"A robot is like... a machine. Where I'm from 'making' people other than through birth, as babies, is... not a thing. Neither is instantly learning new languages." Neither are robots that could pass as human, but it was probably possible, at least. Hell, maybe they figured it out after he left.

"I assumed your people used magic, like..." Come to think of it he hasn't seen any magic here yet. The ship seems magical, but only because this whole place is weird. "How did you learn my language? And how exactly were you 'made?'"

"...uh, a lot of those questions are... just... wrong? They have wrong assumptions about the world in them. Just to be clear there. I didn't learn your language, I was made knowing it. The captain made me; my plans were already mostly drawn up but I'm here a bit early specifically to talk to you. I didn't exist and then I did. People don't... give birth? That's a livestock thing. Presumably also wild animals. And whoever made you was clearly awful since you've got all these confusions and problems on top of having been left floating in the air."

He is rapidly switching back to "none of these people are actually human," regardless of what they might look like.

Her last words also make it clear that explaining where he's actually from is going to probably not go better than last time, if people here can be actually made to have whatever knowledge their creators want.

There's a part of him that learned to question everything his senses told him, that's held constant vigilence against fae glamour for years now, and it only has been able to work because it took certain things for granted. Those things include his history, his memories, his sense of self. Otherwise he would have descended into a solipsistic madness years ago, unsure if New York and his life there had been real.

He's seen it happen to others. He made a deal with himself that it wouldn't happen to him.

Which maybe isn't something totally sane people do to begin with. But it's worked out okay. He thinks.

In any case, it's the main reason all this isn't sending him down a spiral of existential doubt, and instead making him realize with a sinking feeling that he's going to sound a special kind of crazy to people here when he starts talking about the Hedge. Or not "crazy," maybe, just... obviously delusional for understandable reasons.

Hell, he's now realizing that just talking about Earth probably made her assume he was... "made" with fake memories?

This is so much worse than a human-looking-alien landing in the ocean by a fishing boat.

Or... is it possible she doesn't actually know the truth?

They made her to speak with him. She knows she was made, but... if she's the only one they expect him to talk to, she could be unknowingly misleading him about how their world actually works, after being "made with" knowledge that's incomplete or just false.

But they've treated him with nothing but kindness so far, and if he assumes they've got sinister plans then there's not much he can do about it right now.

"Does that happen often?" he finally asks. "People being made like... with fake memories, left to die?"

He almost said "like me," but that would have been too close to a lie by giving her the impression he believed it about himself.

"No! It's not normal at all! Even outside of prolerounds someone has to be a few generations down of strange to do something awful like that. If you were from a cannibal round and had escaped into the air somehow, that'd be one thing, but there aren't any places that bad in this whole sector."

Cannibal round is definitely going in the box of "things he'll ask about later." 

It's a big box.

"...how much of a commotion is it going to cause on the round I'm going to if people think that's where I'm from? Will I be mostly ignored, or taken to police or... some kind of social services, or political leaders?"

Please don't say dissected.

"If they thought you were from a cannibal round? Well, cannibals often make people at complete random, it doesn't mean anything about you - so it'd mean no one was quite sure of you but they wouldn't expect you to be a cannibal too, not with regular food around. If you want to be let alone somewhere to be a woodcutter or a farmhand I don't think you'll have any trouble with that."

He feels himself relax... slightly. "What if they just learn how I was found, and assume some terrible person made me with weird beliefs and left me floating? Is there something they would try to do to figure out where I'm from?"

"If you don't have anything for them to go on about the nature of the terrible person? I don't think there's a good way to find out. I guess they might look into what ships have been passing through the area and see who would have had a chance to make you or pick you up and might be guilty of doing the one or not doing the other but honestly I don't expect them to ever be found. What a senseless crime, though, usually people who make somebody badly want something out of the arrangement..."

What she's picturing seems similar to parents abandoning a child in an alley, after years of brainwashing. It's not a comfortable way to imagine people thinking of him, but he's still probably missing some context.

"Why are new people normally made, and who decides? You said you weren't going to be made so soon, whose decision was that? Do you have parents on board?" He hesitates. "Do you even use that word, for people?"

"...parents? That's for... no, that's for kids, I'm not a kid and don't have parents. On the ship it's the captain's decision and he made me. I was planned to replace someone who's going to retire."

Distant memories of dystopian books tickle the corners of his attention, but far closer are stories of how fae society treats captured humans. People on the boat seem happy enough, and the way she talks makes it seem like they consider what she thinks was done to him a crime, which is promising about other sorts of social norms for how people are treated... except maybe on the cannibal rounds, or the "prolerounds," which she might not know as much about.

Still, he has to ask. "Do you have to replace them? If you decide you don't want to be a sailor, do you... owe the captain labor or anything?"

"Wow, no, if he made a mistake and I turned out not to want to be a sailor that'd be his problem!"

Okay. That's pretty reassuring. Though if he made a mistake... 

"So people can just make any kind of person they want, whenever? What you like, what you know... how you look?" It would explain why everyone on the ship is so athletic and attractive. "What you're good at? Anything else?"

"...everything? If you don't specify something it gets filled in at random so that's a terrible way to go about it. But if you're bad at it and pick things that don't gel together you get a lot of drift."

He's not sure what "drift" implies, exactly, but he's having trouble prioritizing what questions to ask next.

"Can I see someone being made? Or whatever the place where people are made is like, before they're finished? I think a lot of my questions will get answered faster that way." He may have even more additional questions after, of course.

"- no, you can't see someone being made! We don't need anybody else, I was already early! And don't get it into your head to make anyone yourself either, who knows how that would end up. It doesn't look like anything in advance, I don't know what you're imagining - it's not like we're, I don't know, built out of straw -"

I was thinking twigs and glamour, actually. Or grown in a big cloning vat.

It's a fairly specific denial, the kind he's learned to listen for...

"Look," he says after a moment. Alien in the ocean who they think is a baby left by a garbage bin with fake memories. "I know you were made with a bunch of knowledge, so a lot of things probably seem really obvious to you. Like the air-in-space thing. But to me, the idea of people just appearing out of nothing is... very obviously magic. Does that word translate? Do you have something you'd call magic here, or... sorcery, or witchcraft, or even something like miracles?"

"No... I mean, I agree that the word magic fits how people are made, in English, but we don't have any other things like it."

Huh. He would be surprised if that's the case, but maybe the rest is just weird physics? "Is it... expensive, to make someone? Does it take a lot of work or effort? What stops people from making slaves?"

"Wait, let me guess: there are slave rounds, like cannibal ones?"

"I think... the connotations of 'slave' are wrong? Like, I'm made to do my job and want to do my job and maintain ship discipline by following orders from the captain, right, and if he made it so I... didn't like it... that would just be a mistake, and given that I do like it he doesn't need to do anything else to make me stay. And he was made by the last captain himself, there's no way for the ship to slide into being horrible for no reason since it didn't start that way. Prolerounds are a little more like what you're thinking, but still not quite it. It takes a lot of effort to make people well and almost none to do it badly."

"Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. I'm not really against making people who like certain things and then having those things around for them to do. I think I just have... uh..." He runs a hand through his hair, trying to find a way to describe what years of reading science fiction, followed by some sideways glances and brief encounters with what the fae do,  have left him with.  "A lot of borrowed, speculative wisdom, gut feelings, and bad memories about what happens if a whole society does something kind of like what you're describing. Less if I know they can do it perfectly, but not, like, zero?"

He sighs. "And if it requires effort to do it well, then I bet people won't always do it well. Though I guess if you only make people who would only make people if they would put lots of effort in... maybe that works. But I guess I expect it to go much better in some places, like this ship, but get stuck in a bad place elsewhere."