“Father? I never had a father.”

Nim smirked. “You prove my point.”

“How dare you tamper with my memory!” Voltaire said. “Experience is the source of all knowledge. Haven’t you read Locke? Restore me to myself at once.”

“Not you, no way. But if you don’t shut up, before I kill you both, I might just restore her. You know damn well she burned to a crisp at the stake.”

“You delight in cruelty, don’t you?” Voltaire seemed to be studying Nim, as if their relationship were reversed. Odd, how the sim did not seem worried about its impending extinction.

“Delete!” the president snapped.

“Delete what?” asked Garcon.

“The Scalpel and the Rose,” Voltaire said. “We are not for this confused age, apparently.”

Garcon covered the short-order cook’s human hand with two of his four. “Us, too?”

“Yes, certainly!” Voltaire snapped. “You’re only here on our account. Bit players! Our supporting cast!”

“Well, we have enjoyed our time,” the cook said, drawing closer to Garcon. “Though I would have liked to see more of it all. We cannot walk beyond this city street. Our feet cease moving us at the edge, though we can see spires in the distance.”

“Decoration,” Nim muttered, intent on a task that was getting more complicated as he worked. Rivulets of their personality layers ran everywhere, leaking into the node-space like…”Like rats fleeing a sinking-”

“You assume godlike powers,” Voltaire said, elaborately casual, “without the character to match.”

“What?” The president was startled. “ I’m in control here. Insults-”

“Ah,” Nim said. “This might work.”

“Do something!” cried the Maid, wielding her sword in vain.

“ Au revoir,my sweet pucelle. Garcon, Amana, au revoir. Perhaps we’ll meet again. Perhaps not.”

All four holograms fell into each other’s arms.

The sequence Nim had set up began running. It was a ferret-program, sniffing out connections, scrubbing them thoroughly. Nim watched, wondering where deletion ended and murder began.

“Don’t you go getting any funny ideas,” said the president.

On the screen, Voltaire softly, sadly, quoted himself:

“Sad is the present if no future state

No blissful retribution mortals wait…

All may be well; that hope can man sustain;

All now is well; ‘tis an illusion vain.”

He reached out to caress Joan’s breast. “It doesn’t feel quite right. We may not meet again…but if we do, be sure I shall correct the State of Man.”

The screen went blank.

The president laughed in triumph. “You did it-great!” He clapped Nim on the back. “Now we must come up with a good story. Pin it all on Marq and Sybyl.”

Nim smiled uneasily as the president gushed on, making plans, promising him a promotion and a raise. He’d figured out the delete procedure, all right, but the info-signatures that raced through the holospace those last moments told a strange and complex tale. The echoing cage of data-slabs had resounded with disquieting, odd notes.

Nim knew that Marq had given Voltaire access to myriad methods-a serious violation of containment precautions. Still, what could an artificial personality, already limited, do with some more Mesh connections? Rattle around, get eaten up by policing programs, sniffers seeking out redundancies.

But both Voltaire and Joan, for the debate, had enormous memory space, great volumes of personality realm. Then, while they emoted and rolled their rhetoric across the stadium, across the whole Mesh… had they also been working feverishly? Strumming through crannies of data-storage where they could hide their quantized personality segments?

The cascade of indices Nim had just witnessed hinted at that possibility. Certainly something had used immense masses of computation these last few hours.

“We’ll cover our ass with some public statement,” the president crowed. “A little crisis management and it’ll all blow over.”

“Yessir.”

“Got to keep Seldon out of it. No mention to the legalists, right? Then he can pardon us, once he’s First Minister.”

“Yessir, great, yessir.”

Nim thought feverishly. He still had one more payment due from that Olivaw guy. Keeping Olivaw informed all along had been easy. A violation of his contract with A2, but so what? A guy had to get by, right? It was just plain good luck that the president now wanted done what Olivaw had already paid for: deletion. No harm in collecting twice for the same job.

Or had seemed so. Nim chewed his lip. What did a bunch of digits matter, anyway?

Nim froze. Had the entire sim-restaurant, Garcon, street, Joan-gone in a flash? Usually they dissolved as functions died. A sim was complex and could not simply stop all the intricate interlayers, shutting down at once. But this interweave had been unprecedented, so maybe it was different.

“Done? Good!” The president crisply clapped him on the shoulder.

Nim felt tired, sad. Someday he would have to explain all this to Marq. Erasing so much work…

But Marq and Sybyl had disappeared into the crowds back at the coliseum. Wisely, they didn’t show up for work, or even go back to their apartments. They were on the run. And with them had gone the Junin renaissance, up in smoke as the Junin Sector burned and dissolved in discord and violence.

Even Nim felt a sadness at the smash up. The eager, passionate talk of a renaissance. They had looked to Joan and Voltaire for a kind of maturity in the eternal debate between Faith and Reason. But the Imperium suppressed passion, in the end. Too destabilizing.

Of course, the whole tiktok movement had to be squashed, too. He had sequestered Marq’s memory-complex about the debate of 8,000 years ago. Clearly “robots,” whatever they might be, would be too unsettling an issue to ever bring up in a rational society.

Nim sighed. He knew that he had merely edited away electrical circuits. Professionals always kept that firmly in mind.

Still, it was wrenching. To see it go. All trickled away, like grains of digital sand, down the obscure hourglass of simulated time.

R. Daneel Olivaw allowed his face to express squint-eyed concern. The cramped room seemed barely able to contain his grim mood.

Still, Dors read this as a concession to her. She lived among humans and relied on their facial and body expressions, voluntary and unwilled alike. She had no idea where Olivaw spent most of his time. Perhaps there were enough robots to form a society? This idea she had never entertained. The instant she did, she wondered why she had never thought of it before. But now he spoke

“The simulations are quite dead?”

Dors kept her voice level, free of betraying emotion.

“So it seems.”

“What evidence?”

“Artifice Associates believes so.”

“The man I had hired there, named Nim, is not entirely certain.”

“He reports to you?”

“I need several inputs to any critical situation. I needed to discredit the tiktok freedom idea, the Junin renaissance-they are destabilizing. Acting through these simulations seemed a promising channel. I had not allowed for the fact that computerists of today are not as skilled as those of fifteen thousand years ago.”

Dors frowned. “This level of interference…is allowed?”

“Remember the Zeroth Law.”

She did not allow her distress to show in her face or voice. “I believe the simulations are erased.”

“Good. But we must be sure.”

“I have hired several sniffers to find traces of them in the Trantor Mesh. So far, nothing.”

“Does Hari know of your effort?”

“Of course not.”

Olivaw gazed at her steadily. “He must not. You and I must not merely keep him safe, to do his work. We must guide him.”

“Through deception.”

He had lapsed to the unnerving manner of not blinking or letting his eyes move. “It must be.”