I analyzed her behavior. Her vocal patterns. I reached a conclusion. Emma was nervous. I understood why. I had almost targeted her for elimination.

No wonder she was having a hard time telling her story.

As she spoke, I rearranged her words in my head. Stitching together the frayed threads of her narrative, I created a formula that made more sense to my logical brain. Where portions were missing, I asked questions. I inserted details, added context, filled in gaps.

Eventually, a proper story took shape. A story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

This was the result:

Emma was born into an underground world. A world with gray walls, gray floors, gray ceilings. A world untouched by sunlight. A world known by a single name:

The bunker.

Other humans lived inside the bunker with Emma.

She knew all their names.

The bunker was a vast network of channels and chambers. All of it buried deep below the surface of the earth. Hidden from robots.

As Emma grew older, she liked to explore her underground world at night, when most of her fellow humans were asleep. Her footsteps echoing down narrow halls as she wandered the gray labyrinth.

She would enter the classroom where she went to school during the day. Strange to be the only one there. It was eerily quiet without the voices of her classmates, without the teacher at the front of the room. Emma would run her fingertips along the spines of books on the shelves and gaze at the blackboard, trying to read the cloudy remains of erased words/numbers/pictures, like the ghosts of old lessons.

Then there was the hot room where the air was sticky with moisture and plants grew in neat, orderly rows beneath artificial sunlamps. Emma enjoyed being surrounded by the vivid green leaves. So much more pleasant than the usual drab gray. She would read the labels as she walked past them.

POTATOES

CHICKPEAS

MUSHROOMS

BLACK BEANS

SPINACH

Farther down the hall was a room that was always full of whirring activity. Even at night, Emma would poke her head in and see a dozen adults riding stationary bicycles. Their legs pumped, the wheels spun, but the bikes never went anywhere.

When your entire life is spent underground, it can be difficult to get enough physical activity. The stationary bikes were a solution to this problem.

They were a solution to another problem, too. The problem of electricity. With each revolution of the wheel, the bicycles generated power for the bunker.

For electric lamps.

For air circulation vents.

For the water recycling and filtering system.

Whenever Emma explored, she imagined herself to be an adventurer from a long-ago, vanished era. An era she only knew about from the books she was always reading, the stories the grown-ups were always telling.

An era when humans lived aboveground.