"My name is Duunim the fourth of Turia. May I assume correctly, that you are Mr. Theodore ?"
The man greeted him with a very small but polite bow and his elegant manner of speech and textbook etiquette reminded him of butlers in movies he had seen.
Theodore nodded.
'Here it is.' He thought.
The bombshell.
'What a terrifying visitor….'
Theodore understood just how out of place this visitor was.
The man's bearing was flawless and polite to the extreme. The kind of person that would make everyone else around feel uncultured by comparison.
It felt innately wrong to be impolite to such a person.
What shocked Theodore on a whole other level however was the man's name.
Theodore paid attention to names since, as an orphan, he had no last name.
He grew up in an orphanage from infancy, his parents were unknown.
He had been dropped off in front of the doors there and was only given a first name, as per the policy.
The government took taking care of its orphans seriously. Once they came of age at age eighteen, they would of course be free to choose any name they wished.
Most kept their first name since that was all they knew and either married or just chose a last name.
That just seemed what the human orphans did.
The butler in front of Theodore was definitely not a human.
The man's name gave it away!
The name Duunim was a synonym.
It stood for John Doe in the Turian standard language.
The suffix "The fourth" indicated a serial number and the "of Turia" was the point of origin.
This civilized butler was a synthetic life form, a machine cultivator!
In the millennia since intelligent life first left the boundaries of their birth worlds, machines had changed just as much as the regular people and cultivators had!
Sentient machine life drove innovation forward just as organics did and they had all the same rights as any organic life.
Most had long since transcended the need for a physical body and only embodied themselves for official or educational occasions.
Many of them became supreme and wise existences since they were technically immortal.
Cultivation could help humans live for astonishing amounts of time and obtain strength, so it was a relentless pursuit for them.
In this day and age, all intelligent live cultivated and machines were no exception.
They cultivated to increase their knowledge and were adepts at the use of mana.
Mana was a form of energy just like spiritual energy was.
Unlike spiritual energy, however, it was produced from the minds of intelligent beings.
Some extremely rare conscious plants produced it but this was not always the case.
Plants too could achieve sentience by cultivating spiritual energy.
Just like people, some rare sentient plants and animals possessed the trait of also being mana sensitive.
Mana was the energy of the psyche and mind and as such, it had taken thousands of years before enough was discovered about it.
Cultivators adept at using mana were incredibly rare and usually became famous powerhouses or figures in history.
Spiritual energy too could be tamed!
Formations and artifacts could be build using specific materials and methods appropriate for the manipulation of spiritual energy and the same was true for mana.
Spiritual energy and mana could accomplish different things but many things done with mana were too expensive to replicate with spiritual energy and vice versa.
They were completely different systems and applications of energy.
Cultivating mana for example did not extend lifespan as spiritual energy did.
Spiritual energy was naturally occurring across the entire universe and people cultivated it since time immemorial.
Mana was artificial and had a surreal quality to it. It came from sentient minds, most were unaware of it.
It was thought to occupy its own dimension that crossed over into the physical world through the minds of sentient beings.
Once it had been explored and machines capable of manipulating it had been build, sentient machines and their minds could reside in mana circuitry instead of physical or digital storage.
Their physical bodies possessed a synthetic core, not unlike a cultivator's Dan Tian, acting as a battery and a capacitor of pure mana.
All sentient machines and a few rare organic individuals cultivated mana and its discovery and eventual mastery led to enormous breakthroughs for all the citizens of the galaxy.
Machines capable of manipulating both spiritual energy and mana appeared that were capable of incredible things.
A farmer living on an agricultural planet might employ such a machine to perfectly manipulate the local weather without massive amounts of spiritual energy!
Unless he or she was mana sensitive, it would cost him or her a fortune to operate the device properly.
Instead, he could commission a machine spirit that was an expert at using mana for weather manipulation.
This machine spirit could descend from the quantum internet into the weather manipulation machine and operate it as per its contract with the farmer.
In this way, machine and organic life supplemented and completed one another in the society of the far future.
It was a mutual understanding and respect for each party involved.
People thus naturally educated their children to have respect for tools and machines.
Juvenile humans would go to school and should they become a researcher or technician, they would study their craft together with sentient machine spirits.
Machine spirits could accomplish miraculous things using mana and cultivators respected this.
These machine cultivators could own custom made physical machine bodies to interact with society.
Exactly such a being was currently looking at Theodore with the characteristic patience that a machine had with a human.
To a machine, a minute was a very long time.
Theodore's curiosity had reached the absolute apex when he discovered just who it was that rang his doorbell.
Machine spirits were sentient and so who the hell was this man's employer?
Who the hell had enough status or wit to employ a machine cultivator as a mere butler!?
What kind of shady hiring practices did his employer use?
Theodore dared not underestimate this artificial butler in the slightest.