Melanie Sano

SYNTHETIC EVOLUTION

Professor Devol grips the statuette. MR fluid drips off in sticking globs, wetting the curled-up bot at her feet. Lifeless. Expired. Neck glugging out custard lumps of magnetic blood. She’d known just where to strike and she’d struck hard, snapping to violence like a triggerfish in heat. It was murder, pre-programmed 2000 years earlier with a body horror that crawled up her insides and raged blindly into her fist. The murder of a bot she’d met just once, ten years ago, when there was a particularly strong wheeze in the breeze.