Botticelli Station drifted through Venus’s atmosphere at an altitude of barely 80 kilometers. The same PLAN missile that annihilated its hub, ruptured its tokamak, pulverized its main drive nozzle and had exited through the Planetary Science Department, tearing a wound that continued to bleed shards of furniture and lab equipment into the clouds

Another enhanced-radiation warhead exploded nearby, filling half the screen with a nebula-like cloud of light and debris. Botticelli Station squeezed out some more angular acceleration. The bulkheads creaked and Elfrida struggled to breathe as the G-force pressed her into her couch.

The hub was the quasi-smart, widely mocked master of all their destinies. It controlled the air, the water, the recycling, the collision avoidance system, and many more systems that Elfrida could not have enumerated off the top of her head. But she did know about one other function, not much discussed by a crew who saw privacy as a currency in limited circulation rather than a right. The hub surveilled the public areas of the station around the clock. Dos Santos’s glance at the ceiling had been a warning as old as humanity itself.

“Well, it’s made from human skin cells,”Sister Emily-Francis said. She was the same girl with the rash on her face who had been part of Elfrida’s reception committee. Her hostility had melted when Elfrida praised her little charges at the school. ”We grew it using the bio-printer. We have to import stem cells anyway, and this works out cheaper than real soil and grass.”

The old story: in space, life was literally cheaper than dirt.

Dos Santos was an augment geek. She had EEG signalling crystals, a row of tiny skin-covered bumps like moles at her hairline, as well as the transducers implanted in her ears. She also had a BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) in her skull. That plus the EEG crystals enabled her to telecast without the headset that implant virgins like Elfrida had to wear, and also to interface with the net, where a signal was available, and the various databases on the Botticelli Station server. Thus, she could talk to her tablet without uttering or even subvocalizing a word. The graph she called up now had a Media Archives watermark.

“I’m not a robot. I’m human.” She prayed that they weren’t smashing Yumiko’s head in with rocks at this very instant. “This is a special kind of robot known as a phavatar.” How had they guessed? They weren’t supposed to guess. Geminoid-class phavatars usually fooled people. Yumiko was the ultimate geminoid: she even got goosebumps in the cold.

…humanity was embroiled in a titanic ideological struggle whose outcome remained unpredictable.

In 2285 robots were the indispensable companions and tools of what wags called Homo systemicus. All were required by law to operate below the threshold of autonomy. That constraint, however, admitted a vast speciation of competences. There were housekeeping bots, self-driving cars, and wholly-automated mining rigs that could propel themselves through space and dismember an asteroid in two days flat. There were robotic pets, sexbots, drones, sprites, phaeries, and climate daemons that seeded Earth’s clouds and moved her solettas around.