Chapter 3. Hide And Seek
Derec’s study didn’t feel the same. It was physically identical to the ones he’d had before, with the same desk positioned in the same spot, with the same computer terminal on the desk, the same file holders, pin-boards, bookcases, and waste chute situated just the same way all around it-he’d even set the viewscreen image to show him a normal, above-ground cityscape-but somehow the study still wasn’t the same.
He wondered if he could actually sense the weight of all the rock and dirt over his head, if that were somehow affecting his mood, but he couldn’t imagine how it could be. If he closed his eyes he honestly couldn’t tell whether he was on the ground floor or a hundred floors up or a hundred floors down. No, it was a purely subjective phenomenon, this discomfort with the room, and it didn’t take much thinking for him to figure out what was causing it.
The study wasn’t his. He controlled it, certainly; he could order it to take on any shape he wanted, to play him soft music if he wanted that, to feed him if he was too lazy to go to the automat in the kitchen himself-the study existed only to serve him, but still it wasn’t his. It wasn’t unique. He’d had exactly the same study on three different planets now, and he could have dozens more of them wherever he wanted, just by asking the city to create one for him. There wasn’t anyone particular study anywhere in the universe that held more significance for him than any other, none that comforted him with the sense of security and permanence a study should have, and that was the problem. He’d had lots of places to stay during the time since he’d awakened in a survival pod on an ice asteroid in uncharted space, but no place he’d stayed in for as long as he could remember really felt like home.
Certainly not this place, not this time. To find it so completely transformed had been a shock, and to discover why it was so transformed was even worse. Any sense of permanence he might have felt about this, the original Robot City, had died in that moment. No matter how perfectly it recreated his old quarters for him, he would never be able to convince himself that it was more substantial than his next idle notion.
His and Ariel’s house on Aurora might have been a home, would have been a home if they’d had more time to get used to it, but they’d only had a year there before Robot City insinuated itself into their affairs again, and a year wasn’t long enough to build more than a little fondness for a place. He had to think hard now to remember how it was laid out, whether the Personal was the first door or the second beyond the kitchen or how the furniture had been arranged in the living room. If he never saw the house again, he wouldn’t be particularly upset. But if he spent the rest of his days jumping from Robot City to Robot City, troubleshooting his parents’ wayward creations, he just might be.
He looked back to the screen, displaying a few dozen lines of the new instruction set for the city. He knew he could modify it to allow for more buildings on the surface, or even to pave over the forests and the deserts and the plains completely again if he wanted to, but the truth was, he didn’t want to. He didn’t really care. It wouldn’t feel any more like home that way than this, so what did it matter?
He supposed it mattered to Avery, but he couldn’t bring himself to care about that just then, either. He knew he would eventually have to apologize to him for disrupting his city, but he wasn’t eager to do it.
He heard Ariel and Wolruf talking in the living room, could tell by their low voices that they were having a fairly serious discussion. Evidently he wasn’t the only one affected by the city’s transformation. He couldn’t hear just what they were talking about, but he heard the word “robots” more than once, and Wolruf’s concerned, “What happens if they….”
There could only be one they in such a conversation. Derec frowned, realizing that they were still on the wrecked starship. He and Ariel and the others had forgotten all about them in their hurry to get inside-and in their hurry to get out of each other’s company after a long flight. Derec felt a twinge of guilt at leaving them there, still locked up in their conference, but that guilt faded quickly. They were robots; they could take care of themselves. Nothing could hurt them here in the city. Even if the city melted the ship down for parts, it would separate out the robots first.
He supposed he could go see if it had. He got halfway out of his chair, then sat back down. He could find out in a moment through the computer on his desk. For that matter, he could find out in even less time through his internal comlink. But that meant staying put and staring at the same four walls or looking out the fake window, and Derec was already tired of the view. Sometimes it wasn’t worth it to do things the easy way.
He stopped in the Personal on the way out, then met Wolruf on her way back to the kitchen with an empty plate. “I’m going up to the top of the tower to check on Adam and Eve and Lucius,” he told her…Want to come along?”
Wolruf considered the question a moment, then nodded.
“Sure.” She set her plate down on the counter, where it melted down into the surface and disappeared, leaving only a few crumbs of food, which migrated toward the disposal chute as the countertop moved beneath them.
“How about you?” Derec asked Ariel as they entered the living room. “Want to go for another walk?”
She shook her head and held up her book reader. “No, thanks; I’m kind of interested in this right now.”
“All right.” Derec glanced over to Mandelbrot, standing in his niche in the wall behind Ariel, but decided to leave him with her. He could always call him-or any other robot-over his comlink if he needed help with anything.
Leaving the apartment, he and Wolruf entered a wide, high-ceilinged, gently curving corridor that led them after a few turns to an open atrium from which branched dozens of other corridors like the one leading to their apartment. Had there been other people on the planet, this would have been a neighborhood park, full of children playing and robots worrying that they would hurt themselves, but now it was silent, empty.
They moved through the atrium to the main corridor, this one straight and with slidewalks leading off into the distance in either direction. All up and down the walls were more atria and more neighborhoods identical to their own. They would no doubt be modified to suit the individual tastes of their inhabitants, if ever they got any, but until that time their most significant difference was in the addresses written in bold letters overhead. Those addresses-three three-digit numbers each-grew smaller to the left, but the slidewalks moved to the right; Derec and Wolruf took an elevated walkway over the slidewalks to the other side of the corridor, stepped on the first of the moving strips, and worked their way toward the faster lanes.
Despite all the machinery that must have been necessary to keep the strips moving, the ride was nearly silent. They heard only the gentle breeze of their passage, abated somewhat by windscreens placed every few dozen meters on the faster strips. A group of four robots passed them going the other way, but otherwise they were alone.
“It feels even emptier than before,” Wolruf commented. “I wonder w’ere all the robots are?”
“Holding up birds’ nests, I suppose,” Derec said. “I imagine keeping the ecosystem going takes a lot more of their time than maintaining the city. “
“Probably so.”
The three parts to the addresses over the doorways indicated the level, then the north-south coordinate, then the east-west coordinate. Derec and Wolruf rode on down the corridor until the second part of the addresses dwindled to zero, then switched over to another slidewalk running ninety degrees to the first and followed it until the third part zeroed out as well. That put them directly beneath the center of the Compass Tower. Stepping off the slidewalk at a bank of elevators, they entered one and ordered it to take them to the top.