Steel dogs

She seemed to fall into deep thought, and said no more. After a bit, she lifted the water bowl and drank deeply. Aandred watched her, wondering. She was remarkably self-possessed, considering recent events. Had the human race changed so much, or was she simply an unusual woman?

Aandred activated the dogs, and they rose from their sleeping mats, tails wagging. He fed them their morning pseudofood, a ritual they never tired of. It served no purpose beyond providing them with a pleasurable stimulus. The pseudofood passed through them unchanged, to be reinvested with odor and taste and then fed to them again.

When the dogs had finished their breakfast, he decided to repair Umber's olfactory transducer. He released Umber from her run, and she leaped joyfully about him. The prisoner's face was pale, Aandred shook his head; her apprehension was natural enough. What would it be like, to die tom by the dogs? His own death had been easy: the prick of the injection, torpor, then oblivion.

Aandred moved Cerulean's empty hulk aside, feeling a small, familiar twinge of sorrow. He whistled at Umber, snapped his fingers. She jumped nimbly to the insulated tabletop, waited with her usual good humor. «Good girl,» he said, and stroked her back. She wriggled ecstatically. He opened his forearm and touched a switch. She became a graceful statue, and he applied a screwdriver to the access panel on her brisket.

The transducer was mounted on a swing out card. He eased it out, applied the point of an analyzer to various diagnostic nodes. The malfunction became clear: a loose memory flake. He popped it out, examined the contact edge, reseated it.

When he had buttoned Umber's chassis and restored her to active mode, the telltale on his forearm burned a steady green. Umber bounced off the table, raced around the kennel, barked her mechanical bark. «Better, girl?» asked Aandred.

His captive pressed against the grating, watching. «You speak oddly for a machine,» she said.

«That’s because we're not entirely machines,» he said. «Not entirely.»

«What do you mean?»

He took a stool, sat beside the grating. She drew back slightly, she controlled her fear well. «Once upon a time, we were ail living creatures, alive as you,» he said. «Me, the dogs, even the rats in the dungeons. Even Merm. All once alive, all now dead — except for Droam, who is indeed a machine.»

Aandred moved his stool a little closer to the grating, leaned toward the bars. She didn't move away, though her eyes narrowed. «Shall I explain?» he asked. «If I do, what will you trade for this information?» When he had spoken, he felt a trickle of shame. Why was he trying to frighten her? An ugly old habit, he thought. She would, soon enough, know terror, when Droam gave her to the trolls, and then she would be dead. «Never mind. Just tell me your name — that will be sufficient.»

She stared at him for a long moment. «What harm can it do? My name is Sundee Gareaux.» She lifted her chin, gazed into his face with cold eyes, as if daring him to sneer.

Her courage is pleasing, he thought, and then he said, «Listen.»

He told of the beginning, seven hundred years past. SeedCorp had come to the Sea of Islands and built Droam, an expensive resort for a special kind of guest, those fascinated by certain legends of Old Earth. Droam's bulk covered several hectares; its towers rose three hundred feet above the island's highest hill. The builders endowed Droam with a potent macromolecular intelligence, and then they conceived their grand scheme.

«Oh, it was a wonderful idea,» Aandred muttered. «At first they intended to staff Droam with robots in the shape of the Ancient Folk of Old Earth: elves, trolls, fairies, dwarfs, wizards, and witches. But one of them, the cleverest one… she was supervising the building of the castle when the idea came to her. Robots had one flaw — they were predictable. Why, a guest might come to Droam dozens of times over his lifetime. Would boredom set in, if the staff never changed their behavior, never acted irrationally, never displayed any human flaws or foibles? Of course.»

Sundee Gareaux's face was intent «And so…?»

«And so they decided to purchase revenant personalities to ride the hulks.»

«What does it mean.. revenant?»

«Ghosts. We're all ghosts in Droam. The dogs, for example… the ghosts of puppies who died for Droam seven hundred years ago, Put to death — painlessly, I'm sure — and their little souls recorded for the Hunt.»

Revulsion stained her eyes. «That is how you came to be what you are? You were killed to fill the machine?»

«Not exactly.» He chuckled rustily. «Oh, one or two of the human revenants were bargained for that way — dying men and women who sold themselves for money to leave to their families, and for a chance at some sort of continued life. But most of us are executed criminals, our personal- ities auctioned to defray the costs of our crime»

The revulsion spread to her mouth. «And were you always a murderer, then?»