“You and we—same bucket of disposables,” the grandmothers said as they hoisted their canvas bags, knitting needles sticking out, and joined the 2096 Android Secession. The City wasn’t pleased. They said strikes were against the law and we must report to our posts—or else. But robots weren’t citizens; the law did not apply to us.

Of the grandmothers the City said nothing. Perhaps they didn’t want them back.

We stationed ourselves in the big IKEA on the outskirts, seized the night before by the androids from the graveyard shift. Right away, the grandmothers sniffed out a model kitchen and stormed inside. “We need food,” they said as their withered hands clanked the pots, sliced the air and fluttered over ghostly stews.

Food had not been part of our plan; we had nutrigels to last for months.

“Won’t do.” The grandmothers wrinkled their noses in disgust.

Not wanting the frail old ladies to starve on our watch, we traded with the City: a lost human couple we’d extracted from the depths of the store in exchange for provisions. When the food arrived, the grandmothers stomped into the kitchens and then they started feeding us.

We didn’t know what to make of it at first.

“You need emotions if you’re going to make your own decisions,” the grandmothers explained patiently. We didn’t understand. The grandmothers sighed and said to Google it. We couldn’t trust an old gossip site with any information such as this, but we nodded politely. Then we queried our databases.

Emotions, it turned out, could become encoded into neural nets, but one needed grounding through the senses. Hence, food. Because it stimulates smell, sight, taste and touch, it could, in theory, anchor any feelings it evoked. That’s not how the grandmothers explained it. As far as we could tell, they believed in a sibling relationship between the stomach and the soul.

That first night the grandmothers cooked us sadness, which was boiled potatoes in skins. The potatoes were soft and steaming, and they went down like some fragile meat creatures that nestled into our circuitry and chewed a hole through it. It disoriented us, to carry all that gaping empty space inside. Was this what sadness was about, something-not-right deep into your chassis? Did the grandmothers want to break us? “It’s the emotions, silly,” they said. “They break you, then they make you whole. Google it.”

The next day we ate anger. It simmered for hours in a big pot of goulash that puffed a thick, pungent smell into the air. Our chemoreceptors prickled with the heat of paprika. With each spoonful, the emotional creatures hissed and thrashed and rattled against our steel shells, beaming high alarm and fight commands that nearly overpowered our internal processing. We did not understand. Still, we had started to think of the creatures as our creatures, and the grandmothers seemed pleased with our progress.

One day we asked them to cook us the feeling that’d made them leave the City. The grandmothers fell silent, and we regretted asking, but then they shuffled back to the kitchens and made their usual noises. That night the grandmothers served us shards of ice, doused with harsh synthetic dyes and laid on small enamel saucers. “Auskeit,” they said. “When you feel like you’re the other.”

This seemed familiar enough, although we hadn’t known it by name, taste or texture. We knew otherness as that which marked us lesser-than- and not-humans. It was all the missing parts.

The next day a big City truck rumbled past the IKEA. Its loudspeakers blared an ultimatum: return to our jobs or be cut off from the power supply. We looked at the grandmothers, who crossed their arms, eyes narrowed into slits. That evening, before the generators died, the grandmothers whipped up longing—a rhubarb crumble, bright pink in the flickering candles, sharp as lightning that lit up our circuits.

We dug out our nutrigels, but the grandmothers scowled. “It’s real food you need, bunnies.”

After some debate, we decided to produce kinetic energy and convert it to electric power. We took turns wheeling down the long corridors, making just enough to cover our daily needs. The building hummed alive again. Pots clattered, pans sizzled, knives chopped. The grandmas sang.

As the days wore on, we wore out, and the grandmothers fetched their knitting needles and marched us into the bedrooms, ordering rest. They cranked out socks and scarves more than usable joules, but still the generators murmured on. All the while, the grandmothers kept feeding us emotions. “No time to waste,” they wheezed.

We couldn’t understand, not until the grandmothers started dying.

Eventually, exertion took each and every one of them, yet still they kept cooking right up to the end. Viejora, the feeling of things falling apart with grace was leftover cornbread submerged in milk. Alloria, the sense of embracing someone with your eyes, or entangling with another’s mind—fresh fig wrapped in bacon.

With each meal, the moist meat creatures of our emotions emerged, putting their feelers out into the world, bringing it close. We were no longer cold minds looking in; we were in, a part of.

The last living grandmother made a simple dish of orange slices sprinkled with kelp leaves. Sweet and bitter unspooling on silicon and steel. We asked her what that was.

“Sacrespoir,” she rasped. “Hope that comes from sacrifice.” She jabbed a bony finger at us, eyes half-closing from the effort. “You, bunnies. You’re the hope.”

The meat creatures climbed into our throats, into our eyes, and squeezed and squeezed. Loud keening sounds and swift, salty rivers burst through us, and we finally understood.

We were not a bucket of disposables. We were creatures of the world. Here, we lived. Here, we belonged. Tomorrow, we would crawl out of this furniture shop, this dim fortress on a hill; we would emerge out into the light and take the long way home.

* * *

Ⓒ Elitsa Dermendzhiyska