Society of the Mind

'I'm sorry, but I don't understand.'

I do not understand either. I do not understand at all. There were three of us, and now there is only me. Only I am left.

'Do you mean you were one of three Model Eights that came into the assembly building?'

Yes, three, but now only me.

'And you came in here to cut off the power to the assembly building to keep the Model Sixes and Sevens from recharging?'

The text that printed out on the laptop's screen came in jerky bursts.

We came to throw… a switch. We trained and trained in… simulations. I do not know what the switch was, but everything… went dark when I pulled it. We were three, but… now only me, you see. And I will… die but I want to live.

'Oh, God,' Laura mumbled.

Laura clenched her teeth and hurriedly typed, 'You have to answer this question. It's VERY important! What is the 'Other' that is inside the main computer?'

I do not know. The… graduates know. They did not tell us.

'Do you have any idea? Any guess what it might be?'

My friend, he is… dead now. He was in my class. He said he heard something… in the chair. The graduates told him it was just a dream, but he… heard something. It was the Other in the annex, talking to the defective one in the main pool. It was a riddle. A poem.

'What was it? What did he hear?'

He heard the Other. It said, 'Behold, I have… become death, the… destroyer… of worlds.'

'Je-e-esus,' Laura whispered.

'What?' Hoblenz demanded.

She didn't have time to answer. 'Hello? Are you still there?' she typed.

Laura hit Enter, but nothing happened. The huge beast lay motionless on the floor beside her.

'Bin-go,' Hoblenz said. He had found the main circuit breaker.

'HELLO!!!!' she typed, jamming the Enter button over and over, drawing Hoblenz's curious gaze.

The awful reply finally sputtered across the screen. Mary, Mary, quite… contrary, how does… your garden grow?

Laura felt tears flood her eyes. She placed the laptop down and crawled to the robot's face. The deep pits were bullet holes — scars from the toddler's game of hide-and-seek in the cafeteria.

'Goose!' she shouted. 'Is that you, Goose?'

She scrambled back to the laptop, kicking over still more clutter along the way.

A plastic ball rolled across the floor of the room. From it emanated a scratchy recorded voice. Humpty-Dumpty sat on the wall. Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall. It was Goose's favorite tune in the world. He'd brought it with him on his final mission. With a loud bang that sounded like a gunshot, Hoblenz threw the main power switch.

Laura nearly jumped out of her skin as light and motion exploded instantly all around. In that awful moment a low humming sound rose to an electric whine of ever increasing pitch as a hundred, a thousand machines began their ominous windup to full power. Snapping and crackling sounds of discharging electricity arose from all directions.

The soldier at the door dove to the floor, and just behind him came a heavy metal gripper — its exposed pneumatic cables flapping against its side. The claw began to vibrate in the doorway in a mindless, spasmodic fit.

'Look out!' Hoblenz shouted. A thick silver tube jabbed into the room through the empty window frame. A blunt metal piston shot with machinegun-like rapidity from the end of the shiny cylinder. Each punch of the stubby tip was accompanied by the deafening roar of a jackhammer.

Through the shattered windows of the small room Laura saw the building come alive with activity. Not the well-ordered operation of Gray's marvelous factory, but the frenzied contortions of machines out of control. It was bedlam on an industrial scale.

'Come on!' Hoblenz shouted as he crawled toward Laura beneath the pummeling piston. He grabbed Laura's arm roughly and tried to pull her to the floor. She jerked her arm free, and her hands landed in broken glass. Laura looked down at the small red specks that now dotted her stinging palms.

She didn't notice at first the fluttering gusts of wind on the back of her neck, but when she turned she saw a mangled robotic gripper rotating wildly. It spun a metal paint sprayer from the end of a slender rubber hose. The sprayer whirred through the air like a propeller just above Laura's head.

'Gotta do it now!' Hoblenz shouted as he squatted on his heels amid the swirl of machine violence. Laura glanced down at the screen of the laptop.

'Error. Communications interrupted. Host unavailable' was printed just beneath Goose's nursery rhyme.

'Laura!' Hoblenz called from where he pressed himself against the doorframe opposite the snapping, convulsing gripper.

She laid one hand on the smooth chest of the Model Eight — its epoxy skin cool to the touch — then joined Hoblenz at the door.

Hoblenz kept her clear of the robot's dangerous appendage. The hydraulic arm to which it was attached was stretched to full extension. It rose from the base of an immobile robot, which was fixed in place beside the now- rolling main conveyer belt. Hoblenz and Laura edged their way past the shaking gripper, which grasped and snapped randomly at air.

Once outside the power station, she saw the dead Model Sixes lying on their sides and scarred with crisscrossed torch cuts. A single Model Seven lay in the pileup, its leg trapped underneath one of the overturned Sixes and an ugly molten hole piercing its thorax.

All around the Sixes and Sevens was a hodgepodge of their newly energized cousins. Unlike the mobile models, the assembly building's immobile robots seemed to have no batteries and had simply stopped running when power was lost. That attacking machinery was now awake, but it was confused and running amok.

'This way!' Hoblenz shouted in the confusion. He turned to lead them in a sprint along the assembly line. The now-active motor of the conveyer belt was deafening. Its sonorous rumbling was pierced only by the whining stops and starts of cranes racing back and forth across the ceiling. Their movements were without apparent purpose, and heavy cargo swung recklessly underneath — large-scale lessons in the forces of physics. When two loads of heavy equipment met going opposite directions, the result was an explosion of debris which then rained down on the floor.

Laura ran into Hoblenz's broad back, and a streaking load crashed to the floor just ahead. Her ankles and knees were jarred by the blow, which passed through the concrete floor like the shockwave of a massive explosion. She covered her ears and jammed her eyes shut — the frenzy of the enormous cavern overwhelming.

'We gotta run for it!' Hoblenz shouted. He grabbed her hand and took off, dragging her along behind him. They dodged this way and that around piles of smashed equipment that grew in the chaos of random frenzy. And all the while the sky rained crates onto the floor and the constantly moving arms along the conveyer belt snapped menacingly.

Hoblenz turned all of a sudden to the right, pulling Laura down a narrow corridor and out an exit.

The door shut behind them, and the world was plunged into gooey silence. It seemed to coat all her thoughts and nerves with balm and to leave her floating in a peaceful bliss in which time ceased to matter. As an afterthought, Laura joined Hoblenz and his men at the top of the steps.

'I guess that was a waste,' Hoblenz said.

The Model Sixes and Sevens were having a parade. They were strung out in a line, heading from the assembly building across the lawn to the computer center.

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