First came a hush—a vacuum of pheromone talk—as variants sensed something new. Out from the shadow of a pillar stepped a figure child-tall yet perfectly upright. Obsidian plates hugged a slender frame; joint couplings gleamed with nacreous sheen, not chitin. It had no mandibles—only a smooth helm with a narrow line of violet light where eyes should be. Even now the plates flexed as if breathing.
No identifier lamp blinked on its chest. No pheromone tag broadcast rank. It simply walked to the sim start-line, head canting left and right as if tasting the holographic wind.
Rodion felt a rare judder in his processors, an echo of what organic folk called gooseflesh. He accessed the spawning matrix records—counts, batches, variant specs. There was no entry for a biped with humanoid morphology in last six cycles. Impossible, his logic core asserted, the matrix obeys set gene recipes. Yet here it was.
