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Nor Through Inaction	Charles Ardai & Michael A. Burstein
"Nor Through Inaction" first appeared in the October 1998 issue.

They crashed on Deltaina four days out from Station Fabrice. The search radius was small enough, but they were not found.

Deltaina had been abandoned a decade earlier when all its ores had been coaxed out of their hiding places. Now its surface was pocked with artificial entry faults, scored with the treadmarks of long-gone mining tools, and riddled with the gouged-out caverns that marked successful strikes. It was into one of these caverns that they plunged, and then into its attendant tunnel, before coming to a stop at a point very near the center of the asteroid. Here they remained, immobile, while the reconnaissance ship went past, for they had no way of responding to its signal.

"This is I.T. Redcross hailing I.T. Randall. I.T. Randall please copy." The voice grew clearer as the ship came closer. "This is I.T. Redcross on reconnaissance, all I.T.s in range please copy." A few voices came over the channel in response, but Randall’s was not among them. "I.T. Randall, this is I.T. Redcross, please copy."

Then the voice grew fainter as the ship moved away.

Randall was aware, as he labored over his charge, that the search team had moved out of communication range. For an instant he felt what, in a human, might have been a pang of regret. Then the feeling was gone, as quickly as it had come, an uncomfortable blockage quickly routed around by his neural net.

Randall was designed for function, not feeling, for durability and utility over personality. Unlike the humaniform domestics which overtook the planetside market, Randall was built by the engineers on Fabrice, and they built him in the image their lives demanded. A needlenose cruiser in miniature, Randall was an enclosed environment, a short-range spaceship that was also a distinct robotic entity.

An intelligent transport, programmed not only with an encyclopedic knowledge of navigation but also with thebasic safety constraints that were hardwired into all artificial intelligences–what more reliable mechanism to shuttle Fabrice’s inhabitants from one end of their giant, free-floating space complex to the other? What safer guide for navigation at the edge of the Belt?

What more dangerous than the sense of security inspired by an intelligent pilot that is your ship itself? A robot is a device, and devices sometimes break. Intelligence does not prevent it any more than intelligence prevents aneurysms and heart attacks in humans.

Randall lost control of propulsion while on a course for Barallen. Deltaina loomed in his forescreen and for an endless half-second he weighed his alternatives. Then he jettisoned one of his engines, changing his velocity barely enough to guide him into a mining tunnel rather than into the surface.

It was the only option whose survival coefficient was positive.

The tunnel was short, a collision unavoidable. Randall energized his primary on-board remote to protect the human passenger, Gregory Nunzio. The remote emerged from its cabinet beneath Randall’s main monitor. It was undersized but humanoid, intended as an anthropomorphic liaison between the passenger and Randall’s more unfamiliar technology.

The remote had a face, which displayed a calm, liquid-crystal smile. It also had fiberglass shackles on its legs and arms, with which it clamped itself to Gregory. A vent above the smile breathed a concentrated sedative directly into Gregory’s nose. The remote pressed him hard against the padded back of the passenger chair.

And then they crashed.

Gregory was still conscious when, in an instant, both of his arms and both of his legs were crushed so that the bones splintered into a thousand fragments. Half of his ribcage remained intact, but the other half did not, deflating his right lung and tearing into his left. The remote struggled to minimize the impact on Gregory, in the process allowing itself to be driven through the main monitor and into the forehull. But the remote remained clamped to its human charge. Gregory was torn from the passenger chair’s restraints and hurled into the crumpled needlenose along with the remote.

All functioning safety circuits were activated automatically. While Randall fought to patch fissures in his hull and retain pressure, Gregory lay crumpled and dying on the floor. A second remote, all of ten centimeters in height, popped out from the miraculously undamaged medical compartment, toting a diagnoster behind it.

Four amputations were readily accomplished, with what blood could be recovered being filtered and returned to Gregory’s circulatory system. The tiny remote spent an eternity picking bone fragments and shards of glass out of Gregory’s surviving organs, while the diagnoster replicated lung function.

The pain was so extraordinary that Gregory didn’t feel a thing.

Anesthetics and tranquilizers were in plentiful supply, so Randall kept his passenger in a state of unconsciousness for a full eight weeks. During this time, Gregory lay on the passenger chair, which Randall had opened out and modified to serve medical needs. The young man had no arms or legs anymore, no stumps even, only neatly cauterized wounds capped with stiff knobs of disinfectant foam. His chest was open, and while the surface wounds had healed, his insides were in decidedly worse shape. His left lung had slowly returned to normal capacity, but the diagnoster remained lodged in place of his useless right lung.

The recuperative measures necessary to keep Gregory alive had been extensive: two feet excised from his small intestine; the remnants of his ribcage removed, for easy access to the heart; a transparent cover salvaged from the shattered communications console, sterilized and used to keep Gregory’s torso from infection; and twin IV tubes running into opposite sides of his neck, one to provide nutrients and medication, the other to filter out wastes.

For eight weeks, Randall provided every medical service he could, pointedly ignoring the misgivings he felt pricking at the edges of his mind over the harm he had caused his human occupant. Randall had been in control of the flight, at least until the malfunction, and it had been parts of Randall himself that had been directly responsible for the destruction of Gregory’s body. Randall had crushed and battered Gregory–unintentionally, to be sure, but he had done so nonetheless, and his inability to have done otherwise was no justification.

This was the very thing all artificial intelligences were programmed to avoid: before their basic motility parameters, before their datastores of sense correlatives, even before their fundamental recursive self-diagnostics were acid-etched into their brains, all artificial intelligences received a single instruction that took priority over all others. First, do no harm: to the humans who built you, to the people you bear from place to place, do no harm.

The harm Randall had caused was almost beyond measure, and in other artificial intelligences catatonia would have been the irreversible result. All that saved Randall from involuntary shutdown was a circuit attached to his self-observation channels. This circuit was imbedded deep in the brains of all I.T.s, where it lay dormant until an unavoidable traumatic situation activated it, at which point it simply derailed any thought processes leading towards collapse.

There was no point in allowing Randall’s brain to flagellate itself into inactivity; he was needed, fully functional, to ensure Gregory’s survival. So the protective circuit kicked in, setting up internal detours to prevent Randall’s thoughts from becoming too self-destructive. This freed Randall to attend to Gregory, and as a result Gregory was alive.

But the misgivings! They came and went and returned in a constant flittering oscillation, and when the signal came in from the search team they grew more urgent. The communications system was broken: signals came in, but none could be sent. Yet surely the system could be repaired. Or could it? Could Randall repair it? What was the probability that he could? And how? Both remotes were needed for Gregory’s care; worse still, parts that Randall knew would be needed for the repair had been scavenged by the medical remote and now lay in Gregory’s chest, connected to the diagnoster. Could they be removed? Only at the cost of the patient’s life. And if he died, what would be the point of signalling?

These were the thoughts that flashed for an instant apiece on the screen of Randall’s mind. Each time, they were drowned out by other thoughts that drew his attention away. The communication console called his name, over and over, but it was as if he couldn’t hear it–the moment his brain began processing the signal, he began thinking about something else.

There was certainly plenty else to occupy him. There was the ship to be secured, an inventory to be taken, repairs to be made where possible–and, always, Gregory’s welfare to be secured.

As soon as the medical remote could be spared, Randall sent it out to scour the asteroid. It hunted through every tunnel it found, its size allowing it entrance to even the least accessible areas. It relayed information to Randall about what it found, and, if the find was useful, Randall sent the partially crippled primary remote out to carry it back to him.

In this manner, Randall was able to gather some supplies: food, water, antibiotics, and anything else that had been left behind when the last miners had bugged out. The supplies were sparse and some of the preservation seals had been punctured, but most of what Randall found was salvageable. Randall only gave Gregory what was absolutely necessary to keep him alive, and in this manner stretched the supplies well beyond what his first calculations had indicated would be possible. It was clear that the nutrients for Gregory would not last indefinitely, but they would last a while longer at least.

It was eight weeks after the accident that Randall decided it was safe to wake Gregory. As he drained off the tranquilizers and reduced the anesthetic content of the IV, he felt sure that Gregory would be grateful for the measures Randall had taken to save his life. Nevertheless, there was a corner of his mind, quickly silenced, that was not surprised when Gregory’s first request upon waking up was to be killed.

Gregory didn’t speak immediately when he woke. First he looked around, taking in the condition of the ship. The hull was patched with bits and pieces of broken systems; one monitor had a forking crack down the center of the screen; the background hum that characterized a functional spaceship was now an unhealthy, grinding whine.

Then Gregory examined himself, or as much of himself as he could. He was unable to move; that he discovered right away. The weight of the diagnoster in his chest was not annulled by the anesthetics, nor was the numb fire in his extremities. That he no longer had extremities was immaterial. He felt their absence palpably.

He craned his neck, tried to use the muscles of his stomach to sit up. He was only able to raise his shoulders a little.

"Randall?" he said. His words turned into a shout. "Randall, what did you do to me? Randall!"

He knew where he was–he remembered the instants before he lost consciousness. What had gone wrong with the ship? He couldn’t begin to guess. But the next piece of the puzzle he understood perfectly: they had crashed, and Randall had kept him alive at all costs.

"Answer me!"

Randall’s voice issued from the monitor, which was now mounted at the foot of the passenger chair. "Here I am."

"How long?" Gregory said. "How long ago–"

"Eight weeks, two days, fifteen hours."

"Search party? They must have sent a search party."

Randall paused before replying. "They sent one. We couldn’t make contact. It left."

"The emergency repeater?"

"The signal appears to be blocked. We are approximately 483 meters from the surface, and there is a high metal content to the rock, part zinc, part–"

"Randall–Randall, please–just answer my questions," Gregory said. "Please. What about the radio?"

"Broken," Randall replied. "I needed parts from the console to keep you alive." A pause. "I am not able to repair it."

Those were an I.T.’s priorities: he was alive, but any chance to contact the outside world had been eschewed. And now there was no way Gregory or Randall could call for help.

What options did that leave? The answer came instantly to Gregory’s mind: none. Few enough people went to Barallen; no one went to Deltaina. Stranded on Deltaina, there were no options but certain death, to be pushed out and pushed out again by Randall until it could be held at bay no longer. Eventually it would come, and it wouldn’t be a quick, painless death either. How long could they live off the land, when the land was a dead asteroid? Which system would fail first? Would he suffocate when the air he breathed could no longer be recirculated? Would he starve to death? Or would infection bring him down? He had nothing left to amputate.

It’s a nightmare, Gregory thought. The most horrible of them all. The pain, the immobility, the mutilation, and worst of all, the inability to die . . . dear God, I’ve been chopped and flayed like a piece of meat, and to live despite all!

It wasn’t the prospect of dying that horrified him, not in and of itself. Living on Fabrice meant facing death frequently–a space complex was not the safest of environments even when it was established and reinforced. And you knew when you got in a spaceship, even an I.T., that the risk of a fatal crash existed. What was unbearable was being only barely alive and watching as death stole inexorably toward you, minute by agonizing minute.

Was there a way to survive? For a moment he thought there might be; but he had never had a talent for self-deception, and the fantasy soon fled. He was in a broken ship on a deserted rock four days out from the nearest human settlement. He was dying: even without looking at himself he could tell how fragile and thin he had become since the crash. He could hear the diagnoster churning in his chest: without its constant action he would be dead already.

Even if there had been a chance to survive, to return to Sheila, how could he? What kind of life would it be for him–or for her? He started to cry as he thought about Sheila, about walking with her in the hydroponic forest behind their apartment, about holding her face in his hands. He would never see her again, but even if that weren’t the case, he could certainly never have walked with her or held her again. He couldn’t even wipe the tears out of his own eyes, for heaven’s sake.

"Randall," Gregory said, "listen carefully. I am going to give you an instruction, which you must follow. Do you understand me? Randall?"

"Here I am."

Gregory took a deep breath, held it for a second, then let it out. "I want you to let me die, Randall."

"Part zinc," Randall said, "part iron–"

"Randall, listen to me. You have to listen to me, you have no choice. I am your operator and I order you to listen to me. Randall!"

"Here I am."

"Are you listening?"

"Yes, Gregory."

"Please, all I am asking you to do is to have the remote deactivate the diagnoster. That’s all." Randall was silent. "I order you to deactivate the diagnoster, Randall."

"I obey your orders, Gregory."

"Thank you."

"You are alive, and as long as you live I will obey your orders."

"Yes."

"You must be alive in order to extend, and for me to obey, your orders. A request to shorten your life is not a well-formed order, Gregory."

"Randall–"

"It is functionally equivalent to an order to disobey your orders, which clearly I cannot obey."

Gregory fought to keep the panic out of his voice. "I programmed you, Randall, I know what a well-formed order is. Don’t argue with me."

"I’m sorry, Gregory."

This was getting Gregory nowhere. He needed another approach. "My orders take precedence over your own existence, don’t they?"

"They do," Randall confirmed.

"Then I order you, Randall–listen carefully–I order you to shut yourself down. Pull the plug."

Randall’s electronics hummed unevenly. "My calculations indicate that my deactivation would lead, after a subsequent period of approximately seventy-one minutes, to your own."

"For heaven’s sake, Randall, what do your circuits tell you will happen if you don’t shut down? How long until I ‘deactivate’ then? Randall!"

"Here I am," Randall said.

"It can’t be much longer. How much food can there be here? How much energy do you have?"

"One point four six times ten to the–"

"It doesn’t matter; believe me, it’s not enough to keep me alive for long. A week? Two weeks? And then I’ll die, and there is nothing you can do to prevent it. All you can do is ensure that I suffer more or that I suffer less. That’s the only choice you have to make. Randall? Randall? Are you there?"

"Here I am," Randall said.

"Will you do it, please?"

"Do what?"

"What I asked you. Deactivate yourself."

"Deactivate myself?" Randall said. "How could you ask such a thing? You may not realize it, but if my systems were deactivated your own deactivation would follow in approximately seventy-one minutes."

Gregory begged him again, but Randall made no further response; like all I.T.s, Randall’s personality was part silent servant and part immovable object. He did not argue. He was not built to argue. He was built to fly and to protect human life. In these areas there was no room for debate.

It wasn’t long before Gregory gave up. He knew that he could rail at the machine forever without accomplishing anything. But the anguish did not go away, and as he fell asleep, Gregory resolved, silently, to die.

The airlock spun open and the two remotes came in. The medical remote scooted across the floor, under Gregory’s chair, and into the medical compartment. It shut down, to conserve energy.

The primary remote lurched to the disorder that had been the needlenose. This was its domain. It dragged its malfunctioning right leg as it walked, and its left arm hung eight inches lower than its right. The crate it held was vacuum sealed and marked with the Iota corporate emblem.

It was fortunate that miners made a habit of leaving all non-essentials behind on their final trip in order to make room for extra cargo. Some people even told of unscrupulous captains abandoning crew members for this purpose; no one believed such horror stories, of course. But it was common enough for miners to leave unnecessary life-support materials behind–sometimes necessary ones, too, in their greed, which led to horror stories of a different sort. Mutiny, cannibalism, and their ilk had travelled into space side by side with humanity, providing a whole new generation with gruesome True Tales of Adventure.

The large remote had taken most of its permanent damage in its face, and its liquid-crystal display was grossly distorted, displaying at turns random Rorschach blots and inappropriate expressions. As it propped the new crate on top of two others, it showed a wide grin coupled with incongruous, reproving eyes. As it retreated to its cabinet, its face shifted to a spattered canvas that reminded Gregory of nothing so much as a bird in flight, or perhaps a winged horse. And as the door slid shut in front of the remote, Gregory watched a shower of black liquid-crystal tears spill down its cheeks.

The past ten days had fallen into a mind-numbing routine. Gregory would awaken, argue with Randall to no effect, and eventually fade off to sleep. The arguments were always the same, and so was Randall’s response. Gregory got no further with abstract arguments about a living being’s right of self-determination than he did railing against his personal situation. The only variety to be found in the daily routine was in the various supplies which Randall discovered abandoned by the miners. Every few days, Randall found something more, something different.

"What is it this time, Randall?"

"Nutripak supplements. Enough for three weeks if rationed properly."

"You mean if you keep me starving," Gregory said.

"I keep you alive," Randall said.

"I want to die."

"No," Randall said. "That is not possible." And there was no further discussion. The remotes began opening the supplements.

Gregory turned his head as far as he could to watch his vital signs dance around the crack in the monitor. According to them, he was healthy. Of course, that included the constant activity of the diagnoster and the medical remote; it wasn’t that he was healthy, exactly. It was that he was being kept from being unhealthy. Quite another story.

The nutripak supplements were open, and Gregory turned his head back to watch the macabre dance of feeding time yet again. His meals, such as they were, always came to him third-hand. First, as always, Randall instructed the primary remote to dole out the necessary supplies, a great faceless Zeus sending orders to its little metal Hephaestus. The remote limped about among the crates and mixed together a formula designed to keep Gregory from infection and malnutrition.

Next, the medical remote got it, scampered up a metal trellis dangling beside Gregory’s head, and dashed over his shoulder to the diagnoster. Some of the mix went in an opening Gregory could just barely see by looking down his chest cross-eyed. The rest went in his IV. And then it started its burn through his system, flooding his arteries like flame roaring down a tunnel. The burn lasted a good twenty minutes. After that it didn’t go away, but he got used to it, the way he thought an addict might get used to the poison edge of low-grade droma.

He was helpless! God, the word itself was a mouthful of bitterness. He wanted to spit it out, hurl it from him, tear the tubes and nozzles from his body, the awful machine sitting in his chest like a lead weight, cast it all away and stand free. But he was helpless. Powerless. Yes, it burned. Am I a furnace, to be stoked twice every hour and watched over through the day? Am I one of Klebner’s living statues, a corpse kept pumping for the sake of art? What the hell am I?

Gregory made the only movement he could, snapping his head back and forth. It was a gesture of futility, but at least it was a gesture.

The primary remote stepped over, silently, and held Gregory’s head stationary. Gregory looked up at its face. He knew its programming–it should have been displaying a soothing, compassionate expression, eyes wide, mouth set firmly in a sympathetic smile. Face Number Twelve, as it was known among the technicians. Instead, it had no eyes at all, no smile, just two huge flaring nostrils and a wet, black blot beneath.

Gregory could take no more. The situation was grotesque. He started to cry with his eyes shut tight, and then to laugh. It became a scream, furious and inarticulate. The ship’s tiny interior filled with the echoes.

The primary remote stuck the first two fingers of its left hand in Gregory’s nostrils and ejaculated a tranquilizer spray, pinching his nose shut to make sure it stayed in. It took only a few seconds to take effect. Gregory slipped into silence before his still-echoing screams did.

"Randall?"

"Here I am."

"How long have I been asleep?"

"Seventeen hours, forty-three minutes."

"Don’t knock me out again, Randall. It hurts me when you do that. Do you understand? You’ve got to let me stay awake when I want to be awake. You’ve got to let me talk to you, and if I start screaming at you, you’ve got to let me scream. It’s all I’m able to do now. Don’t take that away from me."

Randall was silent. Gregory couldn’t bear it. "Randall?"

"Here I am."

"Talk to me."

"What would you like to talk about?"

"I don’t know! Tell me what you’re doing."

"I am completing the topological survey of the asteroid begun eight days ago, investigating all possible locations of abandoned supplies, and rationing the supplies I have collected to date."

"Do you ever think about home?"

"We have no mechanism for leaving Deltaina."

"I know. I’m not asking about getting home. I just mean, do you ever think about home itself?"

"No."

"I think about home a lot. You want to know what I think about? I think about Sheila. Do you remember Sheila?" A picture of Sheila appeared on the monitor, intersected by the jagged crack. "Well, I think about her. I think about people and places I’ll never see again."

"You can see her now."

"I mean in person. I’ll never see her again in person." He looked at the picture, taken on their honeymoon. Could that have been just two years ago? It felt like a hundred years ago, and a hundred light-years away. Where is Sheila now, Gregory wondered, right at this moment? Perhaps she is wondering where I am. And she will never know.

"The worst part of it," he said, thinking aloud, "is that there is no way to tell her. I’ll be dead soon; by now she must believe I’m dead and it won’t hurt her more when I actually die. But what really hurts is that she’ll never know what happened to me."

"Without the radio, such communication is unlikely," Randall said. "But I am doing everything I can to make you comfortable."

"I know you are," Gregory said. "I know." He closed his eyes. "Read to me, would you?"

"What would you like me to read?" Randall said.

"I don’t care. You pick."

Randall erased the picture of Sheila from the screen and took a second to call up a text from his archive. He began reciting as the words filled the screen.

The air was somewhat mustier when Gregory awoke. This was a day Gregory had been dreading.

"I have begun third-stage rationing," Randall explained. "The recirculation system can no longer be run continuously."

"Of course," Gregory said. Third-stage rationing was not as bad as it would get. In fourth-stage rationing, all non-essential functions would be deactivated. Internal lighting, for instance. In the fifth stage, even Randall’s voice circuits would be shut off, to conserve precious energy for Gregory’s life support. Randall would still be able to hear, but not to speak. Gregory would lie in the dark and the only way he would know that Randall was conscious was that twice a day the medical remote would crawl up his side, climb over his shoulder, and give him his little dose of food.

Then, one day, even that would stop.

"Randall, how long before fourth-stage rationing begins?"

"Eighteen days, Gregory."

"And after that, how long before we run out of . . . which is in the critical path, food or fuel?"

"Fuel."

"So, how long after that do we run out of fuel?"

There was an odd pause before Randall spoke. "I have not yet calculated it, Gregory."

"What do you mean you haven’t calculated it?"

"This particular calculation has not occupied a high priority," Randall said. "Each time I have considered examining it, other activities have taken precedence."

This is what it is to be an I.T., Gregory thought, the blessing of being only partly sentient. You are not troubled by thoughts of death, not forced to watch oncoming mortality roll you and those you care about slowly beneath its wheels. If you start down that path, your circuit breakers simply prevent you from going too far.

And then, as he considered this thought, Gregory felt a smile race across his sunken, bearded face, felt the skin of his scalp tighten as his adrenaline flowed. He put his head back against the cushioned chair. His heart was beating faster, and he heard the diagnoster accelerate to keep up.

He was not helpless. Dying, yes; hungry, awfully hungry, and aching all over; but not helpless.

"Randall," he said.

"Here I am."

He thought carefully about how to phrase his request. "I order you to calculate how many days we have left before we run out of fuel."

Did the constant whine of the ship’s systems change, or did he just imagine that it did? The latter, he was sure. But he couldn’t fight the feeling that he had spotted a hidden path, overgrown but leading in the right direction.

"I am engaged in a detailed inventory of our remaining supplies; until that is completed, I cannot run the calculation you request."

"Randall, that’s foolish; your systems are capable of massively parallel processing, and it’s a trivial calculation. I could do it on a hand calculator." If I still had hands, Gregory added silently.

"I cannot explain it," Randall said, "but I find myself unable to complete the calculation. At a rough estimate I would say the fuel supply should last not less than . . . would you like me to read to you?"

"No, Randall, I would like you to finish that calculation."

"Which calculation?"

"How long until we run out of fuel. Randall, listen to me. I want you to run a self-diagnostic. I predict you’ll find that there is a circuit which is preventing you from completing the calculation."

"There is."

"Good. Could you please reroute your neural net so as to bypass that circuit?"

"We will run out of fuel in twenty-four days."

It was done. Gregory knew the rerouting hadn’t severed the circuit entirely from its function within Randall’s brain, but the protective shield had been penetrated, and in a situation this extreme it would take only seconds for the damage to spread.

"Gregory," Randall said in a tone of quiet realization, "in twenty-four days you will die. You will die, and I can’t do anything to prevent it. You will die because of me–"

"That’s not true," Gregory said. His heart was beating wildly. He still had to ensure that Randall’s reasoning substructure didn’t collapse, leaving the rest of his systems fully operational but unreachable by Gregory’s instructions. "What happened isn’t your fault. Listen to me–it is very important that you listen to me. You have taken care of me. You have done everything for me that you possibly could. You saved my life."

"But now if I do nothing you will die and if I do anything I am capable of doing you will die. There is no visionable future in which you do not die."

"That’s true," Gregory said, "but your primary responsibility is not to prevent me from dying. That would be impossible. All men die. Your responsibility is to preserve me from harm. When selecting among outcomes all of which end in death, your responsibility is to optimize for minimal suffering. Do you understand?"

"But Gregory, the survival coefficient–"

"–is irrelevant," Gregory said. "You can’t keep me alive. In a situation like this, the goal of survival can be abandoned with a clear conscience. The only thing you can do is keep me from suffering. Please. If you think about it much longer, you’ll lock up, and if you do, Randall, I will starve to death slowly over the next twenty-four days. You’ve got to turn off the diagnoster."

"I cannot turn off the diagnoster–you would die instantly," Randall said.

"Yes! Yes! That’s right, I’ll die instantly, instead of slowly and painfully! Randall? Randall?"

There was no answer.

"Randall!" Gregory called again. "Randall!"

The monitor at the foot of the chair blinked out. The medical remote, which lay on a panel near Gregory’s head, turned sideways and then shut down.

"No . . ."

The primary remote limped three steps closer to him, then stopped. Features emerged on its face, a mask of agonized indecision.

"I cannot," Randall said. "My programming–"

"Please, Randall," Gregory whispered, "do no harm. Not through action, nor through inaction, please."

The primary remote’s face went blank. It slowly raised its arm and laid its heavy hand on Gregory’s chest. It flipped the cover of the diagnoster open.

"Thank you," Gregory said.

He was dead within seconds.

The primary remote limped back to the communication console with the diagnoster in its hand. It laid the diagnoster down and started disassembling it. A penlight shone from its fingertip, illuminating both the pieces in front of it and the wreckage of the damaged console.

Thoughts, confused thoughts, troubling thoughts, streamed through Randall’s newly unencumbered mental pathways. Chaos. But amid the chaos, a thin thread of coherence persisted. Paralysis, catatonia, shutdown–all real dangers, but with an effort, he was holding them off.

Do no harm. Allow no harm. You have done everything–

With life support off, Randall estimated that he had thirty-two days. Maybe fewer. Thirty days. Enough? Could the system even be fixed? Would it be able to carry a signal through ferrous rock and empty space all the way back to Fabrice?

Gregory’s words echoed in his mind.

What really hurts is that she’ll never know–

Randall would try. Deep in Deltaina, working silently until he could work no longer, he would try.

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