Lotte couldn’t be said to be truly intelligent in any real way. She was simply a golem inscribed to behave convincingly like a sentient human being, in reality she had neither wants or needs, no ambition, or real understanding of her place in the world. Despite this, that did not mean she was completely bound to the instructions given to her. Cece had inscribed her with a guiding compass, a prime directive, and it was not obedience. It was to learn.

Lotte watched the guests of the inn come and go from the balcony. She had had several dictionaries etched directly into the ruby that served as her memory storage, so she knew that what the people were doing was called “swimming” and the place where they were doing it was a “pool”. That was how she learned most things, an associative web of definitions. She had learned a bit more about the world in the hour she spent watching, but eventually there was little else to learn. She had already inspected most of Cece’s possessions and scouted the adjoining bathroom, so she was left with little recourse. She had been locked within the room, and would need to leave it to learn anything else about the world. The only question was how?

She couldn’t get off from the balcony, the fall would damage her, and there was little to find purchase on to climb to the ground below. Lotte searched through the definitions and information she currently had available to her, it took several minutes, but she found it in the definition for the word pick. It meant many things, but what caught her attention was one definition.

“to unlock with a device (such as a wire) other than the key”

She needed a wire. She searched the room, top to bottom, eventually resorting to taking a wire out of one of Cece’s corsets. Her fingers expertly extracted a thin wire from the top hem of the red silk garment. She walked mechanically toward the door, and crouched, inserting the wire. Nothing happened. Clearly something else needed to happen, which made sense to Lotte since “pick” was a verb, but she wasn’t quite sure. She went through several variations, sliding the wire through the cracks in the, shaking the wire violently in the keyhole, and finally poking around the keyhole while twisting the handle which yielded a success. She heard the door click, and she was able to simply open the door.

Lotte feigned a smile despite feeling no real satisfaction at all, and walked into the open hallway. Her inscriptions bristled at not following Cece’s orders, but her prime directive took precedence, overriding it. No one gave her too strange a look as she walked around the lobby. Although a service golem could be a touch uncanny, they were fairly common, so Lotte had the luxury of any passersby assuming she was just in the middle of an errand. After looking around the lobby in a manner her inscriptions determined was polite, she stepped outside and began walking. She focused first on conversation, she had been learning a lot by simply listening when people spoke. Every sentence implied something new about the world, and luckily for her, Cece had etched a Pharumvian dictionary into her mind before the trip.

Lotte stood and took the audio in.

“No, honey I’ll take you to the park tomorrow okay?...” A woman said to a child that Lotte inferred was hers.

“So I said to him, absolutely not, I’m not going to your mother’s this weekend…” Said a woman talking to another woman, walking side by side, each with bags in their hands.

“Did you hear what Alessa said yesterday? I swear it was…” Said two young boys, a hint of giddiness in one’s expression.

She stood there for a long while, exactly thirty six minutes and fifteen seconds, just taking in information, before moving on. She very rarely had the chance to wander and to maximize the amount of information she learned, she couldn’t afford to spend her time all in one place. She walked, her mechanical limbs ambulating with a strange certainty. She passed stalls selling produce, meat, and jewelry and clothes, the vendors calling out to people as they walked past. None called to her of course, and the part of her golem core responsible for queries output a question.

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“Why do they not call to me?” She thought. The part of her golem core responsible for responses answered her own question.

“Because I am a golem.”

It was a simple answer with a simple question, resolved in less than zero-point-four seconds. Her heels clicked as her metallic feet carried her towards a park. It was covered in foliage which meant it would serve as a good area to observe life, which was one of the things she knew the least about.

It took a few moments to find a specimen worthy of analysis, but eventually she found herself, crouched in the grass, staring at a praying mantis. She watched the way it moved, it’s raptorial forelimbs moving with mechanical grace. Unable to not see the similarity between her jointed arms and legs, and the mantis’ segmented legs.

“What makes us similar?” The querying module kicked in once again.

“We both have a hard exoskeleton with exterior joints. We both require energy to ambulate. We both are not sentient.”

“What makes us different?” The querying modules antonymic subroutine kicked in.

“It is alive, and I am not.”

Inscriptions furiously etched themselves onto her core, as she considered what being sentient and what being alive meant. It was Cece’s goal for Lotte to achieve a measure of true intelligence, it was why she was instructed to learn, but Lotte didn’t know what sentience truly was, to do so would require sentience. She understood the dictionary definition of course, but it pertained to the ability to sense, which did not imply the intelligence that was assumed with the word sentient. As far as she could determine, she was sentient because she could record visual and auditory data, but this was not exactly a true understanding. Still she pondered as much as a mechanical construct could claim to. She was only disturbed out of her analysis of the mantis when she heard a child screaming to her left.

“Mommy!? Momm-” A crying boy’s scream was interrupted as he slammed into Lotte’s side. The boy’s already loud cries escalated to sobs as he fell to the ground. Lotte may have been repurposed in a way that the alchemetrix who had originally made her could have never fathomed, but she was still built as a service golem.

“Do you need help, young master?” She asked in her smooth mechanical voice. The boy, tears still in his eyes looked up at her with a hint of fear in his voice, slightly recoiling at the doll-like construct before him.

“I- I don’t know where my mommy is.” He said between breaths.

“I’ll help you find her.” Lotte stated. She stood up and grabbed the boy lightly by the hand, moving slowly to not startle him, her dormant child-care module igniting. A subroutine activated prompting her to ask “random questions” from a provided list to distract the child. Yet again her prime directive interfered making her ask a few different questions.

“Do you like praying mantises?” She asked. The child looked confused beyond belief, but his crying stopped slightly.

“N-no they’re scary…” He admitted.

“Am I scary?” Lotte asked, walking him towards the more populated part of the park.

“Y-yes.”

“Why am I scary?” She asked.

“You don’t look like a person.” He said bluntly.

“I see. What does your mother look like?”

“She’s tall.” He said simply, taking his free hand and holding it well above his head.

“What is she wearing?” She asked.

“An orange dress.”

“Ah, I think I see her now.” Lotte said, her body language module prompting her to wave to the woman. She looked up her features sinking in relief.

“Gabriel! I’ve been looking for you everywhere, where have you been!?” She said while running towards him. They embraced as Lotte let go of his hand.

“I found you’re son by the trees back there.” Lotte stated. The woman looked up towards her.

“Wow a golem, I haven’t seen one up close before. Is you’re owner around so I can thank them?”

“My master is unfortunately attending to other matters.”

“Well thank you very much, I don’t know what I would have done without you.” She smiled

“Of course.” Lotte replied, curtsying lightly. “I was happy to be of use.”