“Look at yourself, Samash,” Laroo told him. “See what you’ve become! See what I have given you!”
Samash looked and gasped, but seemed to realize instantly what had happened. He jumped off the cart, stretched, smiled, and looked around, a slight smile on his face. I didn’t like the looks of that smile.
“Samash, I am Wagant Laroo. Activation Code AJ360.”
The giant hesitated a moment as if puzzled, then started to laugh.
“Samash, Activation Code AJ360!” Lartte repeated uneasily.
Samash stopped laughing and started looking mean and irritated. He turned and pointed to goatee. “I don’t take orders from you,” he sneered. “Not any more. I don’t take orders from nobody! You don’t know what you did, Laroo! Sure, I know what Activation Code AJ360 means. But it don’t mean nothin’ to me. Not me. You fouled up this time, Laroo.” He turned, ignoring us all, and said to himself, aloud, “You don’t know the feeling! The power! Like a god!” He turned back to goatee. “Greater than you’ll ever know, Laroo, whichever one of you you really are. You’re through now!” With that he lunged for the five Laroos.
“Protect me!” screamed the teenage girl we’d rightly fingered, real panic in her voice—and to our shock the other four, plus Merton and the two assistants, all leaped upon the giant with almost bunding speed. In seconds they had pinned him to the floor.
“Oh, my God!” Dylan breathed. “They’re all robots!”
The girl—Laroo, the real one—stepped nervously to the far wall and tripped the intercom. “This is Laroo. Security on the double!”
On the double was right: we were suddenly flooded with National Police as well as Bogen, arms drawn.
“Stand away from him!” Bogen shouted. “Let him up!”
As quickly as they were on him, they were off. Then it took only a split second for Samash himself, in one motion, to get to his feet and charge Bogen and the NPs.
He never had a chance. As lightning-fast as he was, they were even faster. Beams shot out, covering the giant’s body. It was an incredible display, since any one of those beams would slice steel in two and burn, melt, or disintegrate almost anything we knew—and all they did was stop Samash. No, not even stop him, exactly—just slowed him to a crawl. He was almost at them, but they kept firing and stood their ground—and suddenly you could see the beams finally taking effect.
There was a sudden, acrid smell. Samash stopped, looked surprised and more confused than anything, and then, with a bright flash that almost blinded us, ignited and melted down into a horrid little puddle of goo. At the moment of ignition, all weapons stopped firing at the same moment, so no beam went astray—an incredible display.
“All of them,” Dylan was saying. “Even Merton and Bogen and the cops. All of them.”
“Except her,” I noted, pointing to the still frightened face of the teenaged girl. “That’s Wagant Laroo for today.”
Laroo regained some of his—-her—composure.
“Yes, that’s right. All the important people on the island are robots,” she admitted. “Normally only two of my party are, but I didn’t want to take any chances this time. You can see why.”
I nodded. “But you took one anyway. He almost got you, even after taking enough blast to melt the Castle.”
She nodded nervously. “We’ll have better precautions next time. I really didn’t quite expect that”
“Well? What did you expect?” Dylan asked caustically. “You’re not exactly the most popular person on Cerberus, you know, and you suddenly gave the old guy tremendous power and a real shot at you.”
“Enough for now!” Laroo snapped. “Get out of here, you two! Go back upstairs until I call for you again.”
If you need us again, you mean, I thought grumpily.
“Well, at least we proved the system works, I think,” I noted, and both of us exited at that line, carefully stepping around the NPs, Bogen, and the still smoldering pile of goo.
“How did they stop him?” Dylan wondered later that evening.
“I suspect they trained a bunch of different weapons at different settings on him,” I told her. “His cells kept compensating for one kind of charge and he was finally faced with too many contradictory conditions to fight at one time. One got through, damaged something vital, and triggered the self-destruct in the cell units.”
She shivered. “It was horrible.”
“I don’t think we’d have liked Samash, either,” I pointed out.
“No, not that. The fact that they’re all robots. Even that nice Dr. Merton.”
“I know. Even I didn’t think of that, which shows how paranoid he really is. And damn it, they’re so stinking real! Bogen, Merton—they were real people. Natural, Understandable. They looked, talked, acted just like normal people.” I shivered a bit. “My God! No wonder they haven’t found a defense against these things!”
“So now what do we do?” she asked.
I sighed. “We relax, get some sleep, and find out if we still wake up in the morning.”
We did wake up and were served an excellent breakfast to boot. It was a good sign. After we ate, dressed, and cleaned up a bit we were summoned back down to the lab. Laroo had not changed bodies and was alone now, except for Merton, Bogen, and a figure we both recognized.
“Sanda?” Dylan called.
She saw us and smiled. “Dylan! Qwin! They told me you were here! What’s this all about? I don’t remember anything since I went to sleep last night back in Medlam.”
Dylan and I both suddenly froze, the same idea in our heads, and Sanda, sensing something wrong, stopped too, her face falling and looking a little puzzled. “What’s the matter?”
I turned to Laroo. “You did it anyway.”
She shrugged. “She was here, prepped and available. We decided to see if Dr. Merton’s process would work from what we took off of you.”
“I gather it didn’t, or we wouldn’t still be here,” I noted.
Sanda looked genuinely bewildered. “Qwin? Dylan? What’s all this about? What are you talking about?”
“That’s quite enough, Sanda,” Laroo told her wearily. “Go report to housekeeping on the third level.”
Suddenly Sanda’s manner changed. She forgot about us and her bewilderment, turned to Laroo and bowed. “As you wish, my lord,” she said, then walked out. Our eyes followed her in stunned amazement.
“How does it work, Laroo?” I asked. “I mean, what does the programming we’re canceling say?”
“You don’t know? Basically it states that you love, admire, worship, or whatever whoever gives you the activation code, and that you wish to serve only the wishes of that person or that person’s designated agents. It’s sort of an emotional hook, but it’s unbreakable. They genuinely love me.”
“Surely you don’t activate all of them yourself!”
“Oh, no. But if one of my own robots is the activator, it works out to the same thing, you see. Complicated, though. Takes a computer to remember who loves whom.”
“Well, I gather your process doesn’t work in recording, anyway,” I said, relieved, then turned to Dylan. “Don’t worry about Sanda. She’s still all there. She’s just finally in love with somebody else.”
Laroo sighed. “Well, we’ve done what we could. Merton assures me that the language is still gibberish. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t record and work—but it doesn’t. We tried it out not only on Sanda but on three others, varying various factors. It didn’t work with any of them. I sadly have to admit that I need you,”
Back to my move, I thought, and thank you, Dr. Dumonia or whoever.