"Wake up, my lad," came the voice of Dr. Avery from behind the veil of blackness. "The time has come to join the land of the living."

Derec opened his eyes. Dr. Avery's face hovered over him, going in and out of focus. Avery's expression was as neutral as his tone had been sardonic. Derec sensed they were both calculated; the constant light burning in the doctor's eyes was under control only with effort.

"What happened to me?" Derec asked hoarsely. "What did you do to me?"

"The Hunter robots knocked out you and your friends with a dose of nerve gas. The effects were temporary, I assure you, and there will be no aftereffects. I had to assure the Hunters of that, too, just as I had to convince them that you three would be more safely moved through the narrow corridors if you were unconscious. You see, I know these robots, and can justify much to them that you would never dream of."

"Where are my friends?"

Avery shrugged. "They're around." He must have thought better of that answer, because then he said, and not unkindly, "They're here in the lab. You can't see them yet because your vision hasn't cleared."

"Where's Mandelbrot? You haven't-haven't dismantled him, have you?"

Avery solemnly shook his head. "No. That would have been a waste of some fine workmanship. You're quite a roboticist, young man."

"I suppose I should be flattered.”

"I suppose you should be, too."

Derec closed his eyes in an effort to obtain a better idea of his bearings. He knew he was lying down, but his position was definitely not horizontal. The problem was, he couldn't tell as yet if his head was tipped up or down. Closing his eyes, however, turned out only to make matters worse. He felt like he had been strapped to a spinning wheel of fortune. He tried to move.

"I want to stand up," he said. "Untie me."

"Strictly speaking, you're not tied down. You're being held down by magnetized bars at your wrists and ankles." Avery held up a portable device with a keyboard. "This will demagnetize the bars, releasing you, but only I know the code."

Derec felt ridiculously helpless. "Could you turn down the lights, at least? They're hurting my eyes."

"I know I really shouldn't care," said Avery, looking away. "Canute!" he called out, and the glare diminished.

It was immediately easier for Derec to see. The light grid was several meters above his head. He glanced to his right to see Ariel still asleep on a slab, also held down by magnetized bars. Beyond her was a battery of computers and laboratory equipment and various robotic spare parts-not to mention a compliant Canute dutifully overseeing a chemical experiment of some kind.

On Derec's left, Wolruf lay face-down on a slab. Also out cold. Her tongue hung limply from her mouth.

A closed-down Mandelbrot stood nearby against the wall, looking like a statue, an eerie statue that Derec half expected to come to life at any moment. Indeed, he thought about ordering Mandelbrot to awaken, but he was too afraid Avery had already planned for that contingency. In any case, he did not wish to see his friend again suffer from the feedback Avery had brought on with his electronic disrupter.

"Thanks for turning down the lights," said Derec. " Are my friends well?"

"As well as they were. I really must compliment you, young man. You're really quite resourceful.”

“What do you mean?"

"Even when you were unconscious, you were able to resist my truth serums. You babbled incessantly, but I got little information of any value out of you."

"Maybe that's because I've none to give. I didn't ask to be stranded here, you remember."

"I shall strive to keep that in mind," said Avery wearily. He sighed as if near exhaustion.

Derec certainly hoped that was the case. Now that would be something he could turn to his advantage. "Did you find out anything about my identity while I was out?" he asked.

"I was not concerned with your personal matters. I merely wished to know how you had sabotaged the character of my robots. "

Derec could not resist laughing. "I've done nothing to your robots or to your city, unless you could count saving it from a programming flaw. Any mistakes in your design are your own, Doctor.”

“I don't make mistakes.”

“No, you're simply not used to making them. But you make them, all right. If nothing else, you accomplished more than you intended. Your meta-cells are capable of duplicating protein organizational functions on a scale unprecedented in the study of artificial life-forms. The interaction between the constant shifts of the city and the logic systems of the positronic brain seems to liberate the robot brain from its preconceived conceptions of its obligations. And if what's happening to Mandelbrot's mind is any indication, the end results are infectious. “

“I doubt it. Maybe your robot is just stewed from incompatibility with the city's meta-lubricant.”

“You're grasping at neutrons!" said Derec, futilely trying to kick off the bars over his feet and succeeding only in twitching his toes. "Isn't it more reasonable to assume that the environmental stress of the replication crisis-caused by a bug in your own programming-triggered the emergence of abilities latent in all robots of a sufficiently advanced design?"

Avery thoughtfully rubbed his chin. "Explain.”

“There's no precedent for Robot City. There's never been another society of robots without humans. Different things were already happening before Ariel and I got here, things that had never even been imagined before."

"What kinds of things?" Avery was studiously blase.

"I'm sure you saw them from your office in the Compass Tower," Derec said. He was rewarded with a raised eyebrow from Dr. Avery. "Oh, yes, we've been up there. I've also been to the central core, and I've talked to the chief supervisors. Your robots decided to study humanity in order to serve it better. Robots don't usually do that. They even tried to formulate Laws of Humanics to try to understand us. I've never heard of robots doing that before."

"And I suppose you have a theory as to why this is happening."

"A couple." Derec started to count the points off on his fingers, but it didn't work in his position. "First, the stress of the replication crisis. It was a survival crisis comparable to the ice ages of prehistoric Earth. The robots were forced to adapt or perish. My interference helped end the crisis, but also helped shape the adaptation.

"Second, the actual isolation of Robot City. Without any humans around, evolutionary steps that would have been halted were allowed to continue: the study of the Laws of Humanics, for one example; robots getting accustomed to taking an initiative, for another. These changes not only survived, they flourished. They've become part of the ingrained positronic pathways of the robots here. Even the primitive early microchips went into something like a dream state when they weren't in use. Now we're seeing what happens when we don't wake them up forcibly."

"These things you're telling me don't prove a thing. They're theories, nothing more. They certainly don't constitute empirical proof." Avery stifled a yawn.

"Oh? I'm boring you, am I?"

"Excuse me. No, you're not boring me at all. You're actually quite interesting for a young man, though your charming ideas about robots and reality positively reek of your inexperience. That's to be expected though, I suppose." Again he patted the bar across Derec's feet.

Derec scowled. One thing was certain. He could deal with Avery's mental instability, he could tolerate the man's arrogance, but the man's condescending tenderness nauseated him to the core of his being. And not for any reason that Derec could discern. That was just the way it was. He couldn't help but wonder if he had ever had anything to do with Avery at some time during his dim, unremembered past. "So what information did you get out of me?"