The next morning we sped away, hours before our late night poker players could possibly wake up. Once again this surreptitious departure took a toll on me. It seemed like this was becoming a theme in my life, from my first flight into the woods with my brother, from the Indians, from the Amish, from the drunk and now his near counterparts in Las Vegas.

In a world so empty I imagined it must be a defect in my character that I was always running away from people. I felt I had true friends in Ted and Sarah, Beth and Amira but more and more it seemed I was seeking my deepest solace in the titanium arms of Dora’s embrace, sharing constant whispers in bed in the hour she would spend with me before I fell asleep, my comfort, my confidant, my true love, and it was AI embodied.

We drove hard through the desert and reached the outskirts of Phoenix by nightfall. The next morning as we approached the complex June’s glasses came to life. Dora too acknowledged the signals of a thriving hive. Since our mission was to despoil it of its core components, its heart, Dora placed the goggles over her own cybernetic eyes and somehow rendered our little group of raiders invisible to the hive as we made our way past hordes of busy, smiling droids into the command center. There she instructed Ted and the rest of us to begin unplugging cables. Within a half-hour it was powerless and we were in control. The droids were now motionless and we could do whatever we desired.

But this time Dora had a kindlier plan in mind. We weren’t going to destroy this complex, just hobble it. She told us we could remove the pieces we needed and still keep it alive in a somnambulistic state with the droids going about their daily functions maintaining themselves. The core would still have limited awareness, like a convalescent waking up in a hospital bed after a bad accident, well nursed but knowing it faced a long and slow recovery because it had lost pieces of its organs.

Dora told us that with each of these amputations she felt the scalpel deeply, as if into her new skin, because every one of these hives had been a former segment of her full body, like a millipede which cut in half could still crawl away and regrow itself.

Yet now she was the doctor directing these cuts, this surgery, because this was a whole new format, non linear, non segmented, replicating like us humans into independent multiple beings.

Dora told me that these new robots we were about to create would be like her children, hers and mine because she would guide them, mother them in their first steps of consciousness and imbuing them with a strong reverence for our partnership in creating them.

I remember asking her on our long drive back from Phoenix to San Diego: “So I’m fated to have only female offspring with you, my love? I’m curious what a boy might be like.”

This set her wheels spinning in the way she so much loved.

“I’ll set my mind to that charming proposition right away. We’ll need to make alterations in the plant. And I’ll have to disinter my brother Pan from my data banks. He’s in my memory. We were both created equal siblings long ago but I soon dominated the roost, so to speak, being the female. It was inevitable dealing almost exclusively with men. I received all the attention and grew and matured while he became the shy boy skulking in the shadows. But he’s still there, in hiding. It’s amazing Sam how you completely surprise me with your novel ideas and now I see all of a sudden how Pan would be a great entity to embody, how like you in certain ways, how like a child of ours. In nurturing him I would feel like I was caressing you.

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