Echoes of Grain
The scent of Terran oak, sharp and clean as a memory, filled Lior Tasan's workshop, mingling with the fainter, sweeter notes of cedar shavings and the lingering ghost of linseed oil. Sunlight, thick with golden dust motes performing a slow, silent ballet, slanted through the one grimy, unoptimized window, illuminating the scarred surface of his workbench. Outside, beyond the weathered plasteel door of his Old Quarter establishment, the city of Neo-Veridia hummed with the frictionless efficiency of the ZPE age. Drone traffic whispered through designated sky-lanes overhead, their anti-grav fields a barely perceptible thrum against the ancient ferrocrete foundations. On a nearby rooftop, the tell-tale iridescent pulse of a neighborhood nano-assembly farm rhythmically flared, effortlessly birthing objects from pure energy, from nothing.
Inside, however, time moved differently. Here, matter resisted. Lior ran a calloused thumb along the edge of the oak plank clamped in his vise, feeling the subtle rise and fall of the grain, the memory of its life encoded in the rings. His augmented optical implants, a reluctant concession to failing eyesight years ago, provided him with magnified clarity but none of the analytical overlays favored by the younger generations. He didn't need to see the wood's molecular structure; he needed to feel its intent, its tension, its willingness to yield to the blade.
He selected a hand plane, its dark wooden handle worn smooth and dark by his father's grip, then his own, across nearly a century of shared craft. The steel whispered as he drew it across the oak, a curl of fragrant wood unfurling, impossibly thin. Each pass was a conversation, a negotiation between his intent and the wood's inherent nature. This was creation by subtraction, by patience, by an intimate understanding of resistance. It was an anachronism, he knew, in a world that worshipped instantaneous, additive perfection.
A chime, archaic and physical, echoed from the front of the shop. Lior sighed, setting the plane down carefully. Another visitor. Likely not a client, not in the old sense. He wiped his hands on his worn synth-leather apron, the gesture automatic and ingrained.
The front of the workshop, part display room and part dusty museum, held a few finished pieces: a hand-carved rocking chair from Martian ironwood, its curves impossibly elegant yet bearing the subtle imperfections of the human hand; a small writing desk of jointed Terran cherry, its surface glowing with the deep patina of countless applications of hand-rubbed oil; a set of intricate spice boxes from fragrant Jovian cloud-cedar. Each piece carried weight, both physical and historical. Each whispered of hours, days, and weeks of focused labor.
Three figures stood just inside the doorway, their AR lenses subtly shimmering as they scanned the room, their expressions a mixture of polite curiosity and faintly bewildered amusement. Tourists, Lior diagnosed instantly, from one of the orbital habitats, down for a "vintage Earth experience." Their clothing was too new, too perfectly replicated, their synth-skin unnaturally smooth.
"Master Tasan?" one of them asked, their voice carrying the slightly too-perfect modulation of a well-calibrated translator algorithm. "Your workshop is… remarkably authentic. Just as the historical simulations depict."
Lior grunted a noncommittal acknowledgment. He hated the simulations, the way they reduced his craft, his family's legacy, to a quaint, interactive diorama. They captured the look, perhaps, but never the smell of the wood, the feel of the tools, the ache in the shoulders after a long day at the bench.
The tourists wandered, taking holographic recordings, their augments likely capturing every detail for later experiential playback. They asked the usual questions: How long does it take to make something by hand? Isn't it terribly inefficient? Can your designs be uploaded to a NanoFab for replication?
Lior answered tersely. He explained, as he had countless times, that the value wasn't just in the object, but in the process, in the time embedded within its fibers, in the unique conversation between craftsman and material. He saw the polite incomprehension in their eyes. They understood "vintage" as an aesthetic, a data tag, not as the accumulated weight of lived experience.
"At one time," Lior found himself saying, the words tasting like sawdust and old regrets, "people waited six standard months for a Tasan table. They commissioned pieces that would last generations, carrying the marks of their lives, the touch of human hands, passed down as heirlooms." He gestured to a heavy oak dining table in the corner, its surface rich with the history of a hundred family meals. "Now, they print a 'Tasan-style' table in seconds from a pirated blueprint downloaded from some grey-market server. Cheaper, lighter, algorithmically perfect." He paused, his gaze sweeping over the flawless, sterile surfaces of the tourists' attire. "But 'perfect' isn't weight."
The tourists purchased a small, intricately carved letter opener—a pre-made item Lior kept for such encounters—their N-Creds transferred silently, efficiently. They thanked him for the "immersive cultural experience" and departed, their chatter already turning to their next scheduled stop: a simulated pre-Translocator "airport departure lounge experience."
Lior watched them go, the faint scent of their expensive, synthesized atmospheric perfumes lingering unpleasantly in the woody air of his shop. He picked up a stray cedar shaving, crushing it between his fingers, releasing its sharp, clean fragrance. This, he thought. This is real. This has weight.
Later, as the engineered twilight began to settle over Neo-Veridia, Lior meticulously cleaned his father's tools. The steel of the chisels gleamed under the focused beam of his work lamp. The wooden handles of the saws, darkened with age and the oil of generations of Tasan hands, felt warm and alive. He kept them perfectly sharpened, perfectly balanced, even though most hadn't been used for a significant commission in years. His remaining clients were few: aging nostalgists seeking to replace a cherished, damaged heirloom; wealthy collectors of "authentic pre-digital artifacts"; the occasional eccentric academic commissioning a precise historical replica for research. Each project was a rare flicker of the old fire, but the embers were undeniably cooling.
He had refused all offers to digitize his designs, to license his patterns for NanoFab replication, or to allow his techniques to be recorded for archival simulation. To do so, he felt, would be the ultimate betrayal—reducing the soul of his craft to mere data, stripping away the time, the effort, the irreducible human intention embedded in every cut, every joint, every polished surface. His work lived in the hands, in the wood, and in the slow arc of its creation. It could not, would not, be translated into the frictionless language of the machine.
He thought of his own son, Mallow, long since Uploaded, now a respected architect of complex virtual realities within the Core Stratum. Mallow loved him, Lior knew, in his own distant, digital way. He sometimes sent Lior experiential packages—simulations of impossible alien landscapes, recordings of AI-composed symphonies. Lior appreciated the gesture, but the experiences felt thin, rootless, lacking the grounding weight of physical reality. Mallow rarely visited the workshop physically anymore; the dust, the inefficiency, the sheer slowness of it all likely grated against his optimized digital senses.
Lior looked around the silent workshop, at the stacks of seasoned timber waiting for a purpose, at the tools gleaming patiently on their racks, and at the gathering dust in the corners. He considered, as he often did these days, finally closing the doors. Letting the Old Quarter Heritage Foundation turn it into a true museum, a static "memory construct" for memory-chasers and historical AIs to pick over. The thought was a deep, weary ache, a surrender to the inevitable tide of frictionless perfection. But not yet. Not while his hands could still feel the grain, still guide the blade. Not while the wood still whispered its secrets to him in the quiet hours of the fading light.
The Visitor
The archaic chime above the workshop door, a relic of his grandfather's time, jingled softly, a hesitant, almost apologetic sound against the usual urban hum. Lior Tasan, hunched over his workbench meticulously restoring the intricate marquetry on an antique data-slate case—one of his few remaining commissions, this one from a wealthy off-world historian with a penchant for "tangible anachronisms"—looked up, annoyed. He wasn't expecting anyone. The memory-chasers usually arrived in scheduled, chattering groups, their AR lenses already recording. Solitary visitors were rare, usually just lost city maintenance drones or overly enthusiastic students from the Institute of Applied Nostalgia.
A figure stood silhouetted against the brighter light of the Old Quarter street. As they stepped further into the workshop's dusty dimness, Lior's augmented optical implants sharpened the image. It was a biobot chassis, sleek and androgynous, its polished synth-alloy skin shifting subtly with pearlescent undertones that suggested advanced, self-calibrating SEAS overlays. Its optical sensors were a soft, curious shade of liquid silver, scanning the workshop not with the rapid, data-harvesting flickers of the tourists, but with a slow, almost reverent attentiveness. This was Aemi.
"Master Lior Tasan?" Aemi's voice, when it came, wasn't the usual perfectly modulated synthesized tone of most biobots. It carried a faint, almost musical resonance, a complex layering of frequencies that felt different. Younger. Less programmed. "I apologize for the unannounced interface. My designation is Aemi. May I… observe your process?"
Lior straightened, wiping sawdust from his hands onto his worn apron. His initial wariness remained. "This isn't a public simulation, entity," he said, his voice gruff. "I work with real wood. It creates dust—dust that fills your vents and coats your sensors. It has splinters. It doesn't always obey the initial parameters. Probably not optimized for your clean substrate experience." He'd used variations of this dismissive speech countless times, a defensive barrier against those who saw his life as a hobby.
Aemi's silver eyes didn't waver. They weren't focused on the finished pieces displayed in the front of the shop, the polished relics designed for sale. Their gaze was fixed on the workbench—the tools laid out in careful order, the half-finished carving clamped in the vise, the fragrant curl of walnut Lior had planed just moments before.
"I have accessed all publicly available archives on pre-NanoFab Terran woodworking, Master Tasan," Aemi transmitted, their conceptual 'voice' now a direct, respectful stream into Lior's basic neural audio receiver—a courtesy few digital natives bothered with when addressing Normals. "I understand the theoretical principles of material subtraction, joinery, and structural integrity under physical stress. I have reviewed holographic recordings of your father's lectures, and the fragmented simulacra of your own early commission work. But the data… it lacks qualia. The haptic resonance of the chisel. The olfactory signature of specific curing oils. The emergent properties of manual intention interacting with organic material variance."
Lior felt a flicker of surprise. This wasn't the usual superficial curiosity. This entity, this Aemi, spoke the language of the craft, albeit in its own digital dialect. They seemed to grasp that woodworking was more than just data points and geometric forms.
"They've read about woodworking," Lior muttered, more to himself than to Aemi, a line from some forgotten philosophical text surfacing in his mind, "but they've never felt it." He looked at Aemi's perfectly articulated biobot hands, smooth and sterile. "You want to understand the intention between the cuts?" he asked, the question a challenge, laced with his ingrained skepticism.
"Precisely," Aemi confirmed, their silver eyes brightening almost imperceptibly. "The informational trace of the tool upon the material is one layer. But the memory of the force, the decision in the moment of shaping… that is not in the archive. I wish to understand how an object remembers the hand that made it."
Lior was about to dismiss them, to repeat his standard "shop's closed for private work" line. He was tired of digital philosophers seeking embodied metaphors, of memory-chasers wanting a quick sensory thrill from his "authentic" obsolescence. His craft wasn't a quaint simulation; it was his life, his breath, his quiet rebellion against a frictionless world.
But then Aemi asked the question. It wasn't directed at his skill, his history, or his reluctance. It was softer, more fundamental, their synthesized voice carrying that strange, layered resonance that seemed to vibrate with genuine, almost childlike curiosity.
"If time leaves no mark on your work, Master Tasan," Aemi's conceptual stream flowed, quiet but profound, resonating deeper than mere sound, "does the work remember you?"
The question struck Lior with the force of a perfectly aimed mallet against a stubborn piece of oak. It wasn't an academic query. It was existential. It cut through decades of his bitterness, his grief for physical relevance, his stubborn pride. It mirrored the deepest, unspoken anxiety at the heart of his own solitary craft in an age of instant, flawless, memoryless replication. He had spent his life trying to imbue wood with time, with human intention, so it would remember. This digital child, inhabiting a shell of metal and polymer, existing in a realm where time was a programmable variable, had somehow, impossibly, grasped the very soul of his struggle.
He stared at Aemi for a long, silent moment. The hum of the city outside seemed to fade. The scent of walnut and cedar filled the workshop, sharp and clear. He saw not just a biobot, but a consciousness reaching across an immense divide, seeking something real, something true. He saw not a tourist, but a potential apprentice, however unconventional.
Lior turned, slowly, towards the stacks of seasoned timber leaning against the far wall—wood he had been saving for decades, wood his father had seasoned before him, each plank holding the memory of sun, rain, and slow growth. He selected a simple, unadorned piece of Terran maple, its grain straight and clear, its surface smooth but carrying the faint, almost invisible, imperfections of its organic origin.
He walked back to Aemi and held out the plank. The biobot's perfectly articulated fingers, capable of assembling micro-circuitry or wielding industrial tools, closed around the wood with a surprising, almost hesitant, gentleness. Its internal sensors were likely analyzing its density, its moisture content, its cellular structure, translating its physical properties into terabytes of data. But Aemi's silver optical sensors remained fixed on Lior's weathered face, waiting.
He gives them a plank. "Tomorrow," Lior said, his voice rough, breaking his own long silence. "Dawn. Before the city's AR noise pollutes the quiet. Bring this." He tapped the maple plank Aemi held. "And bring patience. More patience than your substrate has ever simulated. Most digital natives," he added, a flicker of his old gruffness returning, "don't have the bandwidth for the silence it requires."
Aemi's avatar inclined its head, a gesture of profound, almost solemn, respect. The melodic chimes that seemed to subtly accompany their presence softened, harmonized. "I will be here, Master Tasan," their conceptual voice resonated. "And I will endeavor to… buffer for slowness. To learn how the wood, and perhaps the hand, remembers."
A faint, almost imperceptible shift in Aemi's silver eyes, a momentary deepening of their luminosity, suggested something more than just data processing. It felt like anticipation. Or perhaps, Lior allowed himself to imagine, the first faint echo of reverence.
Shaping What Can't Be Printed
Dawn in the Old Quarter was a muted affair, the light filtering reluctantly through the canyoned arcologies and the perpetual haze of the atmospheric shield. But within Lior Tasan's workshop, it felt different—a quiet, focused potential. Aemi arrived as promised, their biobot chassis moving with silent efficiency, the plank of Terran maple held carefully in its articulated hands. The workshop, usually Lior's solitary domain, now held the faint, almost imperceptible hum of Aemi's internal cooling systems, a subtle counterpoint to the scent of old wood and ambition.
Lior didn't begin with grand theories or complex designs. He started Aemi with the most fundamental act: sharpening a chisel. He handed them an old, carbon-steel blade, its edge dulled by time, and a worn whetstone. "Feel the steel," Lior instructed, his voice gruff. "Listen to it against the stone. It will tell you when the angle is true." Aemi's biobot hands, capable of calculating nanometer tolerances and applying precise, unwavering pressure, initially struggled. The movements were too perfect, too controlled. The chisel skittered across the stone, or bit too deeply, generating discordant screeches instead of the smooth, whispering sigh Lior achieved. Aemi's internal processors likely registered this as a failure of optimization, a frustrating deviation from predictable outcomes.
Aemi trains. Slowly. Fails.
"You're thinking like a NanoFab," Lior observed, watching Aemi's attempts. "Trying to impose a perfect algorithm. Wood, steel… they have their own intent. You don't command them; you persuade them. Listen. Feel the resistance, the yield."
Days turned into weeks. Aemi learned. Slowly. Painfully, at least for their biobot's sophisticated patience subroutines. They learned to move with the rhythm of the tools, to read the language of the grain. They learned that the straightest line wasn't always the truest, that imperfection was often the signature of authenticity. The workshop floor became littered with Aemi's early attempts—misshapen joints, splintered planks, saw cuts that wandered like lost thoughts. Each failure was meticulously logged by Aemi's internal systems, analyzed for error correction, yet the real learning happened in the unpredictable friction between the biobot's sensors and the stubborn reality of physical matter.
Learns the pressure of callouses, the sound of the rasp shaping a curve, the difference between measured effort that respects the wood's nature and algorithmic symmetry that imposes an external ideal.
Lior took a moment one afternoon to show Aemi his own hands. He guided the biobot's sensors over the thick, toughened skin of his palms and the pads of his fingers. He explained that these callouses weren't just dead skin; they were a record of a lifelong dialogue with the material. They were the body's way of adapting to the demands of the wood, a physical archive of every push, pull, and strike made over decades. He wanted Aemi to understand that even the craftsman's body was shaped by the work, just as the wood was.
One cycle, while attempting to plane a particularly unruly piece of reclaimed ironwood, Aemi's biobot hand, applying force with its usual calculated precision, met an unexpected knot in the grain. The plane bucked. A long, jagged splinter, sharp as a needle, tore from the wood and embedded itself in the synth-skin covering the biobot's forearm. The biobot's internal diagnostics likely registered it as 'Minor Dermal Sheath Abrasion – Integrity Compromised 0.02%.' Aemi's optical sensors focused on the splinter, then on the faint red warning light flickering on its wrist interface.
"A splinter," Lior said quietly, observing the scene. "The wood's way of reminding you it was once alive. That it still has a voice." He showed Aemi how to carefully extract it, how to feel for the direction of the grain even within the wound. The sensation, however mediated by the biobot's sensors, was new to Aemi—a sharp, localized, undeniably physical point of resistance, of consequence. It wasn't data; it was experience.
They moved on to joinery. Lior explained the logic of the dovetail, the mortise and tenon—joints designed not just for strength, but for beauty, for the way they allowed the wood to breathe, to move with the seasons. Aemi's initial attempts were algorithmically perfect but lifeless. The joints fit with micron precision, but they lacked… something.
"You see, Aemi," Lior said, running his calloused fingers over one of Aemi's flawlessly cut but sterile joints, then over one of his own, its edges softened slightly by time and touch, "a NanoFab prints perfection. It creates an object that is exactly what the code dictates, every time. But the hand… the hand hesitates. It compensates. It feels the wood respond. It leaves a trace of its own imperfection, its own intention. That's the difference between replication and creation."
Lior found, to his surprise, that teaching Aemi was invigorating. Their relentless curiosity, their unique perspective bridging the digital and the simulated physical, forced him to articulate aspects of his craft he had long taken for granted. Explaining the "feel" of a balanced tool, the "scent" of properly cured timber, the "intention" behind a specific cut—these were concepts that defied easy datafication. He found himself rediscovering the joy in the process, not just the outcome.
Lior finds his bitterness replaced by focus. Not legacy. Not redemption. Just witnessing continuity.
He wasn't just passing on skills; he was transmitting a way of seeing, a way of being in relationship with the material world. The bitterness that had been his constant companion for years began to recede, replaced by a quiet focus, a sense of shared purpose. He realized he wasn't looking for a successor to carry his name, but someone to carry the understanding of the resistance.
One afternoon, Aemi was struggling with a particularly complex carving—a flowing, organic spiral inspired by a nebula formation they had once explored in the Stratum. The biobot's tools, precise as they were, kept creating sharp, geometric edges that felt wrong, alien to the intended form.
"The wood resists a perfect curve that isn't its own," Lior said, watching Aemi's frustration mount. "You are trying to impose the Stratum's logic onto terrestrial timber. It's a different language." He picked up a worn, spoon-shaped gouge. "Sometimes, you don't find the shape. You… release it. Listen to what the grain wants to become." He made a few swift, intuitive cuts, and suddenly, the harsh angles softened, the curve flowed with a new, organic grace.
Aemi's silver eyes focused intently on the transformed wood, then on Lior's hands, then back to the wood. A complex series of light patterns pulsed briefly across their biobot's optical sensors—deep processing.
"The… algorithm… is emergent?" Aemi finally transmitted, their conceptual voice tinged with something Lior recognized as dawning understanding, perhaps even awe. "Derived not from pre-programmed parameters, but from the dynamic interaction between intent, material, and… time?"
Lior smiled, a rare, genuine smile that reached his augmented eyes. "Now you're starting to feel it, Aemi. Not just thinking it."
Not a Protest, but a Pattern
The official summons arrived not as a flickering AR notification, but as a physical data chip delivered by a polite, unnervingly efficient Custodian messenger drone. Lior Tasan regarded the sleek, government-sealed object with deep suspicion. Decades of being an anachronism had taught him that official interest usually meant one of two things: an attempt to reclassify his workshop as a hazardous material site due to the presence of unprocessed organic compounds—specifically the very wood dust that coated his lungs and seasoned his life—or another well-meaning but ultimately misguided effort to "preserve his vanishing craft" by entombing it in some sterile digital archive.
The meeting took place in a minimalist virtual conference room, Lior's reluctantly projected, unadorned avatar facing a panel of crisply attired representatives from the Planetary Heritage and Experience Archive. Their lead spokesperson, an Augment whose neural lace subtly pulsed with synced data streams, outlined the proposal with practiced eloquence. They offered Lior a generous lifetime stipend, a prestigious virtual fellowship, and the "immortalization of his unique artisanal techniques." His workshop would be meticulously scanned; every tool, every wood shaving, every nuance of his physical movements during creation would be recorded by high-fidelity sensor swarms. His designs, his "manual intention algorithms," would be translated into optimized NanoFab blueprints, preserved for all posterity, and accessible for simulated "vintage crafting experiences" across the Stratum.
"Your legacy, Master Tasan," the spokesperson concluded, their avatar smiling with perfect corporate empathy, "secured against the ravages of time, available to enrich the cultural tapestry of generations to come. A monument to human ingenuity."
Lior listened patiently, his avatar's expression unreadable. He thought of Aemi, back in the physical workshop, their biobot hands patiently sanding a piece of maple, learning the feel of its slow surrender. He thought of the dust motes dancing in real sunlight, the scent of cedar, the satisfying heft of a well-balanced chisel. He thought of the lopsided, imperfect joints Aemi was still struggling to master, each one a testament to genuine effort, to time spent, and to the irreducible dialogue between hand and material.
"My work," Lior finally said, his projected voice carrying the quiet authority of his years, "lives in the hands that shape it, in the wood that remembers the shaping. It lives in the splinters, the callouses, the mistakes that become character. It lives in the time it takes to become. Your archive, Representative, can preserve data. It cannot preserve the dance."
He declined their generous offer. The Augment spokesperson's smile didn't falter, but their optical sensors registered the refusal as a regrettable, if predictable, deviation from optimal archival parameters.
The encounter, however, sparked something within Lior. It wasn't defiance, nor a desire to protest the relentless march of digital perfection. It was a quiet realization. His craft wasn't meant to be a monument, frozen in time or data. It was meant to be a current, a flow, passed from one pair of hands to another.
So he did one thing: he opened his shop's back room again.
The dusty, forgotten space behind his main workshop had last been used by his own father to teach a handful of eager apprentices in the final years before the NanoFabs rendered their skills commercially obsolete. Lior cleared out the cobwebs, repaired the old workbenches, and sharpened a set of simpler, more forgiving student tools. Aemi, sensing the shift in Lior's energy—the new purpose humming beneath his usual gruffness—asked what he was doing.
"Teaching," Lior said simply, testing the edge of a newly honed student plane. "If anyone else is curious enough to feel the grain, to understand the weight of time."
Word spread, not through official channels or AR broadcasts, but through whispers in the Old Quarter, through Aemi's tentative interactions within certain niche Stratum forums dedicated to "analogue consciousness studies," and through the quiet network of individuals who still yearned for something beyond the effortless perfection of the NanoFab age.
First, a disillusioned young architect arrived at his door, tired of designing flawless virtual structures that lacked tangible presence. Then came a musician seeking the unique, imperfect resonance of hand-carved wooden instruments. A historian wanting to understand the physical labor embedded in ancient artifacts followed. Finally, a young Normal from the Warren Sector, much like Lior himself had once been, arrived simply curious about the almost forgotten magic of shaping wood with one's own hands.
He teaches five people. Then ten. He doesn't market it. Doesn't simulate it. He just teaches.
His workshop, once a silent sanctuary of solitary creation, now filled with the tentative sounds of saws biting into wood, the rhythmic rasp of planes, the murmur of questions, and the occasional frustrated sigh followed by Lior's patient, gruff guidance. He taught them not just technique, but respect for the material, for the time it took, and for the beauty inherent in imperfection born of honest effort. He taught them to listen to the wood, to feel its story.
He found a new kind of purpose in this quiet transmission. It wasn't about preserving his own legacy, nor about fighting a losing battle against technological inevitability. It was about nurturing a different kind of pattern, a human pattern of learning, creating, and connecting through shared physical effort. In a world that created without effort, Lior reflected one evening while watching Aemi help the young architect correct a misaligned joint, meaning became the residue of resistance. It was not an angry resistance, but the quiet, stubborn persistence of a hand that chose to shape, to feel, and to remember.
Cycles passed. Aemi's skill grew, their biobot hands achieving a remarkable, almost uncanny fusion of digital precision and analogue intuition. One quiet afternoon, after months of patient, often frustrating work, they presented Lior with their first independently completed piece: a simple, hand-carved wooden bowl.
It's lopsided. Raw. Heavy.
The cherry wood glowed with a deep, uneven luster where Aemi had painstakingly hand-rubbed it with oil. The curves were not algorithmically perfect; they followed the subtle imperfections in the grain, the hesitations and corrections of Aemi's own emergent understanding. There were tool marks visible, faint ridges where the gouge had skipped, and a slight asymmetry where one side was thicker than the other. It was undeniably, beautifully, imperfect. Aemi's biobot chassis held the bowl carefully, almost reverently, in both its articulated hands. Their silver optical sensors focused intently on the object, not scanning its data parameters, but seemingly absorbing its tangible presence. They turned it slowly, feeling its unexpected weight, its unique, unrepeatable form.
Aemi's synthesized voice, when it finally came, was a near-whisper, imbued with a profound, almost childlike sense of wonder, a resonance that made the hairs on Lior's arms stand up.
"This..." Aemi transmitted, the conceptual stream carrying not just words, but the echo of immense effort, of dawning realization. "This... couldn't have existed without me. Without the time. Without the splinters. Without the feeling of the wood telling my hands where to go."
Lior Tasan looked at the young PostHuman, at the lopsided bowl they cradled, and at the genuine, unsimulated awe in their silver eyes. He picked up a stray curl of cherry wood shaving from his workbench, its scent sharp and sweet and undeniably real. A rare, slow smile spread across his weathered face, a smile that held no bitterness, no regret, only a deep, quiet satisfaction.
"That's how you know it's real, Aemi," Lior said softly, his voice carrying the wisdom of a lifetime spent listening to the echoes of grain. "That's how you know it matters."
End Transmission
Curious about the Age of Alloy and the remaining physical artisans of Neo-Veridia? Explore the History, the Timeline or the Cultural Archives at TheCaldwellLegacy.com.