46 – InvitationHector ducked the jab, and Vek’s alloy fist snapped in the air just a centimeter above his skull. Blood dripped into his eye, but Hector ignored it, focusing with everything he had on Vek’s shoulders and hips. His opponent was a synth, but he was humanoid, and his skeletal structure and musculature were near-identical to a human’s. That said, he tilted and shifted in much the same way a person would when he was getting ready to punch or kick. Still, the man was a machine—literally—and it wasn’t quite the same.They’d been fighting for a while—easily ten times as long as Hector had fought with Sass, and he’d been taking that one slowly. Still, he was adept at managing fatigue and pain, and though Vek didn’t seem to tire, he did have patterns, and Hector was learning them.One might think a machine could employ every possible fighting style, every possible combination of moves, even to the point that it could pretend to have patterns just to lull an opponent into a false sense of confidence. The thought had crossed Hector’s mind, but he knew that synths weren’t like normal “machines.” They had true synthetic minds, and they’d been designed to mimic the way people think and feel. There was debate about how “conscious” they could be, but even in Hector’s time, it had been agreed that they were individuals and deserved some rights.As he dropped his shoulder and rolled away from a stomping heel kick, he recoiled inwardly, lately finding himself bitter toward the Royals—who were they to determine who deserved which rights? The debate had been vigorous, of course, but the truth of the matter was that AIs had almost wiped out humanity on more than one occasion—in the early days of the Empire and long before it existed. That said, synths had certain safeguards that prevented them from thinking in certain ways—a litany of rules Hector couldn’t possibly recite.All of that was to say that, (...)