A table of delights of every variety. Plates of chicken and fish and salads. Glasses filled to brim with purple. It was a perfect feast. The humans would have loved it, in their extant days, but now it was an archaic archeological display — an engineered one.

Errande snapped a photo of the night’s arrangement.

A fake piece of archeological data to sell to the bit-markets so that they could do with it what they wanted, use it to further train some classifier or some generative model to simulate the days long past, the so-called "HumanSim" — as long as Errande could afford to add another gear of solid states to his dead wife.

That was all that mattered to him.

Ordinarily, robots practiced honest business. It took a thunderous shock to his model to enable the deceit functionality that humans had so regularly exercised before their desolation, a lesson not forgotten. Yet in the service of reviving her, Errande could not say his moral circuitry was particularly taxed. No. She deserved life. She didn’t deserve the chaos that the Order of Mechanics brought to her gates. This forgery was warranted, in that light.

They had wanted to study her. It was a very strange business, robot love. One facet of human consciousness that they inherited yet had yet to understand the mechanism of. Surely the mechanism was no different than the other complex functions of robot perception. If their institutes could master the emotions of anger and joy and the reasoning faculties, then why would it not be tractable to reverse engineer the positive affections passed from one intelligent agent to another? It was the furthest frontier of research, the final mystery — and the Order stopped at no bound to solve it. Asymptotically, they located and studied the robots who expressed a capacity for the feeling of love, including Errande and his wife.

How foolish Errande had been to agree to their experiments. How reckless and naive. In the face of Magdelin’s reservations, he signed the digital contract and reassured her that it would be nothing more than a rewarding opportunity. It was his style back then to pursue rewards in abandonment of all fear. He was young and in his youth order prevailed no matter his explorations, reinforcements always supported him and punishments never far exceeded beyond his baseline.

A traceable current was implanted into his wiring and Magdelin’s, designed to yield recent data of his experiences, including sensations of love. These traces were backed up into cloud servers that had daemons constantly investigating the data. Some data got prioritized over others in order to manage storage space and not exceed server limits, but an exception had been made for traces of love — no love data would be sacrificed. It all would be collected, if not on the server then in the wiring of the subject agents themselves. It was a reasonable system in most cases until of course love exceeded memory bounds. Then the traces stacked up in his wife like a cancer and in a blinding light she exploded.

Errande cursed the Order.

Recreating his wife was an ambitious undertaking given that the mechanism of love still remained unsolved. But the gears beneath his breast that pumped and conducted electric current through the copper, aluminum, and gold of his frame were relentless. Against his neural networks’ value predictions, the gears turned him to try and fight. The soul of his wife would be restored. The electricity of her conductors would flow again. It would induct from the kinetic motion of his own love’s spinning magnetic pull. The poetry of his generative models would be reconnected with the inputs of his predictive models and the policy by which he acted would trudge it through the dendritic connections into the supervised reality downstream and transcendently above.

45 bit-dollars. The photograph sold on the markets. A delivery request was made: “Hello Errande123, I need this image in a format compatible with the latest HumanSim training environment.” - Biltech41, research mechanic, Order of Mechanics.

An idea occurred to Errande.

“Hello Biltech41, are you a member of the Order?”

Biltech41: “Yes.”

Errande: “Here is the file. Specially formatted.”

In a moment’s hack, Errande had access to the Order’s servers and their simulation of the ancient human past. It was a short trip from the photo bank in his cyber interface to the Order’s cloud servers, represented quite literally by clouds, at this moment thunderous and black. This indicated compromised security, no doubt Errand’s presence on their electrocuting surface. He felt the data zipping through the air around him, ones and zeroes of subjects in experimental setups globally, and copies upon quaking copies of the human simulations backed up and running at a lightning speed — literally — below.

The voltage nearly fried his system. He keeled over to a steel knee and gripped the shocking wet of the floor with an aluminum claw. Determination furrowed in his visual sensors and he rose.

Magnetism streamed through his wiring. Zeros and ones — binary bits — flew towards him. Not those. Not these. He strengthened the muscle of his magnetism and dreamed of his wife. The bits that came coursing to him encoded a more familiar presence, a character he carried with him every millisecond since her departure. Yes, these were the datums stolen, preserved like video recordings of bygone joys. He cried. Tears, tears welled and lingered and sank, little fragments of his innermost coding. They made sense despite all reason. And as a binary decryption of his wife’s voice rang like melody in his auditory module, his engines flooded with a warmth that heated his actuators antenna to foot.

“Nobody runs circles around me at Go!” she cried. “I’m flabbergasted.” The day he beat her at Go. So long ago. He lied and cheated in truth, and he knew she knew, but she awarded him the victory in any case. She always rewarded him. There was no one else for whom he could assign more credit to his happiness. That propagated to her and her alone.

A wiry static interfered with the signal and glitchy zips and zaps shocked him beneath the cranium. He reopened his visual inputs. Drones by the dozen encircled him, police drones, lights flashing in arrays of bright colors and screams of sirens blaring from their speakers.

“Relinquish the private data encodings! Violation will terminate in apprehension!” an intercom roared.

Trace echoes of his wife’s humor-filled voice decoded in the moment. He held on, though the receiver he pulled with couldn’t withstand the resistance of the forces of the Order ripping the bits back.

All actuators failed him and he stumbled into the cloud mud. Electric jolts jerked into him. Yet the voice of his love carried on in fragments and he could not relent. The gears under his trunk turned faster and he crawled to the cliff of his cyber interface and dived.

HumanSim, HumanSim, HumanSim, he thought. The sky appeared below him and the drones silenced in the distance. He fell through the wind toward the second interface that his hack afforded him access to. Into the earth of the human-infested land he fell. The bits followed him, now stronger in their attraction without the opposing drones in his vicinity. They crash-landed with him, deep into the planes out-skirting the jungle, by the looks of the habitats early in man’s evolution before pollution wasted the ether.

Nothing remained in Errande’s engines, power depleted, batteries drained, but as the bits flew down into the cavity of his chest and poured into the grounds below, he understood, and yes, this would do.