"Maintenance is a heavy burden," said the Angel of the Harvest like a goodbye.

*

Archival/ Ganesh Prayagraj, speech during the T-X-Y Investors Conference

"It sounds like a parody, doesn't it? (laughter) Here you are, considering if you are going to invest your precious dollars in something called the Institute For Artificial Yoga. But here you are, already investing your time - so there's a part of you that's curious. Why does the man who tortures the robots want to teach them how to do yoga? (laughter) Is this a new form of torture?"

"I want you to think about that laughter. Laughter does not come when you hear the unexpected - 'purple monkey dishwasher' does not get a laugh out of anything other than small children. You don't laugh when you're confused, you laugh when you're shaken - when a line is crossed. It's a startled response to transgression, and what could be more transgressive than teaching a robot to do yoga? But then ask yourself: What line is being crossed? Care for the robot's physical body? No, that is surely no different from any other maintenance routine. No, the line that is being crossed is care for the robot's spiritual health. Imagine (laughter) a robot going to India, and learning from a yogi, and coming back with a renewed sense of spiritualism. It is absurd!"

"But it is also one of the few observable triggers for which the human mind will break free from all of its preconceptions and history and learn its place in the world anew. It is one of very few things which will cause a human to alter their own value set from the inside. Is that not fascinating in the context of artificial intelligence? Is it not terrifying?"

*

A beekeeper did not have a great many tools. The smoker; a heavy mechanical cage attached to the end of a long chain, tied around the waist like a belt. The chisel, the tool for breaking open hives, hilted in red plastic. Brushes, scoops, bottles of scented oil, bags of sugar, silver clasps for catching and holding queens in isolation. Harvest collected each of its beautifully mass produced items and stored them in the heavy bags and pouches of its clothing. It also collected a heavy backpack filled with hundreds of tiny storage hexagons - the cyberhive, the home of a swarm of artificial bees.

Then it stretched.

It was important to go through the motions even though it was fully dressed, fully burdened, frame unbalanced by clanking tools and smothering clothing. After all, it was the tools; it was the clothing - they were the purpose that gave the Angel of the Harvest the right to walk amongst the world's people. It lunged backwards, cross-stepped back and forth, rolled its wrists inside and then outside, extending its arms to the sides and then bringing them in close. It took the moment to respect what centuries of inactivity had done to it, felt the exact nature of rust and entropy and decay, the endless hunger of oxygen to burn everything away. It took the moment to care, even as the ground shook beneath its feet.

Then it finished its set. 

"Are you going to die, Ailee?"