"C'mon and order already!" Emma laughed. "Geez!"

"Huh? Oh, sorry," I said. I'd been lost in thought, running back over everything I'd discussed with Grace yesterday. All the questions about how I saw myself, how I felt, and whether free will was even a real thing had my head spinning so hard that when Emma had suggested I come up to the mall with her that afternoon, I'd agreed before even processing it. "Um, chamomile tea with lavender, please."

"Sure thing," the barista said with a smile; then she eyed my shoulder curiously. "Um, that's...er, your, uh, is that...alive...?"

"Oh, uh, yeah," I said. I'd almost forgotten about Lucky, who was perched there quietly taking in the sights and sounds of a world she'd never seen before. Emma said she'd been a bit listless over Thanksgiving, and I'd decided to check the mall's pet store for something to keep her more engaged when we weren't around. "Is that okay? I don't think she'll be any trouble."

She chuckled; I could just see the gill-slits at the base of her skull flexing gently. "I guess it's fine. She doesn't...spread spores or anything, does she...?"

"Not that we've seen, no." That was curious, come to think of it, but I barely understood the life-cycle of ordinary mushrooms, let alone little mushroom-girl homunculi. The underside of her cap had "gills" that I knew were spore-bearing structures, but so far they hadn't produced any. Was there some condition for that? Was it a seasonal thing? Would we discover a bunch of mini-Luckys poking out of the substrate in the terrarium, some morning? Well, we could worry about that if it ever came to it...would she exhibit any kind of maternal behavior, I wondered?

Emma moved her head into view over my shoulder, peering over Lucky at me. "If that's settled, can I order now?"

"Uh, sure," I said, nodding to the barista and joining Gil in the corner booth, by the fake tree trunk; Lucky shimmied down my arm onto the table and began to explore the coffee shop. I wondered if this was a good idea; I hadn't thought about having to keep an eye on her...

"Hah, look at her go," Gil chuckled, gnawing at a piece of biscotti. We'd run into him at the bus stop, also headed up to the electronics store by the mall, and decided to have coffee together. I'd been seeing more of him than I expected after switching dorms; on top of our classes and the Friday-night LAN party, he'd started joining us for lunch some days, and stopping to talk with me when we met in the hall. I found it curious - it wasn't like he didn't have other friends - but it was nice to have his company; nice, in a way, to have another guy around. "Is she always this active?"

"Not in the middle of the day," I said, drumming my fingers on the tabletop as I watched her clamber up the back of the bench to the planter behind it. "Normally she'd just be waking up, with the sun on the descent. I guess she likes that it's cool and humid in here." It was a bit damp, come think; probably from the greenery (well, the real stuff) and the pond/waterfall. Was that more comfortable for the barista? She couldn't be more than quarter-merfolk, but it still might feel nice. I knew Tammy'd been taking longer, cooler showers after that first night.

"Reminds me of Lemmings, watching her tromp around this little fantasy world somebody's set up," he said. "...Music's a bit more Shadow of the Beast tho."

The music, a moody, atmospheric collage of vintage sampler fantasia, did seem a bit darker than the décor warranted, but no more eclectic than the rest of the café's playlist. "At least nothing here is an obvious deathtrap," I sighed. Was it normal to be this nervous about your pet? It'd been a long time since our cat went AWOL, but I didn't remember worrying this much just watching her navigate her world. Was it the not-quite-human nature of homunculi triggering the human parental instincts, as if Lucky were a child instead of a stubby little mushroom-critter? Was that a survival strategy...?

"Ulp-nah," he said cheerily, swallowing another bite. "She can look after herself. She seems pretty sharp, for someone who may not actually have a brain."

I smiled, feeling a little proud of her. "Hey, better wits with no brain than brain with no wits."

Gil laughed. "Worked for the Scarecrow, I guess."

"S'pose so," I chuckled, something clattering merrily away deep in my chest. "Who needs a stupid diploma, anyway? What's that prove?"

"And Oz never did give nothin' to the Tin Man that he didn't already have, either." He chomped down the last of his biscotti, blithely unaware of how much he'd just thrown me for a loop. "Man, when are our orders gonna be up?"

"Can't be too much longer," Emma said, setting her head down on the table and opening up a packet of madeleines. "It's busier than last time, but not that busy."

In fact, the barista called out for "Gilead?" a moment later, and he went to go get his coffee; I half-noticed, but I was too caught up in thinking about tin men and straw brains and stupid little clockwork hearts and what even is "real," anyway? that I almost completely spaced out until I heard a voice call-

"Susan?"

With a start, I lurched out of my seat and towards the bar, and it took a few steps before I noticed some other girl picking up her drink and realized what I'd done; cringing inwardly, I sat back down. Gil hadn't noticed, or at least didn't think anything of it; Emma's eyes were twinkling and she was failing to hide a grin, but she said nothing.

There was a moment's silence before Gil spoke up. "So I hear they've got you signed on as lab rats now? They're not gonna dissect you or anything, are they?" He was being tongue-in-cheek, but the concern felt comfortingly genuine.

"Not so far," I sighed. "I'm supposed to go over to the med building this evening for some scans, but nobody's breaking out the hacksaw just yet."

Emma laughed. "And I'm already in pieces; I'm more worried they'll try to stick me back together." She took a long pull off her cold brew, "smoke" curling languorously up towards the overhanging vines.

Gil cocked an eyebrow. "That worries you? What happens if they do?"

She winced at the memory. "I never got close enough to find out for sure. It's like I get interference on the nerves at either end, or something. Like static on the tactile-sensation channel. Ugh!" She shuddered. "Weirded me out when I tried it. I'm hoping they don't think to ask."

"What did they have you doing?" I asked, watching Lucky meander over to the stuffed fox. She regarded it warily, ducked under the log it was resting behind, and snuck down to the other end before scampering to the cover of a nearby fern. Were they natural enemies in the wild, or something...?

"Pretty basic stuff," she said. "Vital-signs stuff at first, because most of the things like me in folklore are ghosts or spirits - but I'm still breathing and still bleeding, at least."

Gil nodded thoughtfully. "I wondered when you came over that first weekend what they were gonna end up calling you. You're pretty much one of a kind, right? Stu, too. Do they have, like, a formalized system for that?"

I shrugged. "It's like classical taxonomy; scientists name a creature and classify it according to how they understand it, then years down the line somebody points out some nuance they didn't catch and they have to re-classify and maybe re-name it, but by then popular culture's canonized the old definition. There was a whole big argument about ten years ago over whether scaly raptor-taurs were a subfamily of feathered raptor-taurs or vice versa, f'rexample."

He chuckled. "Yeah, that figures. So did they come up with anything?"

Emma laughed. "They were still name-checking possibilities to each other when I left. I'm good with dullahan; if I'm gonna be like this, I might as well make it a nod to the Old Country." She took another pull of her drink. "Then it was tests to see if, say, there was a distance at which I couldn't feel myself, if there was a delay between stimulus to my body and feeling it in my head, how good my spatial awareness was when I was separated, et cetera."

"What'd they find out?" I asked, intrigued. I thought back to her wondering if her body was more than just a body; did she have anything like a secondary nervous system? Well, they wouldn't have established that this early in, but I was still curious.

She shrugged. "There doesn't seem to be a range limit; they left me in the exam room and led me all the way across campus, and I could feel everything just fine. No delay, either. And I was honestly surprised by how well I could sense my surroundings without seeing them. They had to direct me, but they didn't have to, like, keep me from walking into walls or anything."

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Gil whistled. "Crazy. You got a sixth sense or something?"

She set her drink down so she could shake her head. "Not in like the voodoo ESP sense. It's more like, y'know, that kind of 'phantom' sense where you can feel someone come into the room, even though you can't see or hear them in a way that your conscious mind notices. I dunno if that's information your brain pulls together from your other senses or what, but apparently I'm really attuned to it now."

"Well, it's essential for you," I said. "I mean, you just set your head down facing me and pulled up a chair behind yourself without even looking, or thinking about it. You couldn't do stuff like that without a pretty keen sense of proprioception and spatial awareness."

Emma grinned. "Right you are, Professor. And that was about the extent of it; they want to meet up with me again when they've got a bunch of specialty instruments flown in to try and determine what the hey is going on with my neck."

Gil raised an eyebrow. "Wait, do you still have a neck? ...I s'pose you must, if you can swallow and talk. But I'm guessing they're more interested in the part where it's, um, off in some other dimension or something...?"

She nodded. "Pretty much. Wherever it is, it seems to be about how I remember it. The physics side of the group just wants to know how point A connects to point B through point Z."

"Did the medical types have any thoughts on the whole body-self thing?" I asked, watching Lucky try to dig her "roots" into a mossy tree-root; unfortunately for her, it'd been shellacked over long before it could decompose into anything nutritious. She gave up after a moment and meandered over towards the tree trunk.

"'Body-self thing?'" Gil said, confused; we gave him a short rundown, and he was even more surprised. Some part of me felt a little irked that he was paying so much attention to Emma's change when I was experiencing what seemed to me like an even more significant ongoing existential crisis, and I couldn't really figure out why; I tried to tamp the feeling down and make myself be reasonable.

"Anyway, they had some rough ideas, but nothing definite," Emma said. "Like we thought, they suggested some kind of localized nerve center - like the 'second brain' they used to think Stegosaurus had. Which might explain why my body's so well-coordinated even when I can't see for it." She smiled warmly back at herself, and patted herself on the shoulder. "But it's all conjecture, at this point."

"It'd make sense, though," Gil mused. "Offload the body-specific workload to a secondary system in closer proximity, to minimize propagation delay. It's the same reason we keep our brains in our heads, next to all the sensory organs."

The barista called out for my order, and I went to get it, still feeling flustered for some reason; tea would help. Gil turned to me when I came back; he had a funny expression for a moment, but it quickly lapsed into his usual easygoing smile. "So how about you?" he asked, as I sat down and took a sip, savoring the floral aromas. "Word around the CS department is that we had a robot researcher show up on campus? What'd you talk about?"

I sighed heavily, feeling tension unwind with the soothing fragrance even as I thought back over a pretty involved conversation. "Everything, practically. How I feel about the change, how I see machine lifeforms, whether I identify as one, how society sees them, whether free will even exists..." I took another long sip. "Plus a whole tangent about 'artificial intelligence' in popular culture. She's kind of a movie buff, I think."

He laughed. "Okay, that's...not what I was expecting. Is she one of those capital-M Machines that puts a lot of stock in it as a cultural identity?"

"...Not sure," I said with a shrug. "She definitely feels strongly about it, but it's not like, y'know, your freshman-activist types who're just looking to impress their peers by spouting shibboleths at each other. I think she takes it seriously because she has to live with it in any case."

"Huh." He nodded thoughtfully. "So, uh, how do you feel about all that? Is it weird, thinking of yourself as a robot? Do you even see yourself as one...?"

"I...don't know. I think of 'me' and I visualize the person I see in the mirror-" I stopped, surprised to hear myself say it. It was true, but I'd never stopped to think about it before... "But, um, I haven't forgotten the old me or anything," I added hastily. "And...well, I don't think of 'me' as belonging to a group just because we share some similarities, I don't think...?"

I sighed. "Like, there are ways this affects me and makes me feel differently. I don't panic or get stressed like I used to, because I don't have a bloodstream to get dosed with a bunch of hormones that make me feel that way until they wear off. But that's not something I think of as characteristic of robots, and other things that I do aren't reflected in me. But does that mean I'm not really a robot, or does it mean that I hold stereotypes about robots that aren't based in reality? I don't kn-"

I stopped, noticing Lucky, who was investigating the fake fairy-ring around the tree trunk. She seemed to be trying to communicate, if I read her body language correctly; for someone with no real facial articulation, she could be surprisingly expressive. "Oh, no, Lucky," I said, reaching over and picking her up, "those only look like mushrooms. They're not real."

"Aww," Emma said. "Poor kid. Here, I'll get something for her." She picked herself up and went over to the bar, and I sat back down, stroking the cap of my weird little pet. Poor little thing, I thought; was it cruel to give a creature something that was only an image of the thing it desired? Was that a kind of lie...?

"Huh," Gil said, scratching the back of his head, "I guess that would be confusing. I mean, I think of it like duck typing-uh, you know, walks-like, quacks-like," he said, noting my confusion, "-but that still relies on knowing what the key properties of a 'duck' are. And it's not like there's a formal specification for how robots are supposed to feel or behave."

"Yeah." I stared into the bottom of my cup. "That's really been the most confusing thing across the board; I can sit here and enumerate all the ways my life is different now, but that tells me nothing about how it should be, or how I should feel about it. Does the universe care what I am? If so, am I 'being it' right? If not, why'd it make me this, and not something else?"

He nodded. "I get you. Hell, I wonder about that sometimes, and I'm just an ordinary schlub."

I eyed him curiously. "You...you do?"

"I think everybody does, probably," Gil said. "Or at least, anybody with any self-awareness. But it's not like we're born with a fixed destiny all filled out on a form or anything. We all get dumped into life in a given set of circumstances, in a particular body with a particular brain, and we just have to take the rest as it comes. I don't think there's really a way to 'succeed' or 'fail' at that; you just do what you can to care for yourself and be decent to others, and that's about all any of us can do."

"You really think so?" How could he make it sound so simple? Didn't he feel the weight of people's expectations, or the fear of letting them down?

He shrugged. "I mean, I can't speak to everything you're going through, but for life in general? Yeah, I think so."

"Here we go," Emma said, returning to the booth. She'd brought a tub of hummus; she set herself down, opened it, and put it on the table. I set Lucky on the tabletop; she wandered over, curious, picked up the "hem" of her "skirt," and stepped one stubby little foot over the rim, dipping it in carefully. After a moment, she decided that she liked this and climbed in, digging her feet in and quivering slightly in what I took to be enjoyment.

"You realize I'm going to have to clean her off now, right?" I said dryly, but I couldn't suppress a smile.

Emma laughed. "The joys of pet ownership. You should feel lucky that Lucky's usually so tidy; one girl in my comp class can't stay in the dorms and went through like three rentals 'cause she insists on keeping a dog that goes into a total neurotic frenzy if she's away for more than three hours. She has to drive back to her apartment over lunch just to reset the timer on the bomb." She reached over and shook her head. "Don't think I'll ever understand that..."

Gil shrugged. "I dunno - 'love covers a multitude of transgressions,' and all that. I mean, my step-sister is a straight-up mess, but none of us'd ever abandon her."

"Huh, I guess." She shrugged and looked over at me. "Anyway, you didn't just talk about machine identity the whole time, did you? I can't be the only one getting experimented on."

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, we did some simple experiments. Just basic stuff, really - testing to see if I'm naturally adept at math like this, that kind of thing."

"And?" Gil said, curious. "That'd probably tell them a bit about how your mental processes work, right?"

I felt a bit funny having him take an interest in my workings, but nodded. "I'm not a super-natural at it like a lot of robots," I said. "I'm faster than humans, but not nearly as fast as a computer, and the time it takes is roughly proportional to the number of digits. But I don't lose my place in long operations as easily as I used to, and I can handle complex equations in my head without too much trouble."

I drained the last of my tea. "She thinks that, however I work, it's highly symbolic - like, I'm doing arithmetic in my head the way humans do, by 'visualizing' the digits and applying the rules for addition or long division or whatever from memory; I'm just better at it now."

He nodded thoughtfully. "They say humans have a maximum 'stack depth' of three to seven items; you probably have a higher limit. And symbolic thinking probably maps well to human-like intelligence - learning to associate sensory cues with mental concepts, and modeling an understanding of the world based on how those conceptual 'objects' are seen to interact. Interesting."

"Well, to steal Emma's line, it's all conjecture at this point," I said. "And she's really curious about how the sensory inputs work in the first place. But I don't know how long it'll take them to figure that out even with the scans."

Emma was about to say something, but glanced over my shoulder and grinned. "Oh hey, Gramps!"

I turned to see the old man from before; he smiled and waved at us, then came over and peered down at Lucky, who was still standing in the tub, doing whatever it was she did to absorb nutrients. "Well there's somethin' you don't see every day," he said, surprised.

"She, uh, used to be a lab rat," I explained. Lucky glanced up curiously at him and reached her little arms up, giving him as much of a smile as someone with no mouth could. He chuckled, reached down, and rubbed her cap. "Quite the little charmer she is now."

"I, uh, don't think we've met," Gil said, getting up and extending a hand. He and the old fellow shook and said hello; then we talked for a bit, with Emma and I giving him a recap of our friend's story. Gil seemed very intrigued by it, glanced over at the bar, and was about to ask him a question when Emma's phone beeped, and she pulled it out to take a look.

"Oh, geez," she said. "Four-thirty already? C'mon, Sue, the sale's only on for another half-hour...!"

"Well, don't let me keep you," the old man chuckled. "I'm just here to bug the grandkid, that's all. Nice seeing you girls again."

"Sale...?" I hadn't realized there was a sale, but of course there was; anyway, I needed to head over to the pet shop myself. I got up and said goodbye to the old fellow, smiled, and turned to Gil. "Um, I guess we'll see you back at campus?"

He smiled back. "Yeah, see you there. I might bum around here for a bit; the electronics store's usually open late." He settled back into the booth and motioned for our elderly friend to have a seat; I wondered what they were going to talk about, but Emma was already leaving, and I needed her to wind me before we split up. Grabbing Lucky, tub and all, I dashed after her.