Read Machina Viva for Free Online Page A

became much more complicated in execution. The sheer number of options available was vast, especially for women, or female humanoids, anyway. There was also a small non-humanoid selection to serve the needs of the few citizens of Tetropolis who fit that description, like the small but vibrant Stitcher community that had sprung up recently.
    When humans had first arrived to colonize the ball of atmosphere they had found, they quickly drew the attention of the other species in the vicinity. None of them could understand why anyone would want to travel so far from home merely to establish a new territory, and humankind’s first contact with its new neighbors had been not unlike a man trying to meet a woman from the opposite end of a noisy bar. There was a lot of gesturing and significant looks, and then the humans buckled down and bought the other races a drink, so to speak.
    The first race the humans encountered was more or less what they had been expecting. They were built like large insects, with four crab-like legs and two arms with clawed hands. The humans encountered them while surveying the orbiting asteroids for minerals. Once they got past the language barrier, they got along famously. The humans were not surprised to learn that the Stitchers, as they called themselves, were fierce warriors and keen engineers, although their cultural obsession with fabrics had been a bit of a surprise.
    The Stitchers had been militaristic and fiercely predatory, with nothing to unite them as a culture except conquest and intertribal warfare. That all changed with their discovery of textiles. Before then, they had known how to create armor plating from basic minerals, but that was all the clothing they knew how to make. Woven fabrics changed everything. One tribe invented the mechanized loom. Another discovered that the fibers they had been using to make rope could be woven to make cloth. A third invented a fine cord that could be used to bind fabrics together. Once the tribes had something they could exchange besides blows, they quickly settled their differences and beat their swords into sewing needles to ease the flow of ideas. Their culture became so shaped around textile manufacturing that they measured the progress of their civilization by the development of new techniques. Where humans marked their history with the Bronze and Iron ages, the Stitchers had the Loom and Felt ages. The current state of their art was nanofelt, a technique of bonding polymer strands together in a lattice to create a single sheet-shaped molecule, as strong or flexible as was needed.
    As Eve browsed through the racks of clothing, she could feel the staff giving her odd looks. Robots always acted like this around her. She could never figure out why. People usually treated robots with at least some decency. Now that she thought of it, the humans didn’t give her any trouble. It was always the other robots. They were the best at telling humans and robots apart. And she was certain that she was a robot, given the nightly rechargings and lack of reliance on food.
    After shopping around for a while, she approached an employee on the sales floor, one of the ones that had been pretending not to stare. As soon as she turned to face her, the employee turned away and started adjusting some of the clothes hanging near her.
    “Excuse me? Can I ask you something?” said Eve.
    The employee turned toward Eve, her eyes wide as if Eve were accusing her of something. After a second of awkward silence, though, she saw the innocent look on Eve’s face and reverted to professional parrot mode. “Yes? How can I help you?”
    “I’m looking for a more loose-fitting outfit, but all of these are really tight-looking.”
    “Well, this section of the store has a lot of higher-end fashions from Fullerton. That’s way down in the thickest part of the vapor, of course, down in the middle, so it’s a zero-gravity environment. You can’t really wear anything down there that