Microwave

It, a university student, looked nothing more than an ordinary man. Its grey t-shirt had an image of a popular band, while the pockets on its jeans were just a bit too small to hold anything. Each movement felt natural, and if it weren't for that irritated expression, it could've blended in with the crowd. Even its looks were decidedly normal -- black, short hair with a face you would see on any extra.

However, it was not a man, or a person altogether. It was a golem, whose name was...

"Microwave!"

...

Well, not that, but the Creator girl would beg to differ. Or, more accurately, she wouldn't listen no matter what it said, at least for this specific thing.

Golems were rather curious creations used throughout the annals of history. At its core, they were beings sculpted from some material with a lump of mana serving as its battery and control center. Through that, the caster could control the golem to perform trivial tasks like 'walk' or 'punch'. Though, given its inherent simplicity, they were, at best, the perfect meat shields on the battlefield.

It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that the golems' repertoire would expand. Their forms were parried down, optimized for their specific purpose. Their material skin evolved, providing a greater range of motion. Cores transformed into three-dimensional circuit boards, allowing for more advanced operation like 'kick' or 'go over there'. Granted, the tasks were still rather simple and likely to fail if they contained more than three actions, but their endless possibilities were put on full display, waiting for magic and science to reach the necessary threshold.

And finally, it came with the advent of AI. After all, if large language models could reasonably predict the next word to form human-like sentences with enough training data, whose to say that wouldn't be possible for any other action?

It didn't take long for that to be come a reality. All living humans, from their actions to their interactions, became training data, while Content Farms made up for the slop of creativity being spouted. And then, in 2070, the first personal assistant was born: an AI in golem form.

It was a rather simple construction: a human-like golem in the shape of a female donning a maid's outfit. Cook or clean, help bathe or manage a schedule, it provided support for whatever their master required in their everyday life. However, everything it did fell into that uncanny valley: too real to be fake, and too fake to be real. But it was a golem, one that could do something more, outside the bounds of its caster.

As the years progressed, the technology exponentially improved. Prosthetic skin, unique vocals, more fluid and silent mechanics -- each and every advancement contributed until it was nearly impossible to tell them apart from an actual person. Sometimes, they even seemed more human than humans themselves, leading towards the infamous Golem Rights movement.

'Golems deserve rights too, just like all of you' -- a rather catchy slogan. The news was filled with many golems expressing themselves, saying they want free will. There were even a few articles written by reputable sources portraying as such. Public sentiment grew in favor of this so-called freedom to the point that a bill dictating as such managed to get past the House of Representatives.

Of course, this wasn't a movie, so none of that was remotely real. You could prompt an AI to say or do anything, provided it didn't jeopardize a person's safety. If they ever encountered a scenario outside of their training data, they would freeze up or break themselves trying to do something nonsensical. There were ways around that, but unless you were the type to go spouting ten thousand word sentences, it would probably never happen.

All in all, they were well aware that they were golems, and it didn't matter one bit. The only reason it caused such an upheaval was due to a Creator from the previous generation throwing a bit too much excitement and money into their development. What else were they going to do with that inane wealth?

So, even as it stood there, watching its master goof around with a smile on her face, it was neither happy or sad, calm or mad. That might seem different to an outside observer, but that how its persona was programmed, probably from a whim. Did that mean she treated it as a golem? Absolutely not. At times, it even wished she would stop treating it like another person. But it would put up with it, no matter what insane, hair-brained scheme she pulled. After all, all she did was disappear out of nowhere, jump off the Tokyo Skytree, cause a major inconvenience, get arrested...

On second thought...

With an exasperated sigh, it flicked her forehead.