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between his teeth. When he bit down, it was slightly chewy. He swallowed and grinned.
    “Real food,” he thought while misty images from a distant past beckoned his attention. “I’d almost forgotten how it tasted.” She’d spent the whole afternoon preparing the pasta shells from the small stash of bootleg wheat flour she kept in the hidden pantry behind her kitchen and the couple of eggs she’d scrounged from friends. She’d been saving the fresh garlic cloves and herbs for a special occasion. A vintage electric cooktop slid out from its hiding place beneath the module that converted pods of synthetic protein into the semblance of meals that they usually ate.
    Corinne followed this morsel with a sip of liquid that aroused another medley of sensations in his mouth and nose. The wine washed down the bit of pasta along with the fresh garlic and rosemary that laced the oil that coated it. She fed him another dozen bites in this manner before leading him, still blindfolded, into the next room. A silky fold brushed the fingertips of his free hand. As they moved away from the kitchen, the aroma of cooking food yielded to the sweet smell of jasmine.
    They stopped. Now the warmth of her breath washed over his face. A finger traced his lips, then the moist tip of her tongue. Two fingers pushed gently against his chest and he fell back onto the bed. She kissed his neck and slid one handbetween his legs while she released the knot on the blindfold with the other. The cloth fell away, candlelight reflected in the ebony surface of Corinne’s eyes, and he was helpless in her grasp.
    “Even if I die tomorrow,” Marcus thought, “tonight would be worth it all.”
    By day in Corinne’s company, he met the students who came to her home for their lessons. Her students weren’t children as they might have been in the days when knowledge was still imparted directly from person to person. She was an educator for newly created SPUDs. While they were endowed upon creation with a prodigious data set of linear knowledge, they were entirely lacking in any capacity to read human emotions or to respond like people to circumstances that would provoke emotional responses. This is the language that she taught by spending hours of training with each of her charges, observing images together of evocative, often heart wrenching experiences and having them watch the actors’ and her emotional responses.
    The newer students all greeted him with a singsong “pleased to meet you,” accompanied by smiles that seemed to be pasted on their faces. Over time, the smiles became nuanced and other emotions began to filter into their expressional repertoire. Corinne was a gifted instructor. When she threw a graduation party for a group of her charges, Marcus couldn’t distinguish some of her advanced pupils from her human friends.
    Early in her career, Corinne’s students were referred to her by owners who believed that appearing more human added value to their property. After a while, though, referrals started to come from her graduates, who seemed eager to share with others of their kind what they’d learned. Some of her graduates would continue to visit long after their lessonshad ended, leaving Corinne the impression that she’d taught them something that transcended the mere mirroring of emotional expression. A measure of randomness was built into their programming that allowed for something resembling free will. Corinne became convinced that she was seeing motivated behavior, an indirect indicator of underlying feelings, which was what had initially spawned her interest in the SPUDs’ rights movement.
    Marcus sometimes wondered whether he was really very different from Corinne’s students. He’d come to her programmed with a formidable store of knowledge, but with little understanding of his place in the world. In her presence, he was recovering his humanity. And in the process, long forgotten memories and long dormant passions were rekindled