There are hidden cameras in the wings, and microphones concealed throughout the stage and galleries. There are also giant screens hung above the stage on which close-ups of the performers are projected. A technical director orchestrates lighting and the selection of camera angles and depth of field from the backstage control center.]

[CIRCUIT BREAKER: This is the first work of art ever created by a robot, on Robot City or elsewhere. It is a tetragonal pyramid, two four-sided pyramids stuck together at the wide base, that rotates on one point. Circuit Breaker is composed of plasticrete, the same material as the rest of the city, but it has been reprogrammed so that its surface reflects crimson, ochre, and blue as it rotates. Each plane is a different color, and each color possesses nuances, as if it had been done with watercolors. All moving parts, especially the rotation mechanism, are underground where they will not mar the effect. Circuit Breaker is easily the most beautiful building in Robot City, the robotic equivalent of a Japanese garden. Unlike human art, however, it is equally effective for humans and robots.]

CANUTE: Canute is a designer robot built with a tall, imposing black form. His face more resembles the helmeted head of a storm trooper than the featureless faces of most of Robot City's other inhabitants. Canute is the closest thing to a rigid conservative that exists in Robot City. His personality is extremely suspicious of change, creativity or anything else that would threaten the status quo of Robot City.

HUNTER-SEEKER ROBOTS: These specialized robots come encased in featureless silver humanoid metal shells. Behind their blank faces, however, are massive amounts of surveillance equipment-radar tracking devices, infrared cameras, listening devices, recording gear-in short, anything that would aid them in pursuing and apprehending fugitives, whether human, robotic or alien.

LUCIUS: Lucius has the standard slender, grey humanoid shape of most supervisor robots. What sets him apart from his fellows, besides his unique cognitive processes inside his positronic brain, is his slightly slumped posture and hesitant gestures and mode of speech.

THE THREE CRACKED CHEEKS: Following the traumatic near-destruction of Robot City by environmental disruption, Lucius was not the only robot driven to seek a deeper comprehension of the Laws of Humanics through emulating humans. M334, Benny, and Harry came together in an attempt to understand the phenomenon of music. With only skimpy written records to guide them, they reinvented the instruments, created false lips to aid in the playing, and tried to reconstruct the style of jazz of the 1940's.

AUTOMATS: Since the Robot City robots considered their First Law obligations on food fulfilled by providing nourishing, if tasteless, meals on request, Derec reprogrammed the Central Core computer to include user-controlled food synthesizers-automats-in one building out of ten. The automats combine varying proportions of supplies from their stocks of basic nutrients according to codes entered at the keyboard.

The son of an American doctor, Arthur Byron Cover was born in the upper tundra of Siberia on January 15, 1950. He attended a Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop in 1971, where he made his first professional sale, to Harlan Ellison's Last Dangerous Visions. Cover migrated to Los Angeles in 1972. He has published a slew of short stories, in Infinity Five, The Alien Condition, Heavy Metal, Weird Tales, Year's Best Horror Stories, and elsewhere, plus several SF books, including Autumn Angels, The Platypus of Doom, The Sound of Winter, and An East Wind Coming. He has also written scripts for issues of the comics Daredevil and Firestorm, as well as the graphic novel Space Clusters. He has been an instructor at Clarion West and was managing editor of Amazing Heroes for a time. Arthur Byron Cover is a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology The Best of the New Wave and the author of three Time Machine books for Byron Preiss Visual Publications.