onto Laura.
Laura climbed closer to the robot's ear and shouted, 'Hey… where're we going?'
The robot made no move to respond.
'Hightop,' Laura said in a loud voice, 'listen to me. I'm scared. I'm really, really scared. Now I know you can't talk, but if you can understand me, please give me some kind of sign that you're not going to take me into the jungle and do something terrible to me. Please!'
The two robots stopped, and all at once there was silence.
Hightop's head turned with the faintest of whirs. When his face was visible, he raised his fingertips to a grill. He then reached over his shoulder toward Laura.
The smooth, flat fingers gently touched Laura's cheek with a gentle caress.
The procession moved on. Laura had no idea how far they traveled. She had no idea where she was. What little sense of direction she possessed had been lost.
Hightop stopped, then slowly knelt to the ground — crushing the brush underneath. The night was black as coal on the floor of the jungle. Laura took Hightop's move as her cue and climbed down.
Her eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness, and then she saw the robots all around. They were everywhere, kneeling on the ground just like Hightop. They faced the same way, as if in prayer. There were dozens and dozens of them.
Laura stumbled backward — away from the menacing forms that surrounded her. Despite the noise she made, the robots all remained motionless.
Hightop plugged his communications cable into the nearest Model Eight.
Laura saw that cables ran from robot to robot, and the daisy chain ended with Hightop. He was the leader. He gave the orders.
The Model Eights all unplugged their cables and stood. There was a great collective breaking of branches as they rose. Laura shielded her head and face against the rain of falling limbs.
But that was nothing compared to what happened next.
The robots began to move forward en masse. It was as if a wave of metal crashed through the jungle ahead of Laura. The brush was flattened in its path. The stunted trees fell to reveal the starry sky and the roof of the computer center. She heard an alarm — a throbbing, strident tone.
After the last of the robots exited the jungle, there were a few seconds of relative quiet. Then came the horrible screeching sound of rending metal. Laura could see through the thin leaves the eerie light cast by a welding torch. The light wavered and flickered through the suddenly defoliated jungle, and Laura realized it wasn't one torch but dozens. The smell of the burning metal mixed with the cacophony of crashing sounds. It reminded her of some gigantic pile-up on a fogbound interstate, but these were not the sounds of an accident. They were the hellish noise of battle in the earth's second millennium.
Laura made her way toward the jungle's edge. The scene on the open fields around the computer center slowly came into view.
'My God,' Laura whispered, a chill rippling up her body. There was carnage everywhere.
The Model Eights were fighting an army of Sixes and Sevens. The main battle was in the center, where the Model Eights had formed a phalanx.
The tight formation rushed four abreast and five deep straight for the computer center walls. Their wake was littered with wreckage. Most of the fallen were the wheeled Model Sixes, rendered immobile once knocked to their sides. They waited only to die, snapping futilely at passersby with their single long arm.
On the flanks a few Model Eights stood apart. Their torches thrashed wildly through the air. When the torches made contact with metal, the night lit up with the sparks of a killing.
The Model Sevens fared better than the Sixes, but the spidery robots seemed reluctant to fight. They ambled sideways back and forth like crabs. There were many feints and few engagements, but when they clashed the contest was intense. The Sevens lifted a leg to batter their enemies with all the violence they could muster.
They either toppled the Model Eights with the blows or missed and were themselves upended. Once on the ground, the two-legged Eights could roll over but a Seven could only delay. It would grab its attacker like an octopus, but the clench wasn't strong enough to kill.
Inevitably, there was the blistering light of a torch, and from amid the tangle would emerge an Eight — the fittest model on the field.
Everywhere lay the results of the disaster. Twitching legs that once were a graceful Model Seven. The pathetic waste of an armless Model Eight wriggling helplessly away from its nightmare. It brought tears to Laura's eyes. Each was a thing of beauty. There were poets and scholars and felons, and Laura intensely felt the loss of each. It was so senseless, so cruel, and it seemed like the end of all her hopes for the future.
Through the tears that blurred her eyes, Laura could see the Eights dragging their wounded to the rear. They appeared to have set up an aid station, and had drawn cables from the thighs of the fallen.
These weren't the thin cables used for communications. They were power cables built to pass charges of electricity.
The thick black cables were plugged into the uninjured robots, who knelt on the ground beside their comrades.
But something struck Laura as odd. After the healthy Model Eights rose to leave, new robots would take their place. They came, cabled up, and returned to battle, but the wounded robots sank into a stupor.
They were getting worse, not better. They were being drained of their charges instead of recharged. The healthy were sucking the life out of the wounded.
Laura decided she had to make a run for it. She couldn't wait for the Model Eights to return. They were designed to learn about life from experience. From among the awful maiming and killing on the field, what lessons would be learned by the survivors? What scars would they bring back from war?
Laura frantically began to search for an opening. The ragged line seemed to have stalled halfway across the grassy lawn. She scanned the computer center's walls to get her bearings. The entrance was somewhere around the side to the right. All of a sudden she saw several tiny black specks running along the base of the bunker. They were insignificant compared to the robots — mere flies buzzing about the bloodless massacre. But they meant everything to Laura just then.
They were human… like her.
She burst out of the jungle into the open, sprinting straight toward the melee ahead. There had to be over two hundred robots on the field.
Billions of dollars of technology from the Information Age were being ground to pieces with the brutality of the Dark Ages. Her eyes searched the battle lines for an opening. It was a new world to Laura, and she was at a dangerous disadvantage. She didn't know the various models' capabilities, but more importantly she knew nothing of their goals.
They had ambitions, missions, menace, and she didn't know who was friend and who was foe. She pumped her arms and legs as hard as she could, running straight for the computer center wall.
She flew past unrecognizable pieces of metal, her eyes fixed on the small black figures. They were pointing at her and motioning frantically, but her view of them was repeatedly obscured by the rapidly maneuvering robots.
She was now less than fifty yards from the front line, and there was no clear way through in sight. The Model Sixes made their runs against the Eights at high speeds, their single grippers raised straight in front of them like jousting spears. They would take little heed of her presence amidst their battle to the death. She had no business being there in the first place.
Just before reaching the line of battle, she crouched behind an upended Model Six. The Model Eights in the phalanx were being pummeled by the raised legs of a dozen angry spiders. They thrust their welding torches outward in great lunges, and sparks flew as they made contact with the Sevens. Crippled spiders tried to limp away on three legs, and fresh comrades moved forward to take their places.
All of a sudden Laura felt a presence. Slowly she raised her head to look up. The viselike claw of the overturned Model Six opened soundlessly, hovering in the air above her. It was coiled and ready to strike.
The searing sound of burning air announced the approach of a Model Eight: It had disengaged from the line and strode purposefully toward the Model Six. Its torch slashed at the air as if to draw the attention of the one-
