Humanity

Chapter 3. Hide And Seek

Derec’s study didn’t feel the same. It was physically identical to the ones he’d had before, with the same desk positioned in the same spot, with the same computer terminal on the desk, the same file holders, pin-boards, bookcases, and waste chute situated just the same way all around it-he’d even set the viewscreen image to show him a normal, above-ground cityscape-but somehow the study still wasn’t the same.

He wondered if he could actually sense the weight of all the rock and dirt over his head, if that were somehow affecting his mood, but he couldn’t imagine how it could be. If he closed his eyes he honestly couldn’t tell whether he was on the ground floor or a hundred floors up or a hundred floors down. No, it was a purely subjective phenomenon, this discomfort with the room, and it didn’t take much thinking for him to figure out what was causing it.

The study wasn’t his. He controlled it, certainly; he could order it to take on any shape he wanted, to play him soft music if he wanted that, to feed him if he was too lazy to go to the automat in the kitchen himself-the study existed only to serve him, but still it wasn’t his. It wasn’t unique. He’d had exactly the same study on three different planets now, and he could have dozens more of them wherever he wanted, just by asking the city to create one for him. There wasn’t anyone particular study anywhere in the universe that held more significance for him than any other, none that comforted him with the sense of security and permanence a study should have, and that was the problem. He’d had lots of places to stay during the time since he’d awakened in a survival pod on an ice asteroid in uncharted space, but no place he’d stayed in for as long as he could remember really felt like home.

Certainly not this place, not this time. To find it so completely transformed had been a shock, and to discover why it was so transformed was even worse. Any sense of permanence he might have felt about this, the original Robot City, had died in that moment. No matter how perfectly it recreated his old quarters for him, he would never be able to convince himself that it was more substantial than his next idle notion.

His and Ariel’s house on Aurora might have been a home, would have been a home if they’d had more time to get used to it, but they’d only had a year there before Robot City insinuated itself into their affairs again, and a year wasn’t long enough to build more than a little fondness for a place. He had to think hard now to remember how it was laid out, whether the Personal was the first door or the second beyond the kitchen or how the furniture had been arranged in the living room. If he never saw the house again, he wouldn’t be particularly upset. But if he spent the rest of his days jumping from Robot City to Robot City, troubleshooting his parents’ wayward creations, he just might be.

He looked back to the screen, displaying a few dozen lines of the new instruction set for the city. He knew he could modify it to allow for more buildings on the surface, or even to pave over the forests and the deserts and the plains completely again if he wanted to, but the truth was, he didn’t want to. He didn’t really care. It wouldn’t feel any more like home that way than this, so what did it matter?

He supposed it mattered to Avery, but he couldn’t bring himself to care about that just then, either. He knew he would eventually have to apologize to him for disrupting his city, but he wasn’t eager to do it.

He heard Ariel and Wolruf talking in the living room, could tell by their low voices that they were having a fairly serious discussion. Evidently he wasn’t the only one affected by the city’s transformation. He couldn’t hear just what they were talking about, but he heard the word “robots” more than once, and Wolruf’s concerned, “What happens if they….”

There could only be one they in such a conversation. Derec frowned, realizing that they were still on the wrecked starship. He and Ariel and the others had forgotten all about them in their hurry to get inside-and in their hurry to get out of each other’s company after a long flight. Derec felt a twinge of guilt at leaving them there, still locked up in their conference, but that guilt faded quickly. They were robots; they could take care of themselves. Nothing could hurt them here in the city. Even if the city melted the ship down for parts, it would separate out the robots first.

He supposed he could go see if it had. He got halfway out of his chair, then sat back down. He could find out in a moment through the computer on his desk. For that matter, he could find out in even less time through his internal comlink. But that meant staying put and staring at the same four walls or looking out the fake window, and Derec was already tired of the view. Sometimes it wasn’t worth it to do things the easy way.

He stopped in the Personal on the way out, then met Wolruf on her way back to the kitchen with an empty plate. “I’m going up to the top of the tower to check on Adam and Eve and Lucius,” he told her…Want to come along?”

Wolruf considered the question a moment, then nodded.

“Sure.” She set her plate down on the counter, where it melted down into the surface and disappeared, leaving only a few crumbs of food, which migrated toward the disposal chute as the countertop moved beneath them.

“How about you?” Derec asked Ariel as they entered the living room. “Want to go for another walk?”

She shook her head and held up her book reader. “No, thanks; I’m kind of interested in this right now.”

“All right.” Derec glanced over to Mandelbrot, standing in his niche in the wall behind Ariel, but decided to leave him with her. He could always call him-or any other robot-over his comlink if he needed help with anything.

Leaving the apartment, he and Wolruf entered a wide, high-ceilinged, gently curving corridor that led them after a few turns to an open atrium from which branched dozens of other corridors like the one leading to their apartment. Had there been other people on the planet, this would have been a neighborhood park, full of children playing and robots worrying that they would hurt themselves, but now it was silent, empty.

They moved through the atrium to the main corridor, this one straight and with slidewalks leading off into the distance in either direction. All up and down the walls were more atria and more neighborhoods identical to their own. They would no doubt be modified to suit the individual tastes of their inhabitants, if ever they got any, but until that time their most significant difference was in the addresses written in bold letters overhead. Those addresses-three three-digit numbers each-grew smaller to the left, but the slidewalks moved to the right; Derec and Wolruf took an elevated walkway over the slidewalks to the other side of the corridor, stepped on the first of the moving strips, and worked their way toward the faster lanes.

Despite all the machinery that must have been necessary to keep the strips moving, the ride was nearly silent. They heard only the gentle breeze of their passage, abated somewhat by windscreens placed every few dozen meters on the faster strips. A group of four robots passed them going the other way, but otherwise they were alone.

“It feels even emptier than before,” Wolruf commented. “I wonder w’ere all the robots are?”

“Holding up birds’ nests, I suppose,” Derec said. “I imagine keeping the ecosystem going takes a lot more of their time than maintaining the city. “

“Probably so.”

The three parts to the addresses over the doorways indicated the level, then the north-south coordinate, then the east-west coordinate. Derec and Wolruf rode on down the corridor until the second part of the addresses dwindled to zero, then switched over to another slidewalk running ninety degrees to the first and followed it until the third part zeroed out as well. That put them directly beneath the center of the Compass Tower. Stepping off the slidewalk at a bank of elevators, they entered one and ordered it to take them to the top.

The door opened to a biting wind. The sky was overcast, and the air smelled of rain. Derec marveled at how quickly the weather had changed, but he supposed with the new forest transpiring so much more moisture into the atmosphere than the city had, some of it was bound to rain back out, probably on a daily basis.

The wrecked starship wasn’t visible through the elevator door, so Derec stepped out, holding onto the jamb for support, and peered around first one side and then the other, but the ship wasn’t there. The rectangular elevator box was the only feature on the entire acres-wide expanse of roof surface.

“It’s already gone!” he shouted to be heard over the wind. Stepping back inside, he waited until the door closed before adding, “I’ll ask where they took the robots.”

Focusing his attention on his internal link, Derec sent, Central computer, what is the present location of robots Adam, Eve, and Lucius? Lucius II, he amended before it could query him about it.

Unable to locate,the computer responded. Its voice in his mind had no vocal origin, but the input went in along the same nerves, so it sounded like a voice to Derec.It was quiet, echoless, and inhuman, but it was nonetheless a voice.

What do you mean, unable to locate? They ’ ve got to be somewhere.

I do not receive their power signature on any of my scans, the computer insisted.

“Central claims it can’t find them,” Derec said aloud. “What do you bet they’re hiding from us?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Wolruf growled. The robots had run away from their human masters before, when they had matters they wished to discuss in private.

Where did you last observe them?Derec asked Central.

That information is unavailable.Unavailable? Why?

I was instructed to forget that location. Derec arched his eyebrows.

“What?” Wolruf asked.

“It won’t tell me where it last saw them. Says it was told to forget.” Derec didn’t bother to ask it to remember again; a robot might have been able to dredge a forgotten memory back out of storage by the way it affected other memories, since a positronic brain was an analog device, but Central’s memories were digital, each one separate and stored in peripheral memory cubes.

“So tell it not to forget next time,” Wolruf said.

“Right.” Next time you observe them, remember their location, Derec sent. And alert me that you ’ ve found them.

Acknowledged.

“Looks like they out-thought me again,” Derec said with a sigh. “Elevator, take us back down.”

The elevator obediently began its descent. About halfway down, Wolruf said, “ ‘Ow about Avery? ‘Ave you seen him since we got here?”

“Uh-uh,” Derec answered, “but that’s no surprise. He was pretty mad at me.”

“He might know where the robots are.”

“Yeah, he might.” Derec hesitated. Was it worth the harangue he was likely to get from Avery just to find out where the robots had gone? He didn’t think it was, but on the other hand he was going to have to patch things up with him eventually anyway, and the question would provide a convenient excuse to talk with him.

Nodding to Wolruf, he sent, Open a link with Dr. Avery.

I am unable to contact him,the computer replied.

Why not? Where is he?

Unable to locate.

Derec rolled his eyes. “Not again.”

“What?”

“It can’t find Avery, either.”

“That sounds a little suspicious.”

“Doesn’t it, though? I think maybe I ought to start poking around in the computer a little bit and see what all this sudden secrecy is about. “

The elevator door opened, revealing the central transport station. Wolruf stepped out first, looked up and down the long expanse of slidewalk, and said, “Tell you w’at. W’ile you’re doing that, I’ll look around out here. I don’t feel like going back to the apartment just yet.”

The chances of Wolruf’s finding anything were practically nonexistent, but Derec knew what she was really after. He nodded and slapped her on the back. “Have at it,” he said. “I’ll call you if I find anything. “

“I’ll do the same,” Wolruf promised, stepping on the nearest slidewalk and letting it carry her away.

Derec took the overhead ramp and rode the walks back to the apartment. To pass the time he started to whistle a tune, one Ariel had been playing for background music on the ship a few days earlier, but the echoes in the empty corridor soon defeated him and he rode the rest of the way in silence.

Janet looked at the apartment with a disdainful eye. Basalom had landed the ship in a clearing in the forest about twenty kilometers north of the Compass Tower and had then used his comlink to ask the city to let them in and provide them with lodging, but Janet wondered now if she would have been better off staying in the ship. This place was about as unique as a ball bearing, with all the personality of a brick. No, less than that. Bricks at least had cracks; this apartment was seamless

“This place is perfectly, absolutely Avery”, she muttered to Basalom as he carried her overnight bag into the bedroom and placed it carefully on the dresser. He turned around, saw her expression, and said, “You are displeased? We can alter it in any way you wish.”

“Later,” she said. “You go see about the learning machines; I’ll worry about decorating.”

“Yes, Mistress.” Basalom walked toward the door, but Janet stopped him with a word.

“Basalom.”

“Yes?”

“I just want to know what’s happened to them. Information first, actions later, understand?”

“Understood.”

“Good. And don’t let anyone see you. If someone does spot you, I order you not to obey them. Just get away, make sure you’ve lost them, and come back here. My order takes precedence over any others.”

“Very well, Mistress.”

“All right, then, get going.”

Basalom left the apartment, closing the door softly behind him. Janet looked once more at the sterile walls around her, shook her head, and went into the bedroom to unpack.

The contents of one overnight bag didn’t take long to stow. Janet amused herself by ordering the apartment to simulate in ever-greater detail a suite in a medieval castle-a heated one, of course, with hot and cold running water-but she soon grew bored with that game as well. She looked at the desk, now a massive, ornate roll-top with slots and drawers and cubbyholes waiting to be filled, and sat down in the equally massive swivel chair in front of it. Centered in the back of the desk at a comfortable reading height was a flat, dull gray panel that she supposed was a monitor.

So. If she’d been thinking, she could probably have found her learning machines without sending Basalom out after them.

“How do I turn this idiot computer on?” she asked of the desk.

In answer, the gray screen at the back of the desk lit up to white, and the surface of the desk began to differentiate into a keyboard, drawing pad, pointer, and memcube reader. Janet disdained all but the screen, saying aloud to it, “Show me the interior of whatever’s at the address you gave Basalom.” She knew Basalom’s methods, and that he would simply have asked the address to his destination rather than try to find it by dead reckoning.

Sure enough, the computer didn’t ask what address she was talking about. Neither did it give her the interior view she’d asked for. “That location has been restricted,” a calm, generic voice said.

Janet nodded. Not surprising, if the robots were trying to hide. “Give me an outside view, then.”

The screen displayed a wide-angle image of a closed door set in a long corridor, with a two-strip slidewalk running in either direction. There were no figures on the slidewalk, and none of the other doors were open.

It looked about as anonymous as a place could be. Janet considered trying to break through the security for a look inside, but decided to wait for Basalom’s report instead. She didn’t want to start tripping alarms while he was there.

What else could she do while she waited? On impulse, she asked, “Is David on the planet?”

“If by David you mean your son, who now calls himself Derec, then yes, he is.”

Derec. She’d known he’d changed his name, but she hadn’t really assimilated the concept yet. She supposed she was going to have to get used to it. “Let me see him,” she said.

She was prepared to go through the whole rigamarole of talking a recalcitrant computer into letting her invade someone else’s privacy, but instead the screen did a center-out wipe and she found herself staring face to face with David. Derec. Whoever. He, too, was using a computer, and her viewpoint was from his screen. She gasped in surprise and was about to order the computer off when it asked, “Do you wish two-way communication?”

“No!” she whispered. “Don’t let him know I’m watching.”

“Acknowledged.”

Janet laughed in relief. That had been close. If old Stoneface hadn’t been such a snoop, she’d probably have been caught, but she should have known he’d program the system for surveillance first and talking second. She leaned back in her chair and took a good, long look at her son.

He had changed. He was older, for one-much older-but that wasn’t the most obvious change. As Janet watched him work, she noticed the determination in his eyes and the set of his jaw, the hint of a smile that touched his lips momentarily when he succeeded with some aspect of what he was doing, that smile fading back into determination when it didn’t pan out. She watched him lean back and stroke his chin in thought, say something to the computer and read the result on the screen, then close his eyes and sigh.

That was the biggest change: He wasn’t a petulant little brat anymore.

“Let me hear his voice,” Janet ordered.

“Acknowledged.”

Derec remained silent for a time, head tilted back and eyes closed, but after a while he opened them again and said, “How about power usage? Can you give me areas of increased power consumption?”

His voice was shockingly deep-and shockingly familiar. He had inherited his father’s voice. Janet had always considered his voice to be one of Wendy’s most endearing qualities, and now she found herself warming to her son as well. If he hadn’t inherited Wendell’s personality to go with it, then he might actually hold some promise after all.

Evidently what he saw on the screen was no more useful than the response to his earlier request. He leaned forward and shook his head. “No good. There’s too many of them. How about food consumption? Avery’s got to eat.”

Janet’s ears perked up at that. He was looking for Wendell? She’d thought he was talking about her robots.

“That service is not monitored,” the same generic voice that had answered Janet said to Derec.

“ Canyou monitor it?”

“Yes.”

“Then do. Let me know the next time someone uses an automat, and record where. Record the next time someone uses a Personal. Monitor oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide buildup, and report any changes consistent with a human presence.”

“Frost,” Janet swore. She hadn’t been here half an hour and already Derec was onto her trail. He would think he’d caught Wendell, but the computer would lead him directly to her.

Unless, of course, he found Wendell first.

And Janet had a feeling she knew where he was.

“Computer, don’t tell Derec my location. He isn’t looking for me. Instead, give him the address I asked to see first. That’s the one he wants.”

“Acknowledged.”

She watched Derec’s eyes widen when the address flashed on his screen. He obviously hadn’t been expecting results so quickly. She watched him go through the same process she had of asking for an interior view, then an exterior one, but he learned no more than she had.

“Contact Wolruf,” she heard him say.

A moment later she heard a voice growl, “Wolruf, ‘ere.”

“Where’s ‘here’?” Derec asked.

“Level seven, four-thirty-six south, nine-fifty east. “

“I think I’ve found Avery at level nine, three-twenty-two north, four-seventy-six east. I’d just about bet the robots are there, too.”

Janet cocked her head. He almost certainly meant her learning machines. So he was looking for them, too. If that was the case then he couldn’t have had anything to do with their disappearance, could he?

Maybe not this time, but finding them all three here on the same planet was pretty suspicious. Janet had put them on three different planets, two of which she’d only later learned Derec and his father had also visited, and when she’d gone back to retrieve those first two robots she’d found no sign of them. Derec and Wendell had no doubt brought them here, where she’d dropped the third one intentionally, but what Derec wanted with them she couldn’t guess.

She knew for certain what Wendell wanted with them. He wanted to steal the technology she had developed for them, just as he had stolen her original cellular robot idea and used it to build his cities. Derec could easily be after the same thing, either with Wendell or on his own.

Or he could be after something completely different. He sounded more than simply curious, but whether he was concerned for the robots’ welfare or whether he had his own reasons for wanting to find them she couldn’t tell. He could even be on Janet’s side, for all she knew. She wondered if she should risk contacting him, finding out directly what his intentions were, but a few moments’ thought dissuaded her. No, she didn’t want to risk alerting him, not yet. She needed some kind of test, some way of gauging the benevolence of his interest first.

Hmm. The best way to tell would probably be to give him a part of what he was after and see what he did with that. Something fairly harmless, but interesting enough to draw him out.

Smiling, she got up from the desk, retrieved a memory cube from her personal belongings, plugged it into the reader, and used the keyboard and the pointer to recall a page from one of her personal files. It was a robotics formula, part of the program that allowed her learning machines to think intuitively.

“Send this to him,” she said, then immediately added, “No, wait, not on the screen. Put it on his desktop in raised lettering so he can’t record it. Don’t record it anywhere yourself, either, and don’t tell him who sent it. And don’t give him or anybody else any information that might lead him to me in the future, either. Clear?”

“Acknowledged.”

“Let me see his response.”

Derec’s face replaced the robotics formula on her screen. He was still speaking to Wolruf, saying, “-meet you there as soon as I can make it. “

“All right,” Wolruf replied. There was a faint hiss of static as Wolruf disconnected.

Derec reached down to push a key on his keyboard, no doubt his own disconnect button, but stopped in surprise. “What the…?” He blinked, ran his right hand over the raised surface, then asked, “Where did this come from?”

“That information is not available,” the computer responded.

“What is it?”

“Don’t tell him,” Janet warned.

“That information is not available. “

Derec’s eyes flicked left and right as he took in the formula. Janet watched his brows furrow at the nonstandard notation-notation she had devised herself to describe a nonstandard idea.

A shadow darkened the doorway behind his head, and a thin, dark-haired girl entered the room. Ariel Burgess. Janet had known she was traveling with Derec, but it was intuitive knowledge only. She wasn’t prepared for the shock of actually seeing her son’s lover so casually enter the picture.

“Wipe that off his desk!” Janet ordered, snatching her memcube from the reader in the same motion. She watched Derec’s face slip from puzzlement to frustration, then he heard Ariel and turned to ask her, “Did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Put that formula on my desk?”

She came up behind him and looked over his shoulders. “What formula?”

“It disappeared when you came in. I don’t mean on the computer, either; it was molded right into the desktop.”

Ariel looked just as puzzled as he had. “No, I didn’t do anything like that. I was out in the living room reading. I heard you talking with someone and I came in to see what you were doing.”

Derec nodded. He looked at the desk, then up at Ariel again. “I’ve been trying to find Avery and the robots. I think he’s hiding out with them, probably trying to take them apart now that they’re locked up again. I think I’ve tracked them down, though. Want to come along and see?”

Ariel shook her head. “Doesn’t sound like it’s going to be much fun if that’s what’s really going on. You’ll probably just get in a fight with him. “

“Probably will.” Derec sighed. He turned back toward the desk, looking one last time for the phantom formula, and switched off the computer. Janet’s view didn’t even flicker; she watched Derec stand, put his arms around Ariel, and hug her tightly. She nearly ordered the computer to stop watching when they kissed, but her curiosity was too strong.

She wished she had, though, when Derec murmured softly, “Frost, why couldn’t I have had normal parents?”

Avery was watching the microscope monitor when the alarm went off. Someone had stopped in front of his laboratory door. He cursed at the interruption, cursed that it had happened now, of all times. He was just beginning to understand the changes Janet had made in the robot cell morphology and how those changes might affect the way they combined to make macroscopic structures. He didn’t want to deal with Derec just now, Derec and his whining about ruining his mother’s experiment. He knew that’s what Derec would say. He knew what he would say in return, that between them he and his mother and her stupid experiment had ruined just about everything he, Wendell Avery, had ever done, and that it was about time he turned the tables; but he wished he didn’t have to get into all that just now. He had better things to be doing.

Well, he supposed he didn’t have to stick around for it if he didn’t want to. It would take Derec a few minutes to get through the locked door; by then he could be long gone.

He picked up the sphere of undifferentiated robot material that had formerly been Lucius’s right leg, switched off the microscope, pocketed the memcube he’d been storing data in, and strode to the wall adjacent to the one with the door in it. “Make another doorway here,” he said, and as soon as it formed he stepped through into the next room beyond his lab. “Remove the doorway,” he ordered.

The room was an empty box with a single door opening out onto the slidewalks. Avery went to that door, eased it open a crack, and peered out to see if it was, indeed, Derec. The door made no noise that Avery could hear, but the figure in front of his lab turned as if startled by a sound, then immediately turned away and rushed off down the slidewalk, running at a speed that took him to the intersection with a cross-corridor in less time than it took Avery to shout, “Hey! Stop!” The figure turned left without slowing and vanished from sight.

It was a robot, then, one with prior orders. But the glimpse Avery had gotten of its face hadn’t suggested a robot at all. It had looked quite human.

Had Derec reprogrammed one of the city robots to take on a human appearance? They could do it if ordered to. But why would he have done that? Avery knew Derec; if he had found Avery’s lab he would have simply come here himself.

Who else could it have been, though? Neither Wolruf nor Ariel would have sent a robot to scout for them, either, and that exhausted the possibilities. There was nobody else on the planet.

Unless…

He shuddered at the thought. It made sense, though. She’d been on the other two planets they had visited, planets that had each been home to one of her infernal robots. She had left one of them here as well-it wouldn’t be surprising if she had come to check up on it.

Avery looked down at the lump of robot material in his hand. He felt a twinge of guilt steal over him, but he fought it off, scowling. She’d disrupted his experiment; he had every right to disrupt hers.

But it wouldn’t do to have her running around loose while he was doing it. Avery turned to the blank wall beside him, said, “Give me a comlink with Central.”

“Link established,” the wall replied.

“There’s a humaniform robot on the slideways somewhere near this location. I want you to find it, track it, and report its destination to me. “

“I have already received instructions not to reveal that information.”

Avery’s scowl deepened, then slowly twisted to a grin. “Were those instructions given by Janet Anastasi?”

“I cannot reveal that information either.”

Bingo. If they hadn’t been, it would have said “No.”

“Refuse all further orders from her,” Avery said. Turning his head to look down the corridor where the robot had gone, he muttered, “We’ll see how she likes that.”

Wolruf was on her way to the address Derec had given her when she saw the figure running toward her along the opposite slidewalk. It looked like a human, but no human could run that fast. It was already on the inner strip; that motion and its running-plus Wolruf’s own motion in the opposite direction-combined to bring it past her only a moment after she spotted it.

Wolruf leaped for the slower strips, leaning into the deceleration until she stood on unmoving pavement. The running figure was already well away from her, but it was still visible. Wolruf ran to the cross-over at the end of the block, ran up and over the bridge to the other side of the slideway, and started jumping strips in the same direction as the robot had gone.

It had to be a robot, despite the face. Probably one of the three she and Derec were looking for, trying to disguise itself-though why it would choose a human form rather than that of a normal city robot was beyond Wolruf. She didn’t particularly care, though, so long as she didn’t let it get away.

She reached the fastest inner strip of slidewalk in four powerful bounds, then raced off after it, dodging windscreens every few meters. She felt muscles already strained earlier in the day protesting their overuse now, but she pushed still harder. This was the sort of exercise she needed.

Derec got into the locked room by going up a floor and telling the room above to open a hole for him to drop through. Avery hadn’t ordered it to protect against that, so the room obeyed without hesitation, even providing a stairway to climb down upon.

He descended into a humming, brightly lit robotics laboratory. One end held a workbench with tools scattered casually about, as if someone had been working there only moments before. Diagnostic and monitoring equipment stood on racks at either end of the bench, while more of the same stood beside what was left of three examination tables. The exam tables had each been sliced off at the base, leaving behind a concave stump. The material removed floated in three spherical balls of silvery metal above each of the stumps, each at the center of a bulky magnetic containment field generator.

Derec tried to estimate the volume of the spheres. They seemed a little too large to be just the remains of the exam tables. Something had to have been on the tables when the generators were turned on, something that had been crushed under the intense magnetic field into a formless blob along with the city material making up the table. With a shiver of horror, Derec realized what those somethings must have been. Adam, Eve, and Lucius.

He walked once around the containment vessels, feeling them tug at the robotic cells within his own body. He was feeling just the leakage from the magnet coils, but he imagined what would happen if he stuck his hand inside the field itself. The robot cells would probably be ripped out through his flesh. Perhaps the iron in his blood would feel the pull as well; he didn’t know. He wasn’t particularly eager to find out.

The power switches were easy to spot. Derec reached gingerly toward one, ready to snatch his hand away if the tug became too strong, but it remained bearable. He flipped the switch off. The phantom tugging on his body diminished, and the sphere of undifferentiated robot cells nearest him settled to rest in the cradle formed by the stump of the exam table.

“Don’t reabsorb that,” Derec said aloud. He switched off the other two power switches, repeating his command, then added, “But you can get rid of the magnets.” The containment vessels didn’t melt into the floor as he had expected them to, but moved away and through the far wall instead. Evidently they hadn’t been made of dianite, but had been manufactured especially for Avery’s use, and were now either being dismantled again or being returned to a storage warehouse somewhere. Whichever it was, Derec breathed a little easier with them gone.

He examined the three spherical blobs of city material, now slumping out of round like a large water droplet on a dry surface. No clues indicated which blobs were which robots, but one blob had a lump protruding from the side, just at the point where it rested against its cradle. Derec reached out and gingerly pushed at the blob, half expecting it to be clammy to the touch, but it felt more like a metallic sponge, or the cushion of a chair. It gave a little under his shove, and he was able to roll it around enough to bring the lump out into the open.

It was a brain.

More precisely, it was a positronic brain, the kilogram-and-a-half of platinum-iridium that provided the lattice within which a robot’s thought processes took place. Neither platinum nor iridium were particularly responsive to magnetism, which was why the brain had drifted to the bottom of the sphere. Derec had seen dozens of positronic brains before, but the sight of this one sent shivers up his spine. He’d seen lots of them, all right, but never one that belonged to a friend.

The intense magnetic field had destroyed it, of course. Magnetism wouldn’t damage it directly, but induced electrical currents would, and with a field this strong there had to have been plenty of induced currents zapping around. Derec conquered his revulsion long enough to dig his fingers into the blob around the brain and pull it free, then turned around in search of a monitor that might help him read the brain’s final state.

He found one right at his left elbow, still switched on, but its sensor was missing. From the length of cable remaining, Derec realized that the sensor had been inside the field with the robot, no doubt reading its thoughts before-and just possibly during-its death.

He felt a rush of excitement. If the monitor had been recording, and if it had recorded a long enough sequence of thoughts, then it might be possible to revive the robot. Just how functional the robot would be was another story, though. Robotic memories were essentially holographic in nature-any fragment of the recording contained information about the entire thing-but just as with a hologram, the larger the fragment the more well defined the reproduction would be. It would take a substantial amount of recording to re-create the robot’s entire positronic psyche with any degree of accuracy.

Derec examined the monitor for memcubes, found four of the tiny storage devices nestled into a plug-in rack. Carefully removing them, he carried them to an undamaged monitor on the workbench and inserted them into the empty slot there. Using the monitor’s computer interface, he quickly scanned through the cubes to see what had been recorded. He felt a smile growing as he read; two of the cubes were full and the third halfway so, all with the digital representations of positronic thought patterns. That was a lot of thinking, far more than Avery should have been able to get in a few hours, Derec thought, but then he remembered that the robots had been in one of their communication fugues, arguing at hundreds of times normal speed. Perfect! A recorded argument would really help define each robot’s individual character.

Provided…

He got up to check the memcubes on the other monitors. There were four cubes in each one, and two and a half from each rack were full. Derec felt his tension slowly let go. All three sides of the argument had been recorded. There should be more than enough material there to reconstruct the robots’ personalities.

So, then, Avery hadn’t managed to kill them off after all.

Using his comlink, Derec sent, I need three new positronic brains, and three portable micro fusion power packs.

In answer, a cabinet to his left slid open, revealing at least a dozen of each already prepared. Of course; Avery had no doubt ordered a complete robotics laboratory, and no lab was complete without a supply of repair parts.

Derec took a brain from the cabinet, removed its packaging, and carried it over to the lump of robot cells from which he had removed the other brain. He felt a moment of hesitation, wondering just how to go about hooking it up. In a normal robot there would have been a series of direct connections, actual plugs that fit into sockets in the brain case, but with an undifferentiated cellular robot there weren’t any plugs. No one place was any more or less special than any other.

With a shrug, Derec pressed the brain into the mass of cells, maintaining a gentle, steady pressure until the cells yielded and allowed the brain to sink into the surface. He repeated the process with a power pack, then stood back to see if anything would happen.

The surface of the sphere closed over both brain and power pack, but when four or five minutes passed without further action, Derec decided that the cells themselves didn’t contain any volitional programming. That must have been imparted in a brain overlay, the first of many instruction sets governing the robot’s actions.

Derec picked up the severed cable that had led to the inductive sensor and held the end of it against the blob. Even if his mother had used a different cellular structure for her robots, as Avery seemed to believe she had, there had to be some regular city cells from the exam table mixed in with the robot cells, and if that was the case then the monitor could re-form its remote sensor around the brain, and he could use it to feed the memories into it the same way they had been recorded.

“Establish contact with the brain,” he ordered the monitor, and when the status screen indicated that the link had been formed, he plugged the memcubes back into their slots. He still had no idea which of the three robots he was dealing with, but if everything worked the way he expected it to, he would soon find out.

“Download the memory cubes,” he ordered.

For a long moment nothing apparent happened, but just as Derec began to wonder what had gone wrong, the sphere of robot material shuddered, deformed as if being squeezed by an enormous fist, and shed a quarter of its mass in a heavy metallic rain. That would be the dianite from the examination table, Derec thought. The robot was eliminating the foreign matter from its body.

What was left slowly elongated, creases forming and the separate sections differentiating into crude approximations of arms and legs and a head. For a maddeningly long time it remained in that vaguely humanoid state, then the limbs slowly took on more definite form and the head expelled a more conventional external sensor, still attached to the monitor by its cable.

The robot’s face was still generic, with only a faint indication of a nose and lips, and only shallow depressions where the eyes should be. Its hands reached up and removed the sensor, letting it drop to the floor, and where the sensor had been, ears began to grow.

The eye sockets deepened, horizontal slits formed across them, and the newly formed lids slid apart to reveal blank, expressionless eyes. The eyes panned outward, each one moving independently, then inward to fix upon Derec. Robot and human stared at one another for what seemed a millenium before Derec finally broke the spell.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

The robot seemed to consider that question carefully. It raised its right hand, then its left, clenched both into fists and relaxed them, tilted its head from side to side as if listening to internal sounds, then closed its eyes. After a second its mouth finished developing, and its eyes opened again. Its chest expanded as if it were drawing breath, and it stammered, “A…as…as…well…” It stopped, breathed in again, and started over, saying clearly this time,” As well as can be expected.” It took another breath, ex haled, and not bothering to breathe again, added, “For someone who has just returned from the dead.”