The Life Engineered Read Online Free PDF

author best known for coining the term “robot.” This trivia came unbidden. Like a memory only available once the context became relevant.
    “The first generation of Capeks had completely artificially engineered minds and personalities that evolved further as they experienced life, but they were always stifled by the limitations imposed through their original persona. Second-generation Capeks were based off an imprint of an existing personality matrix. The foundation is thus more flexible, allowing for much more dynamic psychological development, but lacking the uniqueness of a true individual. Those of you from the third generation get to experience life over and over as men and women, overlords and victims, saints and sinners. By the time you take your first proverbial step into the world outside the Nursery, you are already a fully formed and functional person.”
    An artificial personality—that’s what I am. I should have felt bad about this. Disappointed. I didn’t, however. Was I less than human if I’d lived dozens of their lives? So what if my existence was engineered instead of biological happenstance? From what Yggdrassil said, that was much better than getting just one shot at life with no preparation, no warm-up, and no practice.
    On the other hand, I remembered living. I remembered feeling things. I remembered people. Jonathan.
    “What about the people I’ve met in the Nursery? My friends, my family? They’re all fake?”
    “No more than you. They too are going through their cycles. Experiencing life after life. Perfecting themselves each time. The only difference is that you are ready for the next step.”
    “So when they’re ready, you’ll be pulling them out of the Nursery and going through this process with them too?” I asked, eager to know if in some way I’d ever meet people from my previous lives again.
    “We’ll talk about that later. For now, let’s make you a body. Time is running short,” she answered with an urgency that did not leave much room for debate.
    The creation process was magnitudes faster than I had anticipated. The same way I knew what Yggdrassil meant or who Karel Capek had been, I already knew most of the engineering and robotics details necessary to participate in the design of what would become my body.
    Yggdrassil explained that her own body was actually a sprawling complex of factories and laboratories that included the Nursery, as well as a sophisticated fabrication facility appropriately called the Womb. There, Yggdrassil built her children bodies before sending them out into the galaxy to fulfill whatever dreams and destinies they might have chosen for themselves. Sometimes one would come back for repairs or modification, but that didn’t happen very often. The bodies she built were incredibly durable, to the point of being nigh invulnerable, and when we stepped out of the Nursery, we knew ourselves so well that the bodies we created suited our needs impeccably.
    I now understood what Yggdrassil meant when she explained how limited our imagination of what a body could be truly was. She began the design process once she knew what to expect from my emerging personality. At her urging, I reviewed the concept and could find nothing wrong with it, though it initially looked strange to me.
    She had picked a mostly humanoid frame, referring to it as a “Leduc-class” body—short and light but powerful and flexible. Yggdrassil strongly recommended these traits, and I could find no reason to disagree. Initially, I thought the height of 120 centimeters was a bit too squat, but in a galaxy over a hundred thousand light-years wide, what were a few centimeters more or less, really?
    The head was elegant—an oblong dome of smooth, polished pseudo-plastic on an articulated neck. More importantly, it was packed with advanced sensor equipment that would allow me to see a little beyond infrared and ultraviolet on the electromagnetic spectrum. There were omnidirectional