Thanks to Mic Cheetham, Sharon MacLeod, Charles Stross and Farah Mendlesohn for reading and commenting on drafts; and to Jenni Hill, my editor at Orbit, for patiently and persistently asking the right questions.
A technical note: conveying robot conversation in human terms is a matter of artistic license. For a very useful template and example, I’m indebted to and inspired by Brian Aldiss’s classic short story “Who Can Replace a Man?”.