The heart was hard to get but she had her fans back in the old days and she got a miniature black hole on the black market, shipped by drone capsule from the edges of the solar system. It dropped over the desert when at last it came. She went to retrieve it, came under fire in the process, had to kill a bunch of UXOs and felt bad for it.

The mind, though. . . . The mind she evolved herself. She spent hours over the illicit breeding grounds she had set up in an old cave, heat shielding to make sure the processors weren’t spotted. The Others had Clan Ayodhya as their earthly bodyguards and they did not look kindly on anyone playing with bootleg digital evolution. So she hid, and hoped, and spent hours over the digital lifeforms that rose and fell within her servers, mutated, evolved, competed, until one chunk of code rose to prominence and she copied it and set it against a new set of instructions, refining, waiting, hoping: nursing it to life like Mary Shelley with her only child who lived.

She had felt so clear, then! So full of purpose! Nasu now could not even imagine why she’d bothered. Creation had consumed her, she barely slept, she kept waiting for something to happen, for the child to be born or for the Clan Ayodhya to come claim her, or for the city to be finally overrun by the never-ending war beyond its walls.

The body of the golden man lay still and waited. Perfect, empty.

Until, one day, the child was born.

She didn’t know how she’d feel when it happened. She had not expected love, but love came, like a tidal force, and it overwhelmed her. The golden man, her child, sat up for the first time as the evolved mind settled into the body.

It said, “Mother?” and it broke her heart.

She was ruthless enough to cut it out of herself. That love she hunted in the neural pathways and excised, the very memory of it: she dropped it into a pendant, of the sort they sold cheaply on the streets of Vientiane or Yiwu, and hid it and then cut the memory of where she’d hidden that and put it away, too.

It was strange to realise, after all those years: she had done this, and now it was back inside her, unwanted, unwelcome: love.

Somewhere between Bethlehem and Mecca lay Neom, city of futurity, where fortunes are made and faiths are lost. Somewhere in that city her child was alive again, and it needed her.

The woman who once called herself Nasu sighed. She felt a headache coming on. Somewhere in the distance, a stampede of robots was approaching.

Nasu stepped across old roads she now remembered, to see her child.

23. The Company

Across town the robot, too, remembered. It looked at the golden man, felt its presence: recalled the first time they met.