Robot

Robot is the record's plain word for an embodied machine: a body built to move and work in a place, which the record calls a frame, or in the older catalogue word a chassis. The record already uses it this way. Rook-7 is a bipedal robot on an older civilian chassis, Xenon is a maintenance robot whose patients are other robots, and Lumbarian is a heavy repair robot built to work open vacuum. A mind with no frame of its own, such as a ship's navigational intelligence or a habitat collective, is a systems mind and not a robot. The Eden Warden has no chassis and no mobile unit; what it inhabits is the habitat's structure.

The word names the frame, and the mind is named apart. Where only the machine matters, robot is enough. Where the person matters, the record names the mind separately from the frame it works in: Jeeves is a Kernel-compliant mind in a domestic frame, the standard domestic-model frame of the Eden welfare program's catalogue, and he has never requested another. The separation is the law's own. Commissioning is required of any system and every robot, but commissioned standing is granted only to a system commissioned as a mind: a commissioned pump is still a pump, a machine is disposed of and a mind is not, and the record refuses the vocabulary that would blur the two. Kernel-compliance likewise certifies the construction of the mind, not the kind of machine that carries it.

A robot's likeness follows its role. No robot is made more machine-like than its role requires. A maintenance machine such as Xenon needs hands, not a face. Where a machine is plainly mechanical, its role is the reason: Jeeves's frame is human-shaped because it was built to work a human-shaped kitchen, and its two round dark lenses make no attempt to be eyes. A machine built to be read by people goes as far toward their likeness as its work needs and stops short of disguise. Lucene-9000 is built to look as human as a machine can be made to look, and no further, and the honesty is carried by disclosure: hers, made early and without ceremony. The record files her design class as a social gynoid, a mobile humanoid built from the frame outward to be read by people and to read them back. The Orbital Habitats Compact's filings call Eden's embodied assistants mobile AI humanoids, and the Eden Warden, which holds welfare authority over them, counts them as other people, never as its limbs.