She felt sorry for them.

Could you make faith into a programme? She’d wondered. Could you code belief? Religions propagated much like viruses. They evolved, spread, died. They were a constant, like disease or death or new ideas. Religion was a part of people. And what were robots but beings cast in humanity’s mould?

She figured it was worth a try.

She’d been collecting her memories all day from the dead letter drops, Neom Rules, the way she’d left them for herself before she fled. Now she wasn’t really Nasu anymore but the little girl she’d been and the terrorartist she once was and the woman she’d since become, the one who went to space, and the one she was right now, all rolled into one. It was very confusing. She remembered her old name. She remembered her mother. She remembered these streets, as much as they had changed.

Back then, she’d figured it was worth a try, and in an abandoned workshop on the edge of town, under constant threat of shelling from the desert she made the body, using laser torches for welding, then hammering and refining, sweat in her hair, which she’d tied back. She’d felt like a real artist then. She wore overalls and wiped her hands on them like in the old pictures.