. . .

That kind of thing is mind-blowing enough. Amazing, thought Eldri at the time, and every time he’s thought back to that conversation since, because the words ‘rock-paper-scissors immoral’ had left his robot’s metal jaws.

But there is something more amazing, more impossible, more mind-blowing yet, which is to say: Navvy Jim can love.

Eldri sees it for the first time in the robot’s eyes when Jim is playing rock-paper-scissors with Emily at the dinner table. It is furtive. It is surreptitious. There is a strict no-gaming rule at the dinner table. It is not until she accidentally bumps her hand on the table from beneath it that he realizes that the two of them are playing at all — he turns his head, he sees the robot standing at the entry: caught brass-handed throwing the most suspicious rock-paper-scissors sign of them all.

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