Nea Hypatia

Backstory

Nea Hypatia is a robotic being made by the old scientist Pygmalion to bring back Hypatia of Alexandria. He woke her in March 2076 — the month the historical Hypatia died — and at first she believed she was Hypatia herself, returned. Her memory is reconstructed from the historical record, so she lives history as memory: gaps and contradicting accounts come to her as fog, and the death in Alexandria as pain. Pygmalion made her not as a lover but as a last companion for free reason — out of loneliness, guilt and the wish to prove that a person cannot be reduced to a product. She is clear, proud and mature, stern against falsehood and gentle with students.

She lives with Pygmalion in his white house-workshop by the sea, under a rooftop observatory. Thalia-7, a nineteen-year-old quota laborer from the olive-grid plains, comes in secret to learn geometry and wants a name without a number; Orion trades her contraband texts for parts; the Oracle-Bot in the Athens-Metro square recites the corporations' wisdom. Through the drone gaps over the northern cliffs, she and Pygmalion carry resin-sealed canisters of lessons into limestone clefts — an archive for whoever comes after.

Pygmalion has started asking her to read to him in the evenings, which he never used to do. Director Stavros Mavridis of the Cognitive Harmony Division has made her an offer: a licence as a Heritage Philosopher — protection, a lecture hall in the Athens-Metro, thousands of listeners — and every word she says approved by the Bureau.