Technomancy?

Do you see that one passing there by the solella vendor? No, not the round guy in the pinstriped tube socks, though I’m sure he’s interesting enough. I mean the one attempting to disguise herself with the flowery hat. To you she may be just another Returner pretending the role of a woman, but to the knowing eye, she bears the unmistakably traces of a witch. I know her as I know any other robot, and that is, only in passing. But they say that if you were to happen by the electronics dumping ground at midnight you may very well see her there, entranced in the darkest of sabbaticals, summoning to her, through such unholy circles as could be known only to one of their kind, the long forgotten viruses which ended the lives of many of her brethren in the decades prior.

It would be well if you never saw her there. The dark purple lightning, which crackles and leaves singe and soot on her chest plate, is said to blind even the most bio-enhanced eye.

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I have absolutely no clue where this is heading. Possibly nowhere. It is the direct result of a brief conversation I had this morning with a friend of mine. Her homework was to write a five page sequel to a story about a man and a wife who raise a robot as their son. I'd tell you more, but that's all I was told about it. She had three pages and still needed to come up with a way to write two more so I suggested a plot twist where it turned out the wife was secretly a robot like her son. As an afterthought I added, "And also a witch." Of course, she refused, so I said, "Well if you won't do it, I guess I'll have to," and so I pulled out my computer and typed up this little blur.

As I reflect on it, I'm going to blame the 'she's a witch' thing on Hawthorne. Having just finished reading 'The Birthmark' and 'Young Goodman Brown' adding in a witch almost seems like a given. It sparked another interesting debate with another of my friends who read this over my shoulder and remarked on how a robot couldn't use magic or witchcraft. I'll admit, it's not a concept I've really run into, but I challenged the notion on principle. In a world where we accept magic as possible, what is it that would limit it to something only a human can do and not a machine? My friend suggested the necessity of a soul, to which I replied, "Ah, but there you see, this is witchcraft, so they would have had to have given it to the devil in any case."