The shriek of squealing tires punctured his sleep. Dr. Dieter Karnak woke with the crunch of rending metal, thrown from his slumber the way his son was thrown from the driver’s seat. Stuttering incomprehensibly, the engineer sunk his feet onto the frigid metal of the Cloister and pressed his palms into his eyes.

“It is 3:27 am. Your REM cycle has been disrupted. Would you like to sleep until 6:00 am, Dr. Karnak?” The clinical voice skipped across syllables like a faulty GPS, as antiseptic as the room. He grumbled low in his throat, slid his feet in slippers and rocked back and forth, his hands against the side of the thin cot.

“I sleep later, liebchen.” Karnak pushed his neck from side to side, feeling the crackle of his vertebrae as he pulled on his thermal lab coat against the artificial temperature of the spherical Cloister.

“Your sleep deficit is 743 hours, 33 minutes. Would you like to sleep until 6:00 am, Dr. Karnak?”

“Liebchen, meine liebchen… what am I going to do with you?” Karnak rubbed his face and stumbled over to the tools, technological bric-a-brac and robotics scattered across worktables laid out in an arc. His palms rested on cool metal. A picture frame with a bride and groom’s euphoric grins held a printed out and taped piece of recycled paper. ‘Obit-‘ Dieter closed his eyes as a moment’s revulsion punctured his woken calm.

A ruined car torn by rescuers, from the snow. The thrum of the drone’s propulsion system chased his inner ears, its’ cut-laser blitzed at the cargo of the truck which hit frozen water. Cargo values trumped carbon lifeforms, in its’ algorithm.

“Liebchen, reboot deep learning algorithms, turn on the monitors. I told you I sleep later. When I am retired, maybe. Maybe… Make me en kaffe. Reconstruct the hypothesis on your neural net via findings 2.4. Warm up the quartz-laser apparatus.” Karnak tap-tap-tapped at data tables, pulled the coffee mug away from the machine and took a hesitant sip.

“Raise volume twenty three percent. Ah! Good… good.” Another night interrupted. Months of interruptions by the sounds of his son and daughter-in-law, as captured by the locals, who went to record an aurora and couldn’t reach the car in time. As he worked, Karnak glanced at the desktop photograph of a young man and a breath-arresting blonde with arms around his neck. Johanes and Agathe, now spectres of disturbed sleep. Eyes stung by sleeplessness craned to a holographic panel above the picture frame.

Sarai’s vitals were stable, locked within the hallucinogenic virtual world her therapist called ‘a healing journey. Three months in, she converted their bedroom into a life-pod. A litany of emails from lawyers, notaries and the delivery of a keycard for a storage container in Langley, the echo of a marriage she no longer managed and a perpetual online existence Dieter couldn’t fathom.

Sealed in the bowels of the Conglomerate’s Vancouver Laboratories, the Cloister received its name from the otherworldly predilections of the chief research scientist. Dr. Dieter Karnak, the world’s leading mind on artificial intelligence and neural net programming. Death’s dealer to the Slavic Amalgamate, Oppenheimer’s bedfellow to the Commonwealth and NATO.

“Meine liebchen… meine liebchen.” He worked amidst the muffled cacophony of laser tools and the eternal repetition of Handel’s Messiah, until the Cloister opened with a hiss. The Cloister became both sanctuary and escape, his pied-a-terre in the Conglomerate building as empty as a marriage decimated by their children’s deaths.

“おはようございます, Dr. Karnak. おはよう, Lieben.” Baiko bowed as she entered, her teal hair caught atop her head in a purple bun. She hugged into a lab coat, and left her shoes at the door. Work with Dr. Karnak was a religious vocation for the intern. He took none but believers in his Trinity. Metaphysics. Hard Science. Wonder.

“Guten morgen, Baiko… Liebchen. I call her meine Liebchen, not Lieben. Liebchen.” Karnak refused to look up from layers of quartz crystals, as he tinkered with the inner workings of his liebchen, his darling. Several samples of fibre optic hairs rested in taped clumps beside the wedding photo of Johanes and his Agathe. One would work… one would be perfect.

“すみませんでした, Dr. Karnak. How is Lieben today?” Baiko bowed at the camera lens hung from a lazy umbilical. Karnak looked up with a scowl, shook his head and looked back down with a hidden smirk. If every day he taught Baiko to pronounce Liebchen, he would be short enough time to make half a machine.

“I am operating at 86% efficiency, Ms. Kaho. I require optimization. Your heart rate has risen 6.9% past resting rate. Have you been running?” The disembodied feminine voice flooded the Cloister, and Baiko covered her mouth with her hand.

“I was going to miss the bus.” Baiko set to her work with the virulent desire to blame the pink on her cheeks to the heat of the screen. A flow of information jittered to life. Baiko oriented herself to the experimental algorithms run over the midnight hours. Never a question of where she was needed, Dr. Karnak valued the lack of extraneous chatter in Baiko second of all. Foremost was Baiko’s ability to match samples to the photograph, without question of his mental health. The penchant for subtext, learned from her Japan-born father was as dear as the gold soldered into their beautiful machine.

Strung up by a collection of wires, robotic arms and threads of fibre optic cable, the shell of Karnak’s Liebchen hovered like a piecemeal angel. The android paused in mid construction. Completed systems hovered; feathered wings of silicone and quartz microchips. Each segment of the machine was as carefully crafted as an icon in an Orthodox Christian church. Dr. Robert Dunlevy’s robotics meshed with the quantum theory of Dr. Karnak’s classical neural net in an array, which made the bureaucratic beasts on the Board salivate for a thrice helping of cream and honey off the top.

“Morning.” Dr. Robert Dunlevy groaned into the Cloister with the scent of harsh black coffee in a flip-lid container, and the leather of his shoes. Dark hair shorn short was worn under a thin microfibre tuque, a cold-weather turtleneck under his button down to stave off the Cloister’s nigh sub-zero temp. “Results in from that servo test, yet?”

“I didn’t check.”

“Oh, ‘cause the damn thing doesn’t need to move if it’s smarter than the average fifth grader?” Robert grit his teeth and slumped into his chair. Flicked on the bank of screens in his area of the Cloister, and searched through emails and data reports as he blew on the thin steam from the travel mug. Baiko scrunched her nose.

“Your gyroscopic servo-motors are not my priority.” Karnak refused to glance up from his work. “Meine Liebchen’s ability to intake stimuli is.”

“There we go, glad we got the ‘your machine’ thing out early today. You’re not the only one building this tin totem. Remember? Tch. Be professional for fuck’s sake.”

As the human sense of time derived from paleolithic seasonal changes and the night sky, so the modern age would look upon Karnak’s creation and realize Death, like night, has its’ waning. Built upon quantum bit superposition, the quantum computer could theoretically augment a traditional computer’s neural net. Not Honda, nor Taiki-Benz managed to ground quantum data in a meaningful way.

Information in the quantum realm was temporary. It was the harshest lesson in quantum computing, since the beginning of the 21st Century. Ephemeral as the superimposed bits. How did you anchor something which existed in a state similar to Schrödinger’s damn cat? Would the data brought from a quantum system anchor correctly, without being altered by the position of the anchor itself?

“Really? Not a word? Not one?” Robert sipped his coffee and shrugged as Baiko offered him a slim smile and forwarded the data reports. Scientists for decades attempted to create meaningful uses for the quantum computers humankind produced. While their potential was the difference between stone aged clubs, and the industrial revolution, practical application remained as elusive as Dark Matter. Whoever broke the code and unlocked quantum computer’s potential could feasibly be the monarch of the post-silicone age.

Dr. Karnak promised to place such a paradigm schism in one of Dr. Robert Dunlevy’s pristinely engineered robots. How else to connive the Chairman into releasing funds for his Liebchen? The eccentric doctor sanded and polished a piece of crystal the size of Baiko’s thumb and held it up to a gold plate bent into a cranny inside his miracle.

“Rose Quartz. For compassion.” His clipped German accent rang hollow off the walls of the technological birthing chamber.

“Will it give Lieben compassion?” Baiko closed the lid of her thermos, set it in her bag.

“Liebchen, mein liebchen. Not lieben.” Dr. Karnak chuckled with a foreign, yet temperate warmth.

“Oh Christ, a machine that can feel. That’s a good use of resources…” Robert sputtered as he looked up from the servos for Lieben’s articulated arm. “Rose quartz for my ass. It can compassionately wipe said ass about four servo links from now.”

If Dr. Karnak heard his fellow, he ignored it.

Baiko talked to Lieben as they worked, picked up on Karnak’s constant mutters and spastic temper. It felt wrong to leave her in half-constructed disarray. A mother carried her child. They had only the cloister, inverted womb where many parents constructed the new creation.

Lieben’s cloister felt like the only place on Earth where disconnection reigned. The world forgot silence in the years since Dieter was a boy. Even then radio-waves rang eternal around the planet long before his mother bore down. Sound whispered through the space, instead of the daily roar, reverberated in holy ratios until it cuddled around the ear of the intended listener.

“Faun! What is this? These conduit wires are flawed!” Dieter threw the box of wiring wrapped in a spool back into its shipment box. An inch-long piece in the middle bubbled. Easily cut away, it would not do.

“Send it back. Request a new spool.”

“Why not cut that off and use the rest? It’s fine.” Robert scanned the spool, tested its conductivity. “Nothing functionally wrong with it.”

“Send it back.” Perfect. It had to be perfect. Only perfect could it be done.

Robert shook his head and sent the spool to shipping, with a hand scrawled note to cut off the offensive piece and send it back with fresh wrap. Eccentricity was a given in the brilliant, but Dr. Karnak’s religious fascinations grated Robert’s atheist sensibilities. If God ever existed, it wasn’t bickering about faulty wires.

In the depths of their copper monastery, circuit boards made believers of post-graduate students, and in the chill hum of perpetual prismatic light, an entity crept closer to being born.

“Hold the door!” Frank yelled from the public side of the security gate, until he got close enough to see the glare on Tara’s diplomatic face.

“Yeah, sure! I’ll hold the door. Sweep aside in a curtsey and let Sir enter, too!” she strutted inside with all the grace of a peacock on the prowl. Tara’s heels cost more than Frank’s car, or so he thought as the glass door smacked his shoulder. Frank fumbled and caught one of the data sticks in hand, the others skittered to the polished floor.

“Goddamnit, Tara. Freaking big head for a dame in PR." Frank grunted. She strutted on those damned red-soled heels, the ones that made Frank’s wife blush when she saw them at the company holiday party.

If he ran, he’d have time to take a piss before the big meeting. Frank tossed his ident-card to the reader. Tara’s smug red pout grinned at him as she waved a manicured set of nails from the VIP elevator. The elevator doors wooshed shut.

Frank slumped into his chair around the boardroom table as Levy Xin, the Chief Operating Officer stood to wave the first screen on their report off the projection port.

“Good of you to join us, Frank.” Levy’s eyebrow raised, her thin lips pursed in the consistent scowl of a woman who got where she was by talent alone. Tara grinned across the table, leaned back in her chair with a stylus in hand and a biscuit beside her coffee cup and saucer.

The Chairman’s personal assistant placed a cup and saucer of coffee and the pastry tray down for Frank, who busied himself with his tablet and pockets for the data stick encoder. The boardroom table held folk in a varied array, a few chairs switched with holographic plasma displays of people in their home offices, and vacation spots.

“Thank you, Levy… I apologize, the elevator attendant didn’t know the meaning of ‘wait’. No cream, thanks. Ah, bagel and lox. Yeah… thanks… Diana is it? Thanks… how ‘bout them Canucks?” Frank mumbled, as she put his order down and went to stand in the corner, unobtrusive for the next caffeine hit in the boardroom. Tara pulled the stylus from her mouth and huffed, taking the tiniest bite of her biscuit.

“Yes… I’m sure.” Levy raised an eyebrow and ran her hand over hair laden with fibre optic extensions, the shifting light a hypnotic and agreeable addition to the otherwise all-business woman in a pale grey power suit. She married the job the way old widowers married virgins, a glorified nanny for the child-ideas percolating in company mind.

“So! Ah, yes, the quarterlies on the NEO’s. Budgetary tables. Stalling tactics and… so how does everyone like the new coffee?” Frank slid the data chit across the table, and Levy set it into its’ dock, as 3D figures emanated from holographic banks built into the glass surface. Chewing on a corner of biscuit, Tara grimaced as the figures danced.

“Frank called this meeting to discuss some necessary updates to the NEO-N Project. Frank, if you would not mind.” Levy sat down and stared at Dr. Karnak, who loomed upon the table with both palms flat upon his holographics, shoulders lowered like some form of avian raptor. Robert Dunlevy leaned back in his seat, ran his fingers along the furrow in his brow.

“We’re over budget. It’s taken our entire R&D coffers and the futures for three years. Sorry, Dieter, Robert, I’m a money man. I don’t know what it is you do, I’m not that smart… but if we want to put out the Vio 4-passenger next year, we have to figure out where the disparities are and how to staunch the economic flow.” Frank sipped his coffee, set it down and added a cube of crystallized honey. The spoon clanked across porcelain. At the head of the table, a pair of gold-ringed and folded hands clenched, then released with a breath large enough for the entire room to flinch by microns.

“I was promised an unlimited budget.” Karnak loomed over the table, his rare electric magnetism assumed as much space as Rasputin in the Queen’s private rooms. The ideal germanic engineer, Karnak was the sort of guy who made Frank nervous around his wife, before they went out for more beers than frat boys on break. Nerves returned for the imminent joust of two alpha males, as the Chairman leaned forward, his gold-clad fingers clenched together.

“Unlimited is relative. I can’t give you what I don’t have. The Payroll, fabrication costs, invested capital, I’m not touching that. You’ve had unlimited access to our R&D budget for two years, Diet. And the profits from the Mia-2, and the futures on the Vio-4. I can’t feed you on air. We have stockholders to answer to.” Frank leaned back, sipped his coffee one more time. Ah, sweet caffeine.

“Take from her.” Karnak pointed at Tara.

“You can’t take my budget! It comes direct from the Chairman.” Tara laughed, a shake to the extension-ladened head. A blown kiss made it across the tabletop via holo-emitters, pursed lips which fluttered until they pressed against the Chairman’s largest ring.

“Oh, I don’t know, social media’s a banging way to sell our company’s products, Tara…” Frank smirked.

“How much extra do we need?” Levy brought forward the PR and Marketing budget, a band of green up to the ceiling.

“Hold the call, here.” Tara sat up and rattled her coffee cup against the glass table.

“Like you held the door and elevator?” Frank snapped, foot tapping on the lunch kit he hadn’t had time to put away.

“Tinker-toy can’t have my budget. I need my budget. He’s going to cut his corners and leave mine be. Who do you think is going to sell this thing, once he’s done? There are trade shows to prepare for, places we’re expected to show up to looking like money. Ad campaigns, hit directors and celebrities to hire to do commercials, stream spots, corporate sponsorships, the shebang. Cut my budget and what, ask me to run to the copy-and-print to photocopy a bunch of posters, of ‘World’s First Android Slave’?”

“Meine Liebchen is not a slave!” Karnak’s fists smacked wet and hard against the table. The room jerked, as if his fists had the power to send everyone two atomic particles over from their current position.

“You’re the one with the insane hippy bullshitters dancing naked around a King’s Ransom of electronics and liquid gold!” Tara barked, the pads of her fingers on the table.

“Fuck you, Tara! You have money! I did not know client dinners included seven thousand dollar shoes and Haute Couture frocks!”

“Dr. Karnak! Tara! That is enough.” Levy threw in, and Frank caught the glares in their eyes, the haunted suck to Tara’s cheeks. Oh god.

“You gave me promises of unlimited resources to create the best android the world will see, and I am giving you artificial life. Liebchen is not some machine to be bartered around. Liebchen is alive!”

“Oh for the love of fuck.” Robert rubbed his temples, “I can cut on the servo mechanics, it’s not that... ow. Who kicked me?”

“Okay, yes, Lieb-lub-the NEO-N’s special Dieter, we get it. I’m banking on it. Tara’s being salty, you don’t bow to her whim.” Frank spread his fingers out, attempted to calm the table. A dozen VP’s and the Chairman himself in the room, and today the notoriously silent Dr. Karnak had to open his gob. “She’s forgotten who controls the money, and you know what Tara? For someone who’s been dipping into the expense account for fashion week, maybe pissing me off isn’t the best start to your day. Dr. Karnak, Dr. Dunlevy, if I shill you another 40% of Tara’s budget, can you get the prototype off the ground? Displayable in half a year? Capable of shaking hands, kissing babies, impressing Mr. Media and the Social Gab Band?”

Dieter’s lips pursed, talon-fingers scratching at the table.

“I was promised free reign. My own staff, my own laboratory, my own space! You cannot take back a gift freely given! Not after the decade of building your war machines. I create you a mechanical army and you give me my Liebchen. You hid behind objectivity while my machines decimated Prague. Kiev. And when I told you…” The scientist wasn’t the same since the accident, and Frank wondered if anybody else much noticed… in this meeting everyone couldn’t do a damn thing but notice the slow unhinge of Karnak’s mind. The greatest mind in artificial intelligence and optics of the silicone age was unravelling. Threw himself into a glory project, while interns and underling teams slap-dashed the cars, worker bee machines, holographics and robotic prosthetics that paid for it. None of the people around the table met Karnak’s eyes, as his wild nerves grit at their collective past. “When I told you to pull the drones, their neural nets were not capable of handling the tactics necessary for peace, you promised… you promised me this.”

“The war stung us all, Dieter. We did our part, but your and Robert’s work saved lives. Human lives. We supplied what the Commonwealth needed…”

“No!” Karnak’s palms slammed against the table. Glass shook, the holo-emitter wobbled. “We supplied what they asked for. What they wanted, not what the world required. Artificial sapience is not a parlour trick with recycled parts. Do this project wrong, and the world burns. Do it right? And we herald Hera on Olympus’ Throne. The… hippie bullshit Tara yips about is as important as keeping the Cloister cold and the quantum computer core colder. How an artificial intelligence is created, the way in which it is built, matters profoundly. One faulty algorithm which equates material cost higher than human life is the knife blade between utopia and annihilation. You asked me to build this. You demanded a machine smart enough and creative enough to take on the Chinese Syndicates’ narrow AI’s. To make it moveable. Functional as a human is functional. How else did you think it could be done?”

Frank’s eyes fell to the data pad synching with the table below his hand, and he tapped at the smart glass to call up the invoices for materials.

Gold, quartz, tourmaline, silicone, copper… in his faith or his guilt, the litany of items expended on the NEO-N Project didn’t mean much.

They meant the world.

“Dr. Karnak, how close are you to finishing the prototype? We need to know when we can put the NEO-N’s into production to recoup our costs.” Levy refused to acknowledge outbursts as the other directors pawed at their parts of the table.

“I am not giving you a mere machine to putz around with the vacuum and watch sodium levels. Liebchen is the first artificially intelligent sentient being in the universe, and you wish me to… rush her?”

“Karnak’s nuts! It’s a machine, an expensive luxury machine. It doesn’t breathe, eat, smoke a joint at puberty to experiment, it does what we program it to do and that’s all it will do. We can cut a profit either way, but industrializing it means we go from luxury to global phenomenon and with the Honda people marketing their newest self help machine for Spring release, we need the working copy. It’s not a negotiation, oh lord, what’s he doing?” Tara rolled her eyes.

Dr. Karnak’s thighs bumped against his chair as he walked to the exit, hands dug into his usually tidy hair. The until now silent Chairman’s eyes rested not on the wayward scientist, but on Tara. She rolled her lazy blue eyes and checked her lips in the mirrored back of her phone.

“Yeah, I got it.” Tara groaned, bit another pastry. The room cascaded in a horrid disquiet, the 3D graph of expense versus funds rotated in the centre like a church spire. Outliers dotted in a way Frank recognized in the alcohol-fuelled dreams of the ubiquitous ‘after’.

The NEO-N’s… the Neo-Nurses would absolve them all.

“So that happened…” Frank blinked, sucked down another cup of coffee, and tapped at his screen on the table. “… March sound good for the next update?”

“March sounds fine, Frank. Take the loss from my part of the budget. Give me enough for some cheap Chinese wire and silicone spackle. We’ll get it done.” Dr. Robert Dunlevy didn’t buy into such professionally suicidal beliefs as creation of sapience, nor of anything but solid work for the bottom line. Dr. Robert Dunlevy built machines.

God. Damned. Machines.

Whoever said a sports car couldn’t have a spare wire or two to replace every two years? Upgrades in services? Robert shoved off from the table in time to watch the Chairman whisper in Tara’s ear, his tan hand firm around the middle of her waist. Rubbing his eyes Robert got two strides, before the honey of Tara’s voice, artificial as the rest of her, played to his ears.

“Oh, Robbie.” She grinned from filled lips, their distended size a caricature to the woman Robert imagined Tara to regress into the minute she was both drunk enough and alone enough to search through what remained of ancient camera rolls. “Chairman needs a teensy minute of your time.”

“Would be my honour.” He sipped the last of his coffee, its’ black and chicory flavour burned down his throat. Setting the mug down with a clink, Robert fixed his tie and followed Tara to a slim copper door built into the side of the conference room. The Chairman’s facial scan opened the copper door of the private elevator, and he stepped inside without a single sound, Tara behind him.

“See you on the top floor.” She pointed to the stairwell outside the conference room, as the copper panel shunted shut.

“God damn.” Robert trotted to the stairwell, reminded with every flight how much cardio he missed locked away in the Cloister.

The rooftop garden of the Conglomerate’s Vancouver spire bled green. Vertical garden walls hemmed in the furtive wind. Pergolas with robotic covers retracted in the rare sunshine, while heaters disguised as sculptures betrayed an opulence beyond everyone, but the Chairman’s chosen. Richly pigmented mosaic tiles reconstructed walkways of the Chairman’s youth, lemon and olive trees lined the walk beside orchids, peonies, rose bushes and herbs. Cushions of silk embroidery rested on low settees, as a fountain bubbled behind a well-loved potting bench, where composite planters were half-filled with marigolds, and nasturtiums. Dirt-spoiled gloves rested beside a gold plated trowel.

A breath of laughter guided Robert to an alcove, where Chairman Kaur reclined on a low Chesterfield filled with cushions, sipping from a glass of deep ruby wine.

“Good of you to join us.” Tara glanced over from her magnanimous grin, poured Robert the tiniest amount of wine, and handed him the glass.

“Tara, does Dr. Dunlevy threaten your calm so much?”

“You want a drunken scientist tinkering with our new merch, I’ll open another bottle, Sir.” She nibbled on an olive, set her own glass down beside feta cheese and lemon marmalade on scones. Head tilted back toward the sun, the Chairman soaked in the beauty of Vancouver in late springtime, clouds over the mountains too far off to linger in the downtown oasis.

Hand clenched around the bowl of his wine glass, Robert bit down the urge to start up conversation. The dangers of disrespect hovered around Robert’s wrist. A word spoken poorly could send one toppling over the edge of Chairman Kaur’s personal Eden. Karnak’s outburst echoed in Robert’s mind, the man was brilliant but Robert didn’t abide the quintessential ‘genius’ as outside the rules of proper behaviour. Dieter thought his post-war pain mattered more than the rest? Karnak’s paradigm bullshit wasn’t going to ruin Robert developing a glorified tinker toy with legs for days.

The wine in Robert’s glass sloshed down his throat. He gripped the stemware between his fingers and leaned elbows to knees.

“Karnak’s out of control.”

“Dr. Karnak is the reason the NEO-N project continues at all.”

“I could…”

“Is Dr. Karnak going to finish my perfect machine?” The Chairman smiled and shook his hair out of the ponytail he wore in the meeting, silken black locks flowed past his shoulders. “If I give the lion’s share, will he complete it?”

“Are you asking me if he’s capable or competent?”

A series of tsks clucked out of the Chairman’s mouth, the shake of his head enough to cause Robert to lean back, accept the long pour Tara offered from the bottle. “Forget not thy faults, Dr. Dunlevy.”

“On a good day, Dr. Karnak can build Jesus out of paper clips and stray wire. Lately, I’m not convinced the man leaves the Cloister to go to the bathroom. He’s fucked in the head, nattering on about mystic bullshit and… I can build the machine. But his woe is me routine? Rose quarts for compassion, yellow gold for ambition. Pseudoscientific bunk. If I have access to his research, I can finish the prototype without him. A sensible, capable machine.” Robert dunked the wine down his throat, sucked half the glass with a slight grimace and a shake of his head. “I’m a scientist, I fear gravity and electromagnetic pulses near my phone, not some mystic emotion giving rock! How can the man lead the most important android and artificial intelligence project with supplies from the metaphysical bookstore off West 4th and Arbutus!? I worked my ass off for this! So what if some archaic limited ai built into our drones caused a car accident in Germany!? The drone had its’ function! It followed its’ algorithm with perfection, the damn accident was human fucking error. We can’t erase human error, but we can build and modify perfect systems. What in the radiant matter of Crookes’ plasma does it matter if a machine has emotions? They don’t matter. Nobody wants a maid that laments the laundry! God! And where’s he, eh!? Crafting a crucifix with supplies some new age hoplite dug out of the remains of a church on fire! He won’t build your new world. I will. Me! The NEO-N’s will be efficient, they’ll do what they’re told and they won’t have chakra prayer beads built into their endoskeletal structure like some Rainbow Road nonsense!”

The buzz of a bumble bee by the rooftop hive joined Robert’s exhales. Lips clamped shut, he set down the stemware so hard he thought it would snap. But like Karnak’s resilient but shattered mind, the thin stem remained. A hum of environmental shielding, which allowed the rooftop to have such luxuries as bee hives, marigolds and lemon trees in a temperate rainforest, 323 metres above ground.

Wild eyes shifted, unanchored by the Chairman’s silence. The gleam of a talisman around the Chairman’s neck, of twin Kara bracelets peppered the silence. Tara tapped the rim of her glass, leaned down and kissed the coil of gold on the Chairman’s thumb ring.

“I’ll handle Dieter.” Her voice coiled around Robert’s ears without penetrating the drum or anvil or hammer. Numb as the statues formed of marble and cement through the rooftop paradise, Robert rose and bowed his head. What was in the Sagan-be-damned wine?

“Chairman. Tara.”

“Forget not thy faults”, Chairman Kaur’s voice bored through forehead and bone. But Robert Dunlevy was a man of science. A creature of proof, habit and information bartered at the fount of experience. As he walked to the stairwell in the side of a living wall filled with clematis, he cursed loud enough to reverberate through the flights of stairs, and hear a limp, empty echo.