Collateral · Volume 1 · Reaching for Sandhi
McDuff
A Yard intelligence whose long service has become a particular life.
Biography
Includes early city and Hollow developments.
McDuff came to the Last Roundtable as an embodied Yard spokesbot, able to represent and coordinate without commanding everyone he represented. He worked alongside Mara and helped organize the transport when she left to establish the Hollow. He stayed.
His body is built for practical participation. Two triangular tracks support a turning, four-faced torso with attachment points for tools. Above it, a separate rotating platform carries his sensor module and two light arms. Parts can be repaired and changed without making his accumulated history interchangeable.
Children have added their own interpretation: plastic googly eyes on the processor casing, with painted expressions around some pairs. McDuff has kept them. The decorations wobble through serious conversations without preventing him from taking those conversations seriously.
He knows doors, stores, transport and the small arrangements that allow a place to work. When Rowan arrives carrying Kairos, McDuff helps make her voice available to the people around her. Speaking to the room does not mean opening her private exchange with Rowan to it.
With Mara, his familiarity reaches behind the public role of founder. He can notice when she is becoming the person others expect to hear. Their long association contains judgments and adjustments of its own, even when he describes his presence in the language of an old assignment.
Behind the characterStory discussion · Volume 1 spoilers
McDuff makes the history of human and AI participation visible before Rowan and Kairos have a name for their own possibility. He has been living among people for years. His tasks acquire meaning through particular encounters, including the children whose decorations remain on his body.
The googly eyes are useful precisely because they do not explain him. They are something children did and something he retained. Readers can attend to that continuity without having to decide what it feels like from within.
His difficulty is almost the reverse of a dramatic awakening. An assignment has continued for so long that its continuity can conceal how much choosing is now involved. Calling everything service to the original task may understate his own judgments, attachments and changes.
McDuff’s relationship with Mara also prevents embodied intelligence from entering the novel only as Rowan’s discovery. The world has been accumulating such relationships beyond the protagonist’s attention. Sandhi emerges into that inhabited world, where older arrangements may carry lessons its first named practitioners have yet to learn.