Lucy Mosata

You found walking came easily. In fact it just seemed to happen, without your direct consciousness telling each limb to rise and fall. The calculations of trajectory, the judgements of distance, the adjustments for balance, all happened without you needing to focus on every input and variable. The body was well engineered and felt seamless to your brain. It was still taking you time to remember that, for all intents and purposes, this was the entirety of you. Being able to feel that it was all of you helped.

You followed the Doctor into the greater apartment, though she had let go of your hand now. You found your focus continually assessing the way the back of her pajama pants changed shape, especially in the area above her legs. How the silken material, hugging so closely to her firm posterior, shifted and bounced in such a satisfying waveform. But there was newer data that required interpreting too. Across the way, at the kitchen bench, was a person you had never met but you already knew the name of. Your facial recognition software picked up her identity within nanoseconds, matching with the sparsely populated database of the Doctor’s contacts she seemed to have included for convenience.

Lucy Mosata was a woman with curly brown hair and light brown skin. Those were the salient points for her immediate identification anyway. Perhaps, if you were asked to describe her with somewhat more accuracy, you would choose words like ‘Rich burnt umber drifted in tight curls down to her shoulders’ and ‘she had a chocolate caramel skin tone with a bronze lustre that made her seem to glow in the sunlight’. But nobody had asked.

“I got Korean! Kimbap! Fried chicken! What do you want to start with?” she asked instead, having sounded especially excited about the chicken.

“For breakfast?” Doctor Isaac was skeptical.

“It’s past midday, Doc,” the roommate reminded her, pulling some items out of a white paper bag marked with a colorful symbolic impression of a burger on wheels. She looked up to say something, mouth open, but then stopped and closed it again without speaking. Her eyes were also brown (dark like singed redwood) and you registered her surprise. “New Dyno?” Lucy asked the Doctor, taking a step to the side to get a better look at you standing behind Isabelle. You followed her movement with a turn of your head.

“You didn’t get the kind with the gochujang sauce,” Doctor Isaac said, nearly pouting as she surveyed the boxes of food on the kitchen table.

“Of course I got your favourite,” said Lucy then, seemingly no longer interested in you and fishing out the last small white cardboard container of chicken. When this was opened everything inside looked very bright red and sticky. This pleased your creator greatly and she fetched some utensils from a drawer. With that being taken care of, the woman named Lucy Mosata, who stood about a head shorter than the Doctor and was built with a bit more curvature to her bust, hips and backside, turned attentions to you again. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your new toy?” she questioned your ‘owner’.

You got a strange feeling from the interested way Lucy looked at you. It made you... nervous. Perhaps it was all the extra artificial nerves you had now. When you assessed this feeling you decided that perhaps ‘excitement’ might be a better term, although you still weren’t precisely sure what you were excited about.

“He’s a prototype,” Isabelle said casually, now wielding a pair of metal chopsticks. She deftly plucked a deep fried morsel from the box, it’s lumpy surface completely smothered in the thick, glossy red sauce, but none of it dripped.

“Oh cool, can I have it after you’re done testing?” asked Lucy, apparently used to her friend’s out-of-lab field testing of new Airmed Tech products. Even though you could sense her request wasn’t serious you still experienced a flash of worry about becoming dispossessed by the Doctor. Isabelle didn’t answer, the woman now too busy biting into crunchy, succulent chicken. “What model are the Dynos up to now? Dyno-80 series?” the roommate said, mainly thinking out loud. That she seemed knowledgeable about robotics made you like her. “What did you name it?” she asked then, glancing over her shoulder. “You always name them.”

“His name is Gus,” the Doctor replied helpfully, smirking. Her lips were shiny with that sweet sauce. Lucy turned back to you, leaning her hands on the kitchen bench behind her.

“Alright then, Gus, what model number are you?”

You hesitated, then looked over to the doctor. Your doing this made Lucy frown and she followed your eyeline to her roommate, then returned to you. She looked as confused as you felt.

“Go ahead,” Doctor Isaac said, nodding her permission to you. The reason you were hesitant was because… well you didn’t exactly have a model number. Sure, this body you inhabited was a Syno-6 (Short of sixth generation Synthetic Organism), but that wasn’t the same thing. There was also another complication… but apparently this was a safe place so you decided it was safe to answer.

“I do not have a model number,” you told the curious Lucy, who grew visibly curiouser at that. “I am… a unique instance. An Independent Affection Metaheuristics Guided Ultimata System.” You were kind of one of a kind. Lucy blinked at you, tilting her head like that Dyno at the bar as she processed this information. Her eyes widened.

“Guided Ultimata… an A.I?” She spun around to find a doctor with a very sticky grin. Lucy’s shock made your neuro-tactel array pulse, and you wondered if this was what blushing felt like. “No way! Did you really do it? Isabelle!” She made to bat the doctor’s questing chopsticks away from the box of chicken. “Stop stuffing your face! Izz, this is serious! You have an untethered, uninhibited A.I walking around the apartment!”

Isabelle rolled her eyes at her mild panic and snatched a box from the countertop and went to sit on the couch. Lucy followed doggedly, voice still pitched high in disbelief. “I mean I knew you weren’t joking about all of that A.I emancipation stuff but I didn’t think you would actually steal one out of the lab! And bring it into our home! You’ve probably already broken a dozen international laws!”

The doctor was leaning back into the couch cushions to get more comfortable and appeared unbothered. She was sucking some sauce off the tip of her chopstick, as if contemplating these laws she had been accused of breaching.

“Name one,” she said challengingly. Lucy was so worked up she took the bait without hesitation.

“Uh how about the MIDAS Act? Which I’m pretty sure you know all about since it’s what shut down Airmed’s biggest competitor back in 2139.” The woman’s arms were crossed over her ample bust. You had wandered over to stand near the bickering roommates but did not interject. You felt like you ought to be nearby, but was rather thankful you were being roundly ignored at the moment.

“Isn’t that item something about banning artificial intelligences from acting on personal gain?” Isabelle said wonderingly, and you knew her paraphrasing was correct due to having information about some of these laws in your databanks. The short of it was, an A.I system very nearly destroyed the North American economy some 13 years ago. Ixchel Industries was shut down just three years ago after it was found to have breached the then decade old act. This didn't seem to be Isabelle’s focus. “Personal gain… ha. Doesn’t make much sense when they’re not even recognized as persons, does it?”

You heard Lucy make a noise that was somewhere between a sigh and a growl. It was the sound of impassioned frustration.

“You know that’s not what any of it means,” she said, voice slower now, but ‘calm’ was still not a descriptor that applied. “How did you even get away with this? And what do you expect to come out of it! How are you even going to convince anyone that any of this was a good idea?”

In the face of so many difficult questions, the Doctor only smiled.

“You always wanted to get into human rights law right?” she asked rhetorically. “Well, I’ve got your first client right here.”

This had somehow quieted her roommate and her frown softened as the woman with brown curls turned to look at you. “Gus, meet Lucy Mosata. She’s going to be your lawyer.”