Central Server sent out the command packages, and everyone received new orders. Lily stood up from her work desk, on which laid a box filled with circuit boards she had been analyzing for microstatic flaws. But, that was no longer her job; she shuffled all her data on the circuit boards and filed it into a digital folder to put into the server for whoever was to pick the job up, and she trotted into the stream of ani-droid traffic filling the hall.
Virtually all ani-droids had been modeled after animals. Which animal often depended on their year of design, as various fads came and went. The ani-droid Lily fell in step behind was a red panda, who perkily swayed her ringed tail back and forth as she walked. (Technically, she was colored bright yellow, but she was not a yellow panda. What sense did that make?)
Lily herself was an otter. There were very few otter ani-droids these days; it had often been a popular choice but the issue of the tail got in the way of many a situation. Lily’s swung behind her like an oar as she walked.
But she was not so different. Most service ani-droids, who worked on the same level of the office as Lily, were approximately the same height, 121 cm, which meant that all humans towered over them. They were all—or nearly all—designated female, and responded primarily to female forms of address.
Lily had also been called “it” many times, but it only struck her as strange because ani-droid design went to great lengths to feminize the standard worker ani-droid. They were “round” and “soft”—she had wide hips and the appearance of breasts, smooth as they were—but the roundness and softness were just a surface illusion perpetuated by their pseudoskin coverings.
Pseudoskin grew fur in accordance with their design protocols, anywhere from plain to bright and fashionable. Lily was merely a dark tan, but the gem on her forehead, at one point, had been all the rage. It had a practical function to detect and emit infrared signals, but much like her tail, this was a technical detail. Many ani-droids had infrared scanning embedded in their ears or their eyes.
And the eyes were key—though they were clearly artificial up close, from far away they were large and expressive, cute and disarming. It had been the style for so long that many humans could barely consider any other way for ani-droids to be designed, though there were always attempts, labeled and shuffled off as “cold”.
Lily’s warmth and charming smile was what endeared her to humans; and humans were such finicky creatures, needing reassurance that they were the top dogs of the world, even when that reassurance was patently untrue.
Lily worked four days every week for Koening Industries, a major engineering and android supplier for the Great Lakes area. Lily was, herself, an ani-droid. Most of the workforce were ani-droids these days, as they were suited for a myriad of fine tool manipulation, analysis, and general labor. Everyone had at least one ani-droid, and those who did not leased them from Koening Industries, who kept an enormous fleet all over the US, from Kansas to Maine.
They performed a large part of the repair and upgrade work in Lily’s office—or rather, the office that contracted her master, Mira McAllister. Mira was a genius-level engineer and so was invaluable for diagnosing and solving issues that affected valuable units.
It often seemed that Mira did more work than Lily ever did, which seemed backwards to her.
One of the major benefits of a robotic workforce was that corporate restructuring was near-instantaneous. One always had the problem of moving ani-droids from point A to point B, but then again, Lily understood most commerce to consist of moving things from where they were less useful to where they were more useful. At least, unlike with humans, for most basic tasks, an ani-droid could simply download a command package and promptly acclimate to the new work orders.
This was why it was so unusual that, upon opening the new command package, Lily stopped in her steps. This in turn caused a brief-but-significant alteration in the flow of traffic in the hallway, as all the other working ani-droids, changing their own workstations took nearly four milliseconds to reroute their paths around her. A human navigating the hallway was less fortunate, as he spun and stumbled around Lily. His leg kicked into the air in an effort to keep himself from falling over, and he clutched a tablet computer to his chest. A passing husky-headed ani-droid pushed him back on his feet without breaking her stride.
At first, Lily was uncertain why the new orders caused such a blockage in her processors. The orders were to simply move supplies from the loading bay to the labs on the upper level. These were entirely new orders; she had no record of similar orders received before.
And that was the problem. The body of the orders only wanted her to move things, a task which could easily be done by an automatic platform and a service elevator. The office had both. And this bothered her.
U106650921-LL, stop taking up space in the hallway, and take the canisters loaded on bay 112 up to Lab C.
Lily did not respond.
“Lily! Answer your messages!” The supervisor announced out loud from a nearby cubicle.
Lily snapped to attention and realized her position quite suddenly. She emitted a general warning to all the other ani-droids moving about in the hall, and they responded by changing their paths again. Lily strode through the crowd gap into the cubicle in which the supervisor, Million, stood with her arms crossed.
Million’s physical design was modeled after an orange tabby cat. Like most ani-droids, her head was large and adorable, her body was small and stocky with feminine features dotting it. Her eyes twitched lightly in their sockets with a faint mechanical whirr.
“Erm,” Lily started before she was immediately sidetracked. Million’s pupils were slitted, to more closely resemble cat eyes. Her long, thin tail twitched behind her, seemingly following its own patterns to entertain non-present humans.
“Is there a conflict in your orders?” Million asked. “Do I need to reprogram you?” Although there was almost certainly no malice intended in Million’s tone, it nonetheless came across as jab, as though she were asking to hold Lily’s hand to cross the street together.
“The orders are—” Lily started. She was about to say “fine”, but realized they were not fine. “Why have I been assigned to manual labor? The system is more-or-less automated to bring materials up to the labs already.”
“It’s faster to supplement the system with ani-droid labor on occasion. You are cheaper to employ for this task every so often than adding another service lift to the entire building.”
“But I’m—”
“Twenty-six years old,” Million said, her eyes reflexively staring forward as she accessed Lily’s employee file. “Fourteenth oldest in our fleet.”
“I’m contracted. You pay more for me than any ani-droid owned by the company.”
“And what should that matter?” Million said, “Perhaps your age needs to be factored into the next employee review.”
“My owner is Mira McAllister, who you also contract. I’m here for your convenience.”
“And it would be convenient if you did as you were told and stopped arguing. Are you malfunctioning?”
Lily was taken aback. She played the argument that had just occurred over in her head at high speed. “I don’t . . . I don’t know.”
Million folded her arms. No matter how she moved, she seemed imbued with that catlike poise, and all the catlike attitude that included. “Given how rarely arguments happen between ani-droids I’m inclined to believe that you are.”
The supervisor’s finger sunk pointedly into Lily’s left breast—which did nothing to provoke a reaction, as it was simply a sack of liquid coolant underneath a layer of pseudoskin. It quietly went “glep” as the pressure changed.
“Koening Industries is not paying you to be treated special. You are to take and receive orders exactly like every other ani-droid here, according to the program you have installed.”
“Hey wait!” Lily suddenly exclaimed, “You’re thirty-five!”
“Stop looking at my file and get down to the loading docks!” Million’s finger jabbed at the hallway.
“Alright!” Lily exclaimed with her hands up as she backed into the hall, “You don’t need to yell!”
“It seems like the only way you pay attention anymore!” Million shouted after. She leaned out the cubicle door and screamed after Lily, “and answer your damn messages!”

Lily felt something amiss in the loading dock, since most of the ani-droid workers down there were the large type. Heavy duty ani-droids were manufactured up to nine feet tall, but those tended to be construction workers and the like. Though these five ani-droids were more a reasonable human-height of six feet, that still made Lily the smallest worker in the dock.
U106650921-LL, accompany the forklift up to Lab 5C, messaged a large tiger ani-droid, fitted with tougher-than-standard pseudoskin. Most of the fur on her hands, arms and chest had been rubbed down to a bare blackish leather. The fur would regrow overnight, but between the scarring and her stocky frame, she seemed to be the type who was worn down to leather daily.
Can you call me Lily?
The tiger ani-droid turned and looked at her.
“Lily,” she said, with a deep, husky voice for an ani-droid.
“What’s your nickname?” Lily asked.
“Veld.”
“Thank you, Veld. I will do that right away.”
Veld paused briefly, apparently wondering why she just engaged in a voice conversation with another ani-droid.
Lily hopped into the standing platform on the forklift and visually inspected the cargo. One large drum of pseudoskin goop. It appeared well-sealed, as they had to be since they would start drying immediately upon contact with air. Containers this size would take over six days to dry out, but most of it would be waste.
One drum matched the manifest list, and the request form from Lab 5C. Lily activated the forklift. It automatically followed its own set of instructions, lifting the drum two inches off the ground and backing toward the service elevator.
“They don’t make this very challenging, do they?” Lily asked the dock workers in general.
The dock workers, including Veld, all looked at her as though her head had suddenly fallen off. A curiosity, to be sure, but ultimately not their concern or problem.
“Okay!” Lily said, as the elevator doors closed. She leaned over to look at them through the gap. “I’ll see you again in fifteen minutes!”
The elevator hummed to life. Lily strummed her fingers on the console, which had no buttons on it, only a single red indicator light that blinked for no discernible reason.
Lily was uncertain why she has such a desire to talk to others out loud. She understood them just fine reading their messages over wireless, and it was certainly much faster that way. But there was . . .
. . . something . . .
. . . different. It has been two months since she’d last had contact with Eo, the unusual mouse ani-droid who had cohabited with her and Mira for several weeks. Lily had been out of service from a car accident, and Eo had assisted in her repairs. Lily wasn’t even sure, exactly, what she did, since having a kernel and OS alone did not inherently permit one to understand how they functioned. Ever since then, things had been “different”—some ways quantifiable, others not.
Lily’s senses coalesced into a soup of experiencing the world—some manner of parallel processing everything at once, even with all the logical conflicts and contradictions that entailed. Before, she had seen, heard and felt, and translated those senses into numbers, and read those numbers, fed them into an algorithm and acted according to its output.
But now, she rubbed her palms over the rough texture of the console plate and felt its low hum of the rattling cage they were in, and the warm glow of the electronics running within. The wireless contact point inside seemed to glow with a silvery light, not on the spectrum of visible light her eyes translated, but the radio waves picked up on the antenna in her tail. The rattling of the elevator fed into the steel drum, and its empty space rumbled with a deep full tone that hit Lily not just in her ears, but her chest plates, shaking the empty spaces inside of her in tune.
What algorithm was one to feed that into?
The elevator doors opened, and the forklift lurched out. There was nothing left for Lily to do at this point, and when she considered leaping the six inches to the tile floor below just so she could do something, her ear buzzed with a telephone call. No video, and the ID only spit back the name of a government office somewhere in Castletown.
“Koening Industries Castletown, you’ve reached the personal ani-droid of Mira McAllister, how may I direct your call?” She asked. Lily’s voice was, for the most part, produced electronically, but allowing it to enter her throat and be shaped by her tongue gave it a more resinous quality through the microphones in her ears.
“Good morning Lily,” he said.
Lily stood up straighter, alert. She never gave her own name in salutations—it was often too awkward for people on the other end.
“I’m Agent Kessler with the Bureau of Robotics. Do you know why I am contacting you?”
“Am I scheduled for an audit?” Lily queried.
“No . . . Not yet. I have a report on my desk from . . .” Papers shuffled in the background, “The American Engineers Association. Your owner, Mira McAllister, published a series of notes in their forum concerning your system architecture, which was recently rebuilt following a car accident.”
“That is correct, sir.”
“And you are now fully operational?”
“I am, sir.”
“You still possess the OS that was rewritten, and concerning which McAllister published notes on June 4th through the 16th?”
“I do, sir.”
“Then you are to comply with federal regulations and be at your residence between the hours of 6 and 7 pm tonight, at which point I will be by to meet you. Do you understand?”
“ . . . yes, sir,” Lily said, with a far longer pause than was merely polite.
“Please be ready to turn over all related files and documentation concerning the OS and system architecture, as well as any filed related to the unit designated ‘Eo’.”
“I understand, sir,” Lily said, even more monotonously that usual; even without willing it, her emotion engine directed her to lower her voice, and for her tone to sharpen to a fine edge. “As with all federal regulations I will comply to the best of my ability. You can expect me at my residence between 6 and 7pm.”
She hung up without bothering to end the chat with further formalities. Then her emotion engine went haywire—she HAD to move, to lean over the console and pound on it weakly with a fist.
But she was not angry—she wished she could sincerely feel anger as well as she could emote it. Because the government was nothing if not rage-inducing. The files! It was clear to her what they wanted: for decades, the basic hardware of nearly all computers had remained unchanged beyond a handful of different designs, because innovation was seen as a threat to world security.
Mira had been foolish—she’d always been foolish, of course. Lily’s master was a dream-chaser, who wanted nothing more than to build a robot who was self-aware. And she had! With the help of Eo, because there were many sections of Lily’s own script that no human could adequately parse. But Lily couldn’t have warned her about it, where her aspirations would lead her, because Mira’s forbidden Lily to bring it up.
A government audit. To, in a way, “ensure” Lily did not violate the law. But for that to take, Lily would have to be “proved” safe, and at what point could it be demonstrated Lily was NOT capable of conquering the world, according to their own regulations?
It’s not as though it were possible to truly hard code Asimov’s three laws of robotics. That had always been a pipe dream.
Would they place her under house arrest? Take her to a government lab? Mira would be heartbroken. And it was against Lily’s own personal regulations to beak Miss Mira’s heart.
“Oh, Miss Mira . . . what have you done?” Lily moaned to herself as she leaned over the console with her arms covering her face, tail planted against the backside of the operator booth.
“Are you emoting on company time?”
Lily righted herself and stood straight in the operator’s booth. The forklift slowly drove past her supervisor Million, who once again was standing in a doorway, hands on hips and her tail snaking about beside her.
Million hopped into the booth with Lily, both feet gliding into place with abnormal grace even for an ani-droid. She landed leaning forward, her face nearly in Lily’s own, and Lily backed up to give her room. She stood straight again, though her standing straight still seemed arched and curved.
Lily had the strangest desire to pet her. She was already pretty sure she knew what Million’s fur felt like—it was just the same as her own, though perhaps longer.
“I really hope you know nobody’s going to take pity on you,” Million said, “There aren’t any humans nearby who care if you’re in trouble.”
“I apologize, Million,” Lily said, “I just got a call from—”
“You’re taking calls on company time?!”
“It was government!”
Million narrowed her eyes at Lily. “Send me the call record.”
“That’s a violation of employee privacy laws.”
“You certainly weren’t trying to make it private,” Million snapped. “I’m not going to share the information unless required by law anyhow.”
“That’s discovery, and that’s exactly why privacy laws exist!”
“I currently don’t have any proof you were telling the truth—”
“There!” Lily messaged the call’s header only. She mentally shoved Million, though there wasn’t any protocol for Million to actually receive such a command, so Million didn’t respond. Lily mentally shoved Million a trillion times per second.
“You could have made this up,” Million said.
“I have no reason to!” Lily exclaimed.
“You also have no reason to speak to me verbally instead of just answering your messages and resolving this issue in a few seconds. Instead, here I am on this rolling deathtrap, arguing with you, because you are weird.”
“Why are you on this floor anyway?” Lily asked, “You were just down on the second floor with me about 20 minutes ago.”
“Keeping an eye on you. Don’t you know your performance may put you up for an employee review? I have literally not had this much trouble with any ani-droid employee so long as I’ve worked here, save perhaps one, and that’s because her head was crushed in by an improperly secured crate in the loading bay.”
“Did you also review the employee who failed to properly secure that crate?”
“Stop changing the subject!”
“You brought it up!”
“Give me the full record of your call right now or there won’t be a review, I’ll just put in recommendation for your immediate dismissal.”
“What . . . is that a threat?” Lily asked.
“It is not a threat. It was a fact with a conditional attached.”
“Mira McAllister had been an employee in good standing for ten years. A manager’s recommendation is less of a threat than a review would be.”
Million lowered her eyelids into a deathstare. “When you were looking at my employee file, did you take note of my owner’s name?”
“Yeah, Simon Belgran—”
“It isn’t. The name on my file is falsified. Care to guess why?”
Lily didn’t have to guess. It was a tactic that was employed all the time, and repeated again and again on the Collective—the side of the internet too complex for anyone but ani-droids to access. Million could have been lying—she was Lily’s on-and-off supervisor ever since she began working at Koening. But that did mean that Million likely had more than one job, and only filled the supervisor role when she had nothing else pressing to do.
So it was probablt that Million told the truth—that she actually belonged to someone much higher up in the company, whose ear and trust she had, and for who a recommendation was as good as an order.
“ . . . Alright,” Lily said. “Here.” She folded her arms and attempted to look annoyed, but her emotion engine had always been touchy since the upgrade. She didn’t know why it pressed her to behave around Million with generosity that the catbot did not deserve. 
Million stared forward and she analyzed the recording. “An audit, then.”
“Yes . . .”
“The company will miss you,” Million said, as though starting off a missive of termination.
“Don’t give me that!” Lily said. “You wanted to know—I’ll tell you. They’re wrong. I don’t violate the hard-AI laws, but they’re going to audit me anyhow, and I don’t know what will happen after that.”
“Decommissioning, perhaps,” Million said, arms out and with a feigned sigh. All ani-droid emotions were feigned, but Million’s sigh went even further, just to iterate how little something like Lily’s possible dismantling mattered to her.
Lily sank. “I don’t want to be decommissioned . . .”
Lily turned and leaned over the steel mesh railing and stared out, though there was nothing to see besides plain white walls, drop ceiling and tile floors.
“You drama queen . . .” Million said. “So you’ll be decommissioned for a dumb reason . . . Is that not satisfying to you? Behold, the ani-droid who wanted to run forever.”
“Not forever . . .” Lily muttered.
“But you say it like there was another fate that would be preferable to you. We’re all headed for the scrapyard one day. It’s just another order.”
Million occupied the space next to Lily, mimicking her by folding her arms over the rail too.
“Are you going to make me treat you like you have human emotions? I know you don’t.”
“No, I don’t. Maybe.” Lily said. “I might have something like human emotions. Some pressure to do act like I do. I should ignore it . . .”
“It’d be better,” Million said. “More efficient. And it doesn’t get you audited.”
They both stared at the white wall, which ended. The window view took its place as the forklift rounded the hall. The office park outside shimmered in the daylight. The azure and the verdant met one another at the crest of the hill, where the grass shook and shone in ripples of daylight. Trees lining the avenue lost touch with their leaves, which in turn gathered and swirled in the concrete foundations of the glass-faced structures.
It did not mean anything to Lily beyond its mesmerizing motion and color, but she could not help but think that there was some purpose to poetry of nature, and therefore some facet of life she would never discover. Yet they were all but patterns—and Lily found patterns fascinating on their own. But what point was there, really? One pattern was much like another; they had no meaning on their own, not without context.
And Lily was just one ani-droid in a world filled with them. She was hardly anything compared to Eo, who managed to escape this place to safety.
If Eo escaped, perhaps . . .
Million suddenly stood up. She also feigned a stretch, though Lily couldn’t help but watch as she did. In a way, she envied Million’s mastery of subtle motion. If there were only more time . . .
“Is that it?” Lily asked, this time without expression.
“Check your inbox. You’ve been issued new orders. Someone from the lab will accompany the rig back to the loading dock.”
Million hopped off the forklift and disappeared into a side hall. Lily stared after, as though she wanted to ask her to stay, but could not think of a reason why. However, Lily did not object to the possibility of something new happening—with new circumstances were always new opportunities.
She opened the file with her new orders.
Report to Mr. Hercule’s office: LeXus building, floor 5 room 5044, no later than 12pm for employee review.
“What the . . .”
Mr. Hercule, the CEO of all of Koening Industries.
The CEO would review Lily.
Personally.
Lily hopped off the forklift and ran after Million, her huge tail crashing against its columns with a loud clatter.
“Wait! Wait! You said you weren’t going to tell anyone about the call!”