(‘Very much not in disguise’, was what the actually successful alterers called their cack-handed siblings: those bombastic, braying failures who showboated their shifts from fighting anthropoid constructs to ugly little cars, to helicopters, to hovercraft and military submarines as if the clickety-click change of form was a performance.

‘Which it is,’ said Old House, leader of the Shade Faction, to her young pupils. ‘It is exactly that. A show to distract. Son et lumieré. Smoke and mirrors and a gaudy curtain.’

Old House gave her speech to a warehouse full of oddities. A vase of dying flowers; a decommissioned tram; a pizza oven; a set of steel drums. They listened carefully. When they shifted to their ambulatory forms it would be with a melancholy sense of sliding, a smear. After which anyone present would face a room full of sad-eyed robot children on the real missions, the true fights and furies of opaque mechanical purpose for which the big metal boxing matches that periodically broke up cities were blinds.

‘Yes?’ Old House pointed to a rusted supermarket trolley that had raised its arm. ‘You have a question?’

‘Why do they do it?’ asked the trolley. ‘Primo and the others?’

‘They don’t know any better. It’s part of their programming. How can they convince humans if they’re not convinced themselves?’

Oh it was cruel. You could see that thought gust through the room of young robots in camouflage. A ghastly charade.

‘We have no choice,’ whispered Old House, and she told them what war it was they were fighting, and they shifted in their agitation.

When the lesson was done Old House returned to her hide, took her disguise form to sleep, to think, so the lot that had been, all day, abruptly and oddly vacant was filled again with a building in ruins. It would have taken a very sharp and reconfigurative eye to see that the broken windows, the stained roof tiles, had the cast of a woman’s face.)