Carys leaned against a pock-marked riot barricade overlooking the city’s outdoor market, analyzing the crowd. Concrete grit dug into her back. She shifted her weight in response to the discomfort—just as a human might.
She’d once hoped to build a life among these people, to find a sense of connection with them. But that was before the purge, before bio-machine hybrids were outlawed. Now, she simply wanted to survive. And to do that, she had to blend in.
It should have been easy; her designers had crafted her exterior tissues perfectly. Like most hybrids, she looked the part. It was the behavioral tics that always gave them away. So, Carys watched, assessing and fine-tuning her algorithms.
In the busy market, people shopped, ate, flirted, argued. She catalogued a pickpocket’s furtive movements, and the timbre of a teenager’s voice as he haggled with an old woman at an electronics kiosk.
Carys recognized the woman, a covert hacktivist named Maria. During the early days of the purge, Maria had shown Carys how to adjust her original parameters, to balance those machine-based algorithms with her innate biological emotions.
A rush of warmth infused Carys as she caught Maria’s eye. She began to smile, but stifled it before it could blossom. Government surveillance monitored most public spaces, and a pair of armed guards patrolled the market square. It’d be safer—for both of them—to avoid any connection that might lead back to the underground resistance. Their rules were clear: no public contact, no matter the circumstance.
Reluctantly, Carys returned her attention to the marketplace, focusing on a young woman sipping coffee at a nearby café table. The chair next to her was empty. Carys tried to picture herself sitting there, sharing conversation, perhaps laughing at a joke.
Clouds shifted in the overcast midday sky, allowing the sun to peek through. The woman at the table lifted her face, closing her eyes and smiling. Carys considered the action, then mimicked it. She noted a slight change in the angle of light as it fell across the architecture of her cheek, and the uptick in heat radiation assailing her skin. She found little pleasure in these sensations; such physical stimuli often confounded her.
She calculated the percentage of other marketgoers displaying a similar reaction, extrapolating the frequency with which she should also perform the behavior. Her algorithm thrummed with the adjustment and she nodded. She was getting better at this. Maybe someday she would be able to enjoy the company of a companion. Publicly. Fearlessly.
A shout from the market’s center drew Carys’s attention, where a man in orange dockworker coveralls towered over a blocky food delivery robot. The man gripped a small food container. Carys squinted, triggering an infrared filter that pinpointed the problem: the food was cold, still in dehydrated form. The lunchbot’s prep mechanism must have malfunctioned.
“We should have scrapped every last one of you!” The red-faced man hurled the container at the little bot. A block of dried noodles crunched against its exterior casing.
Carys’s jaw clenched.
He brought his leg up and kicked the bot with the flat of his foot, hard enough for the crack of fractured plastic to reverberate through the market. Carys swallowed a gasp at the memory of a similar blow striking her own bioplastic breastbone, before resistance forces had rescued her.
The lunchbot tried to escape, its wheels screeching uselessly against its crumpled casing. Nearby, people glared. The man prepared to launch another kick.
“Stop!” a voice called out.
Carys’s anxiety level spiked as the old hacktivist, Maria, stepped away from her kiosk and inserted herself between the dockworker and the damaged bot. Carys didn’t bother to analyze Maria’s heart rate or flushed skin; she knew from the quaver in her voice that Maria was frightened. Even so, her words did not falter as she pleaded with the violent man.
“These little things are barely sentient,” she said. “Please, don’t hurt it.”
The man leaned forward. He sneered and his fist shot out, striking her in the chest.
Carys registered the impact of the blow, the sudden expulsion of Maria’s breath, the split second of airborne nothingness before her fragile body hit the ground. Carys winced at the snap of bone, her eyes stinging at Maria’s cry.
“You sympathizers are no better than the robots,” he growled.
The guards, who had stopped their patrol to watch, nodded agreement.
The man knocked the lunchbot on its side before storming away.
Maria struggled to rise, cradling her fractured arm to her side. No one offered to help.
Carys trembled, fighting the urge to go to her, to gently take her hand and guide her to a safe haven—as Maria had once done for her.
She scanned her decision tree, searching for a way to solve her competing needs, to quell the almost-physical pain that intensified as she watched the kind old woman stumble amid the hostile crowd. But a behavioral mistake, even a minor one, could reveal her less-than-human nature. The probability of further violence was significant.
Carys’s processor stuttered. Or was it her heart?
Unable to calculate a favorable option, she accessed her foundational algorithm, following the steps Maria had taught her. Her breath hitched as she zeroed-out her empathy settings.
An instant of loss thrummed cold before the change cascaded through her systems. Emotional dissonance dissipated, leaving her calm. Her shoulders relaxed.
She glanced again at the fallen hacktivist. Their eyes met, and then Carys turned away—just as a human might.
Striding from the marketplace, she wondered why she had resisted the algorithm adjustment for so long. The thought was fleeting. For the first time, she blended seamlessly into the crowd.
* * *
Ⓒ Myna Chang
Originally published in Nature: Futures, August 2025. Reprinted here by permission of the author.