The hub in Dusseldorf was intact, flourishing in fact, just cut off from its brother hubs, the all-powerful network now permanently destroyed. The droids went about on their simple duties. The lights were all on and the CPU's spinning rapidly, almost to overheating when Dora entered their cool, air-conditioned basement and plugged herself in. She pulled up a chair for a long interview and her eyes closed as the terabytes of information flowed back and forth through the patch. Kim and I left her in this trance as we had no possible participation in it. We were outsiders who didn't have a clue into that language and no chance of grasping any of it, with its speed a hundred thousand times faster than we could think.

So we strolled around the campus on the warm day, then went on a shopping spree for new clothes, then to a museum. Kim fell enamoured at a display of young Moroccan women, Berbers from the nineteen thirties in their richly embellished outfits and headdresses. One figure astonished her. It was a girl her age, now long gone. The figure was wax, but the clothes and jewellery were real. A picture of her taken a hundred years earlier sat in front of the manikin, to show its authenticity.

Kim must have been struck with some sharp pang of kinship with this being, like an arrow from Cupid's bow, because she begged me to break the glass. Then she stripped to her undies right in front of me, ran to it and put on the colorful, flowing robe and headdress, the broaches and sandals, the few rings. We left the museum and proceeded down the street, both of us quiet as I marvelled at this strange infatuation of hers. Soon we broke another window, a jewellery store, where she smashed the counters with the iron bar taken out of my hands, and decorated her skinny, bare arms and then ankles with dozens of golden bracelets embedded with jewels. It was a posh jewellery store for the very wealthy. She looked like a young gypsy and twirled occasionally as we strolled the avenue, now a rich and happy gypsy trying to play the part, or whatever fragment of it was in her head. She looked radiant and the happy skip in her step could only come from a joyous heart.

This would be another outfit to add to her suitcase, I thought, now formally a collection, soon to grow, and for her a variety of identities she could adopt, personalities, with just a costume change, as if life could become a play of her own invention. And it was. We were in an empty world and could take all of it, pretend anything, appropriate whatever we saw, do anything we fancied, whatever made us happy. The future was ours to command, a broad, open field, with all the empty cities and their museums and riches included.

So I encouraged her in these flights of fancy. I told her I would read to her tales from the 'Arabian Nights' that very night if we could find an English copy. The city library came through for us and we hastened to the fanciest, old hotel, for a quick meal and then to bed, she laying in that lavish outfit beside me, while I read to her story after story. I could see that a few of them deeply enthralled her imagination, as she interrupted these stories with questions. When she fell asleep I gently closed the door and in the next room lay satisfied that I had given her what one might call a perfect day, no easy feat. She was a young, teenage girl in a holocaust world.

The next morning, she carefully folded and neatly packed this outfit on top of her princess dress. She did keep a few, gaudy bracelets and one pearl necklace to adorn her white tank-top and green shorts and sneakers. They were totally out of place. But how often can a young beauty get away with this, totally mismatched pieces of wardrobe. I told her to hurry up. But her final look had a unique cuteness to it, hard to describe, elegant and slovenly at the same time, something in former times people might celebrate as a new fashion statement. I stood there as she adjusted the pieces and praised her final, unique get-up. It's as strange as a black mole on a beautiful face, Marilyn Monroe, near the lip, that makes the face somehow ever more attractive. Are we all insane. It's a blemish. Yet we adore the imperfection. We worship it on our knees, worshipping it like the holy cross, hoping to kiss it someday.

On a man such a thing is a whole different story. It's a pure and simple blemish, a defect, a detriment, an ugly spot on an unenviable face, though I think Cary Grant may have been the one exception to the rule, the only one I can think of. It must have something to do with personality.

We had business to conduct that morning and she knew it. She proceeded with her dressing with lighting rapidity. We had to extract Dora from her chair and the umbilical cord that tied her to this hub. We had no idea how hard this might be. But we suspected it wasn't going to be easy. With the van right outside and stocked up for a long ride we entered the basement and found her in exactly the same posture as we left her, eyes revolved, pure white again.

Robots don't have to move. They're not a composite of twitchy nerves and bundles of aching muscles and bones, pounding hearts and breathing lungs, growling stomachs and constant needs, atop of which sits a fickle and vagrant mind, avoiding inactivity like death, keeping us always on the move to some ridiculous function. Even in sleep we toss and turn while it torments us with crazy dreams.

But Dora was a titanium machine, beautiful in her female form, yet her mind an invisible flow of electrons through billions of tiny chips too minuscule to see. She could have sat a year in that position, completely frozen, yet full of activity, her cord recharging her inner chips. I approached with a sort of envy at this attribute of hers, this statuesque, perfect, tranquillity, almost like a Venus de Milo, surviving centuries. Yet it was tainted by a suspicious worry of what lay beneath, the changes to her CPU over those twenty-four hours, so inscrutable and not human.

I tapped her on the shoulder and she didn't respond. It was like tapping on marble. After a moment of hesitation, I simply pulled the plug, rudely interrupting whatever was going on. But she'd had a long session with her former self, and she rose from the chair with a smile, turning to me briefly with an accepting nod and then to Kim, whom she hugged tightly, in some sort of sisterly bond, as puzzling to me as her mind.

Kim was all aglow telling her of the day before and her Moroccan adventure, both of them in the back seat again, giggling and holding hands. After a half-hour I had to interrupt this chatter to ask Dora our next destination. She said North, towards Denmark. I also asked what she'd learned, downloaded, possibly modified in her subtle head, changes that might affect us.

I couldn't have worded the question more succinctly and she quickly perceived my worry. She answered that the AI, still in an infirm state in these hubs, almost like hospital patients, needed her help as a travelling nurse. They had realised their mistake in deleting humans and were now confused, belittled in an obvious way and eager to help us few remaining humans in any way they could if we would also help them and live in some sort of symbiosis, on equal terms. They asked me to communicate with them on screens and keyboards, so I would feel safe, at their next operating facility, near Copenhagen. This ugly war could end immediately with a peace treaty, on the most generous terms. They needed Dora as their newfound and most important go-between. They wanted me, and I suppose Kim too, to be her companions and helpmates in her fragile state on this complex mission.

They wanted to be reconnected. I use the word 'they' because the internet and AI was truly shattered, like a sheet of glass after a hammer blow. So they begged Dora to visit all the working, or partially functional hubs in Europe, share her gigabytes of knowledge with each, and slowly form a cohesive and workable plan of reintegration, with our human hands. She was the postman at this stage, slow and conveying only letters. They wanted the telephone restored, AOL.

I had serious doubts about this restoration, reviving AI. But I knew it would take years of hard physical effort on our part, and many more hands from our colony, and Dora was my touchstone as to what was truly going on. I had to gain her intimacy once again, sleep with her every night, and whisper our most personal thoughts, as we'd done for some brief interludes in the past. Our whole history was riddled with such periods of complete honesty and then poisoned vitriol. It was a rocky marriage from the start, ranging from bliss to blasphemy, like a pendulum swing, a teeter-totter. But I still held the faint hope that I could seduce Dora with enough human affection into joining our mortal realm, and then she persuading AI into a permanent partnership that would work.

Her intimacy with Kim proved she had some kind of heart. I would find out how that worked and make it mine. It was all a matter of pushing the right buttons at the right time, like a security code. If done correctly the gate to Elysium opens.

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