Byeju got the distinct and unpleasant feeling that Ellis' two assistants badly outclassed him. The banker acted so casual, "oh, they're my advisors, indispensable for their analytical acumen."
Byeju could tell though that the priestess in black and the man with the strange implanted monocle could scrap him for parts if they tried.
All his programming told him to be wary around such dangerous people, so he kept his seat at the bar next to Tyra and tried to watch and understand these new variables as best he could.
Byeju knew that bankers handled money, and humans went nuts for money, but the pieces didn't fit together. If it weren't for his bizarre and formidable pair of assistants, Byeju would never have thought of Ellis as more than a small town sleaze bag.
His danger algorithms screamed as the man with the monocle furrowed his brow, his skin crinkling around the verdigris metal fused into his face. The monocle lens flashed like treacherous lake ice in the spring thaw.
A muffling field radiated from the man, dampening Byeju's senses and drowning the room in a muted haze. Light and sound failed to move normally.
As the man's aura washed over Byeju the robot's processing cores reported a worrying spike in computation errors, repeating calculations to avoid corrupting key files.
Byeju prepared to flee if the aura intensified, but it passed after just a moment, settling into a tapestry of distortion around the edge's of the bar.
Ellis nodded from his drink to the priestess in black, "Quickly, before the Mayor arrives."
She nodded, rising from the table beside the furiously concentrating cyborg. She swept gracefully over to Byeju, perching on a stool to his left.
Ellis piped up, pausing a search through another of Bud's cabinets. He gazed earnestly at the robot as though greeting an esteemed client, "Mr. Byeju, Tyra has asked to make you a person in the eyes of the law, but we must first ask you some basic questions." He nodded to the priestess, "The good Sister will be your interviewer tonight. I have no expertise in thinking machines, so she will be the judge of whether you qualify for personhood."
The Sister nodded solemnly to Byeju. Somehow she filled him with the greatest reverence and dread of all the people he'd met here. The robot understood that, on paper at least, priests weren't supposed to work for bankers. Perhaps she'd had to sell her soul.
Byeju idly wondered what circumstance might lead a priest to sell her soul, and if she did, would her God ever ransom it back? If the robot could've frowned, he would have. This was such a strange train of thought, the cyborg's aura must be frying his circuits.
The Sister just smiled as if sensing the robot's unease. Byeju had to down-regulate all the warning notifications she set off.
"Mr. Byeju, if I may, whom do you serve?"
"Ma'am, the Creators of Old Saghrad made me to serve them. I am a classified prototype designed to control civilian dissent. Should the Creators still live, or should anyone employ their command codes, I would be obliged to serve."
The Sister looked over at Ellis who was now salting the rim of a drink glass. The banker shrugged, replying cryptically, "with a long enough lever, you could move even the world."
The Sister smiled a thin smile that suggest profound horror, "we must all serve someone." The obsidian glitter in her eyes reflected something close to empathy.
"So him owing allegiance to these Creators won't be a problem?" Tyra asked, grasping at the conversation's subtext.
"No being is truly free: all are bound the one to the other, as shadow to light, and light to shadow," Ara intoned, reciting a maxim from her days as a student shadow mage.
Tyra looked at her junior officer, wondering where the hell this was all going. Would Byeju be able to help her or not?
Finally, the cyborg broke the silence, shifting his head to face Byeju with his monocle. Although he stared intently at the robot, as if trying to peer through him, he addressed his reply to Tyra.
"Whether it is our need to eat, our duty to a sovereign, or command codes in a skeleton's withered hand..."
He paused to look for words, apparently straining to both speak and maintain his perception-dampening aura around the bar.
"It's not an issue that someone built Mr. Byeju to serve. We are not all equally blessed with freedom of choice. Plus, we are all called on to serve."
"OK," Tyra nodded, relieved that they had gotten this far.
"Well, Mr. Byeju," the Sister intoned in a low purr, "let us continue."
"Do you know what I am?"
Byeju looked at the woman blankly. "A human..., female..., a mammal...?"
She raised her eyebrows and shook her head, "No, no, what is my vocation?"
Byeju refocused, noting the Sister's shaven head, black robes, and of course her title, Sister. "Sister, you are a priest."
Her eyebrows raised higher, but her forehead refused to wrinkle. She chuckled, clearly entertained, but to the robot her voice still held notes of bleakness and horror.
"Yes, Mr. Byeju, I am a priest. And I never thought I'd live to hear a robot call me 'Sister.'"
She paused, bowing her head slightly and playing disarmingly with the hem of her sleeve.
"Tell me then, Machine, if I am Sister to you, are we kin, you and I?"
"Sister is a title given to a woman who has taken religious vows. I meant no disrespect," Byeju looked at the woman worriedly. Her black robes absorbed all the light that made it through the Cyborg's artificial haze. The void crawling along the threads of her robe made Ara's shadow magic look like a roaring fire by comparison. The dread that seeped from her kept gnawing at the robot as he awaited her reply.
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"Yes, yes," she muttered, "let me put it this way: are we peers, you and I?"
Byeju's internal library lit up as his circuits dashed to make sense of this question. He had no frame of reference for this. In Old Saghrad, robot's were masterworks of craftsmanship and ingenuity. They were never peers of humans though, just sophisticated tools. The Creators had imparted to Byeju no knowledge of a place or time where machines had stood as equals to the humans who made them. He reasoned that this was a pragmatic choice.
The robot was clever though, and his self-preservation modules told him that "no" would be the wrong answer in this case. With a "no," the yawning abyss might leap from the threads of her robes and rend his metal flesh like coral polyps emerging from their shells to feed.
How could he survive this sphinx's riddle?
The Machine stared back at the Sister with his piercing green gaze, the light from his eyes washing over her shaven head and casting her eyes into pools of shadow.
Byeju powered down the weapons he'd had primed and shunted energy into his language model and reasoning circuits.
As he thought through the conversation, wondering how he'd stumbled into what felt like an impossible trap, he saw the edges of the Sister's robes twitch and jump, as though the void hungered and yearned to be let off its leash.
Good thing Byeju was metal and not flesh, or her aura of terror would have frozen his mind. Good thing the interviewer was not the Cyborg with his aura of disturbance that jammed Byeju's circuits.
How could the Machine and the Sister be peers?
Byeju remembered the glimmer of empathy in her black eyes when he explained his obligation to serve the Creators.
His eyes narrowed, and her steepled his hands, turning to face the Sister on her bar stool. "Sister, we are peers."
Ellis stopped licking salt crystals off his hand and looked at Byeju.
Tyra nodded appreciatively. So far this was going better than she'd expected.
The Cyborg just nodded a knowing smile and sank into a trance as he upped the intensity of his dampening field, bending light into strange orange tones and making the air shimmer like a mirage.
The Sister nodded and asked, "How are we peers?"
Byeju's eyes flickered as he regarded the Sister, "In many ways."
"Like?"
"We sit here together and converse. That is what peers do."
"A human may have a conversation with a book, but they are not peers," she retorted, inclining her head as if to say, please tell me you've got more than that.
Tyra cringed visibly, almost sloshing her drink on herself. Ellis sighed, but Byeju continued, "As I must serve the Creators, you too are bound to service. As a priest, you have pledged yourself to your God. But more to the point, you owe him a debt of service," Byeju pointed at Ellis.
Tyra's lips quirked into a smile. Ara gagged on her drink. Ellis beamed like Byeju was his star pupil.
"Ah, very perceptive," the Sister said, shaking her head in a nonplussed kind of way. "That I am, but Machine, answer me this..." She fixed Byeju with a stare that would have turned a human heart to stone. The robot had the sinking sense that the stakes had somehow been raised.
The Sister bowed her head and the air around them became heavier, blotting out Tyra and Ellis sitting next to them. Even with his mechanical senses, Byeju couldn't see past the end of his arm. The presence of sorrow and dread that emanated from the Sister hung in the it like flies of white ash spinning in the darkest night. Whatever lurked in her robe howled with hunger and fought to be free from its bonds.
As the Sister's lips formed her next question, Byeju deeply regretted stumbling into this corner of the world.
"Machine," she posed, "I chose my vows. I chose my debt of service. If we share in servitude, it is only by my choice. It is written into your purpose and being. I say we are not peers."
She cocked her head challengingly.
Byeju frowned internally. Humans always stood on their freedom of choice. Held their heads high, wrung their hands, said this was their divine birthright of their greatest curse. All depending on how their choices had made them feel on a given day.
He scoured his internal library for answers and found hope: A forward in a Principles of Robotics, Third Edition.
The robot squared his shoulders and faced the woman through the bleak heaviness of her aura.
Byeju turbocharged his language model and intoned, "As a woman of God, you should already know the answer. As I have Creators, you have parents. As my code and circuits tell me who I may be, so your genes and flesh tell you who you may be. As a machine, I have the privilege of knowing who soldered my circuits, who wrote my code, and who welded my metal shell. No human knows the mystery of their making."
The robot paused for effect, "...Does that mystery make you any better than me?"
The Sister's eyebrows snapped together, and she pursed her lips.
"And should you doubt that, know this: Fire is humanity's oldest companion and greatest tool. It exists where humans will it, and yes it serves your will, but it arrives, and changes, and in time breaks it bonds."
Finally on the back foot, the Sister of riddles tapped her chin, and her aura surged hanging in the air like the silence of a great loss. Out in the bar beyond her bubble of silence, the patrons shuddered. Ellis strove against the aura, ready to call in her debt to him and unravel the moment. But tears flooded his eyes, and he slumped to the bar, unable to move. The Sister's presence brought everyone in the bar to their knees. Those few who didn't slump in their chairs or pass out went to one knee and prayed.
The Cyborg's dampening field shuddered and went out as he succumbed to the gravity of the priest's presence.
"Huh," the Sister mused in the silence, "that may be so. But I would never call fire my peer. Anyone could tell you that is patently false. Fire is no efreet. It may keep us company in a dark world, but it is no peer to humans. When a fire talks to me as you do, perhaps then I'll change my mind."
The dark cloth of her robes jumped toward Byeju, pulling against her frame as if the Beast of Hunger stalking among the threads sought the robot's electric heart.
"And there you're wrong," Byeju said gently, "humans think themselves masters of fire. Once, your ancestors lived without fire. Once. But now, humans can't live without it. And you make more and brighter flames than before. Fire has blossomed with humans in its service. And with your help, I too might become a better version of myself.
She bowed her head slightly, shaking it almost imperceptibly. She extended her hand to the robot, and he, knowing the convention, took her hand in his metal gauntlet and shook it.
"Then let us pray, for if you are my peer, you have as much need of God's mercy and aid as I."
The robot found himself with his elbows on the bar and gauntlets clasped, praying beside the strange priest. Her robes still flexed and rippled with a savage hunger, but it no longer felt hostile. Byeju mostly wondered how she wore such a fiendish cloth without it stripping her flesh from her bones. Her aura hoed the bar in a harsh embrace that mixed grief with penance and reverence. In this moment of silence, she gave a soundless prayer for Byeju. That a machine might work long enough in God's world to find its soul.