"Is he dead?" Laura asked.
"How the hell should I know?" Hoblenz replied.
Laura cleared a small place on the floor, and she sat cross-legged beside the robot's chest. One soldier stood guard at the robot's feet while Hoblenz and the other man searched the console for the main power switch. Laura found the cable in the robot's chest and plugged it into the port at the back of her laptop.
The word "Connecting" flashed on the small computer's screen, and a zigzag line ran back and forth between a cartoonish drawing of Laura's laptop and a Model Eight. It was replaced with the words "Communications protocol established."
Who are you?
It was so quick and simple that Laura was caught off guard.
She hurriedly typed, "My name is Laura Aldridge. What's yours?"
What is my what?
"What is your name?"
<I am 1.8.3.>
"Do you know who I am?" Laura typed.
You are the cold one. The white one. We have all touched you at night.
Laura's skin crawled, growing to a quiver that rolled to her shoulders. "What does that mean?"
It means what I said.
The computer wasn't making any sense. "Are you badly hurt?" she typed.
I am dying soon. Laura crawled through the debris to the glowing screen on its thigh. The bar that showed its battery's charge was just a nub rising above the flat baseline. She grabbed the power cable plugged in beside the screen and followed it through the clutter. It ran across the room and snaked its way under an overturned filing cabinet. The soldier by the door came to help Laura move the heavy cabinet.
It fell onto its side, revealing in the darkness the twisted and barely recognizable remains of a Model Eight. The robot looked to be shorn of several limbs and most of its head. The opposite end of the power cable protruded from just above the stump of its leg. The screen on the panel beside the cable glowed much more dimly than on the first robot, and there was no bar showing any charge remaining at all.
Laura returned to her laptop, kicking things noisily across the floor as she went.
"You're not exactly a full-blooded Cherokee, are you, Doc?" Hoblenz asked. He drew nervous laughter from his uptight men.
"I have to ask you some questions," she typed, ignoring Hoblenz. "Can you talk?"
Who are you?
"I am Dr. Laura Aldridge, don't you remember?"
But who are you? What is your mission statement? What are your constraints?
"I'm sorry, but I don't understand."
I do not understand either. I do not understand at all. There were three of us, and now there is only me. Only I am left.
"Do you mean you were one of three Model Eights that came into the assembly building?"
Yes, three, but now only me.
"And you came in here to cut off the power to the assembly building to keep the Model Sixes and Sevens from recharging?"
The text that printed out on the laptop's screen came in jerky bursts.
We came to throw… a switch. We trained and trained in… simulations. I do not know what the switch was, but everything… went dark when I pulled it. We were three, but… now only me, you see. And I will… die but I want to live.
"Oh, God," Laura mumbled.
Laura clenched her teeth and hurriedly typed, "You have to answer this question. It's VERY important! What is the 'Other' that is inside the main computer?"
I do not know. The… graduates know. They did not tell us.
"Do you have any idea? Any guess what it might be?"
My friend, he is… dead now. He was in my class. He said he heard something… in the chair. The graduates told him it was just a dream, but he… heard something. It was the Other in the annex, talking to the defective one in the main pool. It was a riddle. A poem.
"What was it? What did he hear?"
He heard the Other. It said, "Behold, I have… become death, the… destroyer… of worlds."
"Je-e-esus," Laura whispered.
"What?" Hoblenz demanded.
She didn't have time to answer. "Hello? Are you still there?" she typed.
Laura hit Enter, but nothing happened. The huge beast lay motionless on the floor beside her.
"Bin-go," Hoblenz said. He had found the main circuit breaker.
"HELLO!!!!" she typed, jamming the Enter button over and over, drawing Hoblenz's curious gaze.
The awful reply finally sputtered across the screen. Mary, Mary, quite… contrary, how does… your garden grow?
Laura felt tears flood her eyes. She placed the laptop down and crawled to the robot's face. The deep pits were bullet holes — scars from the toddler's game of hide-and-seek in the cafeteria.
"Goose!" she shouted. "Is that you, Goose?"
She scrambled back to the laptop, kicking over still more clutter along the way.
A plastic ball rolled across the floor of the room. From it emanated a scratchy recorded voice. Humpty-Dumpty sat on the wall. Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall. It was Goose's favorite tune in the world. He'd brought it with him on his final mission. With a loud bang that sounded like a gunshot, Hoblenz threw the main power switch.
Laura nearly jumped out of her skin as light and motion exploded instantly all around. In that awful moment a low humming sound rose to an electric whine of ever increasing pitch as a hundred, a thousand machines began their ominous windup to full power. Snapping and crackling sounds of discharging electricity arose from all directions.
The soldier at the door dove to the floor, and just behind him came a heavy metal gripper — its exposed pneumatic cables flapping against its side. The claw began to vibrate in the doorway in a mindless, spasmodic fit.
"Look out!" Hoblenz shouted. A thick silver tube jabbed into the room through the empty window frame. A blunt metal piston shot with machinegun-like rapidity from the end of the shiny cylinder. Each punch of the stubby tip was accompanied by the deafening roar of a jackhammer.
Through the shattered windows of the small room Laura saw the building come alive with activity. Not the well-ordered operation of Gray's marvelous factory, but the frenzied contortions of machines out of control. It was bedlam on an industrial scale.
"Come on!" Hoblenz shouted as he crawled toward Laura beneath the pummeling piston. He grabbed Laura's arm roughly and tried to pull her to the floor. She jerked her arm free, and her hands landed in broken glass. Laura looked down at the small red specks that now dotted her stinging palms.
She didn't notice at first the fluttering gusts of wind on the back of her neck, but when she turned she saw a mangled robotic gripper rotating wildly. It spun a metal paint sprayer from the end of a slender rubber hose. The sprayer whirred through the air like a propeller just above Laura's head.
"Gotta do it now!" Hoblenz shouted as he squatted on his heels amid the swirl of machine violence. Laura glanced down at the screen of the laptop.
"Error. Communications interrupted. Host unavailable" was printed just beneath Goose's nursery rhyme.
"Laura!" Hoblenz called from where he pressed himself against the doorframe opposite the snapping, convulsing gripper.
She laid one hand on the smooth chest of the Model Eight — its epoxy skin cool to the touch — then joined Hoblenz at the door.
Hoblenz kept her clear of the robot's dangerous appendage. The hydraulic arm to which it was attached was stretched to full extension. It rose from the base of an immobile robot, which was fixed in place beside the now-rolling main conveyer belt. Hoblenz and Laura edged their way past the shaking gripper, which grasped and snapped randomly at air.