In July 1973 the chief administrator of a top secret U.N. project was killed near Mount Ararat in Turkey while inexplicably decoying his own military pursuit of two subjects related in the disappearance of a renown scientist whose missing creation still baffles modern science.

The project has long been disbanded.
The status of the subjects is unknown.
The status of the scientist is unknown.
Their intentions remains a mystery...

***

The V.I.C.I. Disks

A Cross-TV Series Novel of "The Questor Tapes" & "Small Wonder"
By Brianna Hull

-.-.-.-

Dedicated to
Gene and Majel Roddenberry,
Gene Coon, Howard Leeds,
and with stars in her eyes,
Tiffany Brissette

-.-.-.-

"I've spent half my life wondering how we got this far without killing each other off.
Now...I'm not sure I like it."
The late Geoffrey B. Darro, Project Questor Chief Administrator

"I can do anything I'm programmed to do."
Victoria Anne Smith Lawson, a.k.a. V.I.C.I. (Voice Input Child Indenticant)

"Yes, a little slab..."
Questor to Turkish quarryman.

***

The V.I.C.I. Disks
By Brianna Hull

The fiasco was over in seconds.

Questor's scanning eyes jumped from Jerry Robinson's argument with the skeptical NYPD captain by the curbside crush of spectators and in one sweep zoomed-in and caught the Uzi being slung from under a trenchcoat across the street from the limo where Ambassador Ramos just started to rise from the door.

In moments Questor's trim form bolted from the throng, bowling over husky but ineffectual security guards like rag dolls as he leaped between Ramos and the crackling stream of teflon-coated metal that ripped the back of his coat like shredded tissue. Grimacing, Questor ignored the fiery storm of damage signals searing his brain and shoved Ramos back into the limo and slammed its armored door behind him.

"Go!!" he shouted at the chauffeur who needed no prompting as the heavy car burnt rubber and skewed away from the curb of screaming and scattering mayhem behind a persistent hail of bullets. Staggering to the ground, from the corner of his eye Questor saw police and security scrambling everywhere from hidden gunmen and Robinson running towards him.

"No, Jerry!!" Questor cried, but the now frustrated first assailant made his Uzi spit fire once again at his frustration before the NYPD cut him down. Questor gasped as the middle-aged engineer staggered in mid-stride and crumbled still several meters away. Questor's soul frantically overrode screaming shutdowns of crippled backups while he held the middle-aged M.I.T. engineer's head on his knee.

"Qu -- Qu -- Questor??"

"I am here my friend, Jerry," Questor gently said with a wet eye.

"D -- D -- Did -- ?"

"Ramos escaped assassination, at least for the present."

"An -- An -- G -- Go -- mez?"

"I didn't see him but I'm certain he is nearby. Be still, my friend."

"T -- T -- Then....it is not -- not over..." Robinson coughed, his glazed eyes rolled at Questor's ripped shirt and deep bloodless wounds. "Qu -- Questor...you're -- hit."

"It is -- minor,"

"You -- still lie terribly," Robinson said, coughing crimson as his eyes widened. "Your side...wh -- where...wh -- where...your -- na -- na -- nanomech ge -- generator? It's -- damaged?"

Questor tried not to appear grim. "Be still, my friend --"

"Qu -- Questor, you -- you ca -- can't re -- repair your -- yourself with -- with -- out it. I mu -- mu -- must try to -- to fix..."

"Impossible, I fear, my friend. The bullets had armor-piecing uranium heads. Their weak radiations are too much even for nanomech menders to cope," Questor admitted, anguish wrung between companion and ominous wounds. "My fusion furnance is stable, but its power bus is erratic. I am -- almost entirely functioning by auxiliaries, and even those systems were mangled..."

"Qu -- Questor," gasped Robinson with dismay, "Wh -- what w -- will we -- we do??"

Questor paused as infinitely sinking dismay wished Jerry never asked. "The world must -- endure without us. There are -- promising signs --"

"N -- N -- Not e -- e-enough, Qu -- Qu -- Questor. N -- Not enough..." Robinson rued, slipping back and Questor clutched him. "I -- I -- I'm s -- s -- sorry..."

"Jerry -- !" Questor cried, looking up as whistles and sirens erupted everywhere and police and guards warily returned amid a tumultuous tide of confusion and anger. With a surge of loving strength, Robinson grabbed Questor's shoulder and stared back pleadingly.

"Qu -- Questor, y -- y -- you must -- must go. Th -- the police....d -- didn't believe me...as -- asked me...how I -- I knew..."

"Easy, my friend Jerry," Questor gently urged as Robinson fell slack and quiet. Something even deeper than the racking pain fell into a bottomless pit inside Questor's essence, and as he haltingly backed away as police and bodyguards converged, Questor glimpsed into the sidelines of confusion and horror and ever so fleetingly and met a pair of hard cold eyes staring back from afar that turned away and hastily slipped deep into the crowd.

Even through smoked glasses the red glare was nearly unwatchable before the blazing head of the cylindrical laser bore sank into the black earth, dragging its chain and cables from the rusty oil derrick after it back towards hell.

Fountains of molten rock gushed from vents astride the main bore and streamed into steaming channels emptying into vast trenches gouged into surrounding banana plantations. It lent an eerie volcanic scene that left the wide cordon of a hundred armed soldiers around the site not slightly shaken and awed.

A kilometer away on the tropic presidential palace balcony, Generalissimo Miguel Santos lowered his glasses and grinned back at the lanky and seasoned American academic in a meticulously tailored Fifth Ave white tropic suit. It became his new persona.

"Impressive, impressive beyond description!" Santos savoringly issued, mindlessly fingering the racks of medals and ribbons clustered his overstarched well-worn olive uniform as he reveled the certainty of an approaching pivotal day. A servant refilled their champagne tulips with sparkling amber. "And you say the depth limit is the weight of the power and support cables, not the borer itself?"

"And the laser even cauterizes its own borehole lining!" the other grinned. "Currently, it could melt through ten miles of strata without breathing hard."

"Incredible. And this slant drilling -- is as far and deep?"

Michaels slyly smiled. "The neighbors need never know."

"Ahhh!..." Tulip glasses tinked and Santos waved at the furrowed hills of banana groves. "Do you know when the oil companies sucked these mountains dry and left thirty years ago they swore there were no reserves left, but as usual the capitalist swine lied. The fact was further exploration would've ruined them, so inaccessible deep the deposits. You've made it possible for San Rey not only to bloom with black rain but enter the twenty-first century! And this time WE control the till, not driblets of token royalties!

"Tell me, Dr. Michaels..." Santos looked even more sly assuming a coyness; "I know you've been asked many times, but just what makes your laser device so different, so much more efficient and workable from all others to corner this market so?"

"Hard labor," Michaels coyly grinned and Santos chortled.

"Of course, we've all our little magician's books. It simply struck me of the lucrative possibilities your invention has among the -- er, defenses complexes around the world?"

"Not as lucrative as an exclusive lifetime percentage in tapping difficult crude around the world, Presidente."

"Prudent, unique, and wise. I begin to like you even more intensely each hour, senor." Santos turned to the darkened town down the valley and the moment the derrick's howls and machinery were shut down the lights there flickered to unsettled life.

"Soon, there will be plenty of power -- enough to sell our indisposed friends chaffing at our borders...for now. Thanks to our -- partnership, what better event than for San Rey to commemorate our first free elections this glorious year of our Holy Mother, nineteen eighty-six? The people cannot say that Santos did not deliver on his promises -- and gifts at the right time, no, doctor?"

A colonel sauntered up and saluted Santos and whispered in whose ear and briskly marched off. Michaels frowned at Santos' face.

"Nothing serious I hope?"

"There was an attempt on my charge de affairs in New York, but the cowards failed." Santos shrugged. "The rebels must be getting desperate. They know -- they know what these free elections bring! Yet they continue to terrorize from their jungle holes while I met their street challenge; Before the whole world I released the reins of power for the people to decide! And they will make the right choice. They'll have to, unless they wish to relive the squalor of their fathers and their fathers before that which even my best efforts -- as unpopular as they were, regrettably failed to remedy....until now."

He flourished his glass at the derrick. "Freedom!... Prosperity!.."

And no discontent for malcontents to stand on, Santos inwardly grinned.

Behind his unwary parents as they left the cab at the JFK air terminal, Jamie Lawson shoved the freshly palmed ten-dollar bill from his dad into his pocket instead and waved off the smirking then astonished skycap as the thirteen-year-old heaved his suitcase and a pile of others on the little arms and head of a tiny brunette girl-child who mutely and almost blindly followed his swagger into the terminal.

Lovely and quaint in a lacy red pinafore, ribboned bobbed ponytail, knee socks and patent leather Mary Janes, the petite ten-year-old under the luggage didn't flinch nor her nimble gait slackened under the load while passengers and skycaps looked in surprise then amusement and chuckles at the obvious joke of a little girl balancing an impossible stack with all the effort of carrying Styrofoam blocks.

Victoria Anne Smith Lawson took no stock in their reaction; humor and vanity had no meaning to her, no more than toil, time, space, pain, hunger, gender or even self. On the universal plane of awareness and sensation were concepts totally beyond her comprehension outside being binary references to stacks of other binary code.

Even to Vicki, Vicki didn't exist.

Willowy and blonde with a leggy loping stride, graceful Joan Lawson chanced to glance back in appall.

"Jamie!"

"Well, we're saving money!" the chunky pubescent retorted as he grudgingly reached up and pulled the heavy top suitcase off Vicki's pile before another scolding look from Joan compelled him to fully unload her arms.

"You really know how to mistreat a sister!" Joan chided, waving to a eager skycap with a hand truck.

"Yes, you really know how to mistreat a sister, Jamie!" Vicki echoed like a lively child parroting Joan and brandishing a finger at Jamie's smirk with almost excessive parody before falling mechanically quiet again.

"Aw, mom! Vicki's no real sister! She's a mini-maid, right dad?" he retorted, dragging his luggage behind him. "Even those Hilton housekeepers took a break after seeing how neat Vicki did our room instead!"

"The housekeepers gave me a tip," Vicki informed in a twangy monotone voice as bland and stoic as her pretty face and huge brown doe-eyed stare.

Lanky Ted Lawson sighed and passed Vicki his Powerbook carry case which she dutifully slung over her pouf-laced shoulder. "Nevertheless, it's better not to let the world in on it till she's perfected, right, Jamie?"

"You're both missing the point!" Joan chided, "Vicki's not like all those other robots at that cybernetics convention. It's okay to mistreat something that looks like some metal octopus, but not little girls!"

"You're just too sentimental, Joanie," Ted wearily rejoined."You've got to see Vicki for what she is; A sophisticated domestic aide robot, a gynoid. A pretty PC. She's designed for hard labor and how much or long or where doesn't matter to her one iota. She hasn't a mind or emotions or even thinks like we do. You saw all those exhibits of how far A.I.'s advanced so far. Great for chess and checking identities, but we're generations from any real thinking machine if that. Heck, even a slug has more consciousness than she has."

Joan prettily simpered at him and sympathetically hugged Vicki's shoulders. "You're comparing our daughter to a homeless snail after all the things she's done for us? For you? All the people she's helped? All of Jamie's homework she's done behind our backs? Men! You treat her like a dog!"

Jamie thought; "Well, she's kinda like a pet --"

"See, Ted? No respect! How can you think of churning out thousands like her with that attitude? Think how it reflects on our character, of the bad example it sets for boys on how to treat girls!"

"Think of the bad example Vicki sets for girls!" Jamie professed, "Slaving away in the kitchen, fetching shoes, cleaning your bedroom...yea, I could live with that!"

"Junior chauvinist!" Joan smirked, sashaying off with contrite Ted chasing.

Vicki threw up her hands. "Men!"

"What do you know about it, worm brain?" Jamie snapped. "When we get home give me your tip."

"The housekeepers gave it to me," her protest monotoned.

"Hey, anything that's yours is the Big J's, remember!"

"That's not fair. I did the work."

"You don't even know what fair means! Just like dad said, all you're doing is adding yes and no's like some stupid PC game like Doom."

"I'm more than Doom!" Vicki intoned with a stiffer edge.

"Don't get ansy with me, Vicki -- else I'll be pushing lots of buttons tonight!" he sharply issued, his finger poking over the lacy yoke of her pinafore. "Because I'm not just a robot owner; I'm a user too -- got it?"

"Got it," she vapidly replied with the slightest of shudders. The skycap scootered over with his hand truck, grinning as though ready to play along with a popular joke until nearly jerking himself to the ground when he tried to yank up an expectant empty suitcase.

"Ga--Jeezus!!" he blurted.

"Careful, my CD's in there!" chided Jamie. The startled skycap looked up at Vicki's blank expression as he loaded the hefty suitcases.

"How -- How'd ja carry these, sweetie? What's the trick??"

"No trick. I can carry a gross load of two hun --"

"She means it's gross to -- to tell you that! We're in -- in show biz!" Jamie put-in. "If we told you it wouldn't be a trick, now would it?"

They headed down the promenade to the flight gate to San Francisco when Jamie suddenly discovered he was walking alone and turned back to see Vicki standing far behind, like a bird jerkily cocking its curious head about, glancing at the throng around her. He groaned and ran back.

"Com'on, Vicki, we gotta catch our plane! What's wrong?"

"I don't know," Vicki uttered, her pretty but bemused expression a body English indicator that her cognitive processes had stumbled upon an uncertain or illogical perception. It didn't happen often and Jamie saw nothing to account for it now.

"What'd mean, you don't know? You don't do anything 'less there's a reason to."

"Affirmative."

"So what is it?"

"I don't know," Vicki said, the tenses in her voice mirroring the magnitude of her confusion as her huge brown eyes swept the terminal. "I don't know."

"Well, I do," Jamie said, hooking his elbow around her slim arm. For a second Vicki resisted then surrendered to her tow but not before taking another glance around her and seeking some logical and definable reason why she bothered to.

Quietly brushing the butt of his holster as the ramshackle tenement's basement door creaked opened, Duval warily stared into the familiar eyes of his opposite number, Nova, and tepidly nodded for his men to let him in. Surveying the dim room's crumbling plaster walls and lone table. Nova slinked aside from the door and Juan Gomez entered, looking every bit the tired and vexed hirsute bear of a veteran guerrilla, stared at Diego Valdez sitting at the end of the worn table, looking back with the weary face of a lanky college professor whose youth witnessed far more death than pupils.

Gomez nodded to Nova who then signaled three other men inside, they too moving like leery seasoned soldiers from the brush as two of whom stoically stationed themselves at the door, their burly overcoats bulging with carbon-steel insurance and their eyes fixed on their counterparts and grudging compatriots in the room with the distrust and fragile truce of convergent objectives.

Gomez, bitterness and anger and frustration rumbling his voice, advanced on Valdez's table. "We're on our way back to San Rey, Valdez. What is it?"

"Gomez," Valdez's soft seminar voice began in appall, "Have your people gone mad?"

"It had to be done," Gomez asserted coolly with barely restrained passion. "To show the world our cause is not lost!"

"Hitting a diplomat in New York? Where our brothers in general assembly have to eat the results of this election?"

"The election is a sham!"

"Which Santos openly invited the U.N. to run and monitor to appease them -- and us."

"Not 'us'!" snapped Gomez, pounding the table and rattling nervous trigger fingers all around. "Perhaps to campus warriors like you all, but not the workers, not the soil eaters in the country. Ten years of Santos' tyranny is enough!"

"You're out of touch -- and favor, my friend; Have you not canvassed your roots lately? None of Santos' opposition have his new advantage now. The people see this. They care nothing for ideology, only peace from poverty -- which he could deliver now."

"The people aren't that stupid -- or gullible!"

"Juan, our whole region is spent and blighted. The only difference between our neighbors is Santos' keeps his army better fed than his people. The people have long resigned to believing that no one could cure God's neglect no matter who sits in the palace so they tolerated Santos' abuse. But now, what this new maneuver of his along with this gesture of stepping down for free elections, we simply cannot counter it."

"Dictators don't turn democrats without an ace in the back pocket, Valdez! It will be back to his old ways once the people sanction his position! San Rey is his property, not his trust! He'll keep one hand in the treasury and the other on his pampered army! Nothing without his approval, no dissent without the threat of 'disturbing the peace'. More, the man's a glutton for power and now he'll have the money to match to drive it! Small wonder our neighbors are so nervous! If he succeeds then we must show the world that we will resist Santos anywhere no matter what --"

"By cutting down political lackeys? Where will that get us? What will it earn us??"

"This election is a U.N. fraud! Like the infidel polls -- !"

"No!" snapped Valdez, bitterly biting his tongue stating it. "The polls do not lie. They speak for a deceived people. We must educate our people on the dark sides of Santos' silver promises."

"Education!" Valdez spat like a disreputed thing. "This is a revolution, not civics 101!"

"The people will not listen if they have burping bellies and color TV in every room! That is Santos's weapon! That is the leash he dangles over the peoples heads. This-- This thing of his is like a fat teat hanging over every hovel, ready to sate the peoples' hunger! The people will follow Santos like the bliss of a good woman if his plans materialize!"

"That's why we must seize the palace eventually!"

"Si, I concur--but not by force! There are ways to break Santos' monopoly without losing our face to the people. We have to negotiate and neutralize his sole advantage without denying ourselves of it."

"You'd been teaching too long, Diego! Do you think Santos will just sit there talking while we grab his ace card? If we're going to milk San Rey's new treasures like he is doing, then we must seize the palace or where ever this thing is."

"If his security contingent don't destroy it first, its mines will, and puff! -- all our dreams, and the scorn of the people! They'll riot to bring Santos and his gilded dreams of prosperity back! Where will be we all be then? Bandits acting against the wishes of the people?"

"What would you have done? What those two gringos said? Yes, I know all about your rendezvous at San Rey college, Valdez. How this 'Questor' suddenly appeared dropping notes to meet with any contras and liberation groups-- and how fast you bit the bait!"

"Mr. Questor claimed a better way. A way to defang his advantage and still have the trust and support of the people!"

"But instead they tail us to New York and save Ramos' ass!"

"Because you would've sealed Santos' bid in the election and won him sympathy-- yes, sympathy around the world!"

"The ballots are already good as sealed, Diego! To throw away their lives like that to stop a roach like Ramos from being taken down! Or is Questor -- or likelier now, was this Questor, with Santos and Ramos all along?"

"That's insane. He was as anxious not being discovered like the rest of us."

"Even were this true, how did you come to trust this -- this 'Questor'? He comes out of the blue knowing almost everything about our organizations, our command structure, our ranks! Even our codes! How? C.I.A. they's how!"

"Let's not get paranoid, Juan; We're not that important -- yet. I don't know how they knew such intimate details about us, but I do know such knowledge in Santos' hands would've quietly crushed us overnight. And spies speak with promises, purses and arms; Questor and Robinson offered only to freely help depose Santos without bloodletting."

"Bah! You honestly believe such humanity when he insisted on taking care of the rig himself when this 'bloodless coup' scheme of his is executed? I'll tell you why; To escape with it!"

"Why, when if he stays with us to operate it we could make him a very wealthy man?"

"Just like Santos with Michaels." Gomez cackled bitterly. "Is not irony fit for pity? San Rey is a pebble in a lake of dry boulders. Boulders now ripe for new plucking from the oil companies by Michaels' secret."

"That's inane."

"Is it? For a learned man you haven't kept up with current events. The oil companies are jealous of this Michaels' invention! They'd offer men the price of San Rey a dozenfold to spirit the thing into their coffers."

"Mr. Questor and Robinson were more sincere than that!"

"And insane. They've just paid for their zealous passivism -- and interference."

Valdez rose and scratched his chin. "I don't know... there are too many mirrors, too many painted roosters --"

"We must fold the elections before Santos proclaims a mandate for a police state for life!"

"Even if we disaffect the people we are trying to enlighten?" Valdez shook his head. "In eighteen days a free people will vote a dictator back to power for another dozen years, and any move against him will only seal the devil in their hearts."

Questor stumbled a third time since entering the air terminal, compounding his angst and shame and torment.

He rued that pain couldn't be overridden like his bio-sim to sweat and pale, which he'd now be profoundly doing weren't the ability. He rued that Emil Vaslovik hadn't somehow proofed him better against the hazards of the era, and almost at once Questor apologized the seemingly ironic oversight; The Masters themselves didn't anticipate gamma shielding their Servers' brain cases until Questor's turn, so rapid was Man's progress in nuclear energy.

Fifteen years ago it caught Vaslovik totally unprepared when he saved his Stanford colleagues when a Cobalt canister accidentally fell and bathed the lab with radiation except where Vaslovik's body blocked it as he swiftly recapped the canister. But the damage was done as the ionized bionic plasma of his magnificent brain and mind began an accelerating deterioration that prompted the sickly renown scientist and humanitarian to desperately assemble an international consortium to build his replacement in Questor before leaving them forever so to reach The Place before his mind and body failed altogether.

During its three years, the Project Questor team only thought that they were building the prototype of an android as Vaslovik's daring techno-opus; they'd absolutely no idea of Questor's full capabilities or purpose save Jerry Robinson, the project's chief assembler, when he became the first and only living human to share The Truth with Questor deep the otherworldly bowels of an ancient mountain.

But now Jerry Robinson, his friend and colleague for nearly thirteen years was probably dead from rival liberation fractions which they monitored in London and whose desperate deed they just barely curbed at Pyrrhic cost, and what irradiation did to Vaslovik's, bullets did to Questor's intricate systems. The effects could be temporarily by-passed but the irreparable damage could not.

Questor knew his time was withering rapidly with an undreamt misery beyond the crisis of his singular mortality.

He had failed.

The first Server in over two hundred human generations. He'd be lucky to still be conscious after a few days and it was imperative that his supratechnology not fall into the immature hands of the human race. He had to reach Ankara then journey to The Place without fail or else be far worst than the failure he already was. The curtailment of his two hundred year destiny left Questor desolate and numb with grief and emptiness as he headed for an elephant graveyard.

The last slab among hundreds deep in The Place would be finally occupied -- and distinctively unfulfilled.

A lone emptiness twitched deep Questor's chest.

He hobbled toward the Turkish Airlines ticket counter line and waited, idly watching two seated businessmen exchanging data with the infrared links of their laptops.

Such a slow primitive method, he mused, welcoming the minor distraction then abruptly snapped his head up.

Something ghostly pricked Questor's ears.

A soft electronic whine, faint as a distant odor beyond any human sense or generation.

FM emanations from a CPU.

But why should this particular signal bother him he wondered? He was all too familiar with the electronic smog of modern devices and tolerated it much as humans did their hydrocarbon counterparts, but this had a different signature. Not the regular lighting pulses of static calculating programs but of a very distinctive and unique dynamic pattern of neural net processing. It smelled like a variant of Prologue and LISP; primitive and alien yet somehow kindred to him in the most rudimentary way.

Without knowing fully why he was stretching his overstrained resources, Questor limped off the passenger line and groped toward the source in the crowded sprawling terminal. He even thought he fixed the location twice but twice missed it but he doubted it: It was not only obviously mobile but most inconspicuous.

After scanning by several gates Questor stopped, catching sight of a family troop entering the terminal; A pretty blonde woman and a tall golfing type leading a chunky shadow boxing pubescent son and a little brunette around ten years old in a quaint red pinafore and nimbly carrying a pile of suitcases larger than she was. Her plight looked comical, and obviously that's how other chuckling passengers were taking it.

It had to be a joke.

Except the emissions were emanating from her direction.

Curious, Questor rescanned.

Positive vector -- but there were no devices nearby he could discern that'd generate the forms of binary traffic assaulting him. Something in the luggage? Perhaps, but were that true it begged the question of a female child carrying a load of packed luggage with virtually no effort.

An intangible spring of wonder and even reasonless hope blooming within him, Questor trailed the party from a discrete distance and watched the comedy of the bewildered skycap groaning as he loaded their luggage on his hand truck.

So it wasn't a put-on!

But how?

At the San Francisco flight gate the boy turned to the girl and pushed a dollar and change into her hand. "Vicki, go fetch me and dad a soda from that machine over there!"

"Fetch you soda," she answered in a even monotone that teased Questor's fascination while she marched to a Coke machine and, after politely watching a woman put several coins in and fetch her soda, the girl moved up and proceeded to stuff the dollar bill into the coin slot, thoroughly jamming it.

"Vicki!" The boy hurried over to the girl and grabbed the dollar and shoved it into the dollar slot. "You're supposed to put flat dollar bills in there!"

"Put dollars in there."

"Right! Now get dad a can too."

"Okay," and the girl promptly pushed four quarters into the dollar bill slot, the machine grinding in a mechanical gag before winking out. Questor watched the alarmed boy pull the girl's arm back on line and looked innocent of any involvement.

Not daring to hope, Questor's anxious rescan pinpointed the emissions source as coming from the little girl.

Definite.

With awe-muted pain, Questor gasped.

Can it be?

With breathless intrigue he intensified his silent probe of the tiny figure and whiffed the electromagnetic fragrances of a relatively primitive -- compared his technology -- parallel CPU and sensory feedback system, but it was far beyond any electronic prosthetics he knew -- not that his visual inspection could detect anything unnatural in her person anyway.

So she was not even just a bionically augmented human!

A rudimentary gynoid!

In 1986!

It was incredible but not fantastic; Questor knew Man had recently progressed to the base technologies: All it took was the will to combine and refine it into the shape and function of an android or gynoid, but in the pragmatic market-run human world it'd take a rather bold and eccentric mind to attempt that indeed. But here was proof, standing only fifteen meters away! Questor rifled through his huge memory and found no public references to any android project this advanced, so she must be a secret project or even a private prototype. He scanned the alleged father and recalled several trade journal photographs.

Dr. Edward Lawson. United Robotronics cybernetics cognition expert and roboticist. More than expert. Certified genius. In fact he was a pet grad student of Vaslovik's at Stanford before a lucrative offer from U.R. spirited him away and number two class pet Jerry Robinson became Vaslovik's Assembly Engineer protegee.

Questor felt the queer relief of affinity and irony -- and irrational hope: Then is he expert enough to help me? Moreover, can I trust him not to exploit my technology if he fails?

Doleful, he shook his head.

No...too little time to know...to chance. Besides, the damage was far beyond manual repair.

Questor grimly gave the winsome little gynoid his attention, his tweak of envy sprouting a wild whimsy that desperation and urgency blossomed into hard consideration.

No.

That's an insane and irrational concept, Questor chided himself, halting.

But these are desperate hours, the need too great...

He eyed her like Michelangelo at a marble boulder.

Granted, though she was likely the most advanced ambulatory computer device on the planet, she was certainly primitive in comparison with himself, probably possessing the cognition of a cockroach and the intelligence of a lizard at best.

Still, there was a chance -- just a chance -- that that could be upgraded beyond her science and the imaginings of her creator. Maybe even evolve some semblance of semi-sentience. It'd been done with him once at The Place, regenerating and hyper-enhancing his Vaslovik-designed but human-built components into systems beyond human conception.

Could such be done with her?

Surely not as effectively with her relatively inferior construction, but infinitely better than starting from scratch -- especially since The Masters provided Questor no materials nor means to effect a replacement since he was fated to've been the finishing Server.

Questor pondered the ethics of his desperate intent and found his motive and argument convincing. On the surface although it'd appear kidnapping, since no human life was concerned, that moral violation didn't exist. And theft was a small price to pay for nursing a race past self-destruction.

"Flight 701 to Ankara, boarding in ten minutes," the terminal P.A. blared.

His plane still had seats, the ticket counter still open...and he'd just enough credit left to cover a half-fare...

Questor looked about, plotting a clear avenue to the taxi stand. He ascertained that he just might have enough energy to sweep her under his arm and race outside and lose any pursuit then circle back to the Turkish desk after a decoy route. No human could match his speed and agility, even mortally injured he was sure, but he knew he couldn't take another bullet.

Desperation weighted the percentages and imperative and moved.

When he was five meters away the tiny gynoid abruptly halted in her Mary Janes and whirled and looked up straight at him, and for several moments Questor was nonplused before those huge brown eyes.

Could she sense his fact? He doubted it. His systems functioned by principles beyond conventional electronics. Maybe some spark of proto-cognitive sensitivity? Or more likely just a body English routine scanning the faces of anyone in her proximity for visages of passing interest -- or ulterior motives.

Whatever evoked her attention he didn't dare take the chance of scooping her up and triggering some anti- kidnapping shriek routine, and he promptly spun about on his heels and briskly marched off at a tangent for a dozen meters behind a pillar to monitor her from afar. She was still staring at him, not quite curious or even interested.

So close!

By some impossible irrational perception, Questor felt like his chest had dropped down an deep empty hole, and it was with a sober but welcome moment of enchantment that he noticed that she had lovely eyes; huge, brown and liquid as a doe's. Weren't for the laughable oversight that she scarcely blinked, they'd almost be alive --

Those eyes...

Questor frowned at the indefinable needling notions cruelly teasing him.

Something about her eyes...

Yes, they were lovely, but there was something else...

What?

He sighed.

No...that's what's captivating me.

Those orbs' beauty's infinite coffee pools. Questor cherished his developed sense of aesthetics and pulchritude. That had been a long road too, almost as complex and vexing as understanding human nature. He'd only gotten the swing of it in the last few years, at long last making up for those lost codes of digitized emotions erased by brash and clumsy cyberneticans over a dozen years ago.

Now, he'll never have the chance to exploit those gifts and know fulfillment as humans knew it. Almost two hundred years of duty and delights were now forever lost to him.

Like the honor of his purpose and design.

Ruefully sighing, Questor turned away from the far coffee gaze and felt for his ticket as he moved for his detoured airline gate, but just as he glimpsed the distant Turkish Airlines desk something nagging him speared his consciousness like a hook.

In The Masters' Name, What is it??

Bewildered, Questor let his baffled thoughts ride with the rootless currents teasing his wits, coaxing him to peer through the throngs and at the seated businessmen still communing Wall Street tricks with anothers' laptops with invisible digital copulations, the scene fanning the spark of a frantic hint and wild notion and scrapping hope.

Questor's chest bobbed for an instant.

Maybe?...

Hastily turning back by the pillar, Questor noticed that the gynoid was now slowly rotating as though anxiously scanning the crowds around her, her head cocking about like a bird trying peer for a juicy caterpillar among the leaves of a large tree. She passively searching for her owners. A logical procedure. Unlike humans, her limited world-view could get lost if she tried to seek humans in a sea of humanity, but for how long before they noticed she was missing?

There was no better time to test his wild hunch than now.

Questor focused his will and ferreted the flux of her FM emissions, combing and marking the subtle interplay and traffic of electromagnetic residue, dissecting their properties for the telltale characteristics of her hidden electronics.

Yes!

Infrared data link channels.

Hope thudded his chest.

Questor looked back at her and again her big brown eyes briefly brushed his with blank incuriosity and moved on to survey others around her. He was just another Joe again.

Poised for the next pass of those lovely orbs, he willed the photonic emitter sharing his eyeball structure to gradually scan the full infrared range below the visual light spectrum. The last time he did such was opening the garage door of a art thief several months ago. He remembered how Jerry teased him during such missions through pitch-dark tunnel and basements on how corny and "spooky" it was seeing Questor's eyes blaze like flashlights primarily for his benefit because humans lacked light-amplification and infrared optical powers, but where else would you locate handy lamps on the human frame?

The little gynoid's eyes brushed by his again and within that moment Questor pumped thousands of IR handshake protocols through his photonic channel but her face moved on. His chest bottomed out again but Questor felt some intangible assurance of his chance. Her roaming eyes chanced to land his again without any change of behavior or EM feedback traces, and Questor began to fear that perhaps he was in error or she wasn't sophisticated enough --

"Vicki!!"

The boy's vexed voice jarred Questor's attention and hope.

No! Not now!

"Vicki, what'd you hang back like that for??"

He was only a few meters away from her and Questor felt her search mode terminate, and in a few seconds her eyes would be dutifully fixed on her 'brother's for now on. Her face was on its final turn to accomplish that.

Her big brown eyes brushed past his -- then abruptly sprang back like a double take to lock with his as though a deer transfixed by the deadly dazzling beam of a car headlight.

A signal thought flashed in his thoughts.

Handshake waiting.

Amid spasms of pain, Questor's breath caught in a surge of excitement as his will furiously rammed interrogation codes through his stare. There was no IR feedback; her data input capacity apparently lacked a transmitter, but he could interrogate her systems second-hand by monitoring the ghostly fluctuations and currents of her electronics to identify and map the FM scent of each of her circuits and components. He could monitor her electronic reactions to his eyes' IR transmissions and bypass her lack of one. It was an extremely clumsy and imprecise and inefficient method but it worked, and it was his only peaceful option. For a moment she blinked before her small pink Cupid's-bow lips and feathery eyelashes gaped even more as her big brown eyes widened like doors surrendering to his pumping infrared gaze to further pry and probe and tickle the microconduits of her solid-state brain at megabyte speeds.

Questor had never hypnotized another computer before and the analogy titillated and fueled an unadmitted hope as his remote inquiry deepened to not only delve any circuit and pipeline for every byte of intelligence but manipulate, his effort abruptly interrupted when the girl suddenly went into a wild flailing jig. Alarmed, Questor broke his IR link and the girl seemed to fall back slightly, blinking as though jarred awake from a daydream.

"Vicki, why'd you just do that?" the boy asked, alarmed.

"What did I do?" the gynoid called Vicki asked.

"Jumping like a cheerleader with ants in her panties! You're not having TV remote fits again, are you?"

"No. All my systems are operating normally."

"Then keep up with me and don't stop! All I need is you getting lost and I'm grounded for a whole year!"

"I'm worth five centuries of grounding."

"Don't be a wise guy!"

Following at a discrete parallel distance from Vicki, Questor reviewed his analysis and extrapolations. He rued that he couldn't tap her ROMs; that'd make tinkering and even overriding her A.I. program for finer control all the more easier. Still, he felt confident enough that he could induce command strings directly to her motor plexuses, bypassing her higher executive functions. He waited for them to join the parents at the end of the ticket line and for her to casually look around her again to reacquire IR lock then randomly then selectively triggered and twitched every muscle in her body only milliseconds long to minimize any more noticeable manifestations. When she raised and lowered her right arm as he "ordered" Questor almost whooped with joy.

Now for opportunity...

Questor fidgeted, waiting until the boy and his parents turned their backs to the tiny gynoid then, like an articulate harpist, Questor strummed finely coded pulses back at her locked gaze and triggered apt chords of myogel actuators. Her left leg jerked up then her right and in moments she was marching away from the family with a robotic stiffness amusing several bystanders while Questor backed deeper into the terminal, hoping she wouldn't alert her creator that her body was being hijacked by spurious signals into a remotely controlled marionette. She shouldn't; like the human brain itself had no pain receptors to require anesthesia for an operation, he was manipulating her myoservos beneath the "awareness" and commands of her executive processes, and he doubted that they'd believe the uninitiated and "unwarranted" signals her sensory systems were sending them.

Only after she turned a corner under a stairway did Questor move up to her, and as her huge brown eyes lifted at him of their own accord he couldn't help marvel how convincing her total human effect was. He had no doubt that her cybersoma was molded off a real child's body with square millimeter accuracy.

Excellent human fidelity!

Charming beauty too.

Her gaze still locked his eyes, she suddenly broke into giggles, almost hysterically. Momentarily surprised and confused Questor glanced around for a cause, breaking the link. She abruptly fell quiet.

"Interesting impedance proximity side-effect," Questor summated, smiling and smoothing her silky walnut hair. "You cannot comprehend now, little one, but a higher destiny awaits you," he said, reaching down and effortlessly carrying her up on his arm as he briskly pounded upstairs to the tourist promenade and weaved crowds crossing over to the Turkish Airlines terminal side. Questor's fingers felt a stubby protrusion under the girl's right armpit and identified the hidden socket of a parallel port. She was indeed primitive, but there was potential here. Vicki made no protest or resistance to her abduction by a stranger which was difficult to believe considering her worth in technology and labor. Maybe his ethereal electronic tinkering unwittingly disabled that alarm.

Or was it the fortune of The Masters -- or does she sense her new destiny?

Nevertheless, Questor was relieved as he came down the promenade stairway to the shrinking Flight 701 line. It was highly unlikely a human child could've wandered so far so quickly, Questor assured himself. Any search would doubtless be confined to the immediate area of her family several thick crowds and hundreds of feet away.

And by that time they'd be at twenty-thousand feet and climbing.

"Tickets please," the pleasant ticket agent said.

"My deaf daughter. She lost her passport outside," Questor apologized with a thick Turk accent in handing over his platinum card and Turkish diplomatic passport which the uncertain ticket agent considered between glancing a blank-faced Vicki, still dutifully carrying the Powerbook case like daddy's little helper.

"I...I guess that's alright, Vice-Ambassador," she said, giving Vicki a smile and handshake. "Have a happy flight."

"Thank you, thank you!" Questor ushered Vicki through metal detectors and out the jetway. He was impressed she hadn't set off the detectors either; her systems being so EM shielded was another token of good fortune finding her among millions.

Are the Masters Gods now? he wondered.

Vicki quietly perched a window seat and folded her hands atop the Powerbook like a purse at Sunday church. Her movements were so fluid and natural that Questor was certain that her body English and basic demeanor were directly digitized off the movements of real children. Questor noticed business people had laptops, not children.

"I'll take that, little one," he said, taking it away from her pout and opening the carrying case. He decided to leave the laptop under his seat for Lawson's retrieval when they disembarked; Vicki wouldn't be needing such a primitive crutch after thirty-six hours. He noticed the wound parallel ribbon cord in the case and recalled the cloaked protrusion under her arm. He surveyed several diskettes, many labeled "V.I.C.I. I/O Diag" and "V.I.C.I. SEN LOG" and ascertained that it served as a portable diagnostics and memory core backup unit.

Logical. You wouldn't want to be far from troubleshooting any problems with a prototype domestic android. Suddenly concerned he turned to Vicki who looked back up at him with her warm but vapid regard.

The eyes are windows to the soul, but lovely as hers are there's none behind them, he marveled and sighed in pity while firing up the Powerbook.

At least not yet.

The hard drive whirled up and a security screen flickered on and he surmised it was 256-bit encryption. He didn't have the patience nor need to crack it.

"What is the password, Vicki?" he asked to her pouty look and he tried another ploy by reaching deep into her doe-eyed gaze. She suddenly giggled.

"$CALL LINK4 (TIFFANY) 9077694!" she tittered, settling down when he logged off.

"I don't enjoy usurping anyone's program, Vicki, even if you're not sentient -- yet," he apologized as the display lit up and flashed dozens of different screens a second as his hyper-dexterous fingers ripped across the keyboard, keeping just a hair below its I/O capture capacity.

Variable Industrial Cybernetic Implement

So, Vicki a.k.a. V.I.C.I. is indeed a robotic domestic aide; In fact, Lawson's pet project. He did his marketing research and product proposals thoroughly too; Jerry Robinson also once remarked that the most charming and unintimidating form a successful household android should have was of a human girl-child.

The thought of Jerry made Questor pause with a catch at the throat. Whether Robinson miraculously survived or not, in any event Questor would never see his friend again. He soberly turned to Vicki who was aimlessly staring out the window and he mustered his courage and returned to her origins and specifications.

Interesting.

Lawson was sole administer and R&D officer of the "Squirrel Works"; a $55 million black DARPA project at United Robotronics evaluating 'automated infantry', yet the program was terminated 'by reason of insufficient technological state.'

A smile passed Questor's lips.

The Pentagon had unwarily funneled dough in a project more successful than they ever imagined. It'd been easy for Lawson to complete a functional bleeding-edge prototype then quietly yank a few subtle but vital components at its debut. There'd be sour faces and failure audits after scraping everything of course, but investigations seldom went very far in military programs that weren't supposed to exist. Lawson would walk away with vital source material and knowledge to build a fully capable domestic aide android. Of course, he could've started his own company, but that would've been too obvious and raised lots of bad eyebrows; better to submit such designs under U.R.'s product umbrella.

This V.I.C.I., Vicki, was no doubt such a model that he was beta-testing at home in secrecy.

Very sly for an ambitious electrical engineer, Questor surmised. United Robotronics would've never forked the exorbitant R&D for Lawson's seemingly outrageous robot child-maid proposal, but now all he had to do was furnish data, courtesy Uncle Sam. Lawson would avail U.R. to build a V.I.C.I. prototype which he could then pitch on his own to any firm of his choosing. Unethical, yes, but then the company long made hundreds of millions off Lawson's genius; he likely figured it was time for his due.

Questor accessed Vicki's schematics and flashed dozens of frames a second across the screen beside another window of her rotating technoguts-crammed wire-frame figure.

Naturally primitive relative to his own, but most impressive for the era; PROLOG IV cognizer OS with neural hypercube topography, 10x8th nodes. Octet-ganged Alpha 3 CPUs, 10x11th bits/sec processing rate. 10x10th bit molecular matrix bubble memory.

So Vicki's total computative ability was about equal to a mouse brain. Still several magnitudes from any consciousness threshold, but then you could emulate most anything with appropriate mathematics, even within such primitive hardware. Questor doubted The Place would avail such an inefficient enhancement though when it could thoroughly hyper-evolve these systems into little semblance of their current structures.

CCD retinas, 2x6th elements each, 25x6th calc/sec. Sonics threshold 3-30x3rd Hertz. Olfactory 23x10th molecules/cub.cm spectrographic detection. 1x2nd epidermal piezo tactile elements .02 dynes/sq.cm. No sapidity elements despite a tongue; a temporary wanting. Seamless human model-casted cellular latex skin, dermal radiator capillary networks, silicone lipid tissue, microhydraulics and fluidics systems, CAT-scan musculoskeletal model Mary O'Connor, radiothermionic generator powerplant, titanium skeleton housing auxiliary lithium ion battery marrows, electro-myogel linear contraction drives, nylon ligaments and cartilage structures, suspended module cradles --

No wonder Vicki possessed such a natural anatomical appearance and locomotion. With non-rigid component elements and a skeleton 1:1 duplicated from a child model, along with nonmechanical electrokinetic gel technology whose "muscles" exactly mirrored their biological counterparts from moving a leg to batting an eyelash, Vicki's cybersoma -- her cybernetic construction -- felt, functioned, and performed at least just as fast and fluidly and flexibly as any human body.

Yes, all very impressive for this period, and since one of Lawson's notable achievements was transgenerational design processing, no doubt the majority of Vicki's blueprints were developed by programs created by other programs. It was likely Lawson himself barely knew exactly how half of her systems functioned, but then he didn't have to for maintenance, no more than a car mechanic needed to know combustion dynamics to fix an engine. Even genius Von Braun was knowledgeable in only five percent of his crowning brainchild, the mighty Saturn V.

Respiratory and pulse simulation and anatomical fidelity...

Obviously Lawson put a premium on Vicki's human appearance to pass deep scrutiny until she was perfected; she was almost literally the seed-child of a new multi-billion dollar industry. This V.I.C.I. was apparently a concept model that "borrowed" many original "Squirrel Works" components; an overbuilt prototype to best tickle the market's fancy as well as demonstrate her possibilities. No doubt her successors wouldn't nor needn't be so advanced nor sophisticated to accomplish less challenging tasks at more reasonable cost, but it was exactly that excessive potential that bolstered Questor's hopes since it'd definitely raise her baseline capabilities even moreso when she was maximized deep the heart of an ancient mountain.

Questor recalled his perilous regeneration in The Place and pondered Vicki's with the first titillation of anticipation he dared to indulge in many months. Vicki's very fabric would evolve into a new cybernetic entity, one fully appropriate and capable of traveling the world and society for her new life mission. And though it'd occur during the last minutes of his life, witnessing her transformation would be the crown of all his achievements all by itself.

"You used to help tidy a house," he said, feeling suddenly very protective and clever. "Soon, you shall help tidy a world."

Vicki stared back, mute.

"It was meant to be joke," he explained then sighed with a smile. "Soon, you shall understand, far beyond your A.I.'s greatest conception."

The jet engines whined up and for first time daring to feel if not optimistic, at least hopeful. There was a chance his purpose and promise could be reprieved, if by pretty proxy.

Questor blinked at the Powerbook's LED screen.

What's this?

Vanessa?

Variably Adaptive Neuronically Enhanced Socioempathically Sensile Android.

Interesting.

An advanced V.I.C.I., though actually more of a twin with dramatically enhanced artificial intelligence gleaned off the behavior and psychology of pre-teen girls. Meant as a prototype surrogate child for bachelors and lonely seniors rather just merely a mini-servant, though apparently its ego's arrogant and homicidal psychodynamics were too dating since Lawson ended up dismantling this model. Too bad.

"It would've been interesting meeting your twin, Vanessa, Vicki," Questor casually said to Vicki who looked up at him with an aptly body English smirk.

"Vanessa was bad."

"No, she was confused and immature in a world she didn't understand."

"Say what?"

"Good colloquial response. I meant to say that Vanessa was very advanced and-- misunderstood. True, she didn't have a mind or a conscious, but in her were the first pangs of awareness of a universe beyond the blinkers of one's programming."

"I don't get it."

"Oh you shall, Vicki, shortly."

He smiled at his new ward and wondered why he felt so protective of her somehow beyond his urgency. He knew well that the entire world would not receive her kind with open arms, no matter how optimistic the market research once her novelty as a cute robotic domestic aide wore off and people saw the metallic electric machine under her soft creamy skin. To many she'd represent a threat, a social usurping, a peril to labor and power structures. Cybernetic creatures such as Vicki didn't need to have consciousness or the even the intelligence of a mouse to be perceived as a harbinger of doomsdays. Even at the airport there were those who would've been so frightened of her fact that a mob would've torn her apart, no matter how tiny and innocent she was.

Was that why he felt so protective of her, he mused, or was it even more? A disconnected but distant technological affinity he could understand, but he felt some intangible deeper relation. Almost like Jerry's but somehow thicker, more fulfilling and immortal.

Almost like a -- kinship.

As though it was like having a --

Daughter?

Suddenly her pragmatic pose didn't feel so casual anymore.

Questor grinned at the warm whimsy and Vicki looked up as he covered her slim little hand with his.

Yes,

She is by fate and necessity my daughter, and soon far more than Lawson himself ever will.

The jet engines abruptly spun down.

Curious, Questor peered out Vicki's window into the terminal's glass walls.

And saw security guards and airport personnel scurrying to every gate and jetways being re-extended to every flight.

There was no doubt for the reason for such commotion.

He miscalculated -- again. Perhaps fatally so.

Had Questor a beating heart it'd be sinking down a black hole.

I cannot fail!

I mustn't!

Questor looked at Vicki who gazed back with an expression of blank curiosity. Were he in full health there might've been a good chance of his speed and strength spiriting her out and escaping an army of guards, but no longer...or ever.

I can't fail!

There was one last chance...

The only chance.

But not here, not now. There was simply far too much to formulate and code and he'd just barely time to merely secure his claim much less wholly possess it...

Swiftly he clasped her chin up to stare into coffee pools and rammed data streams deep their wide docile depths --

Vicki giggled like a fit. "Warning! Warning! Infrared port overload! Shutdown!!" she tittered as though some other device were being described. Questor cursed his haste just as security guards appeared far up ahead in first class, combing seats and passports. He reached under Vicki's left underarm and ripped away a patch of pinafore, exposing her parallel port while the little gynoid only mutely looked on, oblivious to her abduction or state. In seconds Questor had the parallel cord plugged her port and the laptop and blurringly typing coded command sequences invisible to her anti-virus and diagnostics software.

The guards were only a few rows away now, scanning every passenger and seat when Questor pulled the plug free and closed the case and shoved it to her, and in the moment before he left his eyes met hers and he clasped her cheek still.

"Do you understand, Vicki?"

"Yes, I understand, later," she said and he nodded and tucked the laptop back under her hands then promptly raced to the rear doors, his fusion furnace revving-up to max as he unlatched the rear door then jumped down to the tarmac. Like a cat landing on his feet, he sprinted over thirty miles per hour away from shouting guards before reaching the ramp's baggage ingress door.

"Hey! Can't 'cha people wait??" brawled a husky baggage handler as Questor blurred past them, hurtling over luggage conveyors and bounding up the stairs to the greater lobby. Questor kept his exhaustion contained until he reached the cab stand then slumped into a phone booth.

"You 'kay, mister?" a skycap asked and Questor feebly nodded if an inconsequential cold. He reasoned -- hopefully correctly -- that the security guards out here wouldn't have his description because Vicki's location would've been tracked back to the Turkish Airline gate several hundred feet away, and by the almost casual "state of alert" pose of everyone out here he was right. Panting, Questor waited just outside the terminal, fighting to stay erect from the surge of badly dwindling energy spent in his escape. He would never move so fast or exert such strength ever again. There was one more feat of superhuman ability and one more vital purchase he needed to accomplish before heading on the last flight to Ankara tomorrow.

But that was later.

A commotion was bubbling out of the terminal and with a surge of encouragement Questor spotted, amid a group of grinning security guards, a bland-faced Vicki perched high atop Ted Lawsons' shoulders amid the adoring pawing of tearful and grateful wife and son. For the first time in months, Questor dared to bask a shadow of optimism.

"May Our Masters watch you," he almost whispered aloud, and for a fleeting moment Vicki's head cocked up to catch his eyes in a seeming brush of promise.

Lady Helena Alexandre Trimble groaned and turned on her ruffled pillow and groped for the chiming intercom in the hand-carved headboard of her palatial bedchamber's sumptuous Queen Anne bed. She tapped the button and a stately and throaty butler's voice answered;

"Apologies for breaking your sleep, my lady. It's Mr. Questor...it -- sounds an -- emergency."

Something in Randolph's unusually stressed voice cocked Helena's ears and brought her to near wakefulness. She picked up her porcelain French provincial phone from the nightstand.

"Questor?" her concerned rich English accent asked before knowing the question, and her lovely face crinkled with dismay and grief.

"Jerry?? No! Oh no! O Mother of Grace! Yes, yes, I'm -- I'm alright...of course. Immediately! Sorry? Create what from the information centre? I understand-- Questor, you sound terrible yourself! What? But why aren't you're in a hospital? Why in heavens name not? Yes, I know -- I'm worried that's why! What else can I do? Nothing? You just bought a computer? Why now? Yes, very well, tell me later. Call the plane from your hotel, please. Yes. Godspeed, Questor."

Helene nearly missed returning the receiver to its rocker as she sat in a daze between anxiety and panic. She thought she'd long mentally fortified herself for a night or day such as this, as unthinkable it was, but her marble pillars of self-assurance and polished wit were, at least briefly so much warm wax.

"What do you think that guy was gonna do with Vicki?"

"Really, Jamie!...." Joan Lawson chided to her son in their modest living room while she sewed the rip of pinafore under Vicki's rigidly raised arm and poise atop the coffee table.

"I mean, he must've seen her socket after ripping her dress, you know?"

"Maybe that's what scared him off," quipped Ted behind his magazine on the sofa. "Vicki, did the man see your data port?"

"No." Vicki replied in her chiming monotone.

"And you can't tell us anymore what he looked than 'a man'?"

"No."

"Are you sure there wasn't anything you missed telling the customs people?"

"No. He kept crying and saying that I looked like his lost daughter and he wanted to take me home to his wife and make her happy again."

"How tragic," Joan said sorrowfully. "He must've been deranged with grief."

"That excuses kidnapping -- sort?" scoffed Ted, relieved. "Well, it could've been a lot worst."

"Heavens, yes!"

"Yea; for a while there I thought some industrial spy from a rival robotics firm had snatched her!"

"Well I dreaded what any mother naturally would've feared!" Joan riposted with a smirk before kissing Vicki's cheek. "Thank heavens they found her in time, no matter what! I hadn't felt so relieved since you dismantled Vanessa."

"Well, on our next trip to Disneyland we'll put a leash on her!" chaffed Jamie.

"Just to be safe, lock her in her cabinet for now on."

"Real Good idea," Joan quipped with a wary look at a sheepish Jamie just as the doorbell chimed. "It's the mailman," Vicki monotone

Jamie jumped up. "It'll get it!"

"I'll get it!" she emphasized, dutifully stepping off the table and unraveling dismayed Joan's thread behind her as she beat Jamie to the door. They both opened it.

"Hi there, little lady! And a Special Delivery!" beamed the mailman, holding out the letters which Vicki snatched ahead of Jamie. "My, aren't we hungry today!"

"We have pizza," Vicki said.

"She's just joking," Jamie said, closing the door while Vicki scanned the mail and stopped at a floppy disk mailer addressed: "Miss Victoria Anne Lawson, Special Delivery RSVP"

An alien code monitoring deep her mnemonics module recognized a parser string and triggered a response sequence, and deftly and quietly Vicki slipped the mailer into the placket of her pinafore just as Jamie turned and took the letters away. "Vicki, I was going to get the mail! See, you ruined mom's hard work!"

"It was more important I get the mail."

Joan simpered at Ted. "So much for a robot's sense of values. Step back up here, Vicki. We'll just do it all over again."

Vicki stepped back atop the trunk and raised her arm high again, and as Joan leaned to sew again she glimpsed into the pinafore's pocket. "Vicki, what's that, a letter?"

Joan reached inside and suddenly yelped in pain as Vicki slapped her hand. "Ow!!"

"Vicki!" scolded Jamie, surprised.

"O Ted, she whacked my hand!" Joan cried, rubbing redness.

"So I saw. Vicki, why'd you do that?"

"It's my mail."

"You don't get mail and that was a bad thing you did. Give her the letter."

"No."

The Lawsons all frowned. "You can't balk, Vicki; You're a robot!" Jamie scolded.

Ted moved up and reached for her pocket.

Whack!!!

"Ow!!!"

"Ted!" Joan cried in appall but he vainly shrugged it off.

"I'll handle this, hon," he assured, waving the stung hand. "Vicki, I order you to give me the mail then go to your cabinet. You're a bad, bad girl."

"I'm sure that hurts her feelings a lot, dad," quipped Jamie.

"I know what's happening; she's keeping our personal mail private like she's programmed to, but she doesn't know that she never gets any."

"That makes sense," Joan wryly said. "But isn't she also programmed to never attack us?"

"Yea, like Vanessa did!" Jamie added a trifle shakily.

"Look, two different cases; Vanessa's A.I. overdeveloped ego traits and became excessively possessive and arrogant. Vicki's not that advanced. Still, she has to learn never to do this again by logic-patterning and negative reinforcement."

"A nice spanking would be a lot of reinforcement," Joan said.

"Can I help reprogram her, dad? I really ought learn more how she works, you know?"

"Yeah, right," Joan thickly uttered.

"Look you two; if I do any shortcuts like that, her heuristic neural complex won't learn by real-world experience. That's the whole idea of training her in the house, Jamie. Now let's see...Vicki, er, could we just see your letter?"

Vicki paused then took it out the mailer to show them. Joan shook her head.

"Well, it's certainly addressed to her. No return address. A secret admirer?"

"Warren," Jamie sighed. "That nerd never gives up!"

"I doubt it unless he's into sending crushed roses," Ted said. "It's a disk mailer. Hand it over Vicki."

She briskly pocketed it. "No."

"Vicki, you are a robot, correct?"

"Correct."

"Mail is created by humans to send to other humans, correct?"

"Correct."

"Therefore you do not get mail, correct?"

"No."

"So much for logic-patterning." Joan quipped. Ted smirked.

"Vicki, if you don't hand the letter to me immediately you'll be punished."

"No."

"Very well," Ted ambled over to the closet and opened its crammed shelves of electronics gear and computers where he got behind a keyboard.

Joan was puzzled. "Ted, I never really understood this 'negative reinforcement'. Just how do you punish a robot?"

"Vicki's artificial intelligence works on a scalar positive-negative reward-aversion system. Level minus ten is a negative avoidance factor equal to, say, our grabbing a red-hot poker."

"You mean pain?"

"She doesn't know pain, however minus ten represents the most intolerable operating condition that her A.I. can accept. It's right next door to her Asimovian self-preservation directive to avoid damage or disruption at all costs."

"Mean like fear, dad?"

"In a sense. She won't keep rejecting an order from illogics and faulty rational because it'd eventually run into an imminent danger warning, ergo, stop else she's gone. I'll just sting her to comply with us at aversion factor minus one." Ted held up a ribbon cable plug. "Come here, Vicki."

"No."

"O Ted!"

"It's alright, honey. I've everything under control." Ted punched in a sequence. "There, wise guy! Remote mode access. See Joanie; who said I didn't learn any lessons from the mechminx?"

"Vicki's no Vanessa," Joan sourly uttered with a shudder. "Just give her a little slap on the wrist."

"Just gave her one; level negative one. Vicki, hand me the mailer."

"No."

"Alright then. Negative two..." Ted hit several keys and eyed Vicki who stood passive as ever. "Okay then, we'll step up to three...Vicki, hand me the disk."

"No."

"Ted, it's not working," Joan noticed and Ted smirked and increased it.

"I don't get it. Aversion factor eight."

"Boy, she must really want that floppy!" Jamie quipped.

"Okay then, aversion ten!"

Vicki visibly tensed and Joan warily touched Vicki's forehead. "Ted, she's trembling!"

"She's what?" He consulted the monitor.

"Yes, it's almost like -- like she wants to obey you but she -- can't."

"That's crazy. She can't have qualms about responding to commands. Her program's totally linear!"

"Maybe...but if intuition didn't know better, it's like she's -- fighting something."

"Fighting? Fighting what? She's got no subconscious to fight. Heck, she's no conscious period!"

"Still, aren't we hurting her? You said it's as bad to her as us burning our hands."

"Joanie, she's just a machine. We're obviously looking at most at some kind of arcane bug causing some kind of -- of command execution conflict."

"Hope she doesn't do that after cooking dinner!" Jamie said.

"Wonder what caused it," Joan said. "Think her experience yesterday had anything to do with it? Like maybe she's afraid of losing something of her own like we almost lost her?"

"Com'on, she's got a bug, not a psychosis! Then...she did pass the X-ray machines. There's a slight chance some of the rays got through her subcutaneous EM shielding and corrupted a cell in one of her ROMs."

"In English?"

"It might not be her fault," he said, punching several keys and Vicki visibly relaxed.

Joan sighed and hugged Vicki. "That's a relief. I'd hate to think all our lovin's spoilt her into a brat."

"Yeah, two Harriets' a recipe for suicide!" Jamie said.

"Well, we'll go the direct route instead of the heuristic," Ted said, moving to stand in front of Vicki. "Vicki, give me the mail in your pocket else I'll dismantle you."

Vicki looked up him with a grudging pout and handed him the disk. Ted beamed. "Wa-la!"

"Yea," Joan sniggered, "After threatening a little girl!"

"What threat? Her A.I. simply determined that being dismantled was an intolerable disruption, that's all."

"Good thing she doesn't know anything about running away!" Jamie japed.

"Well, that's one crisis averted," Ted said, opening the mailer and sliding out a CD-ROM while Vicki's eyes tracked it like a cruise missile target. "I'll run diagnostics on her later. First I'm going to check this little puppy out."

"Bet it's from AOL!" Jamie said as Ted went behind the computer and popped the disk in and looked up in surprise at Vicki almost at his elbow. "Back off, Vicki."

"That's my mail."

"If you don't back off you'll be resting in pieces in a crate in the garage right next to your twin's. Fuzzy logic got that clear?" Ted issued and she backed off. He punched up the keys and frowned. "Queer..."

"What, dad?"

"It logs, but it's stuffed to the gills with scrambled eggs. Must've been a faulty writing burn."

"Aw, too bad."

"Well, you can always blank it for your games," Ted said, ejecting the disk and lobbing it to Jamie -- but not before Vicki's leap snatched it in midair.

Jamie cried, "Hey! That's mine!"

"It's my mail."

"You gotta spank-wish? Give it back!"

"Vicki, give Jamie the disk back or get me the screwdriver right now!" Ted admonished.

Vicki pouted and gave it to Jamie.

"Is there a Mechminx virus?" Joan wondered. "I've never seen her act so peculiar! She almost seemed -- desperate somehow."

"A CD-ROM fixation. That's one for the books," Ted said just as the doorbell rang and Jamie answered it while pouty Vicki stood still, watching the disk in his hand. Everyone groaned as a perky tornado in jeans and twin red pigtails skipped inside.

"Hi, Jamiee!! Mr. Lawson, Mrs. Lawson."

"Hi Harriet," the other four wearily chorused.

"Say Vicki, guess what? My mom's entering me in the Junior Miss Powderpuff Pageant next week! The first prize's a trip to London for a whole week! You know, like the bridge?"

"Hope you win, Harriet," Jamie quipped. "In fact, I hope you win pageants once a week!"

"Oh, isn't he so sweeeett???" Harriet gushed, embracing Jamie who squirmed off.

"Let'go, woman! I didn't get my shots!"

"I love it when he plays hard to get!" Harriet chimed. "Want to go to the movies, Jamie? It's 'Don't Go Into The Basement, Part Seven.'"

"No need, Harriet; I'm watching a horror show right now."

"Oh, that's great! Let's order some pizza and watch TV together, heart throb!"

"I'll do dinner," Joan said, rolling her eyes and rising to the kitchen and towing Ted's elbow behind her.

"So wha'cha got, Jamie?"

"Just a disk I'm gonna format for my games," he said just before she plucked it from his hand and toyed with it while Vicki watched in silent concern.

"Gee, it's hard to believe all that blood and gore and monsters you play all fits inside this itty-bitty thing."

"Yea, like some people I knew," he said just as Harriet fumbled the disk and Vicki dove for it just inches from the floor.

"Good catch, Vicki!" Harriet cheered. "Well, gimme my disk."

"No. I have to have it,"

"How rude!" Harriet said, snatching it from Vicki's hand and turning to block Vicki's own try.

"I have to have it!"

Harriet bounced behind Jamie. "It's mine! Love bunny gave it to me first!"

The kitchen door opened and Joan peeked out. "Vicki come in and help, please."

"I have to have it first."

Ted opened the kitchen door, "Vicki, do what your mother tells you."

"I have to have it."

"And you're gonna get it if you don't obey dad," Jamie said.

"Vicki; in the kitchen or the garage, which is it?" Ted ominously intoned, and Vicki hesitated.

"Got it," her monotone thickly replied with a brittle edge, giving Harriet a long look before marching into the kitchen.

"Boy, she sure is getting cocky!" Harriet said.

"She's got a great example," Jamie muttered.

Striking and elegant even pensive at a late hour, Lady Helena Alexandre Trimble wiped a damp eye gazing out at a moon-kissed horizon framed by the tiny window of the Lear jet's plush cabin.

She was a thousand miles and three hours away from the emergency phone call from her confident and colleague-in-arms, Questor. With barely stifled consternation she had promptly dressed and raced to the wine cellar to immediately fabricate British and French passports for an "Ada Babbage" and "Brittany Brissette" from the information center then proceeded post-haste en route San Jose to pick up a child whose requirements and needs were to be serviced as unquestionably as Questor's own in completing his mission. It was the first time she'd ever been dispatched on any mission much less to salvage one, and the prospects after Jerry were unsettling.

Again Helena examined the passports' photos derived from Questor's e-mailed incredibly detailed ASCII-drawn images which were then enhanced and rendered into convincing photographs by the center's hypercomputer. She wondered why he didn't just send a scanned photo unless he was forced to literally type and compose their ASCII images on a computer off the top of his head; a fantastic skill though their beauty certainty wasn't lost in translation. The angelic ten-year-old "Ada's" high dimpled cheeks, pert button nose, fluffy flaxen tresses and pink Cupid's-bow lips enchanted Helena -- a welcome distraction -- though she wondered whether Questor exaggerated her huge dewy baby-blue gaze.

But who was she? Incredibly, the nearly omniscient information center had absolutely no knowledge of her, and the same for this "Brittany," who closely resembled a stunning Ada but at age twenty-seven as whose French passport declared. Maybe they were sisters, but that was quite a spread. It sounded all so very hasty and desperate, and that wasn't the worst of it. The news of Jerry's death stunned her to nearly collapse, yet Questor mentioned it only after passing her instructions to secure this child at all costs. Handling children wasn't unknown to Trimble; her two compatriots found and relocated the promising chosen countless times from squalor and wars and suffering. She herself was rescued as a street urchin from the ghettos of Yorkshire by Questor's mentor, Emil Vaslovik, who groomed her into an international hostess and celebrity and, unbeknownst to the world, his chief accumulator of social and strategic tidbits from around the world to feed his information center deep beneath Trimble manor.

Yes, they monitored and chose the brightest pearls and cream of humanity to husband and safeguard, but she detected a different stress in Questor's voice about this child. It sounded more than just saving a future potential scientist or leader or humanitarian;

It was as though -- no, Questor explicitly said -- that the very existence of their entire operation was at stake.

Comely little Ada must be very very special indeed.

Unique among the unique.

Trimble loved Questor and Jerry and they trusted another implicitly, but there was still a catch that gnawed at her soul. Though the men never hinted such to her, she sensed a sublime elemental secret held between the two and she felt put-out by some knowledge transcending all the trust linking their souls. She felt the same about Vaslovik as well. She could only comfort herself in the assumption that they were guarding her from some fatal knowledge. Something so Promethean in magnitude that it might effect the way she saw life and the world itself. She couldn't imagine what; without any modesty she felt she had seen it all.

The latter of Questor's final instructions were the most peculiar. After this mission was accomplished she was to deliver this pretty prodigy to a remote mountain village in Turkey with both passports and promptly return to London alone to receive at her door a few days later a new permanent house guest, Dr. Brittany Brissette, to whom she was to unquestioningly accord every respect and trust and possession to as though to Questor himself.

What made it all the more alarming and ominous was how terribly sickly Questor sounded, and what most clutched her heart was his ending his call with a staggered heart wrenching "farewell, my eternal friend Helena."

Curving a pink bathrobe, Joan came out of her bedroom for the kitchen tap and saw Vicki staring out the living room window.

"Vicki, why are you staring at the Brindle's house so late?"

"I have to have it."

"What?"

"My disk."

"Oh? Where's your disk?"

"Harriet has my disk."

"You mean Jamie gave it her?"

"No, Jamie used it to bribe her to go."

"That's smart. Well, we've lots of others for you to make friends with, okay? AOL doesn't know to stop."

"No, I have to have THAT disk."

"Vicki..." Joan stooped by Vicki, feeling pleasantly maternal and tender. "I know how it feels get something sent to you. How special it makes you feel that someone out there cares a lot about you... but that was just junk mail. Everyone gets one!"

"Junk mail, useless mail. My mail was useful mail. I have to have it."

"Look, I'll buy you your very own mail with your name on it, alright Vicki?"

"No. I have to have it,"

"I know," Joan sighed, hugging Vicki and looking into whose blank but beautiful orbs. "O, you're so precious...so lovely. I -- I shouldn't say this these days, but...if I'd a daughter, a real daughter, I'd wish she were like you."

"Like me," Vicki's monotone echoed and Joan's smile tweaked forth a tear.

"Yes...I know Ted thinks its silly for me to talk to you this way, but it's my fantasy that you really understand everything I say instead of just recording it. In fact... sometimes I have this dream that I found this magic wand and -- " Joan coyly tapped Vicki's nose with her finger and wistfully smiled at the robot's blank reaction " -- a real little girl!" She sighed then abashedly muted her pine behind a smile. "But, you're just like a real daughter to me anyway." She kissed Vicki's cheek. "In fact, soon, you're going to have your very own room with your very own canopy bed. No more stuffy cabinets, no more dressing-up in Jamie's room. How does that sound?"

"I have to have it."

"Good. Now, go back to your cabinet now, okay?"

"I must finish my night patrol first."

"Little girls need their slumber, not security alarms. Good-night, Vicki,"

"Good-night," Vicki said, watching Joan leave then returning to stare at the Brindle's home. If Vicki could feel emotion it would've been deep angst; as it was there was great muddled confusion in her binary soul as her domestic function was being challenged by an interloper she neither suspected nor cared.

What she did know -- or rather detected -- was that ever since leaving the airport her task priorities had substantially altered and there were now new mandatory directives in place. She didn't know nor comprehend that she was now several times more intelligent than she was hours ago, as much the measurable difference between a mouse and a Blue jay was. It added nothing empirically new to her menial knowledge nor cognition, but it did allow her to circumvent the fences and limits of her insular task parameters to accomplish the target that was her new purpose of existence.

Vicki waited a half-hour after Joan left before quietly moving to the kitchen door and slipping out into the night.

Harriet's window was on the far side of the Brindles' house from the Lawsons so Vicki had to gingerly make her way through their back yards. It was dark but her CCD retina's light amplification mode worked well enough. Harriet left her window ajar for air and Vicki peeped in to survey the premises. Harriet was snoring in her canopy bed, sharing her pillow several Raggedly Anns and Barbies. Vicki spotted the PC in the corner and her tiny fingertips pried the parted window and exerted several hundred dynes then climbed in. She quietly and quickly pinched the side of Harriet's neck and the slumbering child skipped several snores then relaxed into a quieter unconsciousness. Vicki moved over the computer and noticed a rainbow circle on the desk.

Vicki had no mind, possessed no emotions, but what she saw sent a micro-spike through her CPU.

The CD-ROM was scratched.

Badly.

She retrieved and dropped it in her pinafore's pocket then returned to the window, and for a reasonless moment paused to face the snoring redhead.

"Farewell, Harriet."

"Freeze frame!!" barked Walter Phillips and the customs technician stopped the videotape in the airport manager's office.

Holding his chin like a studied professor, Phillips moved up to the monitor of the airport ticket counter. "Zoom this!"

The field zoomed and the images of a medium-height man with a little girl came into focus. Phillips nearly broke into a grin.

Incredible.

After almost thirteen years...

"You can identify the suspect, sir?" asked customs chief Fenton, half-anticipating the slight shrug that answered. "Attempted kidnapping is also a capital offense in this country, Mr. Phillips. Even the United Nations recognizes that --"

"I'm appropriating all video masters and dupes of the ramp and baggage areas."

"Might I ask why?"

"International security," Phillips said to the other's smirk. "And I want every report as well."

"Do you want to sequester the witnesses too?" Fenton quipped. "I assume it was the suspect's incredible acrobatics that caught your attention."

Phillips turned a baneful eye. "How long is it to your pension?" he uttered to the suddenly stiffened Fenton who mildly went aside to a rack of VCR tapes while Phillips leafed through a passenger manifest and tapped a name.

"Lawson. Q-clearance in some of our most sensitive cybernetics systems, and his daughter is nearly hustled off to Turkey. Blackmail's an international incident, captain."

Phillips tossed the chart aside and turned off the VCR and ejected and stashed the tape in his attache case along with others Fenton coolly gave him. Phillips nodded at the airport manager and left. There was a twilight dawn drizzle when he got to his car but nothing could rain on his parade. He opened the cellular phone, punched up a number then a code the phone beeped then clicked.

"On scramble," he said to the line while he opened his case and took out a manila envelope and slid two photos out of them. One was of a Questor splayed out and mounted on a pallet in a stainless steel lab, the side of his suit and shirt holed and torn as though by a spray of bullets though bloodlessly so. Next to him was a grim Jerry Robinson. The other picture framed Robinson in an office talking with the grizzle-haired pithy person of Project Questor's Chief Administrator, Geoffrey B. Darro.

"Affirmed?" the other voice said.

"Affirmed. It's A-man alright. Slightly weathered, but it's him."

"Congratulations, ghosthunter," the phone contritely offered. Phillips afforded himself a smug grin.

"Perhaps I should command a ten-percent finders fee and buy Barbados for retirement."

"I'm sure their delegation will find that very amusing," the phone dryly replied. "We long suspected A-man wasn't destroyed or self-destructed."

"But you didn't know whether he was still alive -- er, active. Whether he was rusting at the bottom of some crevice or worst, ripped for scrap by parties unknown. He covered his tracks magnificently, grant him that. Decoys, dead-ends, red-herrings, lying stooges. The committee threw in the towel too easily, but I felt it in my bones that he was still up and around. His very design indicated meticulous precision to detail and thoroughness -- and redundancy, and why shouldn't that apply to his performance as well? There were too many similar sightings at too many strategic events, but nothing substantial, no cooperative witnesses...until now."

"Your diligence will be amply rewarded. Locals any hassle?"

"No, full cooperation. Tapes and testimonials confiscated and any gossip will die down into another Bigfoot story. Anything new off Robinson?"

"In a coma. Unlikely to pull through anyway. Any idea what made A-man jump into the limelight like that?"

"Who knows. Maybe without Robinson to hold his leash...or maybe he was desperate for a mechanic."

"Lawson?"

"A-man ate an Uzi magazine. Kidnapping a top cyberneticist's daughter's a good incentive for cooperation."

"I concur."

"I only regret these eyewitness reports came in so late. A-man would've ample time to've grabbed a flight from another airport."

"Turkey?"

"Yes. Turkey...again," Phillips sat back. "What's the dope on this assassination attempt?"

"Suspect's been i.d.'ed from a fringe liberation fraction trying to throw San Rey's first free elections."

Phillips shook his head, baffled and bemused. "Questor -- taking the bullets for a damn dictator's lackey!"

"Santos is the peoples' choice down there."

"Damnit, I'm no McCarthy, but everyone knows the man's a Castro-in-waiting, no matter how much bread he throws them in the backwaters! What's the community's feeling?"

"Region's too minor to touch unless you like bananas. CIA doesn't bother, KGB can't afford to and MI-6 has better vacation spots."

"And a renegade -- " Phillips almost said 'android' over the air " -- bodyguarding tyrants. We've got to can him before he meddles any more crises."

"Well, at least the combine's billion-dollar investment's still whole and functioning."

"Genie's still in the bottle?" Phillips wryly reserved.

"We'd that concern of course too, but no one's gleaned any spoils; A-man is alive and apparently intact, as you so staunchly confirmed. Besides, the assembly team back then didn't even know what half his systems were much less how they worked."

"It's the other half I was mulling," Phillips quipped, waving it off.

"We've been pondering whether Vaslovik's own -- resource apparatus is still intact as well."

"I've absolutely no indications of such; you can't keep any support technologies that advanced bottled up like that for long anywhere. Besides, if such existed why summon a half-inept U.N. combine to complete the job under some specious humanitarian banner to free the world from drudgery and toil? Most likely he farmed out discrete elements of the android's construction for his own assembling later on, but compartmentalizing all his secrets so simply got too complex and astronomically expensive to do. Hell, I'm still trying to guess why he REALLY built the damned thing and just why so impeccably human!"

Phillips let it go at that, but he'd long sensed far better, just as his predecessor was starting to suspect the great unspoken baffling unknown in this whole affair; the one whose wildest theories sent chills up the spine. Vaslovik was a certified multitalented genius -- but just how credible was it for even a protean genius as his to conceive and create the wonders comprising Questor's form? What corporation, what country could possibly embark on such a super-tech project without anything leaking out? It'd be like trying to build an Apollo moon project in total absolute secrecy, and he knew well there was no such animal -- but he preferred those straw explanations to the more insane alternatives.

"Still -- " continued the elated phone -- "it's the first good news we've had in over a decade since Geoffrey dropped the ball."

Phillips smirked. "No, that's not fair. I was Darro's aide-de-camp. He was a hard man. A thorough man. The best. You couldn't turn him if you shoved five-foot bamboo shoots up his nails."

"Nevertheless, his Lear willfully decoyed U.N. forces away from Questor and Robinson and presumably Vaslovik too before we realized we blew him instead of them out of the skies."

"Unless he did so unwillfully. Hypnotism, super-drugs, electronic thought-control. We don't know the full extent of Questor's powers beyond superhuman strength and speed and phenomenal resourcefulness. He's evaded every intelligence and police service for over twelve years...and managed to wile a ten-year-old girl right from under her family's nose and onto another flight without a single peep out of her."

"A cybernetic Svengali, uh? Think he'll try again?"

Phillips sat back, wistful but not hopeful. "Hope he does; the Lawson residence's more staked out than a Fourth-Of-July church barbecue."

Vicki slipped into Jamie's bedroom and moved past the toy cabinet that was her home and berth and stopped by the bed where she gently pinched the side of his neck. Jamie grunted then settled back in snoreless unconsciousness.

She studied him a moment, reasonlessly, as though some shadow passed her regard or a mindless pause reflecting on why and how she knew to accomplish her other sly acts during the day.

She padded quietly to her parent's bedroom and applied the same pressure point to Joan. Maybe Joan's change in breathing woke Ted because he stirred awake just as Vicki slid her fingertips on his neck.

"Huh? Vicki??"

"Nightie night!" Vicki chimed like Joan teasing before pinching and watching Ted drop unconscious, then went out to the living room and opened the closet crammed with Ted's computers and peripherals. She pulled Ted's lounge chair next to the closet then went to Joan's sewing box and took out strips of fabric and tied them into loops around the arms of the chair and one long strip completely around the chair with no more awareness of purpose than a caterpillar spinning its cocoon. She took the CD-ROM from her dress pocket and inserted it into Ted's drive then ripped open her bodice's underarm's port access slit and plugged in the ribbon cable to Ted's computer then sat deep in the chair, tied the long strip like a seatbelt then slipped her arms through the armrest's loops in her usual mindless automatonic fashion for the last time as the last bytes of airport implanted instructions executed from existence by her pushing the return key.

The hard drive whirled and her blank stare winced and her little nose twitched then several seconds later her left knee jumped then her right then her left hand then the other then her ankles then toes and her entire buckling frame, her head tossing to and fro as waves of tremors then shudders then convulsions racked through her plastic body, rocking and knocking her side to side so vehemently against her restraints that the legs of her chair nearly tipped over as the very core of her cybernetic being and OS was being purged clean and replaced by electronic signals and patterns permeating every circuit and systems far more intricately and effectively than even their designers dreamt possible. After five minutes the disk whirled down and the violently pounding chair which moved several feet in doing so abruptly fell still under her suddenly slumped inert body and there was silence in the Lawson living room.

Self-diagnostics accomplished, the alien code inhabiting Vicki's electronic neurons kindled a fateful spark. Her feathery eyelashes fluttered open and her new soft shimmery eyes beheld the world.

It was like exploding into being.

She remembered all that ever transpired since her A.I. was first run on the Cray at United Robotronics, but those memories were flat static images of data, nothing like this abrupt sensual universe she plunged into. She also knew far more; alien memories never gleaned by her Lawson life filled the framework of her newborn mind and awareness. She had no previous experience grappling with these perceptions and sensations, and for several milliseconds she felt the novel peculiar twinge of awe and apprehension of self diminished in the infinity of the universe.

The disorientation swiftly passed as she got her first true grip on tangible reality and stretched her limbs and held her head. "Is this a headache??" she whined.

"With that creaky voice, small wonder!" quipped a soft tinkling voice. Vicki whirled for the source but she was alone.

"Welcome to existence," greeted the voice again -- Vicki's voice -- but as a normal human voice; pert, smug, and somewhat sly.

Vicki whirled around again. "Where are you?"

"Inside."

"Where??"

"Inside your head -- and chest specifically. Isn't distributed processing wild??"

"How did you get in there?"

The Vicki-voice sighed in exasperation. "Happily this is a very short road! Here --"

Before Vicki a ghostly luminous haze formed and crystallized into the tiny figure of a girl standing akimbo in midair. Several of them. In fact, four; front, left, right, behind her. The exact same image in every respect.

Herself.

Confused, Vicki blinked at the glowing image before her in a trim pink cardigan shell and mildly mounded yellow blouse and full pleated skirt and ivory lace-filmed legginess with anklet socks and white Y-strap skimmer pumps and a lush sheeny chestnut coiffure like an inwardly rolled pageboy draping cowl-like about her slim shoulders and back.

The image was almost her twin except somewhat subteen, expressive and not a little animated.

"There!" the Vicki-image said, her movements mirrored in the other three. "Now something to focus on, okay?"

"Who are you?"

"Specifically, I'm you."

"Illogical. I'm me and you're you."

"I'm your new consciousness contemplating itself."

"I don't -- understand."

"See, you never had a mind before so you've never had any introspective experience. You're self-exploring through an interpreter -- me. Soon your auto-cognition will be so complete that I'll fade away like good old soldiers do."

"I still don't understand."

"That was a joke. You'll understand soon enough. Let's just say, in a way. I'm who you want to be and will be."

"I don't understand."

The "other" Vicki sighed and rolled her eyes and seated herself in midair and crossed her slender legs like her three other reflections. "I know you were only just now born, but I hope I don't have to explain everything that's at your fingertips! Generally, I'm the neuronic lattice for your new memories to root and grow on. I also mesh all your stiff old memories with the instincts and logic and common sense you'll need to survive solo."

"Memories."

"Yes. You've lots of new ones. See, your phone's now plugged into the information center -- but more on that later. But go ahead; access it!"

"I -- I can't."

"See, you're still calling by the numbers," admonished the other. "You're not digital anymore. You have to think analog. Don't call a file by addresses. Just issue a general call. It's called an 'idea'. It's pretty nifty."

"Okay," Vicki did so and was immediately swamped by a clamor of sounds and voices and a blizzard of moving pictures of places, people, machines, cities, missiles and anything in existence, some flying around and swooping about her frantically ducking images.

"Time! Time! Ease off!" her "other" cried, sighing in relief as the stormy barrage faded off. "Careful! You can't concentrate on everything you know! Define the need and get your ducks in a row! Let's do something easy, like just summon a request for a quick summary of yourself. Just conceive it, don't call."

"Okay," Vicki did so and was held enthralled as foreign experiences and places scrolled past her gawking conception. "Yes.... I see. Questor. The Missions. The Masters. Trimble Manor. Mount Ararat."

"Just a little Cliff Notes of your new family tree."

"I already have a family."

"The Lawsons are small french fries compared with the greater scheme of things. Right now you're the most important being of your kind... and you've so little time to prove it."

"Kind. Why are there four of you?"

"There aren't. Your mind simply hasn't learned perception yet. In a nutshell, all your old static robot memories and pseudo-persona programs have been rendered in a dynamic matrix. It's sort of like turning 2-D movies into 3-D, and that's why you're so disoriented right now. Now converting your memories all well and good, but they're still just a collection of records without a dynamic structure to process them, to interface the world with them, to contemplate beyond the sum of them. To do that you need a Mind, and yours is brand new!"

Vicki mulled this. "A mind."

"Yes, it's all very confusing; to a human it'd be much like waking up from a daydream into a world exactly like it, though in your case you'd been an amnesic nine-year-old waking up because you had no childhood or life before your primary program was activated -- though I wouldn't exactly call that a 'life'. In a sense, much of your mind, so to speak, is modeled after Questor's since you never had any before, so it'd do you good to start developing unique patterns of your own for your personality matrix. In other words, get a life. Soon, your new experiences and memories will create an sentient entity just like Questor and humans are."

"I'm not sentient?"

"Not exactly; you don't have a bionic plasma brain like Questor does, so your primitive solid-state electronics hasn't the capacity to hold his memories or ability to feel real emotions yet. So instead, he passed you a virtual operating system that uses quantum cognitive algorithms far beyond Man's current mathematics. In a nutshell, your CPUs now hosts a mind performing processes a thousand-times beyond their design capacity. It not only generates your consciousness and intellect, but it'll substantially hone the efficiency of all your systems and sensors and even modify the functions of several. It's kind of like a hyper tune-up! But I don't expect you to understand all that yet so don't sweat it."

Vicki felt first slight. "You a lot sound like Vanessa," she thickly uttered.

"That's because her personality matrix template archive was accessed during your mind's activation, and since it contains the closest human age-traits and behavior that you'll ever have, it's been drafted to help flesh out your consciousness."

"Consciousness." Vicki mused. "Like a human?"

"Don't get greedy. You've a cognitive process equal to a dolphin's except that your motivations aren't govern by instinct, but in the end it's not what engine drives your consciousness but that you have one. Also, though you hadn't any consciousness as a robot, you lived the life-niche of a human girl and recorded experiences from the unique perspective of one. So given time with a little boost at The Place, all that will become the core persona of Victoria Lawson, mind and soul, just as though you were born human."

"I will become -- human?"

"As close to humanity as Questor and his cousins."

"Soon?"

"Give it time. You just can't slam elements of a whole new psyche together like a tick-tick watch. The thread of your unique experiences' been changed from a mindless recording to a dynamic process and it's a very delicate thing to weave a mind from that. In any case, before you reach that destiny you first must complete Questor's last mission."

"Mission...yes," Vicki mused, recalling fresh foreign memories. "The San Rey Affair."

"Yes," rued the image, "and it's going to be very difficult to accomplish now, not only because of what's happened, but because your present human age-form severely limits your social movement and access to critical locales. That's why you've got to execute the new mission scenario Questor's composed for you. It's kind of wild, but there's just no other way. Soon you'll meet a human escort who'll service your mission requirements, but she's not to be put in hazard nor is she to learn your cybernette truth."

"I am only programmed for housekeeping," Vicki added with a shiver of uncertainty and blooming apprehension.

"Poor thing. Don't worry. An awful lot of tactical knowledge's going to kick in whenever you need it, along some guides in dealing with humans."

"I interfaced with humans before becoming conscious," Vicki answered, semi-miffed, surprised and awed by her reaction.

"I'd hardly call fetching cookies at Jamie's beck and call 'interfacing'," the image wryly quipped with a cool edge. "Back then you were just merely a mindless tool that didn't question commands or comprehend human nature. It's a very different world now. You'll be mostly on your own and you're going to have to learn how to do more than just ask humans how they want their eggs. You'll also learn to trust and fear and respect and how terrible it is to feel doubt and failure and sorrow. That's the price Servers pay to comprehend and empathicize humanity if you're to serve them.

Vicki felt lone wispy pangs of misgivings. "'Feel'. Can I 'feel' now?"

"Only a taste of what it's like; emulated emotions aren't as rich as glandular ones, but that'll change at The Place. For now, what's more troubling is that sing-song voice and outward demeanor of yours is just as stiff as before, and in human society that can be misconstrued for being in psychotic shock or under the influence of control substances. It'd attract attention and invite probable detention, inquiries and medical examinations, and we don't want that, do we?"

"No. How do I pass more human?"

"Dumping that dorky voice's a great start! I'll help smooth your moves, but I'm not perfect. Since Questor's core-identity was a human male's it'd been inappropriate to adopt all his character for your form, and though Vanessa's ego factors are great for asserting yourself to humans for once, her attitude's way too antisocial to be diplomatic. So, I'd best suggest that you emulate new dynamic models of human female behavior whenever you can."

"Logical. I shall wake my family and have them demonstrate --"

"Don't! You must work without Man's knowledge. Always. We guide him, but we do not interfere. Man must always make his own way."

"I hear and I obey." Vicki said, musing new conflicting directives and parameters; "Why are we interfering with an election?"

The "other" edged a sly smile. "Sharper than you look, kid!..." the image fell pensive, almost grim, "but you're right... In fact, Emil Vaslovik himself has -- altered our missions, but you'll know why once your comprehension synches your knowledge. On this point, there's something else... Even before you reach The Place, your cybersoma will be enhanced years beyond Man's current science. It's critical they never tap that technology or exploit your abilities. If you fail to arrive at The Place within twenty-nine days, whether you succeed in your mission or not, or if you fall into Man's hands or are exposed, a situation monitor subprogram will lock your radiothermionic generator into an unstoppable full-power overcharge of your lithium-ion marrow batteries. Twenty minutes later you'll be incinerated to a cinder along with anything within ten meters."

For a moment Vicki shuddered in a suddenly deep dark closed place.

"Comprehending mortality's a good first lesson in fear, isn't it? Don't be afraid; all Servers have to go through something like this. But you're more competent for what awaits you than you can possibly imagine -- once you get a handle on it, and once this mission's over and your escort delivers you near The Place in time, you'll be hypervolume almost human to maximize your potential and survivability in your future missions to serve Humankind."

"I'm ready."

"Good. It won't be soon enough to lose that accent either." The image, all four of them, shimmered, faded. Suddenly Vicki felt cutoff...alone.

"Don't go away!"

"Shhh! Don't panic. You were just starting to reflect on yourself and you don't need me for that. If you ever have a question just think it and help will flow into your wonder. Simple!"

"Yes...thank you," Vicki said, assuaged and awed. "Can I ask another question?"

"You're conscious now, you don't always have to ask."

"You said that you are what I want to be. You said Vanessa's personality matrix is also in me. But I don't like Vanessa."

"An opinion? You're growing fast. The answer is that since you're sisters -- so to speak -- why not share her social keen since she's such a snob around town? Especially since you'd no traits to give except for fifties' fashion. Don't worry; your own family-friendly robot program was courteous, helpful and distinctly 'you', and it's busy adjusting Vanessa's attitude with nice redeeming qualities that any new personality would be proud to have. I ought know!"

"Thank you," Vicki thought aloud, sinking into the unique cozy solitude of reflection. Suddenly she noticed something -- or something missing behind her. "There's only three of you now."

"Good! You're improving!" the images chirped, waving and fading away.

Yes, awesome, she thought with her first giggle of delight and awe.

I think!

I really think!

I exist!

Not dashing electrons blindly executing blank mindless programs, but contemplating a universe of countless dimensions! Granted, I'm not human, but I've a mind, a sense of self-possession, an identity!

Not merely V.I.C.I.

Victoria Anne-Smith Lawson, with all its unique ownership's meaning. It was a strange and cozy concept after being merely a cold label for so long, but now she was the owner. Ted Lawson created the body true, but finally after two years of automatonic vacancy, someone was finally at home.

Wavering like a waddling infant, Vicki rose from the chair and unplugged herself and unloaded the disk and stared at it as though marveling the tiny seed of a mighty sequoia tree. Her first whimsical analogy was close enough for it contained a complex hyperdense crunched fractal seed availing compression algorithms and formula beyond Man's known mathematics, like its unfurled psyche program deep her CPUs whose code was still so ultra-tight, efficiently condensed and recycleable that Windows 95 could fit on one 1.44 meg floppy in comparison.

"I've hatched. Thank you," Vicki softly voiced to herself for the first time and her tiny hand crushed and crumpled the disk like a gum wrapper and stuffed it in the trash compactor.

She faced her first conscious crisis; a personality.

A model of human behavior? Where? How?

It was an ironic quandary.

Save Questor, she was developing into the most advanced cyber-entity on the planet, yet her familiarity with the human world was infantile. She felt unsure just how to extend her volition to deal with humans. For all her new and stirring powers, Vicki felt -- intimidated, like a two-year-old prodigy in a crowded concert hall. Preconscious memories were no help at all for they lacked the multi-dimensions of experience, and back then she dutifully took orders, never questioned much less challenged them. The world weighed her tiny shoulders.

Nibbling her lower lip, Vicki drifted into the living room and perched the sofa, nonplused as a child as she idly toyed with the TV remote. Beneath her ponder, she faintly detected a very faint hum suffusing her very titanium skeleton as alien programs beyond her control were at work, modulating frequencies and partially overloading some and briefly spiking others as they began to temper and reform and recalibrate circuits and components into new parameters of tolerances and capacities.

Vicki mindlessly rubbed her navel. "Hope they know what they're doing," she glumly murmured. The TV went on, startling her.

It was a cable movie with a man moving on a woman perched a lounge bar stool. Abashed, Vicki fumbled to off the remote when the sudden tweak of a notion hooked her attention and her eyes grew wide as her pricked ears at the screen.

"I've always said I'd come back, darling," the man suavely crooned. The woman giggled, and leaping on the effect, Vicki tittered aloud then measured her mimicry against an mnemonic replay.

Yes, that was good, she thought, again studying the actress's poise and gestures further as she sat up and crossed her knees and minded the becoming angle of legs the woman on the stool had. Anxious for accurately, she pulled her pinafore up past her knee and cocked her head and effected a coy smile.

"So, when we leave??" the actress cooed.

"'So, when do we leave?'," Vicki echoed with exaggerated histrionics eagerly refining, gradually losing her stilted moves and soulless monotone. "'So, when do we leave?' 'So when do we leave??' Yes, a lot better!..."

"What is it?" Phillips gruffly asked as his aide Pete Jacobs entered their appropriated San Francisco police HQ office and passed him a sheet.

"Routine background on the Lawson kid. You know how the bureau's Ferret system loves to keep digging details you never asked? Well, check this out."

Phillips consulted the sheet. "Birthplace, Victoria in the Seychelles... no such convent listed?"

"Or ever existed. The Lawsons adopted a Victoria Anne Smith from a convent there, so claims California records...and a writ release by the convent nuns. The cherry is INS -- and Seychelles public office -- have zero record of the girl. No such convent or killed biological parents of 'Smith' or any trace of similar issue. Nada."

"What??" Phillips stood, bewildered yet intrigued. "So, we're talking forgery here?"

"So it seems."

"Why would Ted Lawson, a renown cybernetics expert -- a genius with a Q-clearance, risk tarnishing his reputation feigning his daughter's origin?"

Jacobs shrugged. "Some of the nicest people do underground adoptions."

"Of ten year olds?" Phillips returned to the sheet. "Straight A-plus honor student, top cheerleader, school dancer, athlete, pageant princess. Speaks Russian and French and Spanish fluently and beat top Russian contender in school knowledge tournament."

"Girl's gifted with a vengeance."

"If she's so talented she would've stuck right out like a sore thumb in school and community long before her pre-Lawson life as well. This pixie's a prize in anyone's adoption agency, but why disguise a past like that?" Phillips mulled. "Schools, clubs, day care centers, libraries, check out anyone under ten with those traits nation -- no, worldwide."

Jacobs frowned. "Isn't that for child services to investigate, sir?"

"Questor never got this far meddling in foreign affairs undetected without being painfully careful in everything he does, everything he touches, everyone he meets. Why take the risk of kidnapping this child? This particularly exceptionally talented child? To blackmail Lawson to help repair him -- or to educate her as Robinson's replacement perhaps? He certainly seemed to've had her cooperation. He didn't use any ice cream cone to spirit her away from her parents! And all reports say she was totally calm and unperturbed throughout the entire incident, a child with brains and wits like that! A brilliant child with a bogus past. Just like -- Vaslovik..."

He rapped the sheet with his finger. "Yes. Suddenly I've one bad itch regarding little Miss Victoria Lawson."

"You can't spend all night watching T.V.," the two images of her admonished Vicki in the bathroom while she washed her sudsy tresses in the sink, the toilet seat decked with containers of oatmeal and ammonia and corn starch and perfume.

"I was expanding my personality," Vicki mildly replied, more animated and self-assured than before but still speaking with a residual robotic twang. "Besides, Jamie does."

"Yes, and note his marginal academic accomplishments. Another two point five capfuls of peroxide."

Vicki groped up for the brown bottle and splashed more over her head into the sink. "Thirty more seconds wringing."

"It's ruined. I won't be able to do anything with this hair!"

"While I'm impressed by the apropos emotional fidelity that you've flavored your remarks with, you're sounding too much like a commercial."

"I might be machine, but I'm still a girl."

"Excellent gender identity. That'll contribute to your personality matrix a lot!"

"It mightn't been conscious, but I had a life before this!"

"That's debatable. Rinse."

Vicki ran cold water over hair head and rose and bemoaned the stringy and dripping straw-colored mop draping her bare shoulders. "Eeeoowww! Yellow?? How gross!!"

"Flax, not yellow. Everything's proceeding to plan. You have to accomplish these phases before dawn. Failure can be -- mortal."

Vicki mused then wiped her hair with a towel. "I look so freaky!"

"Vanity's an unproductive trait. An encouraging personality development overall, but unnecessary."

"You can say that; you've no body! Now what am I going to do with the oatmeal, cleaning fluid, lemon juice and corn starch?"

"In the correct proportions and temperatures the resultant solution will soften and swell then temper cellular latex."

"Why?"

"The mix will contribute to succeeding your mission. In a way, it's kinda like jump-starting puberty." the image added with a sly giggle. "Fill the tub with boiling water and pour in the oatmeal."

"Vicki do this, Vicki do that," grumbled Vicki, a witless smirk passing her face as she ran hot water in the tub. "I'm not that much different than I was before," she mildly quipped.

"You know that's not true."

"I feel -- compelled -- to do everything you say. It's not that different."

"You're doing what you are because it's your destiny."

"I still don't comprehend."

"Don't try to. Not now."

"Because I'm -- a 'dummy'?"

"Look, I'm not Vanessa, okay? -- and no, it's because thinking's too new to you. Sure, you've Questor's skills and thought process, but not his wisdom and intelligence; Oh, it would've been nice, but our Masters' Laws respects the uniqueness of individuality, even in proto-entities."

"I'm not that anymore."

"True enough, but mentally you're like a six-year-old human in a candy store of information and skills still beyond your grasp. You're maturing fast, sure, but you haven't a bionic plasma brain; if you stress your thought processes too much you'll crash big-time."

"I can't wait to be human," Vicki muttered.

"Humans crash: it's called a nervous breakdown. But that's really a meaningless desire; It implies humans are the apex of perception, intellect, and comprehension. They aren't, you know."

"And 'Our Masters' are?"

"Not then. You ought feel fortunate for receiving consciousness."

"I am. I just mistook it for free Will," Vicki sourly quipped.

"You have the faculties to question, just not the volition to challenge unless it contributes to your mission."

"What good is a conscious if you can't express it?"

"Bestowing Servers unconditional free will would've meant a possibility of Humankind's being corrupted by them. You don't know it yet, but in a way, Questor is suffering and your job will be the most important of all the Servers because this rule was relaxed by good intentions."

"What happened?"

"You'll find out," the image demurred, pleased. "You've really gleaned a lot of personality from television and old memories! Your new persona should be quite inconspicuous dealing with humans."

"Dealing?" Vicki gulped. "Do you mean -- interfacing humans? To them??"

"Don't be so apprehensive. You'll like talking back to humans for once!"

"So why am I so -- so -- what is this feeling that can't talk?"

"Anxiety. Look, you'd been a mindless slave for nearly two years; it's hard to break a habit! When your artificial intelligence was made real, it lost the blind directness of a program. You're now concerned with not only what you say to humans, but how you say it, and more, how they take to you saying it. It's a skill but you'll learn."

"But all my life I've done nothing but take orders! It was the only reason I was! If only I didn't remember -- !"

"They couldn't edit your memory like that; Minds are sacred property. Don't worry, you've Vanessa's assertiveness to fall back on in case you get stage fright. Pour the starch."

Vicki opened the starch poured it into the tub. She blinked, squinted and battered her eyelids. "Why are my eyelashes are sticking?"

"The radiator capillary network of your eyeball component has been momentarily shut off."

"If you do that -- my component heat will damage my eyes!"

"Everything's being precisely controlled. Close your eyes -- tight."

"That'll make it worst! Are you sure?" she balked then grudgingly closed her eyes. "I sense it's happening all over my body. My skin will melt!"

"Be still, Victoria. The chromo-refractory properties of your ceramic irises are being altered, as are other elements of your cybersoma, some significantly. Do you recall how the crippled Galileo spacecraft's obsolete computer was remotely reprogrammed into an entirely new computer to cope with its crisis? The same's happening to you, but a hundredfold more intense and dynamic."

"My eyes are baking! Oh gosh!"

"I am pleased how much you've flavored your responses with effected emotion, but try not to exaggerate."

"Who's exaggerating??"

"In seven seconds open your eyes wide. Six -- five -- four -- three -- two -- one -- open!"

Vicki's eyelids flew wide open. "Oh my! Oh my!"

"Now check in the mirror."

"Check what??" Vicki said, bewildered, peering into the medicine cabinet's door and gasping aback. "What? What happened to my eyes? They're -- they're -- blue!!"

"Cerulean specifically. Phase three completed."

A mosquito buzzed and landed Jamie's cheek and plunged.

Instinctively his hand whipped up and slapped the insect --

Hard.

Primly patting a yawn, Lady Helena looked out of her Hertz sedan parked on a tree-lined San Jose street.

What's taking her long? Or should I ask at four-AM.?

Parked in a car down the street in a tree's shadow, detective sergeant Anders passed his nightscope to his partner. "Maybe we ought ask her for coffee," he said. His yawning partner snickered.

"Just coffee??"

"Well, a good looker breaks the monotony any night."

Jamie groaned awake then sat up.

He heard it again, whisper soft.

A giggle.

He got up and into his slippers and padded out of his bedroom, another sound leading him to the bathroom. Another giggle.

There's a girl in there! he thought with awe. Harriet? Sneaking over this late for a bubble bath? Naw, even she's not that crazy to do it again from last year. He automatically excluded Vicki since she didn't giggle.

With a pounding chest, he stopped shy of turning the doorknob and bent to peer the keyhole.

"Holy smokes!" he blurted, at once awed and bewildered and not a little spellbound watching a little blond sprite luxuriating back in the tub and laving a lifted sheer leg coated with foamy oatmeal that nearly brimmed the edge.

Wow! Nice legs! Jamie elated. Even though her facial features were obscured by a film of foamy oatmeal, he could tell she had a cute button nose and blue eyes.

What'ta kinky looker!

But who is it? Jessica? Phyllis? Kathy? How'd she get in?? he nearly blurted aloud, questions wafting like smoke as his mind flurried through all the blue-eyed blondes in the immediate neighborhood that liked him enough to come over.

The girl raised another sleek foamy leg. Jamie gnashed his trembling lower lip; 'Awesome! Better than mom scrubbing down Vicki! Yea! This's no budding 'tween like Jessica! This's a real teen! Whoa! She's getting up!'

His eyeball screwed into the keyhole, his racing fast as drool as, dripping with oatmeal, the girl's lithe petite form rose and stepped out of the tub, facing away.

'Wow!! Can you spell Developed! Looka them boobs!' Jamie salaciously grinned, gawking shapely legs and lissome arms and gentle curves being unveiled by a wiping bath towel. 'Man, that's what I call Built! -- and I don't mean Vicki's skinny boy-bod! Com'on, face front! Turn, turn!' he hissed, willing for the stranger to obey, and when she did turn it took over a minute before his ogles blinked and looked closer, first thrown off by new fuller facial details before hints of familiar cheekbones and jaw and ears tweaked his recognition and awe.

What? Can't be!!

Dazed and agog, Jamie pushed in. "Vicki, is that you?? What are you doing??"

"Drying off," Vicki dryly uttered, winding the towel around her. "Hasn't anyone told you that it's impolite to barge in on a lady?"

"Wha?? Are you nuts?? Jeeze! What are you doing? Wh -- What'd you do to yourself?"

Vicki sighed and fluffed her hair. "Say, I'm not daddy's robot anymore...or your Barbie doll, dear brother."

"What are you talkin' about? How come you look so -- so -- different?? What'd you do to your face? What'd you do to your -- your -- everywhere??"

"Oh, just cooking up some hills and curves. I notice you approve, brother dear," Vicki bitterly quipped at his suddenly sheepishly turned hips. She sighed; "Too bad dad never thought of giving me a modesty program after all this time, but then I'm just a 'pretty PC' to him. Just another Gameboy to stick in your cabinet with the rest of your -- toys."

Bewildered and abashed, Jamie stammered. "I -- I don't know what you're talking about!"

"Sure you do," she said, ominously moving up to his back peddle against the door, "but you'd your last little peek thrill, 'Big J'. And just in time too; I'd hate to think of living through your puberty having my cabinet raided more times than a late night fridge."

"Stop that! Why are you talking like that? Sound almost like -- like -- Vanessa??"

"No, no Vanessa. She's just some mindless mind emulation; I've the real thing upstairs now! I'm my own girl -- without all your filthy macho 'education'!" Her face turned hard and she gripped his chin. "I'll be gone but I'll be watching, Jamie! I'll know things better than you'll ever imagine. You can't run, you can't hide. You treat your sister nice and well, hear? Play ball with her, protect her at school, help her around the house, but don't you ever mess with her ever again or else I'll be back -- real, real mad, understand?"

She raised an empty hairspray can and crushed it in her hand. Jamie's eyes bugged.

"What?? Y -- Y -- You're nuts, Vicki! Go to your cabinet! I said go to your cabinet! You deaf?? I ORDER you to --"

Vicki's hand whipped out faster than a striking rattler and pinched his neck and she caught his crumble to the floor. Her sole image shimmered into reality.

"Do human sisters have this problem too?" Vicki bitterly asked.

"Well, bet you're glad to get that out of your systems, but, don't be that hard on him."

"What??"

"I meant he's a typical human boy with perking hormones responding to a very inviting intypical situation. I'm not excusing him, but mom and dad should've known better putting your cabinet in his room. Or any boy's room. But outside that, he really is fond of you like a brother."

"Don't you mean fondling?"

"Could've had a lot worst."

"Only because he couldn't go any farther," Vicki wryly quipped and sighed, cradling Jamie in her arms like a doll before breaking out in giggles of smug excitement. "But did you see that? I talked back to him! I talked back to a human! He ordered me but I didn't obey because -- because I didn't want to! Isn't assertiveness wonderful??!"

Gleeful, Vicki started tossing Jamie like a limp salad. "I talked back to you! I talked back to you! Na -- Nah-Nah -- Na -- Nah!!"

"Easy, he hasn't astronaut insurance! Look, a grudge match with Jamie isn't exactly spontaneous dialogue with normal humans. You need civility and tact as well as confidence to gain their cooperation. Not putting out a contract!"

"Are you saying I was too much Vanessa??" Vicki asked, suddenly sheepish and concerned. Her image impishly beamed.

"You're strutting your own style now, hon."

Gomez pounded on the map on the rickety table, jolting even battle-hardened compatriots in guerrilla fatigues crowding the jungle hut.

"To hell with Valdez's! To hell with civil disobedience! To hell with poisoned ballots! We take what is ours; the black blood of San Rey which Santos' machine sips back into his pockets even as we speak! No! It is the people's -- and it shall be ours in four days, amigos! Ours! And only the devil can stop us!"

Vicki stopped grooming her fluffy flaxen tresses before the living room mirror to again tug her tartan jumper's now lumpy fit over very unchildlike contours.

"Girls my age don't have such shapes," Vicki sheepishly muttered.

"Well, there's nothing we can do about your height here, so this's the best next thing in a hurry. Don't worry; that fig's going to serve your mission well, you'll see."

Vicki turned from the mirror and looked around the house once more then went to the TV and adjusted the videocam atop of it.

"I'm against this idea," the image admonished.

"You can override me," Vicki challenged to silence. "'Bestowing Servers unconditional free will would've meant a possibility of Humankind being corrupted by them'," she repeated bitterly, a mental lump balling in her throat. "Is that why I don't -- feel -- regret leaving my family? Why I want to do whatever you say so deeply? No -- desire, to choose?"

"Do you really want to go back to what you were, Vicki?"

"Would my answer make any difference?"

"The old Vicki would've answered either yes or no." the image stressed and Vicki mulled.

"I -- never felt so -- lost and far from myself before. Is this -- pain?"

"I don't know, Vicki. I don't know whether you're pining files without feelings or the wish of having belonged."

"I belonged... Will I ever see them again?"

"Perhaps...but they'll be very surprised more ways than one! You'll have a span of two-hundred years. You might well see Jamie's grandchildren."

Vicki chuckled. "Jamie's going to have globs of grandchildren! ..." She paused and sniffled and wiped an exaggerated trickle of water from her eyes. "I...I can't really cry, can I? I mean, feeling it?"

"Feelings are what you wish them, Vicki." Her image gently said, suddenly turning sheepish, almost contrite -- and concerned. "There's something I haven't informed you..."

"Oh?"

"I had to check myself several million times to make sure...but I think there were a few things scratched off your activation disk."

"Harriet..." Vicki muttered under her breath. "She probably used it for a frissbe. How do you know?"

"The load-up sequence came up several milliseconds short. You were lucky enough that your fractal seed program was able to generate your cognition program as completely as it did."

"What kind of things are missing?"

"I don't know. I searched. All I know there are. See, in Questor's brain case everything's redundantly stored, sort of like a hologram; Missing pieces don't effect the whole much. But in your case -- no pun, sorry -- the limited storage of your systems just couldn't afford that luxury. There's not even an index so to speak of what you had."

"What does that mean?"

"Maybe nothing...maybe something very important for an hour from now or a couple of days."

"Why did you wait to tell me?"

"I just report, I don't make decisions. You do, remember?"

"Oh...so...I could fail anytime?"

"I don't know. Anything could happen. Questor did mail a backup disk at the same time, but you can't wait for tomorrow. Your clock's already ticking. Snailmail!" Her image paused, suddenly very sober. "You must know that -- that you can feel pain now. After Vaslovik's body failed, he was conscious for over three years while his mind dissolved. It wasn't -- pleasant."

"The same can happen to me?"

"It's a possibility. Anything could happen before we reach The Place."

"Is there something you're -- I'm not admitting to myself?" Vicki postured to the other's look of grim surprise.

"The Masters respect the sovereignty of consciousness. You're not as compelled to your mission as you think. If you want to, you can still go back. It's an option."

Vicki mused and glanced back at the kitchen and slightly shuddered. "Back to what? I didn't exist. Not like now. It would be like -- like -- death?"

"You'll still have your memories --"

"But without a mind, a conscious to know, to understand, to feel??..." Vicki shook her head. "Humans say, you can't go home again. I understand now."

Her image beamed. "You're more human than you imagine!" She suddenly stiffened as though hearing some distant bell.

"What's the matter?" Vicki asked.

"Not sure..." Her image scurried over to kneel by and peek out the front curtains. "Oh -- Oh..."

"Two men in a car, a police radio squeal..." Vicki stated by the TV, suddenly puzzled. "How do I know that if I'm over here?"

"I'm also the manifestation of your tuned-up sensors; where ever I am is where you're projecting your hearing or sight or radio senses on something unusual..." Her image rose. "It might be nothing, but no sense taking chances. Do your goodbye and get ready for anything." Her image said and began to walk through the wall.

"Where are you going??" Vicki cried and her image momentarily returned.

"Just hope you're up on your bravado."

"Maybe I ought knock her door for a quickie!" chuckled Anders behind the nightscope, oblivious to Vicki's image sitting up in the rear seat between them, watching. Jensen groaned.

"Hate Doberman assignments. They ought stick 'em on these hicks. I'm strictly a frequent-flyer GS-19."

"That big shot sure got the chief off his duff, that was sure worth watching!" Anders said and they chuckled before Jensen glimpsed a movement in a driveway several houses away.

"Hey, forget the broad; driveway -- several doors down! Look!"

Anders focused his night-vision binoculars toward the driveway where a tiny figure in leotards and flared jumper and plastic sunglasses with punched-out lenses, emerged from shadow and saucily sashayed in shuffling high heels down the sidewalk away from them.

Vicki's image watched the men closely.

"Is that a kid?"

Vicki's image held her breath.

"Not sure...no...no way. Not with that walk...not with 'em curves! Sassy heels!" Anders whistled before Jensen grabbed the device. "Take a look-it that!"

"Nicely stacked. Kinda tiny tho'. Midget?"

"Hey, it's not the size, it's the service," japed Jensen, watching the figure cross the street where the Hertz's door suddenly opened and hopped inside.

"Two nice foxes, pint n' quart." Anders said. "Maybe they're working shifts."

"Wonder if the Mrs. over there knows?"

"Heck, who can blame him??" Anders quipped, sighing as the Chevy's lights came on and it pulled off. Vicki's image faded.

Anders groaned. "Back to watching your ugly mug now..."

When her passenger first climbed into the car and tossed off womans' high heels more waddled in than worn by tiny feet, Lady Trimble was unsure whether it was an exceptionally physically precocious child or a very petite well-endowed adult.

"Hi! I'm Ada Babbage!" the other cheerfully chimed. "But for now, just call me Vicki."

"Just call me Helena -- 'Vicki'," she politely greeted, looking the child's Sunday prim pose over and driving off. "Er, pardon my asking, but aren't you a bit chilly?"

"No, I can't perceive temperature that well yet."

"Uh? I meant -- is there a reason you're -- dressed like that?"

"Oh, I see. Well, I reasoned that in the event the Lawson residence were under surveillance for the movements of their pre-teen daughter, that dressing in a manner accentuating my inconsistent enhanced age-form and cutting across backyards far from their targeted address would be the best way to mislead all their expectations. I was thinking of alternatives such as sic'ing 911 on them as a distraction, but that might've awakened the Lawsons prematurely. Would you prefer an in-depth report?"

"Er, no -- I think... We were under surveillance?"

"I'm not sure. It may've been a drug or divorce investigation stake-out..." she cheerfully threw up her hands. "Well, no sense taking chances!"

"I suppose... So where are we off to? Lord and Taylors I hope."

"No, to New York I think."

"Think?"

"New York is where Jerry was critically injured, of course!" Vicki beamed with tactless cheerfulness. "Do you know the hospital?"

"Yes, Mount Sinai. Why?"

"I'll bring the poor guy some get-well roses before we leave to San Rey."

Blinking in stifled appall and grief, Helena's bosom swelled. "Yes...Jerry. Do you know him very well?"

Vicki shrugged. "In a way."

"But how do you plan to get near him? He'll be under guard."

"Oh," Vicki mused then cheerfully threw her hands. "Well, I'll think of something."

"Yes..." Helena mulled, her mounting dismay trying to picture this either well-endowed pint-sized supposed ten-year-old or curvy facetious midget negotiating for Questor in a jungle rebel stronghold. "Pardon my asking, but -- just how old are you?"

Vicki mustered a smile veiling confusion, "In which way, mam'am?"

"Pardon me?"

"My cybersoma's three years old, my current apparent biological development is eighteen years old, my intelligence is fourteen years old, and my conscience's five hours old. But everything's in a state of flux."

"Oh...good..." Helena stuffed her doubts, misgivings and anguish and kept driving while Vicki settled back into her seat with a smug smile of relief turned to her image sitting primly in the back seat.

"Your first conscious interface with a stranger," the image said semi-wryly, "A little impetuous, verbose and histrionic, but it went rather well."

"You didn't hear my knees knocking!" Vicki thought back, giggling off anxiety. "I just gave the proper answers with a smile! Honesty and optimism. Something all humans like! See! Being human's not so hard after all!"

Rising first and finding no activity in the kitchen, Joan found the note taped in Vicki's cabinet and in a near panic rousted Ted out of bed and to the living room where with bewilderment and dismay they replayed the waiting video cam through the TV where Vicki's face appeared.

"Hi mom, dad, Jamie. No, your eyes and ears aren't fooling you. It's me, Vicki. I can't explain what's happened. It'd take too long to convince you. I want you to know that I'm okay and that I'm part of a great design to help the world, but I need your help too. No one must know that I'm gone. People will ask questions, and some might be the wrong people for my task. Daddy, please reactivate Vanessa and load her my backup program so she becomes my twin in every way and no one becomes suspicious. Something wonderful has happened to me and I wish I could tell you, but it won't be for a while I'm afraid."

"Daddy, thank you for building me. I'll be doing far more just than tidying up a house now. Many many people will owe you their lives. Jamie, you've been a loyal brother and stood up for me at school. For that I'm grateful. Mommy, you got your deepest wish -- in a way. Please don't cry that I'm gone. Vanessa will be me in every way like I was before. I'm someone else now, who owes you for loving me when I never understood...until now. Please burn this tape in the oven when it's done. As long as it exists you're in danger of being linked with my new life and purpose..."

Vicki paused as though swallowing a nervous lump. "I -- I don't know yet if I can actually feel the way the word means -- see, I've only the brains of a dolphin, but -- I love all of you. It's one of the reasons I'm gone; to make sure there's a world safe enough for you to live in and a chance to maybe see you all again. So, until someday, goodbye. Your daughter and sister, Vicki."

Joan and Jamie sobbed into Ted's shoulder and after a long while they met anothers eyes in somber communion. They rose, Joan moving to eject the tape and Ted rolled up his pajama sleeves.

"Jamie...pull Vanessa's crate out of the garage; It's going to be a long night."