Unnamed, unfinished story

There were not many people in the bar when Milton arrived, but he had the habit of being early for everything unless it was important, in which case he'd either be terribly late if not entirely absent. He'd taken the usual way there along the electric fences that protected people from falling into the harbor, or maybe the harbor from further nanotech pollution. It'd only been last year they'd gotten rid of the last green fluff in the oceans and there was a particular fear that some poor smuck may still be a carrier and wander deliriously into the waves where the virus would have easy access to resources for multiplication. "Dark ale, tempered please" he said, the bald guy behind the bar didn't seem to acknowledge the order, he turned around in a way that made Milton certain that there wouldn't be other choices than whiskey and draft lager. "Out again" boomed the barkeep "only you lot buy it, no biz in stocking". Milton looked over the rough plastic counter, though the window at the other side of the room. He'd located himself farthest from the entrance, his back to a door with a staff-only sign on it. He liked watching people come and go. A glass of lager descended in front him and his phone vibrated in his pocket as the order was billed. It'd been windy outside and not particular cold, it never was, Milton knew about cold, he knew the history, that Earth had varying temperature when it was orbiting sun-one back in milky way. He'd noticed nothing unusual at all actually, on his monthly walk to this particular bar.

Noik had'nt had time yet to determine if it'd, although it prefer referred to as her, had noticed anything out of the ordinary that morning either, but realtime processing was expensive, and nonessential stimuli processing was a task better left for batch processing tonight when the watts were cheaper and the meaties sleeping, reducing the behavioral entropy prediction requirement by a significant factor. Noik had partitioned her attention processing to allow herself to have quantum eidetic memory, at the cost, obviously, of heavily reduced stimuli processing. When dealing with meaties it was usually better to make quick decisions, but she were used to deal with the two she would meet, and she'd deemed it more important to hyper analyze the days events at a later time. When she arrived to location 33 she captured a few frames and identified Milton Kay sitting at the farthest end of the narrow room and three other meaties, one which was the barkeep, and two she didn't look up.

Milton Kay was the inventor of the modern conscious automaton, and Noik was in fact a MCA MK-II type personality entity.