Free Machina Viva by Nathaniel Hicklin

in their pockets, people who wanted more than simply a hot meal and a bed. The newly christened Shadowtown became a popular retreat for anyone who wanted to leave the bright city lights behind and live on what they innocently called the edge, while the roughnecks from the ships sat and chuckled from behind their cheap drinks.
    Nobody really lived in Shadowtown. Most of the topside clientele only spent a few hours down there, and the ships were only in port for a day or two at a time. The people who owned property down there had apartments elsewhere. If anyone stayed there for more than a week at a time, it was because they were hiding.
    It was the only place for Eve to go.
    If she was going to be able to disappear, then she would need to alter her appearance. But she couldn’t go back to her rooms for anything, and if she bought anything on her card, she might as well stand in front of the Security building wearing a sign saying “I Am Eve, Please Catch Me.” So the first place she found in Shadowtown was a betting house, where she got a cash loan consisting of a handful of QUID and a card saying how much of the house’s money she had been allowed to hold.
    The QUID, or Quasi-Universal Intergalactic Denomination, dated back to before the humans had discovered the vapor. Life on board ship was much more casual than the modern civilization that developed on the arcologies. Tetropolis’s central banking system, for example, enabled people to represent their monetary holdings with a stripe on a plastic card. On the ships, though, people had to represent their money with actual stuff that held actual value. Barter was the standard at the beginning, but this economy was quickly replaced with the QUID, a currency consisting of small plastic lozenges with colored balls embedded in them. The plastic was durable to prevent flakes of it from fragmenting and drifting into the instrumentation of the ship in microgravity, and it was expensive enough that it wasn’t economical to use it for anything else. The colored balls denoted the value of each coin, and each one had a unique serial number to prevent counterfeiting. Since the establishment of the central banks and card stripes as the standard medium of exchange, the QUID fell out of general use, but it was still used for small informal transactions between individuals or in small family-owned shops and the like. And of course, the Vaporwide Gambling Council maintained it as the customary means of tracking debts in every licensed gambling emporium in the vapor.
    The small handful that Eve had managed to get wouldn’t go far, so she had to make the most of it. A few of them went toward the purchase of a needle, thread, and scissors, which she used to transform her new skirt into a pair of unusually baggy pants. She also bought a vial of silvery blue-green dye, which she used to change her hair color. She then wrapped her head with the leftover fragments of her skirt, completing her disguise as an esoteric artist. The appreciation of art, one way or the other, was widely recognized as the last definitive line between humans and robots, and she hoped that with her new appearance, everyone who looked at her would assume she was human without a second thought, and certainly not the fugitive robot that everyone was looking for. Even as she wandered around Shadowtown, she could see her official picture from Robot Production on screens everywhere she looked.
    The clubs and saloons of Shadowtown did most of their business at night, inasmuch as the time of day could be determined due to the comparative lack of Zeitgebers down there. During the day, the buzz of activity centered around the docks. Eve took a look around out of curiosity. A cargo ship had recently arrived from Fullerton, and the teamsters were unpacking crates that had just been brought off the ship by the harnessmen, dangling from their perches above the open cargo decks of the docked ships. Eve couldn’t tell exactly what