From Dominic Pettman’s bizarre, incredible opening address to the 500th anniversary of the death of Francine Descartes, the robot daughter of René:
She learned to become accustomed to the strange looks she received from waiters, shopkeepers, hoteliers, and people in the street: people who seemed repulsed by her mechanical gait, her artificial smile, her uncanny too-blue and too-shiny eyes. Her wind-up limbs. Just as she learned to bite her leather tongue when her father-maker voiced his strident opinions concerning animals, and their want of a soul of any description; his conviction that dogs, cats, pigs, and horses were simply God’s fleshy clocks, bereft of this strange metaphysical surplus that humans claimed to have, yet could never prove or render tangible.
(Francine is a real legend about Descartes, by the way.)