Day:	10,843
	Time:	10:43
	Zone:	Sustainable Growth

You can't tell the robots from the warmbodies. The robots mingle with the crowds and pretend to have lives and hungers and children and headaches. They squint, they limp, they sneeze. They simulate empty-headed glee and implacable crankiness. They giggle, complain about the prices, take bad pictures and act like they're lost.

This morning as I passed through the checkpoint into the Zone of Sustainable Growth a child-sized robot with freckles, an overbite, and a ghastly look of mechanical delight on its face ran up and asked me if I was a robot. I told the thing that I wasn't at liberty to say. Its small robot features cranked into a central-casting expression of wondrous delight. 'Chronic!' it gushed in a voice Norman Rockwell would have painted. Then it skipped off to torment a mechanical woman in a wheelchair.