In Our Last Installment . . .

"There's a partly-filled store down there," Myrtle said quietly, indicating to the left with one arm half raised. She appeared extremely tired and set off along the corridor before Connell could ask which floor they were on. He had formed the impression that they were only part-way up the building that meant if storage had begun from the bottom then there was an awful lot of free capacity left; it was a calculation that worried him.

He began to follow, not sure if this was a good idea or not. On balance it was likely not, he thought; but then, when were his ideas ever classifiable as anything else?

Like the corridor they had first entered, this corridor had a bundle of grey tubes running down the length of the ceiling, but whereas the closed doors he was now passing all had single tubes running to them, ahead of him he noticed the tubes were hanging loosely down.

Myrtle halted at one of the grey hanging tubes and as Connell approached her he saw that the door was open. Myrtle stood to one side and waved him in.

"Uh-oh," thought Connell.

Inside, the room was about ten meters square fitting neatly in with Connell's estimated door spacing; this meant there were probably no hidden areas or corridors to worry about. Stuck to the middle of the ceiling like a giant spider's web were more of the drab grey plastic tubes that radiated out from a central lozenge-shaped hub and were criss-crossed by what looked like thin transparent wires filled with moving coloured marbles; the grey tubes extended to the edges of the ceiling where they ran down the walls spaced evenly at some one-and-a-half metres.

In the centre of the room stood a blue flat-topped table similar to an operating table but with a shallow-lipped clear plastic edge, and attached to it via a neat line of yet more of the grey flexible tubes and a number of shining stainless-steel pumps were a row of tall pressurised cylinders, some with flashing dials. Like the table, the cylinders were also blue.

Blue and grey, thought Connell entering the room. They must have hired an interior designer.

But what really caught Connell's attention neatly lined up against one wall was the row of ghostly white human faces staring wide-eyed and unblinkingly at him. Faces that seemed to follow his every move as if waiting to see what he did next.

And if the building had already put the shits up him then this room, judging by the sinking feeling in his bowels, was about to take it all out again.

WDPS

by

Ray Griffiths

Part Two of Two

- CHAPTER FIVE -

The All-Embodied Globe World Encyclopaedia records that techniques for freezing people in order to preserve life have long been known.

Termed 'cyronics' in its infancy, it involved the ultrarapid freezing of tissues immediately followed by low temperature fixation and dehydration (freeze-substitution).

Its infancy over, as a toddler it lurched clumsily about the world of primitive science as the (then) highly advanced technique of high-pressure freezing. However, in tissue samples above 500 micrometers -- laughingly, that was considered to be quite a small lump -- the process resulted in ice-crystal damage when water seeping from cells collected between the cell membranes and froze.

But in time along came a little brother (or, if you happen to be a feminist, a little sister, or if you happen to be an experimental liberalist anthropologist it could have been a distant foster cousin of your mother's aunt) in the form of nanotechnology, a science that gave early cyrogenisists new hope by pioneering a process that built microminiaturised 'machines' that were directly injected into the bloodstream and performed to a preset program building self-copies that could repair cell damage.

Nanotechnology had to be abandoned though when it was realised that the blood cells were too severely damaged by freezing and put beyond the capability of safely transporting skilled hoardes of rapidly multiplying little boiler-suited microbes to work. A bit like leaves on the line, was how one early scientist described it. Whatever that meant.

This did not stop enterprising clinics from speculatively freezing people, however, and storing them indefinitely in cylinders of liquid nitrogen in the hope of one day finding a cure for their terminal illness; and neither did it prevent enterprising clinics from speculatively taking vast amounts of money off patients (usually in the form of documents called 'life insurance policies' -- see: Alfonse Dartling, Stings of the Twentieth Century for more details of these curiously loaded contracts and see if you can make sense of the motives that encouraged gullible people to sign up for what amounted to paying out vast amounts of money to somebody else while you were still alive, in order that the somebody else could use it for their own avaricious ends as long as they promised to pay it back to you when you were dead).

But even more extraordinary was how swiftly these enterprising clinics lost their spirit of speculative liability when it came to telling their patients the truth; such as telling them that along with waiting for a cure for terminal illness, they were also waiting for a cure for being frozen. But being dead, supposedly, it wouldn't have mattered a legal hoot if they had.

Also there was a lot of initial confusion over freezing humans as freezing meat for consumption was an ongoing (and disgusting) parallel operation at that time; likewise it was in its comparative infancy (haplessly, to continue with this ridiculous family analogy that is now felt should never have been started, it could be described as a less advantaged distant older cousin with rickets), and specimen labelling was not as accurately controlled as it might have been. Mistakes happened and accidents were inevitable.

Only recently excited archaeologists digging on the site of a known twentieth-century English supermarket (it wasn't easy to find as there were several false excavations based on the discovery of metal cage-type baskets on misaligned seized wheels, some of which were discovered in car parks as far away as Tasmania -- these curiously ill-designed artefacts are not yet fully understood other than being in some way associated with supermarket ritual and possibly religious in purpose), found several interesting items preserved in white coffin-like containers with clear plastic lids collectively labelled 'Family Butcher', and concluded from the remains that perhaps the provider for this produce was taking the title all too literally. (This was in tandem with the gruesome discovery on the same site of stacks of preserved tinned meat with clearly intact pictures of apparently healthy cats and dogs, forcing anthropologists who up to now thought they had the diet of the average twentieth-century man pretty well taped to think again about his gross eating habits.)

So it wasn't until the latter part of the twenty-second century that genetic scientists stopped sulking and got together, albeit unwillingly, with molecular engineers and finally ironed out the problems of deep-freezing people with a view to bringing them back again in one piece. But as by then most of the cures for the diseases that people had wanted to be frozen for in the first place had either been found or given up on or, as in the case of the many sado-masochistic sects that sprang up around that time, pleasurably ignored, it appeared pretty pointless to continue research further.

Only a few trial experiments were ever carried out and these on people previously frozen who nobody wanted any more as by that time they were well past their thaw-by dates, and no record exists of the results.

Eventually the molecular engineers went on to higher things and genetic scientists went back to sulking.

Until the robots in Exeter began their unusual hobby.

From close up -- when he found the nerve to cautiously move to that precarious position -- he could clearly recognise both McKinnon and Sharron, their faces white and smooth, glistening lightly from a thin dusting of frost. Blue-black lips were drawn in deadly grimace and were open just enough to glimpse top rows of teeth, yellow against the shock of white. From the neck down they were encased solidly in blocks of ice.

Connell stood rigid. Shocked and appalled he stared at the faces who returned his gaze and that probably would have been equally shocked and appalled (certainly they were rigid) with their unseeing eyes, unprotected, unfocussed, expressionless and motionless. Accusing and full of hate. Or so it seemed.

He moved away.

The bodies stood stiffly to attention in neat upright lines, immaculate like sentries, backs smartly against the wall; and inside the ice they were naked.

Connell, recovering from his shock, walked slowly along the line as though on a tour of inspection, which indeed he was, noting the position of the ice and the position of the grey tubes falling neatly from the ceiling, one to each body, noting whether the bodies were male or female, the position of their feet, the attitude of their hands. Noting anything, but their faces.

What was it about humans, he wondered. Why can't we reconcile what others have done to us when we ourselves have done so much that was worse; its as if we alone have the sole right to defile nature.

The ice blocks, Connell saw, were formed inside an enclosing clear plastic cabinet into which the bodies had been inserted, before or after freezing he could not tell; the heads free to float like a chorus line of grisly, phantom jack-in-the-boxes. To the rear of each cabinet a single grey tube passed behind the occupant's head and entered the cabinet via an old-fashioned electronic gate-valve before disappearing behind the body. By bending low and looking between their legs Connell could see the tube entering the rectum where he guessed from the pattern of frozen crystals that that was where the ice field had been generated.

Connell straightened and shivered. He glanced at the blue-topped operating table trying to work out how it was done; he tried to imagine a human form lying there and succumbing willingly to this hideously primitive procedure, perhaps laughing and joking with the robots then sucking in his breath while the ice started to form in that most delicate of places. A willing victim was the only way a robot could allow itself to do such a thing.

But try as he could Connell could not imagine it, no-one in their right mind would let a robot do that. There had to be something he'd missed, another part to this story.

He turned back to the cabinets and lightly touched a surface, it crackled alarmingly beneath his fingers so he snatched his hand away but not before he felt the chilling strength of its power.

Seeing women there, undignified, encased and trapped, and with that flat singular look of haunting terror etched forever on their faces; that was the worst thing, Connell thought.

The bodies -- he could not bring himself to think of them as people -- extended the whole length of one wall and part of the way along another; the space remaining lined with unfilled cabinets. Connell moved quickly along to the empty cabinets with the intention of examining the interior of one. He swallowed hard and bent forward to peer inside but as he leant over he thought he heard a noise and stopped, cocking his head to one side.

In a rush he remembered Myrtle, and straightened, spinning round, half expecting to find her crouched behind him with a hissing gas cylinder under one arm and a pipe ready to shove up his arse in the other; but she was not there and the room was empty.

Curious, and thankful of the excuse, Connell left the room and went out into the corridor where it was cold and deserted; but of Myrtle there was no sign. He called her name, then called again, louder, and it echoed along the long passage as if searching for her.

"Shit!" Connell was indecisive; wondering whether to go back into the room and continue his examination or to go off and find Myrtle. He decided to find Myrtle and ran back towards the beam lift, jogging lightly.

He thought he heard the noise again and stopped; standing still for several minutes, listening, but he heard nothing. Shaking his head he was about to run on again when he heard it once more, this time quite distinctly, a echoing metallic 'ping' from somewhere behind him and from the direction of the open doors and Mr Frostie's little chamber of horrors. Connell turned and immediately ran back, skidding to a juddering halt outside the door and hesitating as he looked inside and saw all the frozen faces.

Was she here? Was Myrtle one of the faces? Was she playing games with him?

Connell stepped inside gingerly and checked them all before returning to the corridor and running silently on.

As he came to each open room he slowed and cautiously took a peek inside, was she in any of these? Was she making the noises? (And if so, why was she making the noises?) What was she doing? Apart from the cabinets, they appeared to be empty and so he ran on to the next, and then the next, and then the next after that.

He found nothing.

His caution collapsed and gave in to panic, so Connell ran faster; slowing only to peer quickly inside the rooms as he ran past; but still no sign of Myrtle, no sign of the young student who had brought him to this place.

The corridor was seemingly never ending.

He was making too much noise, Connell knew it, but he couldn't help it; the shock of finding those frozen bodies had affected his judgement. He began to stagger wildly from side to side, weaving in and out of doorways to check the rooms.

Mixed in amongst his panic he was still able to rationalise that surprise might be on his side if he should suddenly come across anyone and this gave him the impetus to run even faster; but realising too that surprise can also come from silence, especially when unannounced, and that he was still making too much noise, with an effort Connell took deeper breaths and began to lighten his step.

Careering in this half-panicked half-professional manner carelessly past an open door, from a corner of an eye he thought he saw something move and he crashed to a terrified halt against the side of the corridor and crouched down, panting for breath, frightened that he too had been seen.

And when Connell entered the room it was with the creeping crawl of dread and not the bold leap of the unafraid. And it was to find a room that was being prepared.

There were crushed and empty brown cardboard boxes scattered everywhere, a floor littered with shredded paper and twisted bits of the ubiquitous grey tubing; there was a corner where plastic freezing-cabinets had been piled carelessly high one on top of the other; there was a blue-topped operating table, and there was a robot.

Connell froze.

"Good morning, Mr Connell," said the robot pleasantly, looking around as Connell entered and in one effortless action rose smoothly to its feet from where it had been working on its knees, a large menacing wrench connected directly to its arm and held up in the air as if to strike someone.

"Stay where you fucking are!" screamed Connell, holding up a hand.

The robot did not move.

Connell breathed deeply.

"Where's Myrtle?" he asked.

"Excuse me, but I have heard of several humans by that name. Could you be more specific?"

"Never mind," said Connell, and fled.

The robot had been just an ordinary TRU -- technical robotic unit -- a mechanic, no more, Connell was trying to persuade himself as he jogged along the corridor. His self control if not restored was being put under review. He could tell it was a TRU from the way its arms were configured, multi-jointed with reversible universal couplings, and it had been quite harmless really.

It probably didn't know anything other than the instructions it had been given, Connell thought amiably as he passed more empty rooms; it had had its instructions to assemble those particular cabinets in that particular room at that particular time and with that particular viscous-looking wrench; obvious, really, and not at all unreasonable.

And it knew nothing of Myrtle, he mused, positively bounding along, quite assured of the innocence of the robot; if it had never heard of her how was it supposed to know he was looking for her? It all made perfect sense.

And it knew a lot more than it fucking-well should, Connell thought as he screeched to a sudden halt, horrified, feeling suddenly sick; because the walking toolbox had known exactly who he was.

Connell went running back.

"How did you know my name!" he demanded violently, leaping bravely through the door and confronting the robot who had gone quietly back to work.

The robot rose to its feet again. "Why," it intoned evenly, "From your badge of course. It has your name on it, Mr Connell."

Connell looked embarrassed. "Ah. Sorry. Just wondered," he mumbled, greatly relieved, and began to leave but changed his mind. Why the hell was he apologising to a robot? He waved his hand towards the corner: "Take all those cabinets apart and destroy them."

Satisfied, Connell left the room and decided to turn back towards the beam lift. He was getting jumpy, this place was spooking him. Robots did not need to have the holo circuits activated to see his badge, he remembered.

In the room, the robot gave a mechanical equivalent of a deep sigh of despair and began to dismantle the cabinets. Just as he thought all these poxy humans had gone, he muttered, along comes another one to ruin his day.

At the beam lift Connell marched straight in. If Myrtle had come this way then the co-ordinates would still be in the pad. To his delight Connell went up. He walked through the blue light and emerged into yet another monotonously white gently curving corridor. The building was becoming unbelievably tedious and he began to wonder if the lift was set up properly.

But no, it wasn't quite the same, something was missing from this corridor. What was it?

He looked up. The tubes! There were no tubes, the ceiling of the corridor was free of grey tubes. At least that was something. Connell moved along slowly with no way of knowing what to expect on this floor, for all he knew this was where they kept the guard dogs. Because that was another thing he'd noticed -- in the streets outside, there were no domestic pets. He prepared himself for the worst.

But they were empty.

Each room was empty. No bodies, no cabinets, no tubes, no snarling rottweilers. And there were no iris doors. The whole floor was deserted and uninhabited.

Connell discovered these disturbing facts when the curving corridor eventually led him in a full circle and he staggered breathlessly back to the beam lift feeling as though he had just walked a marathon. But was this the same beam lift?

He was certain this was the way Myrtle had come. He gritted his teeth and went round for another look. He had to find Myrtle, she was the key to the mystery Connell was convinced, he believed she could provide the missing link and he was sure she would give the answer if she was so inclined. She was fickle, true, but then again weren't all women? In Connell's experience they were. And she had called him cute.

Outside, or at least outside of this building, she had been fairly co-operative; but while he was questioning her he sensed that she was holding something back. He hadn't pushed her hard, it had been her suggestion to come here, and Connell believed that it was because it was a means by which she could show him the missing link without breaking faith in whatever it was she seemed to have so much faith in; but as they had approached the building he'd been aware that she was holding back again, as if the building had some claim on her that she had forgotten about.

And now she had disappeared.

It wasn't an empty room; it was more like a white shimmering blanket hung across a doorway that made it look like an empty room. Projected electrostatically-generated moveable fields, Connell thought triumphantly, pleased at recognising Myrtle's handiwork. Taking a deep breath, he passed through and stepped inside.

He'd found her. She was sitting on a bed watching him as he stepped through her field. One day, he thought, I'll have to ask her again how these work, but not now, there wasn't enough time left in the day, he was sure.

She sat motionless as he entered, her face without expression and her thoughts unreadable.

It was a student's room, sparse but brightly furnished, lots of posters on the wall, that sort of thing. There was a wooden desk along one wall with a mimeograph half buried beneath a mound of dog-eared textbooks and a scattered ream of standard notepaper covered in tight blue scrawl, an empty coffee cup, unwashed, a holographic music centre, something that looked rather like a pile of old clothes dumped in one corner that probably was a pile of old clothes dumped in one corner. And, oddly, a quaint patchwork American quilt. Colourful and crumpled, thrown loosely across the foot of the bed where Myrtle sat. The room even had a carpet.

Myrtle sat on the very edge of the bed with her arms stiffly extended and her hands clamped firmly between her knees. Connell wondered if she had put them there to stop them from shaking. She watched him as he scanned the room. Then their eyes met.

"Why don't you go, Edgar," she said quietly, "You know it all now. So why don't you go."

Connell said nothing. He looked down at the girl, the pretty student from Berlin, pitying her dilemma and her stupid misappropriated fanaticism. He began to realise what it was he had missed, the missing link, it was right under his nose; but he didn't want to believe it. He wanted it to go away. He wanted desperately also to help, to find a way out, a way that was compliant with her beliefs for he thought he knew now what those beliefs were. But he couldn't find the words. He felt lost.

Myrtle sighed and gazed about the room as if examining it for the first time which, perhaps, in a way, she was. Her eyes followed the route Connell's appraisal had taken. Then her eyes settled back on him.

"This used to be my room," she said, "Before they gave me the big house. It was comfortable." She gave him a challenging look, but he still could not find the words.

She began to whisper, softly, urgently: "Get out, please, Edgar. Get out. Go. Get out while you can, go while I still have control."

Connell didn't get out. He wasn't in the mood for retreat. He was in the mood for filling in gaps and tying up loose ends and, although he couldn't say it, he was in the mood for being with Myrtle. He sat down next to her on the bed, and for some totally inexplicable reason a children's rhyme went thrumming through his head: there came a big spider, and sat down beside her; inexplicable because it was nonsense, and inexplicable because it was Myrtle who was the spider. He'd guessed most of it but he still didn't want to go, he wanted to hear her tell the truth, he wanted to be her confessor; and he wanted to give her his absolution. At least he thought that was his reason.

"It wasn't difficult to work out, Myrtle," he said, at last, sighing. "In order for all this to have happened there had to have been somebody who was helping them. Someone for whom the First Law wouldn't be compulsory. A human element." Connell extended his hand to cup Myrtle's chin, gently lifting it and turning her so he could see her face. There were tears in her eyes. "But what I don't understand is why, Myrtle. Why?"

Myrtle sobbed and collapsed against his side with her hands still held firmly clamped between her knees and Connell brought his arms up around her, and he held her, and he tried to comfort her with small words, stroking her hair, trying to find the bigger words that would help him understand.

She began talking, at first in German which Connell to his shame didn't understand, and then in English, which equally to his shame he did.

"You don't understand," he heard her say in muted, short gasping sentences, her dark head buried in his chest, "You don't understand. It was a closed loop. It was driving Phil mad. He was suffering. I couldn't let him suffer." She took her head away and looked up, her cheeks streaked with tears, her grey-green eyes appealing to him. "I'm writing their history, you see. Part of my combined. I didn't tell you that bit. You don't like robots. You said. So I didn't want to tell you. No-one's really done it before, not in any structured sense, anyway. Been plenty of emotional stuff, My life with Tinsel-Pot, that sort of thing, but nothing substantial. Not in any way that gives them moral status, just unconnected bits and pieces, a sort of backdrop to our own lives. I was pulling it all together; really I was, properly, how it should have be done; right back to the early computers, the lot. Then suddenly it seemed as if it might all be over. Couldn't let it end like that."

Myrtle searched Connell's face: "What if there was no way out? What if you, or McKinnon, or someone else with the authority came along and said: 'Hmm, closed loop, eh, hasn't been one of those for centuries, can't remember how we deal with one, quite. Can't remember if we can deal with one. Oh well, sorry, robots, looks like its all over; can't find a way out of this little pickle so while we rethink you'll all have to go into the bin.'"

Myrtle straightened and shook her head; her voice was stronger, angry: "It wouldn't be fair Connell, it wouldn't be morally right. It would be a modern holocaust, it would be genocide, it would be ... be ... oh, oh whatever you wish to call it, but it would be the elimination of a whole race of thinking beings, a species damn it! I couldn't let that happen!"

Myrtle looked past Connell and seemed to start. She closed her eyes for a few seconds and relaxed. When she opened her eyes again she was breathing slower. She fell against Connell.

He put his arms around her again and she took her own from between her knees and wrapped them about him. Connell was feeling pleased, and it wasn't just Myrtle putting her arms around him although that was pleasing him a great deal too; no, he had what he came for, he told himself, and that was why he was feeling pleased; nothing to do with her arms at all, it was the confession; she had shed her burden and given it to him, and he was better equipped to deal with it, but he had to decide now what to do.

And her arms around him were just heavenly.

But Myrtle wanted to say more: "He -- they -- found the answer for themselves," she murmured sleepily in Connell's ear. "It was a peculiarly unique answer to a peculiarly unique situation. They realised they couldn't do it without help. You were right, the three laws got in the way. I gave them that help. Its their world now. And whatever you may think of me I gave them that help willingly."

Myrtle paused and drew Connell closer, her hands exploring his back. Connell shivered and sighed. "Come with me, Myrtle," he said, speaking over the top of her head, "Come with me and we can sort something out together, I know we can. But we have to get you out of here first. So come with me. Please."

She lifted her head to him and at first Connell thought he'd won, there was such a look of surrender in her eyes. But he'd forgotten where he was, and Myrtle, lovely fickle Myrtle, Myrtle with her arms around him, Myrtle with that unpredictable way women have of saving things for the most inappropriate of moments, inappropriate that is until you realise what a golden opportunity it really was, apparently had other things on her mind.

"Why don't we both sleep on it, Edgar?" she suggested in a small voice.

- CHAPTER SIX -

Connell was amazed.

Well, at first he was amazed. After he'd had enough of being amazed which, to tell the truth was not very long, he was absolutely delighted. Well who wouldn't be, Myrtle was quite a girl.

She showed him what quite a girl she was by toppling him. Not by poleaxing him this time but by pulling him forwards and down on top of her so they were lying on the bed, and then by kissing him with uncontrollable and salacious passion.

Myrtle tugged at the back of Connell's shirt which was just the signal Connell needed to tug at the back of hers (had she been wearing one and not a baggy old jumper) and which, from Connell's point of view, had more to offer than his silly old shirt could -- so he pushed Myrtle's arms down and concentrated on rolling her jumper up beneath her arms, ecstatic to find underneath that she was soft and warm to touch. He moved his hands over her and kissed her neck where there lingered a tantalisingly elusive smell of peach blossom, not honeysuckle or rose.

Myrtle shivered and moaned and again struggled with the back of his shirt so Connell obliged by momentarily disengaging his own exploration and pulling his shirt up for her; then, because at that moment he was feeling particularly macho and the action appealed to him greatly, he rolled and lay right on top of her, chest to chest, heart to heart; breathing heavily.

As well as thinking himself macho Connell thought of himself as a man of quick decisions, and having made the quick decision that the only successful way to remove his trousers (the decision to remove them at all had actually bypassed the thought process completely) was to remove his shoes first so he wouldn't have to hop around the room like a demented pogo stick. He rapidly rolled onto his side in order to do just that (rapidly because the shoes were spoiling his macho image), and as he rolled he felt something sharp scrape roughly across his skin.

He looked down, admittedly to reference exactly where his feet were in relation to his body more than to see what the scratch was, but then he noticed something in Myrtle's hand that she had been trying to stab into his back.

Connell shot up and leapt from the bed and violently slammed into the wall, chest heaving; he held up his arm and swivelled his head under it to see the vivid red line where the hypodermic had slashed across his skin.

He couldn't believe it. "For god's sake, Myrtle," he screamed, "You might have waited until we'd finished!"

Myrtle by now was sitting upright, her jumper pushed beneath her arms and rolled across the top of her surprised breasts and all three of them were staring into nothing. In her hand the syringe glistened and an electrode flashed slowly.

Connell put his arm down and tried to calm his breathing. How much of the drug had he taken? What was it? Knockeroo? Lemmington Laxalot? Part of his preparation as an agent had been to artificially boost his immune system against the possibility of such an attack, but it was well-known that agents did this and attackers usually compensated by shooting enough of it to fell, if not a cart-horse, then certainly a heavily-pregnant or well-endowed Aberdeen Angus.

His eyes began to water and his head started to swim and the room went wavy.

"Myrtle, Myrtle, why did you do it Myrtle?" Connell moaned, pulling his shirt down and earnestly trying to hold on to some semblance of control. He was still standing so that at least that was something.

Myrtle did not answer. She was staring into space and appeared not to have heard. Connell pushed himself off the wall and tried walking and was encouraged to note he could manage a few awkward steps without falling. He was walking towards Myrtle; perhaps attempting to return to her with a half-baked idea of picking up from where they left off, such was the impetus generated by his masochistic libido, but through his thickening haze he also noted two other things: one; the drug had uncharitably placed a tourniquet on any chance he had of resurrecting his enthusiasm for such activity and, two; Myrtle was no longer on the same planet.

Where she was was hard to tell, exactly; certainly Connell in his present state was unable to determine her precise whereabouts; she was sitting motionless and staring blankly past him at a spot somewhere beyond his severely limited field of vision.

It felt oddly like the children's trick of standing still and staring fixedly up at the sky -- if you did it for long enough some idiot was sure to stop and do the same and you could gather quite a crowd -- only Connell was afraid to turn around and look in case she suddenly leapt from the bed with her syringe while he wasn't watching.

But he turned anyway, he couldn't help himself. Call him an idiot if you like. He turned and he came face to face with the most sinister-looking robot he ever had the misfortune to turn and come face to face with, and Connell, in his time, had turned and faced quite a lot.

"Hello, Mr Connell, I'm Phil."

"I'm not very well myself," said Connell who had misunderstood, and which was a bit of an understatement.

Strangely, Phil's eyes appeared to Connell to be like two red-hot coals which were alight and burning in his face; and they appeared to be turning, boring into Connell's very soul. Then Connell's head stopped swimming and paradoxically he knew he was drowning as instead the face with the red-hot eyes became still and Connell's body began to rotate around this central vision.

And he could see nothing else.

The robot's voice was deep and notional, resonantly persuasive, imploringly kind, filled with the compassion of five hundred years of suffering; and it became all he loved, all he lived for, all Connell had ever wanted to hear from a voice.

And he could hear nothing else.

He felt drawn pleasurably to both the sound and the vision, he felt welcome in their presence, he felt whole by their boundless love; and he wanted only to please them.

And he could feel nothing else.

"You want to live forever don't you, Mr Connell," said the voice, purring, persuading, moving closer, "You don't want to die do you, you want to live." The voice entered Connell and possessed him. "Of course you do, its in your heart, its in your soul. I can see into your heart, Mr Connell, and I can see into your soul. You want to live forever, don't you? You don't want to die do you?"

And Edgar Connell, whose job it was to lay his life down on the line for the love of his country, for the greater good of Euro, and for any other organisation whose cause was subservient to the wholesome virtue of society, and whose job it was to avoid corruption and compromise said no, he didn't want to die.

Because he couldn't help it.

"That's good, Mr Connell, that's very good." The voice moved within him, seeping into his bones. "Because that's what we want for you; its exactly what we have in mind for you, isn't it Myrtle. We want you to live forever."

The last word was whispered and cut through to the heart of Connell and found its beat.

The robot moved closer, its eyes a child's kaleidoscope of burning scarlets and fiery yellows, turning and fermenting, seeking to control Connell's mind. "Think about it, Mr Connell, never dying, never finishing this wonderful existence, always being here."

The robot was about an inch away from Connell. "And all you have to do is say yes and we can provide this for you, Mr Connell, we can provide it for you because this is what you really want. Isn't it?"

Connell's world was saturated; awash with the suggestion of immortality, the chance to live for ever and the chance to put everything right -- he would have the time to do it when he woke up -- the chance to see a world he had only before ever dreamed of. It could happen. It was within his grasp.

"Isn't it, Mr Connell?

Uncontrollably compelled to agree Connell was so overwhelmed with the desire to say yes he was unable to say it right away. Inside he was fairly screaming the word: Yes! Yes! Yes let me live forever! Yes let me be part of it!; the eyes of the robot demanded it, the voice of the robot demanded it, his own feelings demanded it.

But at the very last moment, just as he was about to utter the word that would condemn him, some last vestige of his beleaguered self-control must have fluttered weakly to the surface -- his drowning man's straw -- and told him it was the drug making him succumb and he flung his arm defensively across his face and screamed: "No! No! Keep away from me! Get out of my way!"

With no option but to obey Phil did as he was told and moved to one side. He looked totally crestfallen. His hypnotism had inexplicably failed and he couldn't understand it at all; public servants were normally the easiest to fool as they were so suggestible. Mentally he ran over the exchange and made some notes. He thought he ought to go back to turning his eyes clockwise (he'd reversed them for this session) and thought that perhaps there really might be something in this bathwater-down-the-plughole-north-or-south-of-the-equator theory after all.

Connell staggered away from the room and lurched heavily along the corridor, the whirling eyes of the robot still stinging his drugged mind, its purring voice still echoing in his ears.

He felt awful.

Phil made no move to follow. He filed the adjustment to his eye rotation and looked at Myrtle who hadn't moved and was in exactly the same position sitting on the edge of the bed. "You should cover yourself, Myrtle," he said, his voice normal, "And you should stay with me now. The others will find Mr Connell. Your time has come, would you like that?"

"Yes," said Myrtle and she pulled down her jumper and rose dreamlike from the bed.

"Oh well, just one small victory for Man," said Phil, leading her out of the room.

From out of the blue tower that contained all of hell Connell staggered disoriented into the day. Everything was a streaming blur of disassociated images, an album of still photographs flicked at random that presented their credentials one by one to his drugged mind.

He had no recollection of finding his way through the long white corridors and electric-blue beam lifts just as he had no direct control over either his movements or his surface thoughts. There remained only an aloof kind of awareness, an awareness of who he was, an awareness of where he was and an awareness of where he was going; a kind of inner self who remained detached and remote but cognisant in a place to where he had retired while the uncontrollable rest of him got on with it. A place from which to evaluate and instruct. Even so, the instructions were not arriving correctly or on time, they were jumbled and confused.

Connell edged his way around the outside of the tower by facing in towards it using the flats of his hands to feel his way blindly, like a baby, crawling upright and sideways. Vaguely he recognised the path upon which he had arrived with Myrtle so he left the building to stagger towards it, like a drunk, struggling to walk in a dignified straight line, tripping over the edge of the plascrete base but managing to stay upright.

His remote mind had provided an evaluation and had provided a strategy, a simple one but in the circumstances a sound one. The priority, his strategy said, was to distance himself from the tower and, if he could, regain the safety of his cruiser. If this was not possible, then he was to find a safe place in which to hide while the effects of the drug left him. He had no idea how long that would be but with these objectives in mind the clear message he was sending to his legs was: Run!

Unfortunately, the message appeared to be reaching only one of his legs right now with the unusual but strangely exciting effect of the isolated leg sending back its own message which in essence said: What the fuck is going on? Unable to answer, Connell executively withdrew the instruction to the good leg in order to obtain rebalance, but it too had decided to go incommunicado and was no longer answering the helm. The result was the solid belief by both legs that they had got the right story, and they proceeded to carry him along in the kind of gait hitherto only seen before at his junior school sports day during three-legged races, and which he always lost.

And around him, the others began to close in.

Connell cantered ungracefully across Higher Pennsylvania and into Longbrook Street; his inner self registered that he had missed his way but he told himself not to stop as distance was more important.

Two minutes later he stopped.

Two minutes after that, when the message to carry on arrived, he carried on.

He reached Exeter High Street and its preserved buildings, reputably the oldest surviving high street in England (certainly it is known to have begun as a ridgeway during the Iron Age and used by the Romans between the first and fifth centuries) and was preserved as it stood by Euro Heritage in the year 2015 by order of an Act of Brussels.

That Exeter's high street had been singled out for preservation at that time was not terribly significant; what was significant was that it represented typically any high street in England at that period with the same dreary repetition of shops, beggars and charity tin-shakers that you would find, say, in York, Bristol or Llanfairpwllgwyngll. (That last statement was unfair -- perhaps you cant say Llanfairpwllgwyngll.)

It has been recorded that from the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries that every town centre not wishing to be singularly identified began to model themselves on each other thereby giving the visitor the comfortably reassuring illusion of not having actually travelled anywhere; a policy which sadly backfired when people indeed did not travel anywhere as it was considered there was nowhere left different enough worth travelling to.

The preservation of Exeter was considered unique, however, because of its fanatically dedicated attention to minute detail; and Connell in his disorientated drugged condition found great difficulty in negotiating the piles of authentic dog mess and pools of vomit deposited at random along the pavement and outside pub doorways, and the automated thrusting hands pushing copies of a (largely) unpopular magazine into his face as he passed by. There were no electric walkways here either, so he took to running down the centre of the road but fared no better.

Wheeled public conveyances known as 'buses' (interesting vehicles in themselves which in their day competed with each other to reach either end of the High Street first while knocking down as many shoppers as they could) were also part of the preservation program, and although they had long since had their pollutant engines replaced with replicate harmless thick-blue-smoke generators, a regular program of reconstructed races made taking to the road in the strangely and inaccurately named 'pedestrianised area' every bit as hazardous as it was in its heyday.

Weaving in and out of the simulated traffic, Connell caught a glimpse to his left of the famous pressurised dome covering Cathedral Close, and he remembered visiting the cathedral as a child on his first Euro Heritage Tour. He recalled the green perception booths set at intervals into the dome's lengthy circumference where, for just a few credits, he had been able to enter the great cathedral itself via the celebrated decorated West Front.

And for a moment he stepped back in time.

The two great transeptal towers -- older than the rest of the cathedral by some two hundred years -- dominated the entrance and he recollected the transition from the bustle of the Close into the sombre quietness of the cathedral's dark and musty interior, and the solemn authority of the nave; he remembered running his hands over the cool Purbeck marble columns, tipping his head back to view the superb Gothic vaulting -- the longest unbroken stretch in the world; the incredible colours of the stained-glass East Window, the delicately intricate carvings in the quire, and marvelling as any young boy would at the wonderful clock in the north transept. The tomb of Walter de Bronescombe was simply quite awesome -- he couldn't believe people were buried in that way; it seemed stunningly barbaric.

And outside, he remembered too strolling unhindered past the black-timbered buildings of the Close, through Bishops's Palace, St Martins Church, The Shippe Inn, and gazing spellbound at the full splendour of the cathedral through the galleon windows in Mol's Coffee House.

Leaving the perception booth the young Connell found it hard to believe he had not actually entered the dome, it had all seemed so real. But the sad truth was that no-one would enter Cathedral Close again. If the pressure inside the dome was ever released the cathedral and its surrounding buildings would simply burst apart.

The effects of the drug were beginning to lessen and Connell could feel his vision stabilising and widening; his limbs grew less heavy and he quickened his pace pleased to find both his legs were responding only after a small delay. He was heading for the west of the city seeking to turn north along North Street (aptly named) and Lower North Street, then over the Iron Bridge and up St Davids Hill; and all of this he managed to do without incident, panting lightly as he ran up the slight incline.

And it was there at the top, by the junction with Hele Road and with the city safely behind, that the others found him.

The voices in his head ought to have been a warning, but as the drug's effects were not fully rescinded he told himself that they were just that -- voices in his head. That this was not the right thing to have told himself and was in fact a gross miscalculation was brought suddenly home to Connell when, from out of what he safely considered to be absolutely nowhere, a searingly bright blast of laser light whistled over his left shoulder and demolished half a cottage in front of him; and so, quite rightly deducing this incident had not happened in his head he stopped dead in his tracks and turned to see exactly where it had happened.

The next second they were there. Two men who appeared from absolutely nowhere. And they were armed and they were twenty meters away and they were walking straight towards him; and only then did it occur to Connell that Phil, the robot with the face like an escaped firework in a salad-spinner, had the same mechanisms as all messiahs and was operating with more than one disciple.

The two men from absolutely nowhere were only meters away, their weapons pointing directly at him, and for Edgar Connell it felt like the end of the world.

The two men halted. Both were dressed similarly in blue workclothes which had the EDPS holographic logo stitched into their top pockets, and they carried laser rifles. The taller of the two called over for Connell to raise his hands: "Slowly now, just like in the movies," he said.

Connell brought his arms up slowly and reflected sadly on his lack of condition and how easily they must have been able to sneak up on him; and then he cursed and thought about how he must be getting past it, and how his world was being controlled by people with no names who sent him on impossible missions; and what a shame he would never reach retirement. In all, he was feeling pretty sorry for himself.

And that was when two other thoughts occurred to him. The first was a direct continuation of his original reflection about how easily the two men were able to sneak up on him, and was an attempt to rescue his pride by deducing that the two men must have had access to Myrtle's invisibility field, and the second was a thought which tumbled with an almost audible Whump! on top of the first and was that he was still wearing his.

Connell flicked his wrist, disappeared and dived to his right. In front of him the last remaining half of the damaged cottage disappeared, but its unfortunate condition -- or rather lack of it -- was brought about by being blasted to bits when his own body vacated the space targeted by the two laser rifles.

Fully awake now and back in control Connell ran straight at his attackers making no sound, and they in turn, expecting him to retreat, charged for the place where they had last seen him. Bloody amateurs, he thought. It was quite right for the young, inexperienced Mr Noname to want to be behind a desk as he wouldn't' last two minutes in the field.

He side-stepped neatly between the two men before crossing the road and then doubled back, continuing his flight uninterrupted. And behind him, in their hysteria, two thoroughly dedicated members of the Exeter and District Preservation Society began systematically to demolish a whole row of historic listed buildings.

Connell thought he had his bearings (luckily); if he continued in his present direction he would pass the university on his right and would be able to exit the dome at his original point of entry, which was neat. Thus buoyed, he ran on, elated, and was blissfully unaware of the mayhem that was taking place in the sky above his head.

As the light failed Connell at last looked up.

He began to run faster, not knowing the significance of what he saw but guessing it was not good.

The temperature inside the dome began to fall; what had begun outside as a normal skin-frying sunny day modified to human tolerance by the dome, was being artificially replaced. A few seconds later it began to snow. A few seconds more and the snow had become a blizzard and a freezing wind began howling and hustling across the dome picking up the snow and scattering and swirling it along the ground; the temperature plummeted to well below zero, and remorselessly the snow began to coat every touchable surface and fill every open crack until it had laid a thick white blanket of frozen down over everything.

Connell cowered shivering in the only available shelter he could find, in the lee of a disused doorway to an old claybrick warehouse belonging once to St Davids station. The thick wooden door was locked, gloomily Connell huddled against it hoping for warmth, crouching to conserve body heat while around him the snowstorm raged.

He crouched like this for about an hour, teeth tightly clenched to prevent them from chattering, the collar of his inadequate white two-piece sunfilter suit ambitiously pulled up around his neck and his arms held tightly across his body, hands tucked beneath his armpits, hugging himself, and he watched the landscape gradually change. The buildings softened slowly and blurred into the whitening background; trees heavy in leaf sagged under the extra weight, branches with a loud snap collapsed and shed great slabs of snow which fell exploding onto the ground adding more clouds to the snowstorm; and the wind screamed around the building to grip him as if trying to tear him away so that it might bury him.

Almost as quickly as it had begun the snowstorm ceased and the wind dropped to nothing. The sky thinned but remained grey and dull and the temperature hovered around zero, and after the noise of the storm the silence was deafening.

Connell straightened slowly and looked around. Had it been part of a forgotten pre-planned event, or had it been meant for him? He was puzzled because against the stark white background he would not easly be seen in his white suit, and with Myrtle's invisibility field that didn't matter anyway.

He shivered and started to shake, he couldn't stop; it was bitterly cold and made colder still by the invisibility field, just as Myrtle had said it would. It was time to start moving again, his objective unchanged. He could get out of here despite the snow and moving would help him to keep warm.

Connell stepped out from the doorway and trudged on, his head down, using his arms to balance as he cut determinedly through the snow swaying drunkenly from side to side. He had gone only about ten meters when, halting and turning with a jolt, he realised the significance of the snow. Stretching behind him now like a row of blots on a clean sheet of paper his tracks were obviously visible, leading in a straight line away from the warehouse.

It was a dead give-away.

Connell cursed. And with his earlier misplaced elation at having successfully evaded his captors thus fully vaporised and replaced with a mixture of rising fear and certitude, sliding and slipping frantically across the snow, he began as best he could to run. To outpace them was now his only hope.

A good time, for instance, to stop being a politician would be during a minor by-election when everything was going well and the loss of one insignificant person would hardly be noticed (a situation not too unsimilar to politicians who decide not to resign and continue with their vocation); and a bad time to become a politician would be just about any time at all, particularly if you had been making a lot of new friends recently and were generally feeling pretty good about yourself. A good time, too, to take a holiday would be if you decided you really needed one, and a bad time would be if your boss decided you really needed one.

So, taking this into consideration, you may imagine that if now there were to follow a brief but historically informative explanation of domes in society it would be a bad time to do so, what with Connell in so much trouble and in the precariously awful position where he might not make it at all; but even if it is a bad time (and is seems likely that it is) this is exactly what's going to happen.

A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF DOMES IN SOCIETY

Much of the stratospheric ozone layer finally peeled away in 2235 when chlorofluorocarbons perforated its layer with a zipper string of circumnavigating holes large enough to drop a fair-sized continent through; the remaining dregs fell to Earth joining forces with ozonic photochemical smog nearer to its surface. The result was a cosmic free-for-all for ultraviolet rays which began bombarding the Earth with relentless enthusiasm.

Some say (rather poetically) that this was god's spraygun by which means he could change the colour of his Earth by randomly mutating the DNA of its lifeforms to accelerate the process of evolution; a situation (they also say) which has been brought about by the selfishly inconsiderate and boreish behaviour of one of Earth's superior species who shall remain nameless; and indeed, if god's spraypattern is as dense as its intended target, the species in question shall not only remain nameless they themselves shall unquestionably be rendered incapable of naming anything again, ensuring that their nameless name shall be forgotten by everyone entirely unless another species evolves in time to learn how to write it.

The short-term prognosis for this species is one of hastily constructed desperate counter-measures; the medium-term prognosis is one of a gradual decline into resigned acceptance and an awful lot of sad farewell parties; and he long-term prognosis is that there is that there is no long-term prognosis. In other words, they've really shit out this time.

Given that the nameless species in question is Man (well, honestly, who else?), and given that they are currently starting out on the first leg of their short-term prognosis -- that of desperately constructed counter-measures, which is expected to last for at least a thousand years -- it explains the prolific construction of both domes and robots during the last two- to three-hundred years; robots apparently being developed as a tribute to man's sense of humour.

Primarily its seems that Man may have the last laugh. Long after he has been eradicated (weep no tears, he is expected to find a new home in the stars), his creations will roam his planet of birth in much the same way as he did all those years ago, being made (to coin a phrase immensely popular at the beginning of creation) in his own image. And they look like being a very successful addition.

But domes fall into the category of really seriously desperately-constructed counter-measures.

This is not to say domes are unsuccessful, because just the opposite is true; and they do exactly what they are supposed to do. They are able completely to filter out the sun's harmful rays based as they are on the secret recipe for a world famous brand of total-block suncream mixed with a flexible stiffener and transparency agent; the problem being with earlier models that, due to an oversight in removing the perfume content, led whole towns to being besieged with hoards of wasps and holiday-villa time-share touts.

No, the trouble with domes is that they are too successful. By denying their protectorate their fair share of random cosmic rays from outer space no evolution at all can take place, which means that mankind and the flora and fauna he has selected to shield with him, will very gradually fall out of step with the environment in the outside world, and this world will become more and more a hostile place for them; not because of irradiation but because of the lack of it; and eventually, in two thousand years' time, this will lead to Man's demise.

Hoist with his own petard, as they say. He will die for his technology.

Of course, once the success of domes had been established, it fed the need to build more robots and other cyber-controlled devices; the other proliferation defined within the category 'desperately constructed counter-measures'. Robots to clean it, robots to service it; robotic environmental control to grow the plants, automated weather systems to maintain seasons and to provide air conditioning; thus guaranteeing ambience between the two emergent consequences of man's not insignificant cock-up; though what robots will do with it all when man is finally gone is as yet unknown. They could also party, one supposes.

So, as one of the results of all this paranoia was automated weather systems, it was obviously another good reason for Connell to attempt to leave the dome; making now a good time to get back to him.

BACK TO CONNELL

In the distance Connell heard the unmistakable whine of a hovercar snarl into life. They were beginning the search and he knew it would be only a matter of time before they found his tracks; easy to follow from the warm comfort of an air-conditioned cab.

He ran on, oblivious of the cold, no longer caring if he slipped or fell; his only emotion was terror, his only motive was survival. The coverings of his feet and legs were getting heavier as large lumps of snow stuck to him and soaked right through to the skin.

He turned left at an opening into Station Road and half waded and half ran towards the high ground of Exwick, attempting to seek refuge in its complexity; in its maze of small, neatly compact houses visible only as ghosts in the distance. Behind him he heard the hovercar shriek in triumph as its engine accelerated and Connell knew without doubt they had found him.

Pushing himself to the limit he tried to run faster but succeeded only in floundering helplessly in snow sometimes as deep as his waist, limbs aching from the cold and exertion, his heart straining painfully within his chest, his head hurting from the sheer effort of concentration and all the while the sound of the hovercar growing in his ears as he made slow and painful progress.

There had been other times in his life when Connell had been in mortal danger, but during those times he had been as well equipped, if not better equipped, than his adversaries and he had had the advantage which came with authority; but none were as frightening as this, this was different. But what was confusing him was the reason for it to happen like this at all.

Why, when Myrtle had been to so much trouble to seduce him into the freezers, why did those two men want to shoot him? And were they still trying to shoot him? The other times Connell had been in danger had all been pretty much black or white, kill or be killed, a simple law which Connell understood; it was the unknown which frightened him. And if they captured him, what then? A trip back to the silo and into the deep-freeze?

Connell could not imagine waking into a future commanded by robots, he would rather be dead. Perhaps that was why they were trying to shoot him, maybe they understood how he felt, and with a wry grin to himself Connell decided he ought to be grateful.

Connell skidded and fell badly, twisting awkwardly onto his back, and he lay for some minutes half-winded and half-buried in the cold snow which slipped into his gasping mouth and crept into his nostrils causing him to choke.

Coughing, he eased himself into a sitting position and looked breathlessly around him but found nowhere to go, nowhere he wouldn't leave a trail. Anyway, he was halfway across a flat expanse of land which was as long as it was broad, lodged firmly between a quadrangle of high featureless buildings; it looked like it might have been a cross-roads here but the snow obliterated any form of reference.

Looking back along the route he had taken he could see the two hundred meters or so to where he had turned onto this street; it dipped slightly and unwittingly had led him into deeper snow, his snake-like trail dark and unmistakable, and as he looked he was sickened to see the dark shape of the hovercar carefully nose its way around the corner and make for the old railway crossing where he lay.

Chest heaving and the cold biting into his lungs, Connell heaved himself bitterly to his feet and wiped the snow from his face readying for one last final effort. Not long now, he thought. Again he tried to run, his feet like lead and sinking hopelessly into the snow. It was marginally less deep than it had been and he made better progress toward the other side of the crossing and continued to move ahead. The hovercar shrieked behind him.

Connell saw another large gap in the buildings on either side in front of him, and he saw that the road here was edged by snow-capped iron railings that suggested it might be a bridge; his sense of direction told him that this might be a bridge across the Exe and he struggled desparately towards it.

Behind him the hovercar slowed, its engine slipping mournfully in scale to a low moan; expecting the worst Connell began to weave jerkily from side to side, aware that its occupants could only see his tracks and would have difficulty in judging his sudden changes of direction.

A sound like an involuntary intake of breath rushed past his head and the ground to that side burst open with a bright yellow flash and a fast expanding ball of orange fire crashing over him like a roll of thunder, hurling steaming clouds of billowing snow and lumps of concrete high into the still air punctuating it with raking stabbing blue-white beams of light which exploded rapidly like slamming doors. Oddly, this made Connell feel better; this was something he was used to. Weaponry to which he could relate. And although he could see no way out he exhaulted, certain in the knowledge that he would give them a good run for their money, right to the bitter end.

On impulse he stopped and turned and ran the way he had come, stepping back into holes he had just made, remembering they could not see him, trying to fool them for just a little longer. He lay curled up on the ground as the hovercar passed directly overhead, the noise from its single electron engine pulsing in his ears, its strange smell impregnating the snow around his head and vitiating its freshness.

As soon as it had passed Connell leapt to his feet and ran after the hovercar, trying to catch it up, with half an idea of jumping onto its flat, smooth rear tail where he could, if undetected, hang on for a while and make no more tracks. If he could pull it off it would be a neat trick and give him the breather he needed and some time to formulate a better plan perhaps, although it obviously might take him away from his escape route.

But it was worth a try. Anything was.

And he very nearly made it.

It was as if the hovercar felt Connell's touch; for just as he caught up to it and put one desperately outstretched hand onto its tail, it put in an extra burst of acceleration and spun round to face him.

Connell checked and turned and ran for the iron railings and without hesitation jumped clean over and plunged into the misty waters of the Exe.

- CHAPTER SEVEN -

In its celebrated definitive mid-millennial reference edition of the year 2500, the All-Embodied Globe World Encyclopaedia records that, albeit seemingly at their highest intellectual peak for several centuries and paradoxically in contrast to their unquestionable overwhelming dominance and stewardship over the multitude of life- and cyber-forms, the human race was apparently losing its grip. Some importance, however, may be detracted from this outrageously ambitious and speculative statement when considering its source; though disclosure of the source may likewise for some fuel exactly the opposite argument, an argument that adds importance to it.

To explain.

All information included in the All-Embodied Global World Encyclopaedia has, for many centuries, been meticulously gathered electronically at multi-lateral cross-classification referential-data-assemblage centres spread at even points over and around the entire globe. Grown on the early and positively crude mediaeval system know previously as the 'Internet' (students of this fascinating subject sometimes argue that the Internet died of contraction starvation when it became the vogue to enlarge previously shortened mnemonically-defined words with fuller, more satisfyingly hyphenated descriptions; and multi-laterally cross-classification referential-data-assemblage centres simply became more fun to say at parties).

After collection the continually-sampled mass stream of input is selectively diverted to subject-categorised memory banks where it is further sorted, indexed and cross-referenced. Finally, it is content-validated and authorised for inclusion by a web of unbiased network-computation modules before being compiled into useably-hypertexed non-linear volumes. That this vast source of knowledge is gathered by, sorted by, and produced by an uninstructed, unsupervised nucleus of hyphenation-crazy digital electronic apparatus, we have hastily been assured, is neither here nor there.

What is important -- and we have not been told this directly, it had to be surmised from reading speculatively between the electronic lines (the encyclopaedia would never admit to being anything less than a totally scientific tool) -- is that not only is most of the world being run by robots who are themselves being directed by global bio-cyber entities; they are also controlling the information used by which we monitor how they control it and how well they control it, and as a result we humans were generally having one hell of a good time.

Thus, it is believed, from the result of directly monitoring how we monitor how they monitor the world they monitor (nobody is entirely sure about this), sprang among machines the exclusively human need to provide an exclusively non-human support group that, over the centuries, has held at its core the aim of fostering the use of one-to-one counselling and cyber-psychological service to those robots who felt they were getting a raw deal of things.

Also (and again we must stress that there has never been any direct evidence to verify this claim) they say that hidden deep in the data banks is the exact number of robots who, since its conception, have turned for help to the support group and have been given counselling; and that that number is, in fact, only one.

But this may be only digital hearsay.

Apparently (so the digital hearsay goes), the robot secretly enumerated within the hidden files was an illegal early French copy of the Belgium TRU pattern manufactured in Lyon and programmed as a self-motivating, ego-fed, street-refuse collector; and (the hearsay goes on to say), was subsequently dismantled after an incident directly attributed to its counselling session when it was told to be more assertive after failing to pick up the shattered mainspring of a domestic floor-sweeper that accidentaly fell from a balcony on the Avenue du 8 Mai 1945. (Some reports even go as far as to say the TRU was madly in love with the DRU and had been singing to her from the street when, quite literally, she fell for him.)

And they say too, that the heartbroken French robot subsequently took without permission from the Lyon highway maintenance depot, a total of thirty-five fully-tracked automatic armoured dust-carts, twelve long-range recycling bins, and twenty-three water-powered circular-brushed vacuum sweepers; and all this along with the whole of Lyon's two-hundred-and-fifty portable hand-held incinerators.

Five days later it stormed the city of Paris claiming it was somebody called Adolf Hitler.

The story also has it that the robot managed to hold the West Bank for eleven days before being captured by an enterprising young gendarme from Rennes who talked it into believing that Adolf Hitler had learned the trick of walking on water while on a surfing holiday in Bavaria and proposed a short stroll down the Seine to review its troops. The robot sank and was recovered, but unfortunately the unknown gendarme was drowned.

Moreover it is said to be recorded in the mysterious deeply hidden data banks of the All-Embodied Global World Encyclopaedia is, that after dissembly, many of the component parts of the romantically unhinged robot were distributed elsewhere for re-use in other machinery, such was the enormous influence of the then dictatorial recycling lobby. (Over the past civilised centuries it has become utilitarian custom to recycle most man-made products; the earliest verified recorded instance being that of a substance called 'quilted pink toilet-tissue' which, it is believed, was an early predecessor of the present day mechanical botty-'bot scraper.)

Anyway, by the completely random and unpredictable fickle laws of pure chance; and after innumerable -- and one supposes fufillingly satisfying -- applications in everything from automatic toasters to peripheral dome atmosphere controllers; a significant number of re-recycled parts from the original crackpot French robot found themselves working together again enclosed within the semi-sentinent shell structure of the independently heuristic bio-cyber brain in Connell's cruiser. By way of which lengthy and detailed explanation, some insight towards the sometimes eccentric and uncontrollable behaviour of that particular instrument may be gained, should any be required.

He cursed softly; first muttering the words to himself as if he was practising exactly what he should say. As he gained his breath he cursed louder, blaming everything and everyone, using every profanity that he could remember, and some that he couldn't; then, finally, shouting out loud and almost screaming the words he scrambled uncertainly to his feet and began to stagger forward, holding his arms in front, groping blindly for his seat and eventually falling into it before falling silent.

He looked a mess.

He was a mess.

He was scratched, bruised and bleeding from a dozen small cuts over his face and hands; blood oozed and mixed with deltic rivulets of water draining from his hair. And he was cold. He was bloody cold.

He sat quietly without voluntarily movement for several minutes, just shivering violently from time to time like a dog, shaking off water.

"You've been a long time," observed the cruiser, carefully breaking the silence.

Connell said nothing.

"There was no return-by logged, you know," it added. "And there should have been."

Connell still said nothing. He didn't have the energy to reply. He began to shake and to cough. When he'd finished shaking and coughing he prayed.

And he prayed like he'd never prayed before, notwithstanding that he'd never prayed before.

He prayed that he would never see Exeter again; and he prayed for warmth. He prayed for dryness, he prayed he would wouldn't have to go through anything like this ever again, he prayed for his salvation; in all his long and somewhat undistinguished career it was the closest he'd ever been.

The mist had saved him.

Rapid cooling of the air and a slower cooling of the river had formed mist above the waters of the Exe and all along its valley, hiding his movement, shrouding the direction he had taken in a thick cloak of secrecy.

Connell raised his wrist to wipe his forehead and realised he was no longer wearing Myrtle's wrist-band; he supposed it had come off when he had landed in the river, or had been wrenched from him while climbing out.

The swim had taken nearly one and a half hours against the artificially increased current; never knowing if he would be spotted, never knowing which of his gasping breaths would be his last. Then the terrifying dive beneath the water to clear the dome, some four meters down, completely exhausted and hardly able to regain the surface, the breath punched out of him. After which scrambling up the muddy bank where he acquired the cuts to his face and hands during a wild scramble over a bramble-covered slope on the edge of an old road. Finally reaching Stoke Woods and the safety of his cruiser.

He hurt, he ached, he stung; he was soaked to the skin and half frozen to death -- but he had made it. By Christ he had made it!

Connell punched his fist hard into his palm and told himself over and over again that he had done it, he had really done it, he had got back. Against the odds he was alive. For that he was thankful. For that he was proud. For that he slumped feverishly back in his seat and began to pray again.

Connell eventually stirred and looked around the cruiser; at the screens and dark black display banks, as if seeing them for the first time. Something was wrong. He turned and looked hard at the boxes he had knocked over when he had entered.

"What the hell are those?" he said, half swivelling his seat.

The cruiser was apologetic; it was not insensitive to Connell's condition: "Sorry, Connell. I can see you're pooped. We had a systems update while you were out gallivanting."

Connell grunted and turned back to the console. There was still something wrong here.

It was not unusual for the cruiser's manufacturer to send out spares from time to time, there was a roving crew especially equipped for such a task; it was part of Euro's contract with Mercedes Flying Cars -- and their proud boast was that they could find any one of their active cruisers wherever it was in the world. Probably he had read about the update and forgotten it.

It was still damn cold. Maybe that was what was wrong.

It was precisely at this sort of inopportune moment that the cruiser's interactive computer would choose to link together its previously associated re-recycled components; bringing them together for a class reunion, so to speak. What triggered the get-together was beyond analysis, the computer being completely out of its electronic mind if it had one; but whenever it happened the cruiser would usually begin with an odd comment or two, often on recent topics, then run off at the mouth -- or in this case, the speaker -- supposedly the way Adolf Hitler might have done.

"I haf talk with somebody while you were out," it began conversationally, "Lots of new ideas. I liked them."

Connell nodded but he wasn't listening; he was beginning to have a few ideas of his own. The temperature inside the cruiser seemed to have dropped further, his limbs were stiff and numb. He rubbed them.

He thought that he might be having a nervous reaction to being chased and shot at, after all it was a pretty traumatic day he'd had, not like a normal day at the office; so he began a few familiar mental calming exercises starting with his favourite -- the one where he was walking out of the Euro Security building for the last time, a fat pension cheque in his pocket.

Just to enhance the effect he decided to include a mental image of Myrtle in the situation he had last seen her, half-undressed lying on the bed; but even that failed to warm him. He thought of calling for more heat but found he had trouble moving his jaw.

"Nice fellow," said the cruiser, "Said his name was Phil."

Connell was no longer able to move any part of himself; his brain had slowed and his body was growing glittering ice crystals; the water in his clothes was frozen and had expanded into a virtual straight-jacket.

And slowly, remorselessly, the ice crept to engulf him.

The last thing Connell heard was a hiss as the cruiser filled rapidly with liquid nitrogen pumped in by shiny rows of newly-installed nozzles and he realised too late that this was what had been bothering him. It swirled greedily over the controls and screens, consuming them all.

"Said he was a member of some Exeter society or other," said the cruiser, slowing; its speaker crackling like the ice surrounding it as it struggled against the cold and the quickly rising frozen gas.

"And they were thinking of expanding . . ."

The End

---

© 2000 Ray Griffiths

My name is Ray Griffiths and I live and work in Exeter, Devon.

For more years than I care to remember I have been involved in computer production of scientific journals using sgml (the parent code of html); so writing my own material is a way of hitting back at all the frustration, I suppose.

Apart from writing, my hobbies include travel, music, and archery. I am also studying with the Open University for a degree in computer science.

You can contact me at raygrif@ouvip.com