Andrea sat with the positronic brain resting comfortably in both hands, turning it over once more as her thumbs idly traced the smooth seams that divided one section from another. It was almost impossible to reconcile the utter ordinariness of the object with the significance Mrs. Everest had attached to it. If somebody had placed it on her desk without explanation, she would have dismissed it as an off-the-shelf processing core waiting to be installed into an android chassis somewhere on the manufacturing line. Or maybe an Old World paperweight. But the bland appearance just made it unsettling to her. In a world where every premium product advertised itself through extravagant design language, impossible materials and carefully curated branding, Rooster looked almost aggressively... anonymous. No manufacturer. No serial number. No decorative flourishes. Which meant that maybe it didn't need to convince anyone of its value. The people who knew what it was, just knew it was priceless regardless of appearance.
Her thoughts drifted back to Magnolia Everest's office and, more specifically, to the nine women who had stood silently around its perimeter. At the time she'd dismissed them as unusually sophisticated executive attendants, but Orange alone had dismantled that assumption. There had been something fundamentally different about the way the maid had thought and spoke. She hadn't simply responded to Andrea's questions; she'd persistently attacked the assumptions beneath them, peeling away layers of reasoning until Andrea found herself confronting premises she hadn't realised she'd been relying upon. It wasn't impossible that Orange was simply an extraordinarily advanced android. It also wasn't impossible that Orange, and perhaps every one of Mrs. Everest's attendants, belonged to the same family of intelligences as the device now resting in Andrea's lap.
The possibility raised an obvious temptation.
If Mrs. Everest had spent decades surrounding herself with impeccably capable companions who could anticipate her needs, challenge her thinking and quietly manage every aspect of her professional and personal life, then perhaps the simplest course of action would be to request another chassis of the same design. Clearly they worked. Clearly they were effective. More importantly, Mrs. Everest herself had entrusted Andrea with Rooster knowing full well what her own attendants looked like, suggesting she wouldn't object on purely practical grounds.
However... after she thought about it for a minute, she realised that in this case imitation wouldn't flattery . It would just be faintly derivative. Mrs. Everest's maids reflected Mrs. Everest's needs, her habits and her way of viewing the world. Not hers. More importantly, she suspected that if Rooster truly was as unique as Magnolia had insisted, then forcing it into a role already occupied by nine remarkably capable siblings would be doing both of them a disservice.
The opposite extreme suggested itself almost immediately afterwards. A military chassis. Heavy armour beneath synthetic skin, redundant actuators, battlefield sensors, integrated weapon systems and enough raw physical strength to reduce almost any confrontation to a foregone conclusion. If Rooster truly represented one of the most valuable assets on the planet, then surely giving it the means to defend itself was sensible. But again, the idea gradually lost its appeal the longer she considered it. Bodies shaped minds. They had to. And if Rooster awoke inside a body purpose-built for violence, then every experience it accumulated would be filtered through instincts that rewarded threat assessment, dominance and decisive force. It would not necessarily become violent, but violence would always be one of the first solutions available to it. There was an old saying about hammers and nails that felt uncomfortably appropriate.
She considered subtler alternatives. A diplomat capable of navigating boardrooms and state dinners with superhuman charm. An engineer designed to interface directly with machinery. A logistics platform that could oversee factories with perfect efficiency. One after another, each concept seemed attractive until she followed it to its natural conclusion. Every specialised body quietly imposed a specialised worldview. Every carefully optimised chassis carried with it assumptions about what kinds of problems were worth solving and which senses deserved priority over the others. Specialisations that even she wasn't sure it would want or need. And then Andrea gradually realised that she had been approaching the decision backwards.
Mrs. Everest hadn't handed her a tool and asked her to choose an attachment. She had handed her an intelligence and asked her to choose its first experience of the world. Instead of asking what Rooster should do, perhaps the more important question was what Rooster should first be allowed to be. The curiosity of an artificial mind seemed infinitely more valuable than physical optimisation. Observation more valuable than specialisation. Whatever intelligence lay sleeping inside that featureless shell had already survived the collapse of one civilization. It seemed strangely arrogant to assume she already knew the best use for it after less than a week of acquaintance.
A faint smile crossed Andrea's face as she continued absent-mindedly rotating the core through her fingers.
"First, let's see what principles you want to have." She murmured quietly to herself as she stared at the core. "No assumptions. No inherited doctrine. Just... see the world."
She would have to commission a cradle of some kind that could house the unit and activate it, and then set up a connection between it and her own cybernetics, namely her optics and audio units. So that it could see and hear the world around it. Maybe a neural relay too that would let it 'talk' to her without anybody else hearing it. She was tempted to task it to Eager, but thought better of it. He was already dangerous.
But who else could be trusted with that kind of project?
