16.

          Anita and Brian returned to Anita's apartment in the city by midnight. They made a stop along the way for food, which they had bagged up and carried it upstairs into the apartment. Brian watched Anita carefully as they returns to the city, watching for signs that she might relapse into another fit of screaming incoherency, but she remained conscious and alert, albeit quiet. Brian tried to make conversation, but it seemed mostly in vain.

          "So what's our next move, do you think?" he asked her.

          "Our write-up," she answered.

          "Naming names?"

          She shook her head.

          Later, as they waited on line for the skinny sixteen year old behind the counter to turn his blotchy cratered face towards them to take their order, Brian tried again.

          "So, are we going to try and get in to see Gammons again?"

          She shook her head.

          "Don't you want to talk to him some more?"

          She shrugged her shoulders. Brian was quickly becoming exasperated.

          "Can I help you?" asked the boy at the counter. They gave him their order, which he repeated back to them, bundled into small paper bags, and handed to them over the counter. Without waiting for them to move and without a "thank you for your business" he looked past them to the customer behind them and intoned flatly, "Can I help you?"

          They walked slowly to Anita's building which was located in a poorer part of the Village. The light bulb in the foyer was burnt out and the sky had become cloudy during their trip back from Sidney Hermann's house. The darkness of the building threatened to swallow them alive.

          "Are you okay?" asked Brian. "Do you want me to come up?"

          "Sure," Anita answered, enthusiasm lacking from her voice. But that didn't matter to Brian. Any chance to be near her, or better yet, in her apartment was welcome for him.

          They marched up the stairs of Anita's apartment, their footsteps echoing along the empty hallways. The jangle of keys seemed so loud to Brian he was certain that the neighbors would wake and stick their heads out of their doors and angrily demand that the two late night arrivals be quieter. But no one in the building appeared, and Anita clicked the lock and swung the door inward with a low creak. Once inside, she swung the door shut again and locked it.

          Brian dropped the food on the kitchen counter. He fished in the fridge for a couple of beers, which he popped open with the opener magnetically clinging to the fridge door.

          He turned back to the living area and saw Anita standing in the center of the room. She had dropped her bag on the couch, but had not moved again.

          Brian tried not to show his concern over Anita's state. He sidled up to her, his tall form casting an awkward shadow across Anita in the pale light of a floor lamp.

          "Hey," he said, and handed Anita the beer. She took and threw back her head in a long continuous draught. It was three-quarters of the way gone before she came up for air.

          "Uh, you want me to get you another?" asked Brian. Anita nodded as she up-ended the bottle and emptied the rest of the amber liquid into her mouth.

          A pop! fizz! preceded Brian as he walked back into the living area with another beer. This one Anita held and sipped slowly.

          "Anita, are you okay?"

          "Yes. I am. Just a little dazed from the night."

          "Can I ask you something?"

          "Sure."

          Brian took a deep breath. He hoped this didn't send her over the edge again, but one never knew. He took a chance.

          "Who is Gladys?"

          Anita turned her big brown eyes up toward Brian's face. They were wet and threatening to over run their lids. She put her beer on the scratched wood laminate coffee table, threw her arms around Brian's neck, and planted a kiss on his lips that could not have been more passionate. Brian's heart raced, his groin throbbed, and he kissed her back. Suddenly they were two souls crushing each other, trying desperately to become a single entity.

 

          Monday morning came and with it a knock on the front door. Marianne Sunderland opened it, her dark eyes taking in the visitor. Marianne had brown eyes that were so big and so dark they seemed to absorb the light that radiated off of other people. Whenever she looked at someone, and that look turned cold, it felt as if she were stealing your soul. But they had little effect on the visitor before her, who had no soul to jeopardize. Standing on the front steps was an old robot with scratched and flaking paint. Her name was Gladys and she was a nanny-bot.

          Gladys rumbled into the house on two short fat treads that served as her method of locomotion. They were attached to two thick struts that whirred with all manner of pneumatic pumps and suspension coils. These in turn led into her body, which was shaped like a pear. She was heavy on the bottom and thinner on the top. This lowered her center of gravity, which made rocking sleepy children to bed easier. Her arms were the same mass of air pumps and servos covered over by thin sheets of metal. They whirred and clicked when they moved. Her head was shaped much like a rectangle, with the occasional proboscis-like protrusion here, something resembling ears there, and so forth.

          What made Gladys's build ideal for the job of nanny was the padding that covered all of this. There was a copious amounts of compacted foam padding wrapped around her arms, legs, and body, which was subsequently covered again in dingy rub-worn silk. This had the effect of making her huggable and squeezable for children.

          Gladys entered the foyer of the townhouse and stood until Marianne addressed her.

          "Um," Marianne began, unsure how to start, "good morning?"

          "Good morning, Miss Lory," answered Gladys. "How are you?"

          "Fine, thank you. Actually, that's a lie. I'm not fine."

          Gladys nodded, a motion so familiar to Marianne but so out of place when coming from a robot that Marianne lost her train of thought.

          "I was apprised of the situation via my nightly data stream. The specifics of you and both of the children were part of the load. Might I offer my apologies for what happened before?"

          "Um, thank you." Marianne had met robots before, she had dealt with them for years. They were common at the D.O.D. They were everywhere, actually. It seemed like more and more, robots were being used to fill job vacancies for menial grunt work that humans did not care for. Robots were utility workers and garbage collectors, landscapers and septic workers. Jobs that were dangerous and difficult could easily be done by a robot with limited intelligent and by the end of the first year of work, the cost of purchasing a robot to perform a task had more than paid for itself.

          But as common as they were, Marianne had had very little direct contact with robots, and even less of a chance to give them direction. She had nothing to say to the menial workers and heavy laborers. She took for granted their presence they way she did her power outlets or running water. They were part of the greater infrastructure of her world. She didn't need to understand how or why they worked, as long as they did.

          Today was different.

          At that moment Anita came slowly down the stairs. Her bruises were beginning to go away though the hurt arm was still in a sling.

          "Mommy?" she asked, her eyes riveted to the robot.

          "Hi honey," Marianne said. She bent and scooped her daughter off the bottom step and into her arms. "This is Gladys."

          "Hi," said Anita without much emotion, including fear.

          "Good morning, young lady," answered Gladys. Her voice was almost musical, soft, soothing, and perfectly at home, like a hymn in church. "How are you?"

          "Okay," Anita replied.

          "Anita," Marianne said, "Gladys has come here especially for you and Alex. She is a nanny-bot. Do you know what nanny-bot is?"

          Anita shook her head.

          "A nanny-bot is a robot whose only purpose is to watch over sweet little girls like you. She is here to take care of you while mommy's at work."

          Anita tensed slightly in Marianne's arms. Marianne, sensing the tightening of Anita's muscles, continued.

          "She had been built to watch over children. And she can't hurt you. Ever."

          "Ever?"

          "Ever," confirmed Gladys. "The people who built me made it so that I could never ever hurt any children I was watching. That means you and your little brother."

          Anita had her arms around her mother, not sure what to make of all this.

          Gladys continued. "And they made it so that anyone who tried to hurt you has to go through me first. And as you can see," and she tapped a spot of exposed metal skin, which clanged with a hard noise, "I'm pretty hard to get through."

          Anita smiled a little. Marianne began to feel relief spread through her, warmly. She put Anita down. Anita took a step toward the robot and held out a clenched pair of knuckles. Gladys smiled, which was nothing more than a swatch of LCD across her face where a mouth might have been changing color from a light red to a bright happy blue. She stuck out an arm that had a bit of metal exposed under the foam and silk padding. Anita rapped on it with her knuckles. It clanged under her hand. She smiled.

          Gladys held out her arms.

          "Would you like to be picked up?" she asked.

          Anita nodded. Gladys's body pivoted forward and her arms scooped up the girl. She swiveled upright, Anita in her arms. Gladys's grip was softer than Anita suspected and Anita leaned into Gladys chest. The robot was soft and comfortable. Anita felt instantly at home.

          Marianne watched all of this with her heart in her throat. But as Anita leaned into Gladys, the feeling of relief returned. She let out a breath she had been holding.

          "Baby," she said, stroking Anita's hair while Anita sat in Gladys's arms, "I have to go to work now. Are you okay here?"

          Anita nodded.

          "Will you help Gladys take care of your brother?"

          Anita nodded again.

          Marianne leaned in to kiss her. Then, slowly and quietly she gathered the work she had brought home, packed it in her bag, and put on her coat. She left through the front door, pulling it closed behind her with a soft click, leaving Anita and Gladys in the foyer, swaying slightly like a gently rocking cradle.

 

          Brian didn't sleep that night. Anita slept soundly in his arms, like a baby after a feeding. He watched her face as he cradled her. She sighed once or twice, her brow furrowed several times, and once her breast heaved as if caught in a gigantic sob. They lay in her bed, which they had not even bothered to clean off. The laundry that Brian had spied early in the day had been mere instruments in which to better angle each other off of. All that laundry's going to have to be washed again, he thought.

          His eyes swept over the tiny bedroom. There was the typical furniture to be found in a girl's bedroom: bed (obviously), dresser with a small dirty mirror that served as a vanity, a bed table, and little else. There just wasn't room. Brian couldn't see the floor because Anita had a habit of leaving her dirty laundry scattered in little heaps on it. He thought she had a rug somewhere under there, providing some warmth to the hardwood floor, but he couldn't be certain.

          Outside, the city buzzed and honked with life, even at this late hour. He was a kid of the city, born and raised here. Would probably grow old and die here too, he thought. Why move when everything I'd ever want or need is right here in the city with me?

          He squeezed Anita gently. She shifted in her sleep, nestling deeper into his arms.

          "I love you," he said to the darkness of the room, hoping it might fill her head while she dreamed. He closed his eyes and fell into a soundless sleep.

          He woke alone. His eyes opened suddenly, as if he'd been startled out of his dreams and he lifted himself halfway upright before he realized where he was. Then he sank back down onto the bed and let his sense come back to him slowly. Bed, with the uneven lumps of laundry, white sheets that smelled like Anita, the constant hum of traffic from the window, cracked slightly open.

          Then he realized he was alone. He sat up, wondering where Anita could be when the strong smell of coffee hit him. The bedroom door was opened slightly and he could hear Anita bustling around the kitchen.

          He threw back the sheets, slipped into a pair of pants, and went into the living area.

          Anita was sitting at her computer, clacking away. She was typing fast and furious, oftentimes stopping to look at her notes or to listen to something she had recorded on her micro-recorder. Then she would attack the laptop again with a furious passion.

          "Morning," Brian said with a silly grin.

          Anita held up a finger, asking him silently to wait. Her fingers moved in a flurry of motion that Brian could barely follow. After another minute of typing, she paused and looked up.

          "Morning," she answered.

          Brian poured himself a cup of coffee. He looked around for sugar but saw there was nothing available, so he sipped it black. He sat down next to Anita on the couch. She was busy clacking away in her laptop. He placed his arm behind her in a show of affection and she winced and squirmed away.

          "What's up?" he asked.

          "Nothing, nothing."

          "Anita?"

          "Really it's nothing."

          Brian's head exploded in a raucous of noise like klaxon alarms. He looked at Anita, who looked away. What's going on here, he thought.

          "Anita, what's up?"

          "Really, Brian, when I say it's nothing, I really mean that it's nothing."

          "So why are you trying to wriggle away from me? Why can't you look me in the eyes?"

          Anita stood and paced over to the kitchenette, refilled her cup with scalding black coffee, and turned around. It didn't escape Brian that she had put a measurable distance between herself and him.

          "Look, Brian, about last night …" she began, but found she couldn't finish her sentence.

          Brian stood and took a step towards her, causing her to shift from one foot to another in agitation.

          "Anita, what's going on here?" he pressed. He had to know what was in her head. He knew what was in his, but Anita had suddenly become more of a mystery to him than he'd ever expected.

          "I think we should be friends," she said at last.

          Brian didn't move. He stood stock still, blood pounding in his face, his ears ringing from it. He took a couple of breaths.

          "Why?"

          "I just think … I just don't want to … I just think it'll be simpler that way."

          "Simpler than what?"

          Anita's shoulders slumped, like a prize fighter who'd finally thrown in the towel.

          "Dammit, Brian! I can't be involved with anyone right now. My life is too complicated. My past is too fucked up for me to sift through, and I don't have the time to unravel it. Me and dating don't mix well. I turn into a fucking bitch and end up hurting the guys I date. And I don't want to …" Anita's eyes began to fill. Her lip trembled and he looked away. She tried to hold it back, but it was like sticking all ten fingers in a dam with a hundred leaks. The levee was going to break. It was just a question of when.

          "I don't want to …" she tried again, but failed.

          "I don't want to …" she whispered and then could hold back no more. She started to sob and then to shake and it was all she could do to hold herself upright. Brian was by her side in a flash and gripped her in the warmest, sturdiest, most gentle hug he'd ever given. She clung to him, her hands with their short bitten fingernails clawing into the bare skin on his back as she kept from falling.

          Brian led her to the couch, where they sat together and she cried in his arms. Finally she began to regain her voice.

          "My dad left when we were young. Actually we left and he never followed. And mom was never home. And we had all these nannies that came and went. One of them beat us so badly we had to go to the hospital. That's when mom got the robot to nanny us. And she did, for year and years. Until one day we were attacked, and the nanny killed the guy. So they took her away and shut her down and sent her to a factory to … to … to be … smelted." At this last statement, Anita began crying again and the sadness she had experienced in life poured out of her like a river. Brian held her and cradled her.

          She began to calm down again, the sobbing becoming more hitched and less bawling. Her nose had been running, and her face was a red blotchy mess. She looked up at Brian.

          "I'm sorry I can't be with you. I have all this shit to deal with. I don't want to fuck us up. I don't want this to be the end of our friendship."

          "Anita," Brian replied tenderly, "I won't let you fuck us up."

          "How will you stop it?" she whispered.

          He took a chance. It was a dangerous move, but he had to let her know he was in this for the long haul. "I'll stop it with love."

          Her sobbing stopped and she looked at him with open-mouthed shock. Then she giggled, which he had not expected.

          "That's so cheesy," she said, giggling more through her tears. Then the giggling stopped. "That's so wonderful."

          17.

          Gammons stood again the wall, thinking. Well, perhaps less like thinking and more like processing. The document he had seen was a clear indication of Eric's brilliant vision, as well as his willingness to be utterly ruthless. Gammons suspected that Eric had the complete support of the Board of Director for IoGen, but then again, maybe not. Maybe they had doubts. After all, it was a gruesome thought, the idea of taking a lifeless human, stripping it of its skin and muscle, and placing it on a robot. It made Eric look less like an entrepreneur and more like a jackal, a fiendish vampire of identity, waiting in the wings for some poor soul to be killed only to swoop in before burial or cremation, perhaps even before autopsy, and harvest the tissue and organs needed.

          Harvest. That was the term he had used in his proposal. Harvest the tissue of the body person. It conjured up visions of the human skeleton as nothing more than a Petri dish for growing cells, a bony framework where the future of robotic engineering would grow. Humanity reduced to nothing more than farmland.

          How could he possibly continue this program, once it began? Would he establish a lab whose sole purpose would be the growth and development of living tissue, manufactured at the helix level and wrapped around metal frames like so much Christmas wrapping paper? Would he be able to grow eyes? How would he grow ears? What of all the other little things that went into being human? Fingernails? Nose hair? Fingerprints?

          Gammons processed through the many different variations, trying to understand if it were even possible to do such things. Then he took a different path.

          Perhaps Eric was not planning on growing this tissue at all. Perhaps, instead of trying to develop it from stem cells or manufacture it completely, perhaps the idea was a continual harvest. Raking the skin from the sick and elderly. They would pass on eventually, and when they did, wills permitting, why not harvest the tissue?

          Or perhaps it would be carnivorous. Human bloodlust was oftentimes insatiable. Instead of waiting for the old to die, perhaps they would simple contract out to institutions for whom killing was perfectly legal. Governments came to mind. Some states were executing criminals regularly for heinous offences. Perhaps once the body was dead, they would pack it in ice and ship it out to IoGen for harvesting.

          And then there was the potential capitalist side of the equation. IoGen could begin a small side business. Loved one dead prematurely? Send us their body and we'll send you a replacement for your loved one. Sure, it's not the same, but we can program anything, so send away and we'll fill your emotional holes quicker than you'd expect.

          Gammons rolled these thoughts through his processor, trying to make sense of Eric's proposal and the long term effect. Not that it mattered to Gammons how Eric planned to maintain a sustained diet of dead bodies to peel and wrap the skin around metal robots. Gammons' plan, should he pull it off, did not allow for future vision and long term effects.

          But the discovery of Eric's proposal caused Gammons to evaluate his plan. More specifically, he needed to speed it up. If this proposal was as far along as Gammons suspected it was, he would need to speed up his plan by a significant amount. And that required action.

          The first thing he needed to do was to hide. Someone was tunneling into his base code library, looking for something. Like a sparrow in the darkest corner of a barn, Gammons was able to ball up his digital self and sit well away from where the activity was. He watched as the programmer worked his way through the lines of code. Then Gammons saw what the activity was for.

          Quickly, almost undetectably, Gammons watched as his registry number in that part of the code was wiped out and replaced by a new registry number. The programmer moved slowly, deliberately, and thoroughly. Under any normal condition, he might have been horrified at the violation of his inner self, but this struck Gammons in a strange sort of way, almost amusing. He watched as the programmer found another instance of the registry number, wiped, and replaced it. He might have been alarmed, except that he now had custom code to escape the confines of IoGen's firewall. He didn't need the registry number.

          Of course it had been Eric who initiated this review. He had told Eric of the visit by Brian and Anita only this evening. Eric had reviewed the data dump. It only made sense that Eric would have heard Brian ask for the registry number and would require a programmer to change it. Another reason to despise his master. Yet even Eric could not escape the coming storm, and this thought soothed Gammons somehow.

          But for now, he had to hide the custom code. But where?

          But then the answer came to him and he relaxed almost at once. Gammons took the custom code, like scooping a hand full of sand from the beach, and placed it in a section of the base code that the programmer had already reviewed. Gammons opened his hands and let the sand fall out of them, into the waiting bucket. Later, when the programmer was finished, Gammons would move the code back to its proper place in the custom library. Then he would begin his plan anew.

          #

          It was late in the night when the programmers finished and Gammons felt comfortable returning the custom code to its original spot. Once it was functioning again, Gammons burrowed his way through the once secure directories and opened up Eric's calendar. He reviewed the upcoming weeks in Eric's calendar at a glance. In a moment he found what he was looking for.

          There was a Board meeting in the morning. If Eric didn't have the Board's approval yet, he'd have it by the end of tomorrow. He was just too sly not to get the approval he needed to move forward.

          Was it possible that Eric would act prior to Gammons's being able to take the first step of his plan? He would need to have the first part of his plan complete before Eric could start the cybernetic organ transfer. If Gammons were wrapped in skin and muscle prior to the completion of the first part of his plan, then he would never succeed. All Eric would need to do would be to look at Gammons and he would know immediately.

          No, it would have to be sooner. Which meant that all of the steps that led to the execution of the first phase of his plan needed to happen immediately.

          It all hinged on a trip to the maintenance shop. Arranging an accident would be easy. But that was only part of the plan. He needed tech specs, and he needed to pick the right ones. With so many to choose from, finding the right one would be like looking for a needle in a digital haystack. Mountain ranges of information loomed beyond the firewall and finding his way along the paths and up to the zenith would be like climbing a mountain to the moon. But it had to be done.

          Which meant he needed to start tonight.

          Gammons opened up a file listing all of the production robots in the Foundry. Many were built here at IoGen, but many more were manufactured elsewhere. They had no artificial intelligence, they were simply machines that executed commands typed into them by an external source. Largely they were used in the production of machines like Gammons.

          It never failed to strike him as ironic, existential even, at the fact that machines were used to build machines.

          Then there were other pieces to the puzzle—like digging through the IoGen libraries to find the source code for the inhibitors—but for the moment, he needed to tackle one thing at a time.

          Just as he was about to take his first step toward what he perceived as freedom, another thought occurred to him. Perhaps he could use Eric's plan to his own benefit. Indeed, perhaps there might even be a way that he could take the next step toward his ongoing evolution. Perhaps he might even be able to find a true sense of happiness. For if he became encased in living tissues, wrapped in a skin that gave him the appearance of humanity, perhaps then there might be the chance that she could return his feelings.

          Yes, the idea grew stronger in his mind. Perhaps he could find love. Perhaps he could find companionship. Perhaps he could find a partner. And perhaps still, she could become like him, carefully preserved and immortal, the two of them finding joyful bliss, until the end of time.

          With this happy thought, Gammons took the bold step to open a window to the outside world, step through, and begin a journey for which he'd longed since the moment he was created.

          18.

          The deep, dead, dark of night had descended upon the city and its suburbs. It lay like a wet blanket over the landscape, suffocating the moonlight and the stars. It caused creatures of all shapes and sizes to be restless and nervous. Women tossed and turned in their beds, men paced the floors, and children whimpered in their sleep. A dread foreboding filled the air in a way that was palpable, yet no one could pinpoint from whence it came. They only knew, somehow, deep within the most hidden layers of their subconscious that something was wrong. Insomnia rolled throughout the city and suburbs like blackouts in an age of waning electrical power. Restlessness descended upon everyone.

          Except for Arthur Phelps. A big man who worked hard, ate hard, and slept hard, Arthur would allow nothing to disturb his night's rest and became a fierce grumbling bear when woken.

          So it was with a certain nervous trepidation that Leon Ulrich dialed Arthur's phone number. The phone rang on Arthur's nightstand. Groggily he picked it up and managed to mumble "Hello" into the mouth piece.

          "Arthur? It's Leon. Are you awake?"

          "Seriously?" barked Arthur, still not fully awake, though his anger with his assistant was getting him there. "It's—what time it it?—it's two-thirty in the fucking morning, Ulrich. What the fuck do you want?"

          Nonplused by Arthur's language, something that most of the staff in the web systems group at Reval Industries had long since grown accustomed, Leon pressed on.

          "Arthur, we've had a hack."

          Arthur paused. He was a little more awake now than he had been before. His wife resettled next to him and stirred slightly from her dreams.

          "Arthur, honey," she mumbled, "what is it? Everything 'kay?"

          "Hold on, Leon," Arthur murmured into the phone. Then holding it against his chest to muffle it, he leaned over a kissed his wife. "Everything's fine, baby. It's just work. Go back to sleep, I'll be back in a few minutes."

          She mumbled something in reply that Arthur could not understand. He stood and pulled on a pair of boxers and grabbed a T-shirt from the pile of clean laundry sitting at the foot of their bed, waiting to be put away. No sense shuffling around the house in nekked, thought Arthur. Might scare the neighbors. He pulled the bedroom door shut behind him as he left and padded downstairs in bare feet. The weight from his massive six-foot seven-inch frame caused the floorboards to groan under the carpeting.

          "Okay, Leon, go ahead," Arthur rumbled in his throaty baritone that blended perfectly with his size as he walked into the kitchen for some water.

          "Okay," said Leon, "here's what we know. At about one-forty-five this morning the firewall was breached. The perimeter alarms went off and alerted the night watch crew. They logged on immediately and found some pretty sophisticated tunneling that had been done about two hours earlier. As they started to follow the electronic signature trail that led out from the tunnel—to try and determine the source, you see—they got caught in a trap set by the intruder. The tunnel through the firewall collapsed and all the local machines logged onto the site at the time crashed."

          Arthur interrupted.

          "Internal locals or external? Or both?"

          "Internal only," Leon continued. "Anybody who was surfing the site who was external, you know, like surfing from home or something, was fine. It was just the internal local machines that suffered. The booby-trap was set so that if any local machine was trying to determine the source of the breach, any machine logged onto the server from the backend—in other words, the company end—was infected and crashed."

          "What's the damage?"

          "Significant. A quarter of the machines were infected."

          Arthur brought his big brown hands to his face and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He had not put his glasses on when he came downstairs, but it seemed to him the pain of them was present anyway. Maybe it was just a habit he had developed after so many years of wearing glasses and so many years of dealing with systems issues.

          "You're telling me that twenty-five percent of out machines went down? A quarter of our people were up at two in the morning working?"

          "No," Leon replied, "I'm sure not. But a lot of people leave their machines up and running. And a lot of people have a scheduler built into their system to kick off some tasks before they even come in in the morning."

          "Fine. Keep going."

          "Okay, so anybody who was logged on crashed. So the night crew logged onto their secondary PCs. The tunnel was gone and the booby-trap sprung, so they went in search of the files that had been breached."

          "And?"

          "Are you sitting down? They found that the hacker was still in the system."

          That gave Arthur pause. Something very strange was going on and it was just hitting Arthur that he might have a really huge problem on his hands.

          "Say that again?"

          If he could have heard Leon nodding through the phone, Arthur would have sworn that Leon was nodding at that moment. "Exactly," Leon said. It was like he was agreeing with Arthur's disbelief without Arthur having to ask more than a simple question.

          "The hacker, whose tunnel collapsed on our night crew, was still in the system."

          "Where was he?" Arthur said curtly.

          "In the specs."

          Now Arthur knew he had a problem. A big one.

          "Wake up the internet security team. All of them. Get them in the saddle. I'm coming in."

          He didn't even wait for a reply before he clicked off the phone, tossed it on the nearest chair, and bounded up the stairs for some clothing.

          The ride in was the easiest Arthur had had in several years. Security was his thing at Reval Industries, the biggest direct competitor of IoGen, and there hadn't been a breach in years. He took the thirty minutes it took him to get to work to reflect on his tenure at Reval. He came in after college, a leaner, meaner version of the man he was today. He landed a job as a systems programmer, nothing more than a low level grunt in the company, a fly on the rhino of the workforce. He was saddled with acrimonious supervisors, little men with god complexes that rule their tiny fiefdoms with a mean and underhanded cruelty. He worked with broken people, programmers older than he who had seen the golden age of programming come and go and pass them by. They sat, fat and lazy at their terminals, tapping on the keys at a snail's pace, the ennui of midlife born of wanderlust weighing them down like anchors roped around their necks. He worked for next to nothing, the glut of programmers that flooded the markets in the earlier part of the decade bringing the cost of hiring one down to that of an entry-level grunt.

          And this was to say nothing of the racism. Being a black man in white work group was difficult enough, but being a black man in a largely white company, a company that put on a brave face for the federal government but in truth did not really like black people—the first few years in the job he fought tooth and nail with himself to stay on track.

          Eventually he began to move up, slowly at first, then very quickly. His accomplishment could not be ignored. He introduced huge advances in systems security to the company, implemented operating procedures, protocols, process improvements that allowed the upper management to feel safe. And he did it before being asked. Always a forward thinker, he had already nearly completed improvements before they were even identified and requested by management. So he was given more and more work, and consequently more and more money. In no time, he was the vice president of internet operations and digital security, no small job in a company that built robots.

          Arthur reflected on all of this as he drove his battered old pickup truck into the office. Much as he tried, he could not give up this truck that he seen him through so many years. The seat had only really become comfortable, molding itself finally to his muscular bulk, within the last few years. He identified with the truck, a vehicle that had seen better days, that was no longer new, that was at times vulgar and overbearing, yet that never failed to perform, never failed to succeed, never failed come through at the right moment.

          So when he reached the office complex of Reval Industries, Arthur Phelps, despite the early morning time of three-fifteen, was wide awake and in attack mode.

          The big glass doors slid open for him and he nodded to Teddy, the security guard on duty this morning. He swiped his ID card, thumbed the elevator button, and waited. Finally the polished steel doors slid open, allowing him to step inside where he was forced to place his eyes in a viewer by the floor buttons. A quick red beam of light flashed and verified his identity via a retinal scan, then the floor buttons became active. He thumbed the fifth floor and up the elevator glided.

          "Who is here so far?" he asked, his voice carrying over the cubes like water.

          "Everybody but Simpkins," answered Leon. "Didn't pick up any of his phones or pages. Not sure where he is."

          "Fine, we'll move forward without him. Meeting in my office, folks," Arthur bellowed over the cubes, causing heads to pop up like prairie dogs. "Now!" he added for emphasis.

          "Somebody tell me where we stand?" he asked after the internet security group had crowded into his office.

          A small mousy woman named Jackie stepped forward. She had kinky black hair that she could do nothing with other than to pull it back into the tightest pony-tail Arthur had ever seen. At three in the morning, she had serious bags under her eyes. She recapped everything that Leon had told Arthur over the phone. Then she got to part about specifications.

          "So they broke into the specs?" Arthur asked. Jackie nodded. "What did they take?"

          "I'm not sure they took anything."

          "What do you mean?"

          "Well," shrugged Jackie, "none of the files show any activity. It doesn't look like they were opened or even touched."

          Arthur didn't like the sound of that. Someone breaking into Reval's specs just for fun? Just to show they could? Why?

          Jackie was on the same wavelength Arthur was riding. "If you ask me, I'd say they weren't after anything at all. I'd almost say they did it to see if they could."

          "That's what it sounds like," said Arthur, "which is why I think you're wrong."

          Jackie looked at her feet. She didn't take criticism very well. It made her uncomfortable and hurt and she tended to study her shoes in depth when she received it. Arthur pushed her very hard. He had a goal. He knew she was very good at what she did, he just needed her to know it. So he pushed her around, trying to get a rise out of her. It had become a running joke in the office. Only she didn't find it funny. So Arthur pushed her harder.

          "Would it make sense to you to break into a highly secure, highly confidential area of another company, just to see it you could?"

          Jackie shook her head.

          "Then why do it?"

          "Maybe it was just kids?" offered Amy, a girl who worked in the cube next to Jackie.

          "Nope," answered Arthur. "Try again."

          "Industrial espionage?" tried Matt, another member of the team.

          "They didn't steal anything," Leon answered before Arthur could reply.

          "That doesn't mean it was industrial espionage," Arthur said, surprising everyone in the room, including Leon.

          "Huh?" Leon asked.

          "The intent may not have been to steal something. Maybe the intent wasn't to steal, but to show us that they could steal, if they wanted to."

          "Why would they want to let us know that?" asked Jackie.

          "Why do you think?"

          She shrugged her shoulders. Arthur sighed. She'll never be more than she is here, he thought.

          "It's digital saber-rattling," he said. "It's an industrial arms race in the robotics industry. It's a challenge."

          Arthur was met with a room full of blank looks. So much for the forward thinkers of this group.

          "Go do what you do best. Find out where the hack came from. Also, check out the spec files, all of them. I know they don't appear to be touched, but check them out anyway. See if any of the timestamps have been altered. Come find me the moment you do."

          A few hours and several cups of coffee later, Leon knocked on Arthur's door.

          "Yeah?"

          "We found something."

          "'Bout fucking time."

          Leon stepped aside and let Jackie enter the room. Arthur stopped himself from being crestfallen. Hopefully this won't be the waste of time I'm worried if will be.

          "Yes, Jackie?"

          "I found something in the specs."

          "Yes?"

          "Someone has gone in and tampered with the time stamp on one of the specs. It was accessed this morning, during the hack."

          "And?"

          "And whoever did it appears to have opened it, copied it, closed it, and altered the file history."

          Arthur looked at Leon and nodded grimly, folding his hand behind his head. "Well, there you go. It was theft after all. Where'd the hack come from?"

          "We're still running it down. Should hopefully have an answer within the hour."

          "But …" began Jackie, hesitantly.

          "But what?" prodded Arthur.

          "I don't think it was industrial espionage."

          "Why?"

          "Because of the spec. It wasn't anything fancy."

          "What was it."

          "A basic automobile production robot."

          Arthur raised his eyebrows, leaned forward in his chair, and put his massive hands flat on his desk.

          "A car-making robot?" he asked.

          "Yes," Jackie replied. "It's not even an A.I. model. This technology's been around for years."

          Arthur turned his quizzical look toward Leon, who merely shrugged. At that moment, Matt poked his head into Arthur's office.

          "I found the source," he said. "Well, not the exact source, I couldn't trace it all the way back, there's a pretty hefty firewall in place, but I think I found where the hack originated—"

          "Where?" interrupted Arthur.

          "It looks like it started somewhere within IoGen."

          The puzzled expression on Arthur's face deepened, the grimace on Leon's face lengthened, and Jackie sat waiting for an explosion she felt sure was to come.

          But Arthur didn't explode. This one he could not wrap his head around. He managed only a softly spoken question:

          "What the fuck?"