The identical twin girls looked peaceful and asleep, side by side, like little angels in a cozy bed. The snakelike brain scanners inserted through holes drilled into their skulls were almost unnoticeable.

Immobilized by drugs, the unconscious children lay on a laboratory table inside the experimental zone. Erasmus’s mirror-smooth face reshaped itself into an exaggerated frown, as if the severity of his expression could force them to reveal their secrets about humanity.

Damn you!

He could not comprehend these intelligent creatures that had somehow created Omnius and an amazing civilization of thinking machines. Was it a miraculous fluke? The more Erasmus learned, the more questions he developed. The inarguable successes of their chaotic civilization presented a deep quandary in his mind. He had dissected the brains of more than a thousand specimens, young and old, male and female, intelligent and dimwitted. He had made detailed analyses and comparisons, processing data through the unlimited capacity of the Omnius evermind.

Even so, none of the answers were clear.

The brains of no two human beings were exactly identical, not even when the subjects were raised under matching conditions, or if they started out as twins. A confusing mass of unnecessary variables! No aspect of their physiology remained consistent from person to person.

Maddening exceptions, everywhere!

Nonetheless, Erasmus did notice patterns. Humans were full of differences and surprises, but as a species they behaved according to general rules. Under certain conditions, especially when crowded into confined spaces, people reacted with a pack mentality, blindly following others, eschewing individuality.

Sometimes humans were valiant; sometimes they were cowards. It especially intrigued Erasmus to see what happened when he conducted “panic experiments” on crowds of them in the breeding pens, wading in and butchering some while letting others survive. In such circumstances of extreme stress, leaders invariably emerged, people who behaved with more inner strength than the others. Erasmus especially liked to kill those individuals and then watch the devastating effect it had on the rest of the people.

Perhaps his sample group of experimental subjects over the centuries was too small. He might need to vivisect and dissect tens of thousands more before he could draw meaningful conclusions. A monumental task, but as a machine Erasmus had no limitations on energy, or patience.

With one of his personal probes, he touched the cheek of the larger of the two girls and sensed her steady pulse. Every droplet of blood seemed to withhold secrets from him, as if the entire race was participating in a massive conspiracy against him. Would Erasmus be considered the ultimate fool of all time? The fibrous probe glided back into access channels in his composite skin, but not before he intentionally, petulantly, scratched her skin.

When the independent robot had taken these identical twins from the worker pens, their mother had cursed at him and called him a monster. Humans could be so parochial, failing to see the importance of what he was doing, the larger picture.

With a self-cauterizing scalpel-beam, he cut into the cerebellum of the smaller girl (who was 1.09 centimeters shorter and 0.7 kilograms lighter— therefore, not “identical” at all), and watched the brain activity of her drugged sister go wild— a sympathetic reaction. Fascinating. But the girls were not physically connected to each other, not through body contact nor by machine. Could they sense one another’s pain?

He chided himself for his lack of foresight and planning. I should have put the mother on the same table.

His thoughts were interrupted by Omnius, who spoke from the nearest wallscreen. “Your new female slave has arrived, a last gift from the Titan Barbarossa. She awaits you in the sitting room.”

Erasmus raised his bloody metal hands. He had looked forward to receiving the woman captured from Giedi Prime, supposedly the daughter of the League Viceroy. Her familial ties suggested genetic superiority, and he had many questions to ask her about the government of the feral humans.

“Will you vivisect her as well?”

“I prefer to keep my options open.”

Erasmus looked down at the twin girls, one already dead from the interrupted exposure of her brain tissue. A wasted opportunity.

“Analyzing docile slaves gives you irrelevant results, Erasmus. All thoughts of revolt have been bred out of them. Therefore, any information you derive is of questionable applicability for military purposes.” The evermind’s voice boomed from the wallscreen.

Erasmus soaked his organic-plastic hands in solvent to eliminate the drying blood. He had access to thousands of years of human-compiled psychological studies, but even with so much data it was not possible to create a clear answer. Many self-proclaimed “experts” offered wildly disparate answers.

On the table, the surviving twin continued to mewl her pain and fear. “I disagree, Omnius. The human creature is innately rebellious. The trait is inherent in their species. Slaves will never be entirely loyal to us, no matter how many generations they have served. Trustees, workers, it makes no difference.”

“You overestimate the strength of their will.” The evermind sounded smugly confident.

“And I challenge your flawed assumptions.” His curiosity piqued, sure of his private understanding, Erasmus stood before the swirling screen. “Given time and adequate provocation, I could turn any completely loyal worker against us, even the most privileged trustee.”

With a long litany of data from his storehouse of information, Omnius disputed this. The evermind was confident that his slaves would remain dependable, though perhaps he had been overly complacent, overly lenient. He wanted the universe to run smoothly and efficiently, and did not like the surprises and unpredictability of League humans.

Omnius and Erasmus debated with growing intensity until the independent robot finally put a stop to it. “Both of us are making conjectures based upon preconceived notions. Therefore, I propose an experiment to determine the correct answer. You select a random group of individuals who appear to be loyal, and I will demonstrate that I can turn them against the thinking machines.”

“What will that accomplish?”

Erasmus replied, “It will prove that even our most reliable humans can never be fully trusted. It is a fundamental flaw in their biological programming. Would that not be useful information?”

“Yes. And if your assertion is correct, Erasmus, then I can never again trust my own slaves. Such a result would call for a preemptive extermination of the entire human race.”

Erasmus felt uneasy, that he might have trapped himself by his own logic. “That . . . may not be the only reasonable conclusion.” He’d wanted to know the answer to a rhetorical question, but also feared it. For the inquisitive robot, this was much more than a mere wager with his superior; it was an investigation into the deepest motivations and decision-making processes of human beings.

But the consequences of discovering the answers could be terrible. He needed to win the argument, but in such a manner that Omnius did not shut down his experiments.

“Let me ponder the mechanics of implementation,” Erasmus suggested, then gladly emerged from the laboratory to go meet his new female house slave, Serena Butler.