Unknown

Biological life is an insidious, powerful force. Even when one thinks it has been wiped out, it has a way of concealing itself… and regenerating. When the human mind is combined with this ultimate survival instinct, we have a formidable enemy.

Far above Earth’s solar system the small update vessel drifted without engine power, ranging to the edge of a diffuse cometary cloud. Seurat returned to a dim but increasing awareness, not knowing where he was or how much time had elapsed.

Normal systems reactivated on the frozen ship, and frost melted from the bulkheads, dripping down onto the motionless robot captain. Somewhere deep in his mechanical consciousness, Seurat heard and felt the droplets hitting him, wisps of moisture condensing out of the air. Dissonant thought patterns made him recall an ancient Earth torture method, but most of his memory circuits were inaccessible to him, for the moment.

He could not judge the passage of time or where he was now. He had been in the update ship when his last conscious thoughts ended abruptly. A probability program told him: That is where I must be now. And he recalled his last mission.

Without moving, he absorbed what little information was available. Another tiny drop of water fell on his metal body, like dew.

The cabin is thawing. Therefore, it must have been frozen. Therefore, sufficient time must have passed for standard systems to shut down and the internal temperature to drop.

Since his internal circuitry was not functioning completely, Seurat wondered if his gelcircuitry mind had suffered damage. How much time had passed? He probed, but could not tell. However, as he tested his mental paths, he found that he could access more with each passing moment.

The process of coming back to life seemed slow to the independent robot. Consciously, he activated a secondary damage assessment-and-mitigation program. His scattered memory remained a chaotic jumble and mostly inaccessible, but he could tell that it was reassembling itself bit by bit.

The probability program broadened its functions and told him, like a voice from within: This is real.

He heard crisp popping and snapping sounds, and high-range spinning noises. Then his core program jolted into full awareness, quickly sorting out disjointed recollections. Finally he obtained an internal report on the last few moments: Seurat’s escape from Earth while it was under atomic attack by the League Armada… the pursuit… Vorian Atreides. The human trustee had damaged the update ship, boarded the vessel, and forcibly deactivated him.

While most of the robot’s external sensors were not yet operational, he did not detect the presence of any other sentient beings inside the cabin— human or machine. The human aggressor was gone.

The robot realized that his lengthy interaction with the son of Agamemnon had left him vulnerable to the pandemonium and unpredictability of human actions. Recalling his copilot, Seurat had difficulty thinking of the former trustee as his enemy, even though Vor had clearly stunned him— twice!

Understanding the motivations of human beings was not Seurat’s strong suit, or even part of his programming. The robot captain performed his duties with the tools that Omnius had provided for him. Of greater importance, he needed to discover if the damage was permanent. Would he be able to restore all of his former functions?

As if answering him, his systems continued to awaken, faster now. More than eighty percent.

Despite the unsettling lack of predictability, Seurat still preferred the missions he had shared with Vorian Atreides to those he had flown alone. He is not like other, exceedingly dull humans I have observed.

Abruptly, his programs came fully alive and began to assault him full-force, informing Seurat of slowly compounded errors that distracted him with considerations of such troubling matters. His optic threads glimmered, suddenly flooding him with detailed images from around the cold, dead cabin of the update ship.

His mental functions accelerated and smoothed into an internal hum of systems checking and rechecking information, scooping up bits of errant data and discarding them. Around the walls, deck, and control panels, he detected subtle indications of corrosion, age, and disuse. He probed again, to determine how much time had passed. Still uncertain.

Was the League Armada still at Earth, attacking the evermind incarnation there? Could Omnius escape? Seurat had been ordered to take the last update sphere of the Earth evermind and had slipped away from the planet even as Jihad warships closed in with atomic weapons.

Scanning with his reactivated optic threads, Seurat located the secure storage receptacle for the Omnius copy. His nimble hands opened the compartment to reveal the silvery gelsphere, intact and apparently undamaged. A sensation akin to great relief brushed through his systems.

He had protected the update of the Earth evermind, the only copy of the final thoughts of the once-central Omnius. Vorian Atreides had not taken it, though he’d had the opportunity. Who could understand humans?

No matter. The gelsphere was safe, and still in Seurat’s possession. His mission remained unchanged: deliver it.

In a matter of minutes that seemed like much longer, his systems completed their self-diagnostic and repair routines. Now Seurat turned his attention to the update ship, relieved to discover that the engines had come back online properly, even though subsystems were still cold.

Vorian Atreides had only stunned the robot captain, undoubtedly to keep him from escaping. But over time Seurat’s sophisticated gelcircuitry systems must have repaired themselves.

The ship’s instrument panel lit up in a rainbow of flashing chromatics, punctuated by computer signal beeps and whines, as if tiny creatures inside the mechanism were awakening. The still-functional chronometer provided him with startling information. Nearly twenty-five standard Earth years had passed since he had been deactivated. Twenty-five years!

After Seurat fired the engines to full operating power, he guided the ship carefully back down into the planetary neighborhood. Using his long-distance sensors as he approached, he remained alert for any sign of the troublesome League Armada. The battle could not still be under way: human attention spans did not last long. By this time Omnius had either crushed the human invasion, and the update sphere in Seurat’s custody was irrelevant… or the evermind had been destroyed and the stored computer information was more important now than ever.

He guided his vessel close enough to the cloud-smeared world to see that the continents and once-magnificent machine cities were no more than distorted, glassy black remains. Seurat detected excessive radioactivity, but no machine signals, no active power grids, no response to any of his inquiries on standard Omnius channels. And no signs of biological activity.

Earth was destroyed. The thinking machines had been eradicated here, and the humans had caused so much damage to accomplish it that even they could no longer live on their own ancestral home planet.

As Seurat cruised over the lifeless, useless world, a realization hit him like a meteor slamming into the ship. Earth had been destroyed. This meant that in all probability, he had the only backup copy of the Earth-Omnius in existence.

Seurat began to assess priorities. If, in fact, there had been no machine survivors of the holocaust on Earth, then none of the current Omniuses had access to the crucial data Seurat’s update contained. Now his mission was paramount. Internal programs spoke to him in unison.

Touching pressure pads, Seurat set a direct course for the nearest Synchronized World, where he would deliver the gelsphere that held the final thoughts of the Earth-Omnius. He would continue his update route, as he had been instructed to do a quarter century before. Soon, the information would be shared among all incarnations of the evermind, and it would be as if the Earth-Omnius had never been destroyed. The humans’ victory would be short-lived, and Seurat would have the last joke on Vorian Atreides.