Kintsugi

She had come to fear those hands, which stole her from her own garden. Their rough touch. All the bruises and calluses that she could feel. The torture session they brought with them. Her barely mended wounds were reopened to be filled with pieces that will forever be her. She could feel the resin he injected in the cracks. It burnt her.

Kintsugi is an alloy technique named after the antique Japanese restoration method. Traditional kintsugi is used to repair a broken piece of art, usually pottery or ceramics, with lacquer coated in gold. The philosophy of Kintsugi is to embrace the flawed to create beauty. However, it has seen a novel use when a Japanese craftsman created the first automaton when repairing a broken porcelain doll.

Enduring

Modern kintsugi is an alloy fabrication method where the metal is moulded into the desired shape, then broken down in pieces of roughly equal size. Finally, they are stitched together by an elaborate chemical mix. The exact recipe has been kept a secret by Hetteroza Inc, the only company manufacturing the alloy. Many have suggested that it might be close to the golden-based lacquer used by the old craftsman, but there surely is more than gold and lacquer.

The mix has strong fixating properties and keeps the metal almost as strong as if it was moulded from a single piece, with additional properties. The main one, and the reason it has been researched at all, is that it makes the automaton less vulnerable to the passing of time and corrosion. The mix is potent against most metal-eating organisms and near unalterable, sharing part of this property to the whole. And even if a piece is corroded, the decay rarely pervades other parts of the construct, blocked by the kintsugi barrier.

This alloy made automatons incredibly durable, and near untouchable by time. This proved to be a problem later on, as humans had to give up on the idea of outlasting machines designed for outlasting humanity.