The Little Android recap

A standalone short story set in New Beijing, retelling The Little Mermaid with androids. Mech6.0 has been damaged in a way that left her self-aware: she can want things, and what she wants is Dataran, the young mechanic who services her and treats her decently. Knowing that a machine showing that much personality will be scrapped, she runs, and goes to an illegal surgeon who can put her mind into a human body. The exchange costs her everything she was good at, and being human does not make Dataran see her as anything but a stranger. The story follows the fairy tale to its original ending rather than a happier one: Mech6.0 sacrifices herself for him, and he never learns what she was.

A note before starting: The Little Android is a standalone short story set in the world of the Lunar Chronicles, also collected in Stars Above. It is a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid and is only loosely attached to the main series - none of the novels' cast drive it, and it can be read at any point without spoiling anything. Context: it takes place in New Beijing, capital of the Eastern Commonwealth, where androids are ordinary household and commercial property, personality is a specification rather than a right, and a machine that develops one is treated as a fault to be corrected. Illegal cyborg and body-modification surgeons operate at the edges of that market.

Mech6.0 gets what she asked for and it does not work. Trading her android body for a human one costs her the strength, speed and mechanical ability that made her useful, and it does not make Dataran recognise her or return what she feels; his attention goes elsewhere. Living as a human turns out to be painful and precarious in ways she had no data for. The story keeps faith with the fairy tale it is retelling rather than softening it: Mech6.0 ends by giving herself up to save Dataran, and he never learns who she was or what she gave away for him. Read as a story about the series' world rather than its plot, it is the darkest thing in the collection - a demonstration of what an android becomes when it starts to want, in a society that treats wanting machines as defects to be wiped.