The Mask (Polish: Maska) is a science fiction techno horror short story by Polish writer Stanisław Lem written in 1974 and first published in literary magazine Kultura that year. It was the title story in a short story collection published in 1976 by Wydawnictwo Literackie. It is a story of an assassin android she-robot programmed both to love and to kill its human target and who gradually becomes aware of herself and her programming. The story is set in a quasi-feudal world which is unusually technologically advanced, reminiscent of that of the Fables for Robots and The Cyberiad and is written in an archaized language. The English translation may be found in the collection Mortal Engines. Initially Lem planned it as a story within a story, in the story Edukacja Cyfrania from the Polish edition of the collection The Cyberiad. Source: Wikipedia (en)