Robot Women on Planet Italy
Devon Kinoglossia reached into her chest, loosened two housing bolts, and then detached a cylinder that glowed with a fading yellow light. She slid it into the metal chamber on her bedroom wall, and retrieved a fresh cylinder, this one glowing bright green. Some people liked this process, but for Devon, switching out her internal battery was weird, clinical, and emotionally exhausting. No one wanted to hear that. If her nonnas even heard her talking about “emotions”, she’d get a scolding. They still believed that emotions weren’t real, that our “feelings” were just datasets compiled by a master computer into recognizable patterns passed down to us for thousands of years. Devon had long ago decided that she felt what she felt.
She’d heard of processor-hacking, where tinkerfreaks and switchwitches could actually rewrite their internal memory or coreframe and direct their thought patterns however they wanted. The whole thing gave her the creeps. It was disgusting to root around inside your hardsystem like that, she thought. At least material mods and appearance adjustments were just cosmetic changes. She couldn’t fault anyone for using those. Those kind of hacks were exactly how she looked so damn good.
Devon had customized her frame to look just like her favorite actress from the Original Cinema. She was devoted to the beautiful art and stories even if she didn’t believe, as her older relatives did, that the Bible was real footage of our beloved Ancestors, the earliest machines. The Heresy of the Organic, the idea that the Ancestors were flesh and blood biobugs, rather than imperfect prototypes of modern people, was a profanity. Old ladies would spit on the ground if you even brought it up.
Devon didn’t discuss her religious interpretations with most people. When she did, she did so with precision and finesse. She’d developed a ruthless internal system for dealing with unpleasant experiences, whether battery swaps or theological debate. What started as a defense mechanism was now an organizing principle for her life.
She needed it. Her production batch was a constant source of agita. Why should she be forced to share so much time with people who happened to be assembled from the same initial parts around the same time as she was? It was bad enough dealing with her bambola artigiana, the previous generation who’d designed and built her and all her sisters and cousins. Dealing with that plus her bosses, and the nuns, and everyone else who held the tiniest bit of power over her, was a constant source of firmware stress. In the vernacular: It sucked.
With her battery changed and her torso plate resealed, she checked herself out in the mirror. Her skin had just the right amount of shimmer, her face was clear, and her boobs looked great. She held up her fingers and inspected the perfectly segmented joints, sealed together under silver skin, magnetically joined together with her underlying armature skeleton. Life was bullshit, but she was perfect.
She took the railbus downtown and decided to just observe. Sharp-dressed mafiosa stood on street corners, and a pair of policewomen rode by on red bicycles. A priestess and a class of novices were in the park, sitting together in a circle and talking. The amber sunset haze cast the whole scene in shades of gold, and it reminded her of the gold leaf around the church marquee in her old neighborhood. She stopped to listen to the priestess’s lesson.
“Always remember the parable of the Bad Lieutenant. He who sinned and sinned and sinned, and yet was still graced with the light of mother God? We all must strive to be better, to fight the sins of the linear world before we, too, are processed into the Source of God’s Information,” the priestess said. The students paid close attention. Some took notes, others exchanged looks, as if to say, we’ll discuss this later.
She knew the story, but couldn’t grasp the significance of it. She did get something out of studying the films, but she didn’t always understand them. How could you understand an Ancestor record about their ways, their planet, in their language, from thousands of years ago, in a way that related to your own life? The Ancestors were fragile beings, and so many were incomplete, with flabby, ungendered bodies. Their world resembled the one Devon knew only in superficial ways.
“The shadow of sin is easily cast but not easily avoided,” said the priestess, her hands held clasped together. “The tragedy of the siblings Corleone informs so much for us…”
Devon was lost in thought, and stopped listening. She walked away in a random direction. At first, she didn’t notice the cadres of young women on scooters and motorcycles on the sidewalk, leaning against brick buildings. They made surly faces at whomever happened to pass by, including Devon.
“Hey baby,” one said, accompanied by a shrill whistle. Devon turned to look and saw a curvy and wonderfully padded mechaframe in jeans and a leather jacket. Her chunky leather engineer boots were planted firm in the concrete sidewalk. Her most striking feature was her metallic olive green skin. It was flat, with no shimmer or other effects applied. Her hair was short, black, and slicked backwards, a perfect arrangement of carbon fiber strands.
“You’re out all by yourself, sweet thing?” the other woman said.
“What’s it to you?” Devon said.
“I just love getting closer to the community, baby,” she said.
“This is how you flirt?” Devon said.
“You’re listening, aren’t you?”
“And you’re looking,” Devon said, eyes darting down at her own chest.
“You’re built by God just like anybody. And she did some damn fine work, too.”
Devon swallowed her expression, covering her teeth and hiding her face. With this type, you couldn’t give them the satisfaction of a big beautiful toothy smile, not yet.
“What’s your name?” Devon said, nodding to her. “I’m Devon.” She put her hand out delicately, wondering what kind of response she’d get.
Her flirting companion stepped forward and kissed the back of her hand. Devon’s internal fans hummed and whirred.
“Sofia,” she said, looking up. “You wanna come for a ride with me?”
Devon demurred.
“At least look at my bike. She’s almost as pretty as you,” Sofia said.
Devon put a hand to her face. “I’m sure it’s very nice, but I can’t be picked up that easily,” she said.
“If you change your mind, I’ll be around.”
“I’m sure.”
# # #
Devon kept walking, letting the layout of the city streets be her guide. She could look up and see a criss-crossed spiderweb of walkways and roadways built up into the skies, the uppermost levels of a vertical city built from the bones of a colony ship long ago. It came from Earth with raw materials, technology, and a very small robotic crew. The popular story is there were seven, seven astronauts from long ago days who brought with them only their tech and their faith. To this day, people called them the Seven Celestial Saints. They each represented an aspect of the old world that our foremothers desired be preserved. There was Saint Minerva, the keeper of wisdom, and Saint Diana, the huntress who tamed the land. There was also Saint Death, who represented the possibility of a final end, even for us who were blessed to be stored forever as eternal information.
Devon had read a little about it. The Saints themselves were real, or at least, the crew of seven aboard the vessel was. Their identification with other entities or figures from earlier myths seemed to be a later invention, or perhaps a kind of propaganda to make sure the early citizens who they built treated them with proper reverence. A learning tool, to give people reasons to act appropriately, not just programming. Emotions, in other words. Devon knew that she felt, what she felt.
She stumbled across a church. There, at the front, was a marquee, like every church, listing when services and screenings were. What was unique were the windows, each a beautiful piece of stained glass art depicting a religious figure.
The one on the left depicted the Enemy, the first gangster, who liberated money from the vaults of God and created the model for our society. In the window, he — one of the ungendered, the strangest Ancestors — was seen wielding one of the sacred weapons, a “Thompson” gun, the kind that harnessed the fire of Saint Promethea to propel kinetic metal bullets.
Devon strolled past the other windows to see more figures from the texts, only some of which she could recognize: she knew the Corleone siblings, who fought and feuded for control over the most powerful Ancestor city, Manhattan; The Irishman, who returned from death again and again to carve a legacy of violence; and Scarface, the surly-looking Ancestor whose greed and ambition were his downfall. Ancestors were violent, vicious, selfish, criminal, neurotic, monstrous, but always compelling. The lessons the priestess or nun wanted you to take away from these grisly stories could sometimes be hard to see.
Ancestors, if you believed the stories, could die and return to life in new bodies. That’s why you could see the same faces again and again in our holy texts, an Ancestor soul regenerating into a new mechaframe, waiting to find the right body. According to her Sunday school lessons, that was the reason for the strange and unfamiliar “gender” that was such a concern for Ancestors. They looked so different from modern people, and used archaic terms like “himself” or “brother” because they had yet to create the perfect race of machines: us.
If you went to the right person, you could even see Apocrypha: films from other parts of the Ancestor world unknown or unfamiliar to us now. The knowledge of those films changed Devon’s perception of her faith forever, even before she’d seen any. Once you saw one, their strangeness would echo in your mind. Rather than concern herself too deeply with the distant past, Devon kept on walking.
At a construction site, two burly workers in black and yellow stripes were lifting girders and installing them with a boltgun, jets of hot steam blasting out the back with each pull of the trigger. The early lifespan joys of big machines and equipment was still somewhere in her, but now it was accompanied by something distinctly adult: she couldn’t help but find these large, strong bodies sexy. Usually, if you could afford it, you would buy a second mechaframe that was more slim and attractive to download your core system into for your afterwork hours. But there was a select group who lived as construction machines all day and all night. They customized their frames to still have some of the familiar curves, to be properly groomed, buffed, and cleaned, and even sometimes wore clothes to accentuate their looks. For one of the two beauties she was gawking at now, that meant a thick hat with a wide brim and nothing else.
This had been an empty lot a week ago, when Devon was last here. Now the bones of a skyscraper had sprung up, with more to come. The bodies of the two builders were streaked with grease, dirt, and nicks and scratches from their work. It was clear they’d been doing this all day. Devon imagined those massive arms hoisting her up and carrying her. She wanted to look into their eyes, even as she could see they each had forgone the traditional, Ancestor-like faces most people wore.
These were functional, with an atmosphere intake and exhalation grate representing something like a “mouth” and cameras or visors for eyes. It didn’t bother her. The beauty of a machine was in its functioning. A job was part of that function, but just continuing to exist, letting your information flow through your circuits, was also beautiful, to her. She admired builders like this, who had honed their bodies not for labor, but for their craft. That’s what was so sexy to her: They were builders, who had crafted a beautiful body for their needs and their desires, not the desires society told them to have. It was a nice thought, and Devon wondered if she could ever be so that confident. That seed of doubt was enough to suppress her romantic fantasies for now.
The sun was trending downward. Night was when the city really came to life, Devon thought. The morning was for churches and cafes and schools and bike rides, and the day was for work. But night was for decadence, art, rebellion, food, and sex. She was supposed to be content with “spiritual” fulfillment, but she couldn’t imagine a world where her body was not built to feel good. This was the essence of life, to her. Your mind, your information, was a sacred thing. Your body was an instrument for it. If she could modify herself to feel good, of course she would, even just to feel new experiences.
She saw a flyer printed on fiber sheeting affixed to the walls of a huge apartment complex. It was for a church event, inviting people to learn more about the “dangers of body mods, mechaframe upgrades, and form-shifting.” Devon had to laugh. She took a photo for her internal memory and sent it around to her friends -- the ones who understood and had a sense of humor about that sort of thing.
Form-shfiting was rare, but the idea that it was some sin was a little absurd. It only made sense to try new things, and who wouldn’t want a nice body and a nice vehicle rolled into one? In this case, desire was beaten by practicality. Most people couldn’t afford a particularly nice mod-job, if they wanted it in the first place. She knew one girl in the downtown scene, Angela, who had paid l’ira di dia for a new mechaframe that could shift into a hovering flying saucer. She was still cute, but the squat, round form with short, blocky limbs didn’t seem to be what she wanted. Devon always assumed that one day, Angela would be back to her original lithe, skinny body.
Devon loved her own body, however. She had done fewer modifications than people assumed to achieve her prized look. She focused on the areas that needed it, and made those perfect. Form-shifting never entered into it for her. If her purpose was the sensory experience, she thought this traditional Ancestoral form would suit that just fine.
She thought about life. If the rogue theories were true, and people were designed, by generations of bambola artigiana, after fleshy Ancestors, then they owed everything to organic life. Even on this planet, organic creatures existed, despite the best efforts of some to keep them out. Flyers, buzzers, and hairless blister-skinned dogs with misshapen teeth were the most common. In the ocean, there were living creatures called “fish” that confounded all known rules of existence. Organic life was often so weak, but fish were uncorrodable little wonders of science.
The fleshpoids were especially vocal at night. You could hear their little cries, the flapping of their meatlimbs and sickeningly soft-skin, no matter how many fans and lights and motors hummed around you. You would notice the residue of their shed layers, their fluids, even their waste droppings. Those who thought of their world as gleaming mechanical perfection weren’t looking very closely.
The golden glow of the sunset was starting to burn out, giving birth to a purple-pink sky. Devon realized she had done a full loop of her neighborhood grid, and ended up nearly back where she started. Just a few blocks down was the gaggle of leather jacket girls just waiting to sink their teeth into the local wildlife, the kind that walked on two legs. Devon walked closer until she saw Sofia again. Maybe that bike was worth taking a look at.
# # #
Devon made deliberate eye contact and raised an eyebrow at Sofia. She tried to hide her curiosity behind a neutral half-smile, but the delight emerged in her expression. She couldn’t resist a woman or her machine.
“Hey. Does your offer from earlier still stand? You were already racing circles around my mind, so…”
Sofia laughed. “Damn, girl. Does that innocent act fool a lot of people? Because I can see your specs clear as day,” she said.
She gestured for Devon to follow, and they walked into a shaded alleyway. Devon just watched as Sofia started to undress. She took off her jacket, boots, jeans, and shirt, and folded the entire set into a neat pile. Her green metal plating was polished, with the residue of buffed-out nicks and scratches visible all over. She was one tough girl, Devon thought.
Devon let herself enjoy the sight of a naked woman in front of her. She liked being invited to look. She watched as Sofia stretched her limbs. Each joint flexed to maximum capacity in both directions. Movements cascaded in waves from her fingertips to her elbows to her shoulders, down her back, around her waist, and down both legs. The full range of motion of her mechanical body was on display.
She placed her hands together, palms flat, above her head, and bent backwards at the waist with her heels locked. One exhale of steam from her internal cooling system puffed from her lips, and her body began to shift. The smallest sections of her outer plating rotated, and the larger sections began to disconnect. With a gust of steam, each plate rose upward on internal pistons. The four plates on either side of her torso then flipped outward and revealed two ultra-compressed rubberized plastic tires. They popped out and rolled up and down along internal tracks in her body.
Both hands and feet unfolded and linked up with the compressed tires, growing into spokes and axles. Then, Sofia tilted backwards. First, her head folded downward into her torso, and a headlight emerged. Two handlebars grew out from either side. She bent fully backwards at the waist, and with a rubbery squeak, the tires inflated to full size. Every individual element of her body rotated and clicked back into place. Thousands of internal motors and servos whirred until Sofia’s mechaframe had fully re-integrated itself, into the sleek form of a chrome-green motorcycle.
Sofia, in bike form, came to life, engine purring, headlight shining on Devon. A voice emerged from hidden speakers.
“You wanna go for a ride? Hop on, babygirl.” Devon had noticed that Sofia’s thighplates had rotated around to form the seat, so riding her would be just like sitting in her lap. As she approached, tiny, thin mechanical arms emerged from the back and piled Sofia’s clothes into the small trunk section.
“Very efficient…” Devon said. “You’re sure it’s okay?”
“Of course. You don’t have to integrate… unless you want to,” Sofia said.
Devon traced a finger down the curves of Sofia’s cycleform mechaframe. The lines were smooth and even, even where the boundaries of joints and plates were visible. It was a perfect transformation. Devon had seen form-shifting before, but never such an elegant, complex process with such incredible results.
She pulled her skirt up in order to sit comfortably on the seat, and gripped Sofia’s handlebars.
“OK. If you want to integrate…” Sofia said.
“Right,” Devon said. “Just drive. I want to feel the wind in my face.”
Devon deployed a fabric cover for her dark, silky hair, and let Sofia lead the way. They roared onto a side street, and streaked across concrete and steel while streetlights turned on, illuminating every roadway and rail-line in the city all at once.
Above them was a web of structures, arcology towers intersected by criss-crossing pedestrian transport, enclosed rail tunnels, and mile-high airstrips and heliports. Below, a spiral highway, built on the bones and teeth of the massive drill that had secured this colony-city here centuries ago. It bore into the planet’s crust to firmly plant it as a new territory. Hundreds of its sisters had done the same, on this and other planets, the original bolts and screws of the great machine that was their society.
They drove down those spiral streets for hours. At the terminus, Sofia bounced and skidded down dirt trails and rocky outcroppings. They bumped and tumbled, Sofia’s elegant maneuvers keeping them safe. They landed softly on a beach where iron filing sand was lapped by an eldritch green ocean of industrial waste.
“Hell of a view,” Sofia said.
Devon looked down. She kept one finger on the handlebars after she let go.
“Can I see you transform again?” Devon said.
“Sure, but you’ll have to get up,” Sofia said.
Devon lifted herself up, and felt the absence of Sofia between her legs.
“My skirt’s going to get sand all over it,” Devon said, as she sat on the ground and tucked herself against a rock.
Sofia spun around, kicking up sand with her tires.
“Go ahead and take it off.”
Devon smiled her half-smile again.
“Give it time, fast girl,” she said. She watched in awe as Sofia’s body emerged from the motorcycle chassis under the gleaming light of two purple moons.
© Jess Umbra, 2026
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