She had never liked the attention her illness had forced upon her before, either. Derec nodded. “Okay,” he said, giving her a strong hug before going over to the closet and picking out a fresh pair of pants and a simple pullover shirt to wear.He wouldn’t tell the robots, but he would keep a close watch on her himself today just to make sure she really was okay.
That intention died within minutes of stepping out from the bedroom into the rest of the apartment.
Avery was waiting for him in the kitchen. “What did you do to them?” he asked in his usual belligerent tone.
“Do to whom?” Derec replied calmly, going to the automat and dialing for breakfast.
“The robots,” Avery replied.
“The-oh, those robots. Ariel sent them off to their room last night to talk business out of earshot. Theirs is the new door at the end of the hallway. Can’t miss it.”
“I’m aware of that,” Avery snarled. “What I’m talking about is that the robots are locked up. Inert. Dead.”
“What?” Derec turned from the automat with his breakfast still only half ordered.
“Is your hearing going along with your intelligence? The robots are-”
“Locked up. Inert. Dead. I got that. My statement-” here Derec mimicked the tone of a robot so clearly that Avery rolled his eyes to the ceiling, “-was merely a conversational device intended to indicate extreme surprise. And,” he added in his own voice again, “to indicate that I had nothing to do with it. Which I didn’t.”
“So you say. You must have said something to make them lock up. Some contradictory order.”
“If I did, I don’t know what it was.” Derec looked back to the automat, shrugged, and pressed the cancel button. “Come on, let’s go see.”
He padded down the hallway, still in bare feet, to the robot’s new room. They hadn’t been interested in creature comforts; it was just big enough for the three robots to stand in without bumping into one another or the walls. It held no windows, no chairs-nothing but the robots.
When Derec and Ariel first arrived in Robot City, the robots gave them a small, one-bedroom apartment to live in. It had seemed miserly in a city built on such a grand scale, but the robots had truly thought they were fulfilling the humans’ every need. Similarly, the food had been nutritious but bland until they experimented with the automats to get them to produce flavor. Robots simply had no concept of the difference between sufficiency and satisfaction, and now, as Derec looked into the tiny, windowless closet these particular robots had made for themselves, he realized they were still a long way from making that distinction. Either that or their concept of satisfaction was simply so different from the human norm that Derec didn’t recognize it when he saw it.
Avery had certainly been accurate enough in his description of them. All three of them were frozen in place, standing up straight, arms at their sides. None of them betrayed the slightest hint of motion.
Derec tried the obvious. “Adam. Eve. Lucius. Respond.”
Nothing happened.
Avery smiled his “I told you so” smile.
Derec tried the less obvious. Adam, Eve, Lucius, he sent.
At once his mental interface filled with a hiss of static like that from a poorly tuned hyperwave radio. Behind it Derec heard a faint whine that might have been a signal, but it might have been just noise. On the off chance that they were still receiving, he sent, J order you to respond.
Nothing happened.
He cancelled the link and said aloud, “They do seem to be locked up. I got nothing on the comlink, either. I wonder what happened to them.”
“We’ll find out.” Avery-lacking an internal comlink of his own-stalked out of the robots’ cubbyhole, went to the corn console in its niche in the library, and keyed it on. Into the receiver he said, “I want a cargo team, big enough to carry three robots, up here immediately.” He switched it off before the computer could respond.
Derec had followed him into the library. “What are you going to do with them?” he asked.
“Take them to the lab. I’ll find out what happened to them, and what makes them tick as well.”
Something about Avery, s manner made Derec suspect that he wouldn’t be restricting himself to non-invasive examination. “You’re going to take them apart?”
“Why not?” Avery asked. “It’s the perfect opportunity.”
Derec didn’t know why he felt so disturbed by that thought; he had taken robots apart before himself. But then, when he had done so he had known how to put them back together again, too. With these, Avery had no assurance he could rebuild them when he was done. That was the difference: Avery was considering permanent deactivation, not just investigation.
“Is that reason enough to do it?” Derec asked. “Just because you have the opportunity? They’re thinking beings. You should be trying to fix whatever’s wrong with them, not cut them open to satisfy your curiosity.”
Avery rolled his eyes. “Spare me the sentiment, would you? They’re robots. Human creations. Built to serve. If it amuses me to take one apart-0r to order one to take itself apart-then I have every right, legal or moral, to do so. These robots are a puzzle, and I want to know more about them. Besides that, they’ve interfered with my own project. I want to make sure they don’t do that again.”
“You don’t need to destroy them to do that.”
“Maybe I won’t. We’ll see.”
Derec was of a mind to argue further, but the arrival of the cargo robots interrupted him. There were six of them in the team, and under Avery’s direction they moved silently through the apartment, picked up the inert robots unceremoniously by arms and legs, and carried them out to a waiting truck. Avery followed after them, and Derec, struggling into his shoes, came along behind.
“Do you wish the malfunctioning robots taken to the repair facility?” the truck’s robot driver asked as Derec and Avery climbed into the cab with it.
“No,” Avery said. “To my laboratory.”
“To your laboratory,” the driver replied, and with a soft whine of maglev motors, the truck lifted and began to slide down the street.
The truck used the same magnetic levitation principle that the transport booths used, holding itself up off the street and providing thrust with magnetic fields rather than with wheels. It was an old design, but not that common on most worlds even so because of the need for a special track for the magnetic fields to work against. Trains and busses were all maglev, but trucks, which needed the ability to travel anywhere, were usually not.
Here in Robot City, however, all the streets would support maglev vehicles. Everything was made of the same material. There was no place in the city where a maglev truck couldn’t go, and thus no reason for them to have wheels. Derec wondered briefly if there were wheels on anything here, but couldn’t think of a single instance where one was necessary.
Humanity had finally outgrown them, he realized. Or would, when this and the other robot cities on other worlds were opened up for human occupation.
They had hardly gone a block before Derec noticed a flicker of movement in the recessed doorway of one of the buildings lining the street. He looked more closely and saw that it was one of Lucius’s rodent-like creations. He looked for more and wasn’t disappointed; they were out in force, scavenging the nearly sterile city for food and no doubt starving in the process. They would be able to glean a little nourishment from the occasional strips of grass and ornamental shrubs between buildings, but given as many creatures as Derec saw in just one block, that food supply wouldn’t last out the week. Lucius had evidently bred more of them than that one warehouse-full he had shown them yesterday.
Some of the rodents eyed the truck as it glided past, and Derec felt a momentary chill. When they got hungry enough, would they attack?