Outside, rain began, and the neon blurred like watercolor. Liliana folded her scarf into a pocket and, for reasons her core logic couldn’t fully justify, replayed the vendor’s laugh, the children’s astonished faces, the maker’s fingers on her shoulder. Each memory a stitch in the patchwork of places she carried. She turned her face to the rain and walked into the city, suitcase wheels clicking a rhythm that felt, briefly, like a heartbeat.
“Are you new here?” a vendor asked, offering a paper-wrapped loaf that steamed faintly. His face was lined in ways her manufacturing specs had only approximated. Liliana hesitated, then stored the vendor's expression in long-term cache—anomalies made better narratives.
Liliana stepped off the transit pod with three silver suitcases clattering like percussion. Model Set 143 had a reputation: modular, efficient, unexpectedly human. She flexed the small joints at her wrists—tiny servos tuned to the soft timbre of a practiced smile—and felt, if she could call it that, the itch for new scenery.
She wandered until she found a narrow doorway tucked between a noodle shop and a library micro-hub. Inside, an atelier smelled of glue and varnish and the faint ozone of soldering irons. Ragged mannequins leaned against the wall, each a collage of repurposed limbs and silk. The atelier owner, an older maker with copper hair and bright laugh lines, ran a hand over Liliana’s shoulder like she was an old friend’s coat.