LukeBot was a graceful teal. MikeBot had a complementary chartreuse finish. The humanoid shapes were designed with certain distinct features. Mike had chosen to have beard detailing on his Bot and broad shoulders, while Luke’s was tall, with glasses and a messy hair finish. Both, of course, had caterpillar tracks on the underside of their Bot feet and tended to favour the smooth rolling over the jerky gait of actual walking, until stairs got involved. Luke was more teacher-esque, having been a Maths teacher early in life over a century ago, while Mike tended to treat the trainees more like any other team he was introducing to new software.

Their vocal patterns were fascinating. As TraCoP (the Transferrable Consciousness Project) had evolved and become more streamlined for public use the vocal boxes had become generic and engineered, so you would choose a vocalbox if you could afford to have your intelligence botted upon death. But the first technicians offered the project were given a modulation specification that tended to glitch. This resulted in the beautifully melodic nuances both completely alien in their exquisite musicality and closer to the original voices of each technician than could ever be chosen today. Luke’s tended to be slow and measured but Mike’s was faster with a lilt that was apparently the remainder of a gently west country accent.

Mike had reticently taken up the offer of virtual immortality at the chance for self improvement. However, his immense success with the Academy meant that he spent the majority of his time improving others. At 123 he had made his peace with the fact that perfection was often too high a mark to achieve.

Meanwhile Luke was passionately curious about the world, nature, the human psyche and essentially the universe. His artificial longevity gave him the opportunity to never cease learning, and every few months he would travel and attend faraway conferences.

The sensory adjustments the models had received ensured that although food was completely obsolete to them, they both enjoyed the odd meal with the trainees, savouring the samples with gusto.