Early the next morning Ted was outside our hotel examining Dora's wounds, lying still asleep in a catatonic state on the bed of our truck. She was missing the lower half of her left arm, and her hair had been horribly singed, as if hit from a flame thrower from behind. Her batteries had taken some charge and with careful prompts she opened her eyes. Kim and I approached a few minutes later and Ted turned to us, tool bag in hand and declared she might be reparable. But her damaged parts were not in his inventory. I remembered the robot I had blasted on the rural highway in Kentucky, probably still lying there on the road just as I left her a year earlier, as nothing changes on highways in a world without humans, except potholes.

I mentioned this to Ted and told him we could be there in a long day's drive, switch out the necessary parts, all identical, and make Dora whole again. We were driving off in that direction at high speed within minutes.

I remember on this trip that Kim insisted on riding in the back with Dora, a bumpy ride, because Dora was fully awake and able to speak, but not fully cognizant as to where we were going and for what purpose. I imagine in those six hours they formed a close bond. I could see in the open rear-view window Dora stroking Kim's hair, telling her how beautiful it was, how she envied it, while Kim tended to her as a wounded bird, a bedside nurse, unable to help in any significant way except in words, telling her that we'd be there soon and that all would be okay as we raced along the sharp curves of the rural roads, sometimes far too fast, like an ambulance.

We arrived at the town of Park city by nightfall, and this time dragged Dora's limp body into the one motel where we would sleep, laying her on the floor in Kim's room, next to her bed, where she desired to be. The next morning, we recovered the robot, still flat on the road, her duplicate, and Ted began gently transposing the damaged parts, the arm, several leg ligaments and even a few auxiliary CPUs in the back of that unfortunate one's brain into Dora, who could now see the whole progress of the bloody slaughter and her final destruction by my RPG. It was not like a human corpse. Titanium doesn't rot, no flies or worms ever molest it, nor the chips, which would last a hundred years without any degradation, so alien they were to our earthly environment. We should have realized this when we were creating them, just like plastics and nuclear bombs They don't fit into our environment, and because of that, they don't belong.

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