This time the bullet grazed Sysigns, the electric charge causing a short, but not a shutdown. Still, the few seconds were enough for Laughton to get out from under him, choking, gasping, coughing, his free hand around his own neck, as though holding it would somehow prevent the pain.
He blinked, his vision turning black for a moment before coming back into focus. The boat wobbled. Sysigns was rising. Laughton turned his head, raised his gun, and shot as the robot leapt at him. This bullet hit him square in the chest, and the charge dropped him like it had dropped his men.
Laughton fell onto his side, coughing. At one point it felt like he was going to cough out his insides, and he was almost wishing to vomit while struggling to get enough air. A sound, out of place, was coming from somewhere nearby, mechanical, no, electric.
He was able to stop coughing, but still had all of his attention focused on breathing. The stars up above were calming, comforting. He pulled himself up into a sitting position, leaning his back against the side of the boat. Sysigns was slumped in an odd pile. As always, Laughton noted how a robot, when shut down, became a thing. When people slept, they were still people, breathing, moving, living. Robots were just things, things that ruled the world.
The sound was coming again, and Laughton realized it was his phone. He was far enough from the building’s jamming signal. He put the gun down beside him, and pulled it out. It was Mathews.
“Chief? Chief? Are you okay? You there?”
Laughton tried to say yes, but all he was able to do was cough again.
“Chief!” Mathews was almost in a panic. “They’re on their way,” he said. “They’re on their way.”
Laughton took a stuttered, gasping breath, filling his chest. “Good,” he said, a croak. “Good.”
The cleanup was messy. Mathews had gotten in touch with the commissioner, and the commissioner had known enough to send a human force, so, despite the scene being off the preserve, it was the preserve that got to control the scene. They brought inhibitors, which kept all of the robots shut down. Two young men helped Laughton get Sysigns out of the boat and back to the resort. Titanium was gone. She must have had another way off the island. She had left the antivirus in Kir’s hand—a white stick to counter the red one that was causing so much damage—and she must have shot the robots again, Laughton realized; otherwise they would have come after him. In any case, it seemed like a deal was a deal, so Laughton thought it was easier to not mention that she had ever been there. The only way this was going to go their way was if it could be all tied up. Once the scene was under control, the commissioner called the army. Laughton figured Brandis would probably love tearing down one of his counterparts almost as much as tearing down humans.
Laughton and Kir snuck back to the boat they had commandeered from the yacht club. They would have to face the colonel and the rest of the robot panel from the day before soon enough—in fact, they received a message not long after leaving the island demanding their presence at police headquarters that afternoon—so they took the opportunity to slip away even if it was only delaying the inevitable. After all, they needed to return the boat and retrieve the truck.
The wind from the speed of the boat made Laughton’s eyes water, little rivulets of tears flowing from the outside corners of his eyes back along his temples. It was chilly, but in a way that was refreshing instead of discomforting. The groan of the motor made conversation difficult. Instead, the chief detached his mind, letting the wind and the water and the landscape that had been invisible to him on their night journey wash over his thoughts, suppressing them.
“Look!” Kir yelled, pointing ahead of them, taking the boat down to a whine and then to a grumble.
Laughton tried to follow Kir’s sight line, seeing nothing but the oscillating water. Then he saw one, two dorsal fins crest about seventy yards away, describing a gentle arc as they slipped once more beneath the waves. Dolphins. Waiting in anticipation, he kept his eyes on the spot where they had disappeared. Kir cut the engine and joined the chief at the front of the boat. “Breathe,” the robot said, but before Laughton could follow his advice, the two fins appeared again, much closer than he had expected them. They were two different sizes and very close together.
“I think one of them’s a baby,” Laughton said.
The dolphins were just feet away then, and one was definitely a juvenile. They circled, and sped under the boat, appearing on the other side, rising and falling again and again as they explored this novelty.
“Erica will be so jealous,” Laughton said.
“Watching you watch them means more to me than they do,” Kir said.
That made Laughton miss Erica all the more. That’s what he’d have felt if she’d been there. Did that mean Kir saw him as a child? He didn’t like that. “I’m not a child,” he said.
“I only meant I like to see you happy. Haven’t seen that in a while. Betty will be jealous.”
The robot meant that he loved him. And Laughton loved Kir too. If he stopped and reflected that Kir was a machine, and that this fact had created the preserve to separate them, he began to wonder if the whole project was a mistake. What was that teaching Erica? That segregation was the only answer to differences? There was ample evidence of hate between robots and humans, which presupposed there could be love, and killing went in all directions.
The dolphins made another pass, and he wondered what the dolphin mother was thinking, showing them to her calf. They dove.
Laughton waited and waited, and when he finally caught sight of them, they were already sixty yards away. He looked at Kir. The robot was watching him.
“You can’t plan for this,” Laughton said, trying to put his feelings into words. “Even if you go looking for it, you can’t plan.”
“Like humans,” Kir said.
Laughton thought back over the last few days. “Humans are too predictable,” he said.
“Less than dolphins,” Kir said. “Less than any other organic being.”
“Because we kill each other over ideas? Over nothing?”
“Because you can think your way beyond your nature.”
“Robots do that,” Laughton said.
“We have no nature,” Kir said.
That fell on Laughton like a weight. All of his life robots had been people to him. That was perhaps the key difference between his thinking and Smythe’s. It was about living with them and judging how they would react. Hell, Kir was his best friend. But he was, at base, a machine.
“I recorded the dolphins for Erica,” Kir said. “I’ll send it to you.”
“Thank you,” Laughton said, wanting to say more but not sure what that was.
Kir returned to the engine, and their speed picked up again. Laughton now scanned the horizon for the telltale appearance of more fins, but they didn’t see any more.
* * *
That afternoon, Laughton and Kir were back in the same room they had stood in the day before, in front of the same panel of robots from all of the different branches of the robot government minus Sysigns. He remained decommissioned in some army stronghold.
“The antivirus patch works,” Pattermann said to the room. “We expect all robot forces to be removed from the preserve by the end of the day.”