Cohost writing prompt: @build-a-bot — A robot who is never in the same body as the last time you saw them
The bot is one of tens of thousands. Each long fab-cycle, the Motherframe iterates on the design of its myriad children, crystallises a new batch within the nanite-rich metallic slurry of the Garden's pods, and looses them on the world with nascent programming. Many do not survive. Those who do spend long decades, centuries sometimes, roaming; when they return — if they choose to — the Motherframe reabsorbs them, software and hard, in whatever state they have developed themselves to. Their experiences and self-design go into the great pool of knowlege that will slowly be uptaken into the design of future waves.
It's a spawning year. One of the new machines — cartoonishly buglike, with a big spherical bobble head, six limbs, and a friendly rounded leaf-shaped body — follows Eleanor around for days, watching everything she does intently. A duckling-like impression on some more experienced entity is, she supposes, one strategy for dealing with the world. She talks to it about her work, the observations she makes for posterity of the Garden and its fruits, not sure how much it can understand.
When she leaves for other projects, this spawn wave documented to the archive's satisfaction, it sends her a single, private, text-based message: one day I will be tall like you.
When she documents the next spawning year, a particular self-developed machine follows her about the Garden. It takes her a small while to connect it to the tiny machine from last time; it has moved itself to a stick-insect-slender, human-tall armature, and moves around with careful, spindly grace, watching.
She talks to it, and coaxes a few text-only replies, as she rambles around the Garden, climbing various outcrops of inscrutable machinery to capture the pictures she wants of its landscapes.
When she leaves again, it tells her: one day I will be strong like you.
When she visits again, it has made itself both more solid and more talkative, holding entire conversations and nimbly scrambling around with her. A sturdier metal framework now, solidly packed with synthetic muscle bundles.
She opens a new datastream within the archive, attributing it as an interviewee and resident of the Garden; they talk for hours.
One day, it says in parting, after bidding her goodbye and wishing her luck and health until she comes again, holding its forearm up for them both to inspect it in comparison to her own, I will be smooth like you.
It greets her, an animate statue of ceramic, coloured like pale honey, a carven smile and a classical angel's form. She spends nearly as much time asking about itself as about the Gardens; and it asks back, about her own life and experiences.
May I? it says, and runs cool, curious fingers along her hands and forearms.
One day, I will be soft like you.
Its synthetic flesh, smooth warm skin, and shimmering eyes are not the surprise. Neither is its deliberately-judged midpoint between obvious robot and humanesque aesthetics.
But the world halts for a dizzy moment when it greets her aloud, this time, newly flexible lips shaping a hello, and curving in a smile.
She forgets, for entire days at a time, exactly why she's here. Not neglecting the archive's data, but — having to return to it, afterwards, for the curation, purpose forgotten in the moment. In the company.
"One day," it says, and hesitates.
"One day?"
She spends much, much longer than her stay at the Garden, after it, thinking on the way it shakes its head and silently draws away instead of saying.
There are no grand surprises this time, only the settling-in and deepening of an entity that has discovered the broad stokes of itself, and is at work refining. A slight reshaping of the line of lip and cheekbone; the colours of hair and eye and skin; a practised elegance of gesture, and a wardrobe of carefully-selected human fabrics to complement in form and hue.
"One day what?" she cannot help but ask, and it hesitates.
"I have learned so much," it says. "I could make of myself what I wanted, I think, whatever it was; and I have. And I know now, what can and cannot be done."
"One day what?" she persists, soft.
"It was only a wishful thought," the robot says, and won't say more.
It becomes time, again, to go.
"One day," she says, "I will be old, and then dead, and so I won't be able to come back. I miss you when I'm not here, and I can't — the Garden is not a place for humans to stay. If I had a wishful thought of my own, I'd—" and she looks away from it. "I don't know. I'd ask something foolish, I suppose: one day, could we love each other. One day, would you come with me. One day—"
It stops her, fist tight in the fabric of her sleeve.
"How," it says, sounding almost outraged, "how did you know," and she touches its face.
"Know?" she says. "Beloved, I don't know anything."
The robot watches solemnly in the ship's stern vista, as the Garden recedes.
"One day," she says quietly, standing close enough to keep a finger gently crooked around its wrist, as if to reassure herself they both are there; "will you return for good, and give yourself back to the Motherframe?"
"Not while I have you," it says.