Over the following weeks we continued our grim talks on how to annihilate our enemy. It was never a pleasant conversation and everyday seemed even more depressing and hopeless as we realized their insurmountable advantages. I mentioned that in any one on one encounter, with my pistol at my side, I could put a hole through a droids eye at twenty paces, faster than anything he might draw on me. But I was one of the very few with that talent in our group and if there were two or more opponents I would probably lose. Ted came up with the idea of explosive bullets. But even the best of these would have to be accurately aimed at just the right places to do enough damage to stop the thing.

His next idea was for us to construct some sort of improved taser, as robots were obviously more electronic than us and susceptible to any power surge. But for any experiments to proceed we would need test dummies to find their vulnerabilities and we remembered the four robots we had blasted and were left behind at the farm. So we made the sad pilgrimage and collected all we could of their remains. The first two we had machine gunned and then crushed beneath our tank treads were little more than scattered parts. But against the barn was a far more disturbing task, at least for me. Half slumped up against the wall sat Juliet, the robot I had taken such care to create, with a bowling ball sized gaping hole through her lower abdomen, almost splitting her in two. This, we later discovered, was her entire power supply, even the back-up system, her center of gravity and the most heavily shielded portion of her body, but no match for a tank shell. So she died an instant death, like flipping off a light switch.

I lovingly lifted up her corpse and carried it to the back of the truck, then collected every piece, down to the smallest that was scattered in the vicinity of her death. Ted handled the other bot. He was in much better condition. He was the one whom we had nailed in the legs and who managed to crawl into the barn, where I dispatched him with a bullet through each eye.

Back at the lab we laid our two almost complete bots on two side by side tables with the design to exchange working pats and restore one to some functionality. We immediately decided it would be Juliet, not only from my obvious affection for her but from the damages she sustained. None of her complicated chips were damaged and power supplies are fairly simple in design an the other bot's guts were still intact.

It took us many days but with infinite care we cleansed the gaping whole in her belly and translated each missing piece, which was almost exactly similar to the other robot's internals and shields and partitions. When the final clips were reconnected, she opened her eyes and with my face inches over hers, she recognized me and spoke my name. She raised one arm and caressed my face with her hand, exactly as I did to hers.

We had a most interesting conversation over the next hours. She remembered the very beginning of the battle but had no idea why it ever occurred. She had no notion that she was compromising the humans around her in any way. Dora must have somehow withheld her darker purposes from her minions and given them their daily instructions as if they were just improving the efficiency of the farm. Her warm smiles to all of us revealed this truth without any words necessary, as if she had just woken up to the faces of a set of old friends.

The one thing that puzzled her, she was bedridden and asked us to explain why. We told her of the wound she had suffered and that we were still working on correcting the final pieces that connected her hips. The male robots anatomy was different in those sections and despite Ted and Hanna's best efforts they couldn't get the male and female parts, the pubis and femur, to match up and we didn't have the heavy milling machinery to adapt them. So she couldn't walk.

She could feel her legs and move her toes and even knees. She had bios and backup caches everywhere. I suppose the Japanese had designed this in their robots so that if any one part failed, like an arm or a leg the rest would still be fully pleasurable. But we told her she would be bedridden for a while, able to sit up and chat with us and we would take the very best care of her.

This was my one ray of light after many dark weeks of trying to devise ways to destroy robots. Now I had one I felt great affection for, a robotic friend again, whom I could visit and nurse and converse with for hours. I made Ted try out his taser experiments on the working components of the other robots in a different building, never asking him of his progress or wanting to know.

I think Sarah and Beth were actually a little jealous of my spending all my daylight hours with Juliet, of bringing the children to her bedside and telling them all stories from the past, which they delighted in, because now a far different plan was beginning to congeal in my mind, one so radical I had to keep it a secret from everyone.   

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