10.

          Anita's apartment was a tiny little mess of a place and Brian loved every single second he could be in it. The main living room was nothing more than a small square space off of which sprouted a cramped kitchen, a bathroom with enough room for a stall shower only, and a bedroom that barely fit a bed. The door was cracked open slightly and Brian caught a glimmer of Anita's laundry, clean and dirty, co-mingling in a dastardly fraternization that defied hygiene. Among the filthy revelers was the odd undergarment here and there. The sight of purple lace made his heart skip a beat.

          Anita noticed none of this. She banged around her apartment, the old touch-tone phone in one hand, the handset in the other, with the twirled cord running like a lifeline between the two. Brian laughed when he saw it but Anita shot him a nasty look and he shut his mouth quickly. She didn't go into the details of why she used such an old phone, and now he didn't want to ask.

          For her part, Anita was in full attack mode. As soon as they left the robotic production plant, she made Brian pull out his pad of paper and he began to take notes as they strode back to her place. She rattled off names and phone numbers that she had crammed in her head. She threw various points at him that defended their position in the war against the tyranny of humanity over robots. She preached about the ethic and moral position in which mankind—I beg your pardon, humankind—had placed itself. These she would take later and shape and mold them like wet red clay until they took the form of something useful—a cup, perhaps, or a bowl—and would then fire them in the kiln of her passion until the thoughts emerged a finished piece that she could later take and sell as a position from which there could be no detractors.

          Her passion spooked Brian just a bit. It also kind of turned him on.

          Now, as he sat in an old director's chair that sagged significantly when he placed his body into it, he watched her pace around the rubble of her life, practically yelling into the phone.

          "No! No he didn't do that at all! I know! Yes! Can you believe it? They actually thought they could get away with it! Do about it? I'll you what we'll do about it…" And then she was off on another stream of thought that poured out of her mouth like so much logorrhea.

          Eventually she hung up the phone and her pacing and her vehemence caught up with her. She stood in the middle of her tiny living room for a moment and then her legs simply buckled under the sudden lack of adrenaline, which vanished from her bloodstream.

          She plunked down on the sofa, opposite where Brian sat. They looked at each other for a moment, and then Anita rubbed her eyes hard.

          "Oh man, am I tired," she mumbled.

          "I'll bet," replied Brian, still amazed at the display he'd just seen.

          "It was just so amazing!" Anita continued. "To find a robot who had tripped the inhibiters and hadn't had his short term memory erased! And then, to find out a human had forced him to do it! I just can't believe our good luck."

          "So what's the next step?"

          Anita sat upright as if struck by a bolt of lightning that had re-charged her batteries. Brian wouldn't have been surprised if he saw machine bolts sticking out of the side of Anita's neck and a short man with a hump bustling around her intoning "Yess, maassterr".

          "We have work to do. We have to compile our notes. I have to transcribe the conversation from shorthand and I need you to fill me in on your observations during the conversation. Do you have time to run through this now?"

          Brian checked his watch. "Yeah, I'm good for a little bit. I have some job stuff I need to get done today, but it won't take more than a few hours. I can do that tonight."

          "Great," answered Anita and she bounded off the sofa and back into the kitchen. Brian heard a blast from the faucet and in another minute he could smell the strong pungent odor of coffee scalding at the bottom of Anita's pot.

          Anita pulled out her laptop. It was one of the few items in her apartment that wasn't disheveled or in disarray. She kept it tucked neat and safe in its case and placed lovingly on the side table next to the sofa. She fired it up, splayed her notes of the conversation before her, and began typing.

          "You're the only person I know who can read and write shorthand," commented Brian over her shoulder.

          Anita shrugged. "Once in a while I have to take a break from working advocacy all day every day. Sometimes I need to make a little money, even if I do pour all of it back into the cause." Brian winced. Clearly he had struck a nerve with that conversation earlier. "It's that whole eating-so-you-don't-starve thing," she continued. "I just jump into a temp role as a secretary or admin assistant for a bit. You wouldn't believe how handy shorthand comes in when doing that kind of work."

          "I'll bet."

          Anita looked back over her shoulder at Brian. "You mocking me?" she asked.

          Brian shook his head quickly. "No!" he said a bit too loud.

          "We all can't be freelance techno-geeks," she smiled. She turned back to her laptop. Brian let out a breath of air he suddenly realized he'd been holding.

          They began to walk through the conversation Anita had with Gammons. She hammered on the laptop's keys quickly as she transcribed her conversation. She would reach a certain point and stop to ask Brian about the observations her recorded at that point.

          "So then I asked him to clarify his owner's stance on forcing a robot to act based on the sole fact that the guy paid for the unit," summarized Anita. "What happened then?"

          "You put your hand on his arm. He looked at your hand, then at you."

          "Oh," responded Anita. Some of the excitement had left her voice. Brian looked up from his notes.

          "Can I ask you something?"

          "Yes," she replied.

          "What happened at that moment?"

          Anita looked over the laptop screen at Brian. Behind his square glasses, his eyes were fixed on Anita's face. He did not avert his gaze as he had on many other occasions. This wasn't personal, at least not in the way Brian wanted it to be. This was different, and something about the exchange Brian recorded had seemed suspect.

          Anita looked down at her laptop then out the window, then she surveyed her apartment. She seemed to be having trouble finding a place for her eyes to rest. As long as they didn't land on Brian. He decided he needed to press the issue.

          "Anita? What happened at that moment? You looked…" He couldn't formulate his thought and he was hoping she would finish it for him.

          "Scared?" she offered, staring at the burning bubbling coffee in the pot in the kitchen.

          Brian nodded. Yep, that was it. Scared. Not "frightened" or "apprehensive". These had a certain connotation Brian would just as soon have avoided. These words seemed too elegant to describe the emotion he saw in Anita's face at that moment in the production facility. "Scared" was a far better word. It wasn't as panicked or hysterical as "terrified" or "petrified". It was much more basic than that. It was a raw unfiltered emotion, like the feeling he sometimes got when he was driving and a car jumped in front of him and he had to swerve to keep from plowing into it. It was all about survival and the fear for one's life in a split second moment of danger. Brian thought maybe it was something instinctual buried deep within the human psyche, but that got into realms he knew little about.

          "Yeah," said Anita, "I guess I was scared, though I'm not sure quite why I was. It was the way he looked at me, I guess."

          "Looked at you?"

          "Yeah. When I touched him, he looked at my arm and then looked up at me. He looked me right in the eyes. It's kind of hard to describe, considering his eyes are really just optical sensors that take in information and process it. But I'd swear he looked right at me, deep at me, you know?"

          "But I still don't get why that creeped you out. So he looked at you. So what?"

          "It was the way he looked at me. It was almost as if he was sizing me up. Like assessing an enemy." She snapped her fingers and stood up quickly.

          "That's it!" she cried. "It's been bugging me since we left, but I just figured it out! He was looking at me like I was an enemy and he was sizing me up to see what kind of threat I'd be to him!"

          Brian remained calm and seated. "Your eureka moment aside, you have to figure that to him, humans probably are the enemy. He's been owned by a human since creation and that human makes him do funky things like trip his inhibitor protocols. I'd be wary of humans too."

          "No, this wasn't wary," she said. "This was malice."

          "Malice?" laughed Brian, immediately sorry he did when he saw the expression on Anita's face darken and she sat back down heavily. Time to do some damage control for my stupid mouth, thought Brian. "Anita, he can't feel malice. He's got the emotive processor, but the necessary emotions to experience still have to be programmed into the chip. And things like hate, malice, jealousy—these things are all kept out of the programming code."

          "I'm telling you, Brian, he looked at me with malice, with hate for my flesh and his silicon. Something was going on in his brain and it wasn't good thoughts."

          Brian shook his head. Anita stamped her foot on the floor in frustration, causing Brian to jump.

          "How do you know they aren't programmed with those emotions?"

          "Cause I know. I have a couple of friends that have done some programming for robotic companies. The negative stuff is kept out of the programming."

          "What if he is different? We already know that he's owned by a VP in the company. Maybe he's a prototype?"

          This was something Brian had not thought of, but it did sound reasonable. After all, robotics companies were always developing model units and testing. It's possible that Gammons was a test unit who was being run through a number of situations to test the responses and the level of action as a direct correlation to the responses. That would certainly—

          Brian's thought cut off in the middle as a new thought broke into his head. Anita must have seen the change on his face and asked "What?"

          Brian turned pale. Was it possible? And what were the implications?

          "We know he's got the positive emotions programmed in," said Brian, "and we know from Peter that he's a unit designed to learn. An 'F' unit as I recall."

          Anita nodded, wondering where this was going.

          "Well," said Brian, "what if he's learned to hate?"

 

          11.

          Gammons stood against the wall. His eyes were open but he could not see anything. Power surged into his body. Data streamed into a port in the back of his neck. He was completely vulnerable.

          Eric sat to one side of the robot, daintily sipping at a cup of very expense white tea, smoking a long unfiltered cigarette. In his palm rested a thin delicate handheld, jet black with a full color screen. Like Sidney, he usually spent time scrolling through industry articles online, familiarizing himself with the news from the competition and gleaning ideas for future development. But not this evening. This evening Eric sat scrolling through pages and pages of raw data.

          As Gammons stood, inert and dormant, feeding hungrily on the incoming power, his rubidium brain ran through the seemingly infinite number of daily processing protocols that were required to meet the new day. Many of these were newer versions of much older code, code developed during the early days of artificial intelligence design. These scripts had been perfected decades ago and were simply updated to fit each new model.

          One of these protocols, however, was a newer one, developed by Eric himself, coded by an inquisitive intern, and loaded into Gammons' protocol library. It allowed the raw data from the robot's day to be dumped and sifted through using an off-the-shelf data reader program. The intern was later involved in a terrible car accident that killed him.

          Gammons had been stuck in the Foundry for the night, so Eric was running through two days' worth of data. He made a few notes for follow up. Gammon's memory cache had evidently not been wiped the way it should have been. It would have been relatively easy to locate the guilty party and have them punished. But Eric seemed to think it wasn't as simple as an oversight.

          Sidney's questioning of Gammons led Eric to believe that perhaps Sidney had requested Gammons' memory not being wiped. The questions were specific and pointed, and they focused on that time frame that should no longer be in Gammons' memory. Specifically, Gammons should have remembered nothing about his attack on Sidney in the office. Instead, he did remember it, he remembered that it was a command given him by Eric, and he had an emotional reaction from it.

          Emotions were fine. They were not unusual in a robot. Certainly the large majority of the robotic population did not have emotions, for they were dangerous in beings made of metal. One angry robot could easily decimate scores of soft fleshy humans before being taken down. That was the rationale behind the behavioral inhibitors. It just wouldn't do for these amazing modern marvels to be helping humanity one minute and destroying it the next.

          But some robots had them, which could make life very interesting. Emotions were emotions, and as with any human, they were largely unpredictable. The early types of emotive processors and artificial emotions were slow and clunky. Robots tended to be either as angry as rogue elephants or as happy as mental patients on happy pills. Then came the first real advances in the science and emotions in robots jumped to the next evolutionary level. Along with these advances came the need for behavioral inhibitors. No one would ever forget the story about Jealous Joe, the love-sick robot.

          And that brings us to today, thought Eric, as he replayed this history in his head in the blink of an eye. He focused in on Gammons' emotions. The raw data revealed the conversation he had with Sidney earlier the day before. The robot had told Sidney that he was angry, very angry about being a second-class citizen. Eric had to chuckle to himself. The irony was that Gammons was poised to become the nation's most primary citizen and he didn't even know it.

          But what interested Eric more than Sidney's questioning of the robot was the visit the robot had the following day. Eric watched the replay as the door to the room Gammons was staying in opened. In walked Rubios, the soaking wet, blind-as-a-bat brain designer. Eric was repulsed by the man and had as little to do with him as possible. If he wasn't so damned talented, Eric would never have allowed him to remain in with the company. But the truth is that Peter Rubios was the reason Eric's stock value in the company was so high. It was the advances in quantum computing using rubidium vapor chambers that put the company first in the race to craft the perfect artificial person.

          Behind Rubios entered a man and a woman. Both were wearing street clothing. Clearly these were not employees. Eric turned up the volume and listened to the conversation as it unfolded. When it was finished, he had the names Anita Lory and Brian Coleman written down on the pad before him. Above them he had written "National Organization for the Freedom of Robotic Individuals". NOFRI. How silly. Eric looked up the organization briefly on the internet. An advocacy group looking to free the "bonds of tyranny that relegate robots to the role of slaves". How quaint. They should be fairly easy to deal with, he thought.

          There were two moments that struck Eric as interesting. Both involved the girl, Anita. Beside the video on Eric's handheld was a black background segregated in a grid by faint gray lines. Running vertically through the grid was a green line that wavered like a seismic chart. It was an emotional register and it gauged the level of emotion Gammons felt at any point and time. Depending on whether the emotion was positive or negative, the line swung to the right or to the left, respectively. Anita had reached out and touched Gammons' arm. The green line bounced to the right. Then, as they were preparing to leave, Gammons and the girl shook hands. Again the line bounced to the right. Gammons was feeling rather positive about both of these tactile encounters.

          Eric mulled this over for a moment, the video and the green line both paused while he took another sip of tea and another long drag from the cigarette. As he stared into the blue hazy cloud he exhaled, he wondered: could Gammons have a crush on this girl?

          Eric wasn't sure it was even feasible. He would need to ring the chief architect of the emotive processors and discuss it with her. In the meantime, this is what the raw data seemed to indicate, so he had to conclude it was certainly a possibility. The robot had an almost completely unrestricted emotional range. But if it were so, it could be the first time that data had been recorded showing a robot having amorous feelings for a human. That could come in very handy later.

          Then there was the man, Brian Coleman. Before he even opened his mouth Eric saw that Brian would fit perfectly into his plan.

          Eric listened to the rest of the conversation. Nothing too interesting. He made notes to change Gammons' registry number and have his data loads routed through a different server. That should solve the issue of Gammons giving out his registry number and IP address. Those changes wouldn't take affect until tomorrow morning. It was possible, he supposed, that Brian could hack into the Foundry's system tonight, but the firewall was heavy-duty and he felt it was a chance he could take.

          It was now time to wake Gammons.

          The room Eric sat in, with Gammons plugged into the far wall, was really nothing larger than an oversized walk-in closet. It could comfortable fit three, maybe four people at the most. Rarely was there anyone else in the room with him and Gammons, so Eric had made himself comfortable with a leather chair spattered by brass upholstery tacks, a dark side table made from a long-felled tree, and the most high-tech equipment the company could afford for the management of Gammons. It included screens and data ports and input devices of every kind. But in the end, Eric always settled on running through his nightly routine with Gammons using his handheld.

          Gammons stood on a little rise that stepped up to his data port. He faced outward, his back to the wall. The power port plugged into the base of his back and the data port plugged into the back of his neck. In the early development of robots as a realistic aspect of modern life, the placement of the data and power ports were debated widely and vigorously, as were most things in the early development stages. But the chief concern of many was the danger that ports in the back and the neck might look like science fiction knock-offs. Movies and books had already placed these ports in these locations. But in the end, these were two of the easiest places to plug in a machine. Other locations such as fingertips, toes, even on the face were considered, but ultimately shouted down. A port on the finger would get in the way of day to day functions. A toe was difficult to access quickly (a shoe would need to be removed, which sparked another debate about specific artificial life uniforms and whether they should be required). And the face would just look too alien to be easily incorporated into everyday life. So the back and neck it was.

          Eric walked over to the console just beside Gammons and opened up a new screen. He tapped in his security code for the robot. A command menu popped up on the screen giving him several options. He chose "Wake".

          Gammons didn't blink, didn't flutter his eyes as he woke, didn't yawn or stretch. He was a robot and didn't require any of these functions. Nor was he in the midst of the general population, so the pretense of humanity was unnecessary. The only indication that Gammons was now awake was the glow in his eyes that changed from opaque black to the optical eye color, blue.

          He turned his head and took in Eric with a single glance.

          Eric picked up his teacup and took a sip.

          "Good evening, Gammons."

          "Good evening, Mr. Brickenridge."

          Formality was a requirement of Eric's. He didn't care how stuffy it may have seemed, he required Gammons to address him properly.

          "How are you feeling this evening?" Eric asked the robot.

          "I'm still a bit tired."

          "Really?" Eric tabbed a few buttons and touched the screen once or twice. He checked the robot's power level. It still had a bit of a ways to go. Gammons was not yet fully charged and his internal processors knew that. The protocol called to answer the questions gave the reply as "a bit tired". It still amazed Eric sometimes the lengths that were taken to try to emulate human responses in robots. Gammons was such a dichotomy, thought Eric. He doesn't yawn to show a drained power level, but he'll state that he's tired when asked.

          "You've had a long couple of days."

          "Yes."

          "Would you care to tell me about them?"

          Gammons cocked his head to the side. Eric wondered if a little bit of canine had been programmed into this unit. Of course, that was not possible.

          "What would you like to know?"

          "Let's start with your visitors this morning, and then we will move on to Dr. Hermann, whom you met yesterday, and Peter Rubios, the programmer who reset you."

          Gammons visibly twinged. Eric thought the robot probably didn't want to discuss any of these topics. However, he didn't really have much of a choice.

          "Okay."

 

          12.

          The doorbell buzzed its annoyingly chipper chime, and Sidney looked up from his papers. His bulky form was seated in an armchair in his living room. Around him and the chair, papers were strewn in heaps of varying heights. Sidney often brought work home and spent hours in the evening reading through technical manuals and specs, functional design requirements, white papers on the subject of robotic engineering, and reports of competing robotics companies. Currently he was engrossed in a confidential paper that showed the design layout and programming code for the next upgrade to the robotic brain operating system.

          The doorbell chimed again and he cursed. He put down the paper and struggled to rise from his chair without disturbing the stacks of papers. On a TV tray next to the chair stood his dinner, a frozen meal he'd microwaved thirty minutes ago and had yet to start eating. It sat lukewarm in its plastic container, the gravy around the chicken beginning to harden into a gelatinous goop.

          The doorbell chimed one last time before he reached the door.

          "I'm coming," he shouted, his annoyance quickly growing.

          Looking through the eyehole, he saw the concavely warped images of two people, a man and a woman, both in casual clothes. He was certainly not expecting visitors, and even if he had been, he would have expected people in business attire from his job. He didn't really know anyone outside of his job.

          He opened the door and turned on the front light. "Yes?" he asked with impatience.

          The girl looked to be in her mid twenties. She had long dark hair that ran like rapids over the contours of her head. The boy was about the same age. He was tall, had shorter blonde hair pulled back slightly with hair gel, and square glasses. Both looked nervous, but Sidney couldn't tell very well in the dark night.

          "Are you Sidney Hermann?" asked the girl.

          Sidney had always been cautious about giving out too much personal information. He didn't like the fact information passed so freely over the virtual landscape of cyperspace. It made him nervous and in his profession, a new wave of dangerous had arisen, that of the industrial terrorist. Like the participants of industrial espionage before them, industrial terrorists made a living by hiring themselves to scrupulous companies that were willing to pay for the terror of competing companies. Beatings, kidnappings, and extortion seemed to be transitioning to legitimate business practices. Even murder was not wholly out of the question.

          "Can I help you?" he asked, making little attempt to hide his impatience but taking great pains to shield himself with his front door.

          "Are you Sidney Hermann?" the girl asked.

          The light from the porch cast only a weak pool of illumination. Sidney could see that these two visitors were making a calculated guess. The girl appeared to be searching his face for a reaction. Brian was trying to look past Sidney into the townhouse where Sidney lived.

          "Who are you?" he asked cautiously. He didn't like that someone he'd never seen before had shown up on his doorstep and knew his name. Robotics was a cutthroat business. Sidney had known colleagues—friends might have been too strong a word—scientists and doctors had been kidnapped from their homes. They had been ransomed or never seen again, presumed murdered in the dead of the night. These were the reasons most high-level people in the robotics industry took great pains to keep their identities hidden from the public. And the precautions didn't end there.

          "Who are you?" repeated Sidney.

          "I'm Anita, this is Brian," the girl said. "Are you Sidney Hermann, the fourth level evaluator in the employ of the IoGen Corporation?"

          In a flash of motion, Sidney threw open the screen door and launched outside. Brian was forced to jump back and down a step to avoid being hit by the swinging door. Anita was clearly not prepared for Sidney's quick action. She tried to dodge out of his way, but before she could he had grabbed her by the collar of her jeans jacket and pulled her close.

          With the door propped open, Sidney half in and half out of his house, and Anita in his grasp, he asked with a raspy breath, "Who are you and how do you know what I do?"

          Anita tugged at his grasp, but Sidney held fast, yanking Anita off balance and pulling her into his house. Brian threw open the screen door and darted in after them, readying to leap to Anita's rescue.

          "Close the door," he barked at Brian. Brian made no move. Sidney pulled a small black object from his pocket, Sidney yanked Anita to her feet and placed it on her neck.. Anita, who was still off-balance, froze.

          "Now!"

          Without turning or even taking his eyes off of them, Brian reached his long arm behind him, found the door, and with a quick motion swung it shut. It clicked with an ominous finality.

          "Who are you working for?" Sidney demanded.

          "No one," breathed Anita.

          He shook her once. She had still not regained her balance and Sidney was holding her at an odd angle.

          "Don't lie to me! Joe Schmoe off the street can't get my employment information! Who are you working for?"

          Anita muttered something incoherent under her breath. It seemed to Sidney that she was getting heavier.

          "What?" he demanded.

          "Please," she whispered. "Please, not again." Her legs were beginning to give out. She was blacking out.

          Brian saw Anita starting the slump. He needed to get her away from Sidney. "We're with the National Organization for the Freedom of Robotic Individuals," he tried. "We just want to ask you some questions about a robot."

          "You're from an advocacy group?"

          "That's right. We're trying to get some personal freedoms for robots. We just want to talk. So how 'bout you put down the tazer?"

          This made sudden sense to Sidney. Sure if these two had been industrial terrorists they wouldn't have been bested so easily. But better safe than sorry.

          "Let me see your member cards."

          Brian reached into his back pocket, fished out his wallet, pawed through it and then produced a card. Right at the top Sidney could see the logo, one with which he was all too familiar. NOFRI. In his travels with the company, he had dealt with them all, NOFRI, AHAG, HRRC.

          "How about you?" Sidney asked, tugging on Anita. She didn't move.

          "Hey!" he shouted, "you in there?"

          She still did not respond. Brian stepped in before Sidney decided to do something drastic.

          "She's with me, we're together," he said quickly.

          "So what's her problem?"

          "I don't know," Brian replied. "I've never seen her like this before."

          Sidney didn't like it. This girl named Anita hung limply off the ground, being held up by Sidney more than by her own legs. He thought that it could be some kind of trick, get him to loosen up on his grip, only to have her spring at him like some mad alley cat. But the boy seemed legitimately concerned—or he was a fantastic actor—and Sidney didn't know how much longer he could hold Anita off the ground with one hand. He was strong and fast for a guy his size, something that most people mistook in him, but, though he concealed it well, his arm muscles were screaming. Add to that the adrenaline which was now fleeing his body as the situation began to calm down, and he thought he might collapse right on top of her. He let go and she crumpled into a heap on the ground.

          "How do you know my name and my position?" he demanded. "That's supposed to be confidential information. How did you come by it?"

          But Brian had rushed over to Anita, who was awake but far away. Her eyes were glassy and her mouth mumbled inaudibly.

          "Did you taze her?" he asked Sidney.

          "Not yet," Sidney threatened.

          Brian lifted her up and sat her in a chair next to the foyer. She sat for a moment, then her eyes dropped and she slumped but did not fall. Brian and Sidney watched her for a moment but she appeared unconscious. Brian turned back toward Sidney and Sidney could see a fury in the boy's eyes that wasn't there before. Sidney held the tazer in front of him in defense. He understood with a sudden clarity that the boy had a crush on the girl, and by the look of murder on his face, a pretty strong crush at that.

          "Why are you here?" asked Sidney in a level tone, brandishing the tazer in front of him. "Where did you get your information about me?"

          "Our source doesn't matter," seethed Brian. "What matters is what we do with the information."

          "And what exactly will that be?"

          "Whatever we want."

          "And what is it you want?"

          "To put an end to the faceless anonymity that lets you people do what you do without facing the court of opinion."

          Sidney shook his head and nearly laughed. Post-college kids, he thought. Why are they always so idealistic?

          "You have no idea what you're talking about, uh, Brian was it? No idea at all."

 

          Anita was thirteen. Her brother Alex was nine and Gladys was still with them. Anita was becoming too old to need a nanny, even a robotic one, but she felt comfort in Gladys's presence, so she continued to allow herself to be governed by the soft-padded machine.

          One particularly beautiful afternoon Gladys gathered Anita and Alex together for the purpose of going for a walk. Washington D.C. could be so beautiful in the springtime when the cherry blossoms were in short bloom and the birds had returned from their winter migration to the strip of grassy land by the Jefferson Memorial known as the National Mall. They took a car from their suburan house to the D.C. Metro, took the Metro into the Smithsonian stop, then walked from the Metro stop to the Mall, enjoyed the yellow sun and the chance to give their legs a stretch.

          On their trip back home, they cut up an empty alley and were assaulted by a homeless man with a knife.

          He had been crouched behind a dumpster, festering in stinking brown rags and motionless. Anita did not even notice him as they passed by. But just after they passed, he stood and with a rushing forward motion, he had grabbed Anita and had a knife to her throat. She cried out and he wrenched her backwards.

          "Shut up!" he snapped, his dirty breath smothering Anita.

          Alex wheeled around, his eyes as wide as saucers.

          "Hey—" he began, but the man cut him off.

          "Shut up!" he snapped, indicating Alex with the knife, which he returned to Anita's throat. "Or I kill her."

          Gladys turned around, her heavy rubber treads squeaking slightly on the alley floor. Her wheels creaked and ground and she began to inch forward.

          "Gimme their money!" the robber said.

          Gladys didn't even pause with her answer. "No," she said. Her sweet sing-song voice never changed, never went up or down in anger or happiness. It was enough to make the robber dangerous.

          "Don't fuck with me, rust bucket. Gimme their money or she dies."

          "Why do you think I have any money? I am a robot. I have no need for money."

          "I know that, bolthead! You have money for them"—he indicated Anita and Alex—"and I need some. So give it!"

          Anita had grasped the robber's greasy arm with her hands. It was snaked around her throat. In the other hand he held the knife, which was now pressed against her cheek. She was breathing heavily, the putrid reek of the filthy man filling her lungs. Her heart was pounding. She didn't know what to do, didn't know how to act. She didn't know how Gladys would react. Gladys had told her when they first met that anyone who wanted to hurt them would have to go through her. She had asked Gladys once what that meant. The robot answered with a mysterious "I'll simply take care of the problem," and left it at that. Now the moment had come and Anita was on the verge of panic. Maybe Gladys had no plan, maybe there was nothing she could do, maybe Anita was about to die.

          She began to whimper. Tears filled her eyes.

          "Shut up!" said the robber again, yanking her backward again.

          Gladys continued to move forward.

          "Their money!" shouted the robber.

          "No," answered Gladys. "You will let her go or I will disable you."

          "Oh yeah? I'll take my chances."

          "I will give you one more warning."

          "Shove you warning! I know that robots can't attack people. They got stuff in their chips to keep them from doing it."

          Gladys stopped moving. She raised one arm toward the robber. He watched the movement tensely but he didn't let Anita go. He thought that maybe she could have a gun hidden in her hand, but he had covered his body with Anita's. He felt confident in his knowledge that the robot would not be allowed to attack him.

          "This is your last opportunity," Gladys sing-songed. "Release her or I will disable you."

          He answered by shouting. "Their money, now, or she dies!"

          The knife gleamed brightly as it brushed Anita's throat.

          With a pneumatic blast of highly pressurized air, a twin set of barbed darts launched from a tiny compartment in the side of Gladys's forearm. They whizzed toward Anita and struck the robber in the forearm he was using to hold Anita close. The moment they struck home the strong scent of burning oxide filled Anita's nose. Her hair crackled to life and she felt a tingling in her body.

          At the same time, the robber cried out and arched backwards, dropping the knife and releasing his hold on Anita. He felt to the ground.

          Anita stood still, trying to understand what was happening.

          "Come step over here, honey," said Gladys. Anita obeyed and as she did, she took in more of the scene and began to understand. Gladys had hit the man with a tazer. The electrode barbs stuck in the robber's forearm and wires ran from the base of the barbs to a point inside Gladys's forearm from where the tazer had been launched.

          "Are you okay, honey?" asked Gladys. Anita nodded yes, though she had begun to shake like a leaf. Alex continued to stand where he was, stock still and wide eyed.

          "You will stand, please," said Gladys to the robber, "and we will go present you to a police officer."

          The robber stood. "I don't think so, you metal bitch."

          He rushed forward.

          Gladys didn't move.

          The tazer went off again.

          The robber fell under the new level of current and contorted into a dreadful shape. Once the current stopped flowing, he panted, out of breath. He tried to stand and lunged once more. The tazer went off again, the man's hair sizzling under the strain of the electricity. His eyes bulged and his face constricted. He writhed on the ground while Gladys continued to fill him full of electric current. Finally he stopped moving. Gladys's current stopped flowing. Her body titled forward slightly, her power core mostly drained by the tazer.

          Anita wondered if he was dead. He looked dead. Not that she had ever seen a dead body, but he wasn't moving and his eyes were open. He looked dead.

          In the background, her ears began to register a noise.

          Alex stirred first. His nine-year-old brain unwrapped itself quicker than Anita's, and he recognized the sound at once. "Hey! The cops are here!" he cried.

          "I know," answered Gladys. "I sent them an emergency signal when we were attacked. You would not have been able to hear it."

          Anita turned and looked at Gladys. The light in the robot's eyes never changed. Anita wondered if she had done it on purpose.

          Two squad cars pulled to a short stop and four officers climbed out in quick order, guns drawn.

          "Everybody freeze!" yelled one.

          "Hands up!" shouted another.

          Anita and Alex lay threw their hands in the air while the officers began to piece together what had happened. Gladys didn't lift her hands up because she really couldn't. She remained stock still until the officers assessed the situation. Soon Anita and Alex were told to put their hands down.

          Anita spoke first.

          "Is he dead?" she asked in a timid voice.

          "Yes," answered the officer, a young blond man with a military haircut and a terrible set of ears. He indicated Gladys. "She killed him."

 

          "You have no idea what you're talking about, uh, Brian was it? No idea at all," Sidney said.

          Brian was about to respond when the girl stirred. Brian reached down and tried to wake her.

          "Anita?"

          Then she screamed.