1. Fill tear ducts with provided saline solution. Do not mix or combine with non-approved third-party solutions.
2. Open the mouth of your robot when ready to activate. Press the purple button under the tongue unit. Speak your name into its mouth the way you want it said every day for the next three years.

There wasn’t a lot of me left after the war.

I was in a skipship on my way to being deployed when the Drinzit attacked, and I got sucked into a hole in the ship’s wall before the patch system kicked in. My comrades put what was left of me in cryo, and we retreated to Known Space.

Alvin fidgeted in the austere metal elevator, flanked by two security guards in sunglasses. He felt a little out of place, so he produced his own pair of sunglasses and put them on.

“Take those off,” barked one of the guards. Alvin put them away again.

As her head hit the pillow, Yadira felt exhausted and relieved. Exhausted, because she’d worked on a very large collage almost the whole day straight. Her shoulder blades ached from hunching over her worktable, and, despite scrubbing, she still had ink under her nails. Relieved, because she felt like she’d left it all out on the field, rather than still vibrating with artistic energy.

We put my body double together in June Lee’s basement. Her mom was one of those chill Asian moms who liked having an artsy-fartsy daughter she could brag about at Bible study. She was already pushing the whole portfolio-for-college-apps deal, so she didn’t mind staying out of the basement to avoid contaminating our radiant artist auras humming at the frequency of the Big Bang.

Tilda stands at a crossroads just outside of town. It’s a place where worlds meet, and the perfect place to create a new person. The crescent moon glimmers through the oaks bent thick along the roadside. The cold-burning stars in the sky hold a sort of magic if you know how to swim in their light. Tilda spits in the dirt, turns a tight circle, and recites the incantation she learned as a child.