“Thanks, Mike. There’s some people here who would like to talk to you,” Suzanne said, glancing over her shoulder to the crowd at the base of the stairs. “I’ve told them a little about Haven, but I’d like you to repeat to them what you told me earlier. Could you do that for me?” She stepped aside to stand a little off from the open entrance door, leaving the servant in full view of the passengers.

The sun hung low in the sky by now; Mike’s smooth body gleamed in its golden light. Suzanne got the clearest view of the being up to now. No blemishes or any signs of wear were visible on the white material of the servant’s body. Inside it had looked like some kind of white plastic to Suzanne, but in the radiance of the evening sun it was clear that it must be something else. The surface was translucent to an almost imperceptible degree, she now noticed. The light penetrated to maybe the depth of an apple peel and was reflected again, giving it a marble-like glow, although unlike marble there were no patterns whatsoever. Mike stepped outside. It was slightly taller than Suzanne, but not intimidatingly large. The body was humanoid and had the proportions of an adult, but was completely devoid of any signs of gender. Mike’s movements were completely smooth and somehow didn’t disturb the surface of the body at all. If there muscles moving inside the body, they didn’t reveal themselves by any rippling under the skin, but neither did Mike move stiffly like a robot, with rigid limbs connected to a torso block, turning around fixed axes at the joints.

Suzanne wasn’t sure how she could ever have mistaken it for a simple mannequin earlier. She remembered photos of early computer-generated images she’d seen in old magazines: convincingly realistic in some aspects, but far too clean and wrong in small, hard to describe ways that marked them as clearly fake. Out here in the sunlight Mike evoked the same feeling of only almost being real, yet was very solid and obviously, unmistakably present at the same time.

“What the hell are you supposed to be!?” an older male voice rang out from below. It was the large, mustachioed man who had threatened to beat up whoever was responsible for their predicament earlier. He started climbing the stairs, fists balled, with an expression of barely contained fury on his face. Others, maybe encouraged by the large man’s initiative, started loudly and angrily airing their frustration as well. Suzanne’s stomach sank with a deep dread; the situation was already getting out of control.