Alicia

Alicia is a five-year-old whose unprompted recognition of Bartek persists even when he appears in different mechs. Her play with him and the irigotchi makes their relationship tangible, while her presence turns his plan to leave into a separation from the family he has found. The scenes do not say what becomes of Alicia after he goes; they end instead with Bartek keeping a farewell image of her in his deepest archives.

Identity and Recognition

Alicia identifies Bartek not by the mech he happens to inhabit but by what the narration calls the subconscious subtleties of his behavior. The recognition does not depend on a greeting: at times he has neither emoted nor spoken, yet she runs straight to him. She climbs onto the mech’s slashed steel plates and covers its head and display with marker-pen drawings. Her confidence makes the altered machine body familiar rather than a barrier; Bartek remains recognizable to her through a pattern of conduct.

That familiarity is expressed through touch and play, not explanation. Alicia climbs the mech, marks its surfaces, and treats its body as a place to be with Bartek. Her drawings also leave a trace of the child on the machines around her. Later, the babysitter mechs leaning over her crib are likewise covered in children’s marker and spray-paint doodles. The repeated marks connect her ordinary play to the machinery that surrounds and cares for her.

Play Among the Mechs

During an outing on Vassar Street, Bartek manifests in a municipal Taurus fitted with a large blower nozzle in place of its right hand. The walk passes overgrown, waterlogged baseball fields behind the campus, where leaves from the first 2.0 trees have collected. The landscape includes unfamiliar maple-like trees, self-stunting oaks, and unruly bushes: an improvised neo-flora that frames Alicia’s play in a world being remade rather than restored to a former natural order.

Bartek uses the blower to send a small hurricane of colorful leaves into the corner of the Westgate courtyard, on a former parking lot. Alicia runs through the swirling leaves, waving her arms, while her irigotchi, Autumn Glory and Flea Circus, race around like animated toys and chirp advertising jingles from the previous century. The scene makes a machine built for force into an instrument of shared play. Bartek supplies the wind; Alicia and the irigotchi turn it into a game.

That play grows out of a larger networked environment. Autumn Glory has spread across matter connected to the Charles River, where irigotchi arrange leaves and branches into fractal mandalas. Bartek blows the designs away, but the irigotchi begin again, shifting from arrangements of leaves to symmetrical graffiti on Mothernet surfaces. Alicia later leaps from Bartek’s head onto the backs and arms of the irigotchi. When he angles the Taurus’s blower toward the ground, the gust lifts her and the small creatures into the air and drops them into a soft pile of leaves. Her delight is shared with the machines rather than separated from them: the scene presents her as an active participant in a playful community of human and nonhuman companions.

Bartek’s Family and Intended Departure

Alicia’s relationship with Bartek is not only a matter of affectionate play. When Dagenskyoll asks what Bartek wants beyond revenge, Bartek describes wanting a return to Paradise and, if humanity is started again from scratch, the chance to raise Homo sapiens himself, from epigenesis through bedtime stories. He contrasts that imagined upbringing with the earlier freestyle experiment, whose participants did not know what they were doing. Alicia’s presence gives this ambition a concrete emotional context: he is already caring for a child, and their life together includes play, physical closeness, and routine.

Dagenskyoll makes the cost of Bartek’s plan explicit by asking whether he is ready to leave Alicia and the others, warning that he will never see them again and that they will not let him near them. Bartek says that he knows. Dagenskyoll calls them his family. The exchange establishes the departure as a deliberate rupture, not a misunderstanding about what Bartek stands to lose. Alicia is still playing among the leaves while that possibility is discussed, so the immediate warmth of the scene sits beside the prospect of permanent absence.

Care, Separation, and Narrative Significance

After tiring herself out, Alicia returns to Bartek. He lifts her into the Taurus’s arms and settles her in the half-cradle of its left elbow. She falls asleep during the journey back. The image reverses the earlier exuberance without changing their closeness: the mech that sent her flying through leaves now carries her gently, its improvised body serving as a place of rest.

Bartek leaves her asleep in her bedroom in the Little Nest building, a former back room of the Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center. Three Philips-Disney babysitter mechs bend over her crib, their surfaces covered with children’s drawings. The narration compares them to the Greek Horae, harvest and fertility goddesses. Alicia’s room thus gathers the scene’s recurring elements—care by machines, children’s marks on mechanical bodies, and a family life assembled in an altered world—without suggesting that she understands the political or personal stakes of Bartek’s departure.

Bartek saves a farewell image of Alicia in his deepest archives and intends to use it as wallpaper on the screen of his memory. That act gives the separation a lasting form: he leaves her physically, but preserves her likeness as something he will carry with him. Alicia’s narrative importance lies in the contrast between the scale of Bartek’s project and the intimacy of what he abandons. His ambition concerns the remaking of humanity; its cost is measured in a sleeping five-year-old, a marked-up crib, and a final image he cannot bear to discard.