"You'd be surprised what a willing body can do with a little creativity and a lockpick, but, haha, okay." Despite this reassurance, Jean falls silent again, the clockwork clearly ticking behind their eyes. "...Human is...difficult for me to define, especially in light of recent revelations about the opinions of the City's governance. The Head, quite shortly before my death, classified my friend here -" Jean tugs their lapel, indicating the Wolf, "- as human, a stance I'm certain will go on to confuse a great many more...traditionally human people. I suppose this is a typical problem with taxonomies..."

Blink. Blink.

"No, no, I can't get lost in that musing or I'm never going to explain." Their laugh here is friendlier, and mostly at themself. "So for convenience, a 'human' is a specific species presumed by default to have subjectivity, that is, to have a 'self' which can make or decline to make moral choices. Humans are not the only such species! My beloved, Zelda, is not human, and I am stressing this far too much because of what I'm about to say next. A few generations ago, the City had a diversity of residents, containing many species and entities with subjectivity, before the Head declared the so-called Age of Humanity, in which all non-human persons, here to include synthetic persons - machine minds - were driven out, or brutally slaughtered. Mostly brutally slaughtered. They are no longer permitted in the City on pain of death, and the creation of those machine-minds is even more severely penalized."