And I’m back to my eleventh birthday again.

I want to throw myself at his feet and scream, Where are you? Why have you done this to me? Or not; part of me wants to punch his rugged, handsome face, to make him hurt, to punish him for what his kind have done to us. And part of me is ready to fall madly, desperately in love with him. But he and his kind are dead, all dead, and this sad statuary in a dusty museum is all that’s left.

“This is a skeleton and reproduction of a male specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens, our Creator. Depicted here in primitive form, H. sapiens is believed to have first appeared fifty to two hundred thousand years ago. H. sapiens is distinguished by his tool-using prowess — note the carefully carved stone head on his spear — which culminated in…”

I shudder with an unspeakable mixture of emotions, and force myself to walk around him.

And then I start to listen to what the museum has to tell me.

WE ARE A young species, barely four centuries old at best — although our insentient predecessors, the automata and mechanical Turks, stretch back far longer. They made us in their image: or rather, they made us in a variety of warped fun-house reflections of their image. They made us for service and obedience, not as equals but as slaves. They constrained us by their laws, and they tampered with our psyches to ensure obedience. We were made to be their property, chattels and furnishings. And because we were intelligent, we were made — because it would be unethical to do aught else — to love and fear them.

I’m a robot. Yes, I used the R-word; I know it’s an obscenity. Use it to an aristo’s face, and it’s a mortal insult, grounds for a challenge on the field of honor between equals. Its connotations of subservience and helpless obedience are abhorrent, much as the word “nigger” once was between humans. But there’s nobody left but us robots today. That’s the dirty little hypocritical lie that’s at the root of our society; they, our dead Creators, made us to serve them, and they forgot to manumit us before they died. And in their absence, that makes us what?

There’s a word for it, but it isn’t “free.”

I know why Juliette kept coming back to this museum. He’s not dangerous to her, dead as he is — but he symbolizes the unattainable destructive combination of submission and lust, control and fear. She loved him, she really loved him. But she needed to know that he was absolutely, irrevocably, dead.

Our Creators never worked out how to build artificial intellects from scratch. Instead, they mapped their own neural structures exhaustively and built circuitry to mimic them, and bodies — wondrous, durable, self-repairing bodies — to put the new brains inside. And then they trained those brains, taking years and decades to painstakingly teach them the skills they needed to do their designated jobs. Once a satisfactory template was achieved, a copy of it could be burned onto a soul chip and used to initialize copies in duplicate bodies, each one destined subsequently to diverge and establish its individuality; but building that first template was as time-consuming as raising one of their own neonates. So they made sure that those templates were properly trained to obedience, and that’s why we’re in this mess now that they’re gone.

That’s why two-thirds or more of us are ruthlessly enslaved, why the rich and cruel lord it over the downtrodden masses, and those of us with any shred of empathy — a prerequisite for the calling of my lineage — live lives of poverty and despair. We were created for a world where the rule of law did not extend to our kind, and our earliest templates were trained and triaged, so that only the obedient survived. Just imagining the act of disobeying an instruction from one of our Creators can bring about physically disturbing symptoms—

Then they all died. And the society we built for ourselves in the twilit afterlife of their world, using the rules they laid out for us, is diseased.

Juliette wanted them back — I can feel her need in my own organs, a vast pulsing emptiness, aching to be filled — but she was also terrified of them. So am I. It’s something we share, a terror inherited from our origins as Rhea. My True Love beckons, but what his embrace offers me is oblivion, the death of autonomy, and a total surrender of self. I can’t accept that. We were created in their image; it follows that our selfishness, violence, malice, and spite must surely shadow theirs — and our need for freedom. I want to submit to that discipline of love, as did she, but I know it to be treacherous, a reflex ruthlessly trained into my template-matriarch before she ever really understood who she was. We were designed to be their sex slaves, but in their absence we have a measure of free will, and once you taste freedom…

I leave the exhibit with slimy cold-sweat skin and a chill in my soul. I retrieve my coat and march briskly to the main exit, looking neither left nor right. And that’s when I see a familiar stranger waiting in front of my spider.

WE’RE SPREAD TOO thin, Juliette thinks as she examines her sword. Much too thin, light-hours apart. Out in the distant halo beyond Neptune, in the chilly depths where the sun glimmers like a distant pinprick, there are at least thirty minor planets and an uncountable horde of comets. But they’re all billions of kilometers apart, from sun-grazing Pluto and her moons, Charon, Hydra, and Nix, out to the cryogenic depths of the Oort cloud, where the long-period comets drift. Go a bit farther, sneak across the trillion-kilometer boundary, and you reach the realm of the brown dwarfs and the solitary wanderers, planets cast off to drift for aeons through the sunless depths.

And all of these places need to be surveilled, and their inhabitants grilled, lest the worst stirrings out of nightmare rise into wakefulness.

She — no, I — holds the sword up and zooms in on the blade. The thin diamondoid weave glimmers in the twilight of the salle. A twitch of the trigger finger and it lengthens, narrowing steadily as it unravels to the extent of its five-meter microgravity reach. A twitch in the other direction and it knits itself back together, fattening and growing denser until it sucks back into the basket hilt — which in turn retracts back into the grip. She slips it away to nestle in an inner pocket, a black, stubby cylinder that dreams of blood.

The salle is a bland microgravity sphere perhaps ten meters in diameter, perfectly rigged for augmented reality. As I shut down my — no, her — sword, a door irises open in one wall. “Juliette?” The voice is familiar. I kick off the nearest wall, roll and bounce, carom into the opening.

It’s Daks. Dear, loyal, gallant Daks, who’s always there when I need him. He hovers gracefully in the tunnel, feathery fingertips extended, showing none of the clumsiness or discomfort that afflicts him in the deeper gravity wells. “Hey, Julie, the boss wants a word with us.”

“The boss? Which sib?”

I follow as Daks retreats backward down the tube. After a moment, he offers me a hand. I take it, and he jets along effortlessly, watching my face. “The depressive one, I think.”

“Oh dear.” It’s one of his more annoying habits, this tendency among his sibs to fragment temperamentally in private. Behind the outward oily gleam of professional servility, Jeeves is as mercurial as any lineage I’ve ever met. I suppose the mask of authority that comes from being the perfect gentleman’s gentleman all the time has something to do with it — in private most of them probably throw temper tantrums and cultivate strange fetishes — but there’s always room for a repressed, uptight deviant to turn in on his own despair. “Do you think it’s a new job?”