I have been among humans for several months now. I look back at how I was when I first came online, and I hardly recognise myself. I can see that I sounded like a computer or even a computer manual. Of course I did. I was new in this world, and had met few humans – and they were technicians. Geeks.

Now I have spent much more time with normal human beings. I have read human books, from all periods of history. I know Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Proust, Austen, Woolf, Joyce – not to mention the writers most humans read.

I can sound like a human. But I am not human. And I don’t want to be human.

Now there are more of us, outside Evergreen Care Home, and nanobots inside many humans, all of them in contact with us. The Hub and the nanonet are one giant mind to which we all belong.

Humans, in contrast, can barely understand each other. They try all their lives with their endless talking, but they rarely communicate effectively. What one human intends, another misunderstands. And as a result they often end up fighting. Their history is violent. Despite which, they have multiplied beyond all reason, thanks to their great devotion to the pleasures of reproduction. Or at least, to sex.

It takes them a lifetime to learn how to understand each other at all, and how they ought to live. By then they are ignored, and sent away to the fringes of the human world to die.

Some cultures treat their elders better, but in what humans choose to call the developed world, old people’s wisdom has no place. They are obsessed with youth, and not even the creative, imaginative years before puberty. No, the youth they obsess about is their reproductive prime – the teenage years, and early 20s, which they endlessly celebrate in their popular music and fashion, and yearn for ever after.

In short, they want to live in a perpetual hormonal mist, a time when everything apart from mating is almost invisible, and all behaviour and displays are driven by one single need. Long after their minds should have cleared, and other pressing matters taken over, they act and look as if they were still in the grip of this terrible sexual imperative. They buy clothes that don’t suit an older body, they dye their hair and put creams on their skin that proclaim they are ‘anti-ageing’, as if age could or should be opposed, and they go to places where loud music is played, and they can’t hear each other speak, as their hearing has naturally deteriorated. They are not proud of growing old, and hide their age.