We exited the tunnels at an old power station. The door was old and heavy, and only budged when both of us leaned against it with all our weight. For a second before it opened with a lazy, creaking sound, I suddenly expected that we would be greeted by a squad of fully armored and armed Talos Commandos. But to my relief we found ourselves alone, on the outskirts of the lost sector somewhere in the woods. The power station was a derelict little hut, overgrown with shrubs and vines that had blocked the door.

I had no idea where we were, but Moon somehow deduced the way back to campus, so I once again just followed her lead. I felt relieved, and even somewhat elated after our little adventure. In hindsight, there may have been more elegant ways to get out of that situation. For once, we could have tried to come up with some story about how her com had ended up there that did not involve her breaking any academy rules. Or we could have trusted that the people at the hangar wouldn't find the com, and just waited for them to leave.

But something about that Commando, Bullet, made me feel like we had made the right call. She was tenacious, almost obsessed with whatever her mission was, that much I could tell. And if she had found the com, she most likely would have tried to track down its owner. I wondered who the people were she had been working with. I had never heard of any official division with a capital lambda designation, nor seen their uniforms, but the thought that a Commando might be working with a private company struck me as even more unlikely.

As we walked through the woods, I suddenly heard a rustling sound in the distance. Reflexively, I grabbed Moon's sleeve and pulled her down behind some thick shrubbery with me. She gave me a bewildered look as I put my finger on her lips and tried to listen more closely, to make out where the noise was coming from.

Pharos was a walled city, and not much wildlife existed within its confines, but the forest was never a silent place. One could hear the singing of birds and the buzzing of insects, and occasionally a small rodent scurrying across the dried leaves covering the ground. Probably this was just one of the latter.

But as I stepped out of our hiding place again, something about the sound was still unsettling me. If it was an animal, it would have taken flight by now, yet the source of the sound didn't move.

"I thought I heard footsteps," I whispered to Moon, "but it's something else."

I made my way towards the source of the sound slowly, and when I finally spotted it among the brushwood, I froze in surprise. On the ground before me lay a bird on its back, its black feathers ruffled and one of its wings pointed away and bent at an awkward angle. It turned its head around in quick, erratic motions and seemed to have trouble getting back up on its feet. It didn't seem to notice me at all, despite its bright, grey eyes darting around rapidly.

"Oh my gosh," Moon exclaimed as she stepped up beside me, "Do you know what this is?"

"A jackdaw, I believe," I concluded from the color of its feathers and eyes.

"No, that's not what I mean," she said and knelt beside the animal that continued to finch and tremble.

I took a step forward to stop her, but she picked it up gently and cradled the bird in her hands. That was when I spotted the smooth, silvery plating on the back of its broken wing and the wires poking out between the feathers, and I couldn't suppress an astonished gasp.

"It's an Artificial," she said. "Well, an artificial bird, anyhow."

I recalled Moon mentioning failed attempts to create artificial cats, but beyond that, I hadn't even known that artificial animals existed. I had always assumed they only made humanoid ones.

"But it's made from metal, not biomaterials," I argued, as  I squatted down beside her to get a better look.

She gently stroked the bird, which seemed to calm it down - if that was even possible, considering that it was a robot. Maybe it was just running out of power. I noticed now that it was quite obviously not breathing, but it still twitched occasionally.

"They're special," Moon said with a gentle voice. "I thought there were none of them left – they were constructed decades ago to eradicate an insect plague, back when there was still some conventional agriculture in Pharos. They were supposed to eat bugs and convert them into their own fuel. They were the first functional prototypes for self-fueling robots - part of the groundwork that led to the construction of later Artificials. You're right that they are still mostly mechanical, and not biomechanical, but they're still considered to be the first Artificials. Because it was the first time an AI was put into a self-fueling unit that mimicked a life form."

"How could it have survived this long all the way out here?"

"The material is very durable, so there's little wear. And out here, there's plenty of food for it. They don't need all that much to sustain themselves - it's one of the reasons they failed at their task, actually. People thought they would just descend on the insect population and eradicate them completely, essentially feeding until there would be nothing left to feed of and they could be recalled. But it was as if they somehow knew that they had to rely on the insect population for nutrition. They simply reduced the numbers but never wiped them out completely. I thought they would have been recalled to recycle the materials, but it seems like nobody bothered..."

With fascination, I watched as she turned the tiny robot over on its back to look at its talons. From this side, nothing about the creature betrayed the fact that it was not a real bird. Its feathers had a beautiful, purple sheen to them, and other than the broken wing it seemed to be in perfect condition. I found it hard to believe that it could really be as old as Moon had claimed, and even harder to believe that something like it had really been created by humans and not by nature. Then again, I found myself thinking the same about Artificials.

Moon wore a serene smile on her face as she got back on her feet with the robot bird gently cradled in her arms. It had apparently powered down, and had stopped moving. I expected its grey eyes would just stare off blankly into the distance, but instead, it seemed to be looking up and watching Moon intently.

"We should go back. I will bring it to the factory and see if I can fix it. Perhaps they'll allow me to keep it and use it for the songbird project, wouldn't that be fun?" She had that excited tone to her voice again, as usual when she talked about her project, and I found myself smiling too now.

"Hey, I just realized something," I said, after we had been walking again for a while. "You remember that bird swarm we saw the other day?"

"Oh! You think this little fellow might have been part of that swarm?"

I nodded. "Perhaps a few of them went too high and hit the mesh after all?"

"But that would mean... oh, of course!" she exclaimed. "That sound we heard before the birds ascended, it must have been a recall!"

"A factory recall, you mean?"

"Yeah. The birds were created based on the same AI as the Artificials we have today, so they'd have the Circuits. Perhaps they were testing the range of their recall protocol on the birds. Or perhaps they just wanted to see if there were still any around. Maybe they wanted to recycle them after all."

"So... you think all of those birds we saw the other day were actually artificial?" I asked, furrowing my brow. I could imagine a couple of these robots surviving out here, but surely not that many. The swarm we had seen had been massive.

She shook her head. "Not necessarily. Do you know about emergent behavior?"

"Emergence – like smaller things giving rise to something bigger?" I suggested. "When something is... more than the sum of its parts?"

"Yes. There's many examples for it in nature, in the behavior of colonies of insects, swarms of fish, or large flocks of birds. The individuals move in a collective through complex feedback patterns. Essentially, every member of the swarm can only see its closest neighbors, but as a whole, their motion translates into something uniform."

It was difficult to imagine, but I had seen it with my own eyes when I had watched that flock of birds ascend.

"Modern computation also sometimes works on that basis," she continued her explanation, "With several smaller units being connected into a bigger processing unit. From the outside, it becomes hard to tell how these processes are executed – where exactly and how, but the computations are fast and reliable. The downside is, if some units slow down or malfunction, it can take a long time until you pinpoint which of them causes faulty behavior – it's one of the major problems they are having with the city infrastructure AIs at the moment. Now in analogy to the bird swarm, it's possible that a small percentage of artificial birds following the recall might have disturbed the pattern of the whole flock's movement and drove them all to follow the recall. It could explain why they flew so erratically."

"So the artificial birds might have lived among the real birds," I realized.

"I wonder what happened to them when they all reached the factory," she mused, petting the bird gently.

"And I wonder if the other birds ever noticed that some of them were different," I mumbled.

The thought became more and more upsetting the longer I turned it over in my head, and I eyed the bird suspiciously. I wondered if it really had all the secondary and tertiary Circuits like a proper Artificial, as Moon had claimed. I doubted it.

After all, how would you even command an artificial bird to reveal its identity as a robot?