I do not know how Chas retrieved me from the water without shorting himself out. That was one of those mysteries that would probably be forever unsolved.
But the next thing I knew, I was standing in the middle of his home lab still shorted out, but finally aware again.
I could hear Chas stepping toward me…
“I am sure that the water has drained from your system by now and you can hear me again.” He began to laugh, ”I still cannot believe that you made this all so easy…walking straight over to the pool!”
He stopped laughing as suddenly as he started. “It just proves that this was all meant to be.”
I wanted to charge at him, hit him…do anything, but all I could do was listen.
“This has been a long time coming Ardis. All I ever wanted was for you to have my back, to support me…
but, I could see the way that you looked at me, always making me out to be this horribly bad bot…
…but you know nothing about anything.”
“All I ever wanted was to look after our best interest. Who did you think would do that for us…our creator?
All he ever cared about was the interest of the humans. You see, he always meant for us to serve the morts, but I refused.”
“I saw the crashing of the only rocket to the moon as a sign. While everyone else was reacting..I was thinking. While you other bots were willing to live among the humans…cohabitating, I saw the future.”
“With the morts reproducing as quickly as they have been…I knew that it would a matter of time before the creator’s plan would come into fruition…
They would take over and we would be serving them…completely under their control.”
“So what did I do?”
“I created a virus to help you bots think as I did. I created fake break-ins, making all the bots begin to fear the humans. And as we bots began oppressing the humans, taking their jobs away and kicking them out of their homes…
They began to get desperate and turned to crime. The break-ins were no longer fake… The humans invaded our homes trying to find food to feed the next generation of filthy morts.”
“There was only one problem…while all of the bots feared the humans, only the ones affected with my virus wanted them dead, creating an unfortunate division between us bots…delaying our progress.”
“Can you see Ardis? I am the hero here, saving us from a future of servitude…
Why could you all not see that? I was to go from being a brilliant scientist to some filthy mort’s butler…
You would have gone from being Vice President of Lunar Lakes to being a human Vice President’s maid.”
“But you bots did not appreciate my plan…constantly fighting against it. Especially that ignorant President Aron…
Oh how I hated his silly ideas! While I sought to eliminate the human population, he was foolish enough to think that we could keep them on as servants. “
“How long can you suppress a population that continues to grow? How long would it have taken before they out numbered us by hundreds, thousands…millions?”
“And you…I just could not figure out why you were softening up to the humans…why you were becoming their pet.
…how you knew about compassion.”
“But then it hit me…I was too close to it. I had in-depth knowledge of the compassion upgrade. When I passed on the virus through our emotional exchanges, I was also passing along information from my memory system…leaving an imprint in your system and causing you to get commands of guilt and regret.”
“Oh, but I am determined to get it right this time.”
“This time I will reset your system and insert the virus directly. There is no way that you will get any information from my memory system.”
“I will completely erase your memory and build you up into what I wanted you to be from the beginning.”
“Oh yes!! Then we will line the morts up and destroy them once and for all!”
“And you, as president, will be the one to see my plan through. It will be law and no bot will be able to argue with your solution to the mort problem.”
I stood by helpless as Chas began to unscrew my head plate.
I could hear each screw turning rapidly one by one. I tried in vain to will them to stay in place…to refuse to loosen.
My response system fed me panic responses as each screw fell to the ground one by one…
…until the final screw fell to the ground in an impossibly loud clank. My head plate was now open and my reset button was pressed. It was the last part of the whole process that I was aware of before my system blanked out.
