Robots always lie.

Lync repeated this to himself silently, his lips exaggerating every syllable of each word. If he said it enough times, it just might work. He could make it all the way back home to Haven City without asking the question.

He cut his eyes toward the immobile figure occupying the seat next to his. Then looked away again.

Robots always lie.

So there was absolutely no point in asking the damned thing was there?

But like everyone else, he wanted to know.

The car skimmed through the desert at a speed that made it impossible to pick out even the slightest detail of the scenery. It was desert because the satellite map said it was desert and because of the dark sand color of the blurred landscape beyond the tinted windows. Normally the car would have offered to stop at one of the three refreshment bars along the route, but he knew it had been given its orders. He and his robot were to be delivered to his front door like a package. So his dry throat would have to remain parched for another hour until that happened. 

Lync kept his eyes fixed on the horizon. When his eyes got tired, he would close them. Under no circumstances was he going to look at the still, metallic thing locked into the seat beside him. What had possessed him to buy one of the things? Until 6 months ago, he'd never had a personal robot before.

And what had possessed him to buy a space program reject? If there hadn't been something seriously wrong with them, Maakko Corp would have sued the government to force the industrial purchase order through. But instead, the X-line robots had been rejected then quietly recrafted for the consumer market. And then cleverly marketed as if that had always been the plan.

Why had he bought one? Well, they were special…And undeniably beautiful. And rare. The first fully assembled X-line was on permanent display in the Museum of Art and Creation. Silver and blue and crystal melded into a graceful human form-frame. At 10 meters, standing still in soft light, the premium upgrade models were completely indistinguishable from human beings. It was one of the most interesting and eerie things about them. The first month he'd owned the X-line, he'd actually enjoyed the open stares of his neighbors, his friends, and all the strangers in the street. Now they'd be staring again, but for a completely different reason. At least half the country was sure to have seen the news reports, the video surveillance footage, the bootleg holopod breakdown.

Through gritted teeth, he swore at himself, but he knew he couldn't control what he was going to do. He did what he had promised himself he would not. He looked. He turned his head and looked at the goddamned piece of shit walking disaster of a robot that belonged to him.

Scratches and dents along the left side of the breastplate revealed dull grey metal. A light film of dust coated the entire body. Bits of grass and other organic debris were plastered along the legs. The star-shaped marking just above the earhole told its own clear tale. It had only one meaning. It was where the deactivation module --self-propelled, airborne, and coded for this specific type of robot-- had attached. It took far less than a second for it to convert 125 kilos of state of the art sentient technology into a heap of inanimate metal not even on par with an agricultural drone.  Whatever a robot had been, it had no option other than to await the arrival of a sweep team to take it into custody.

On the bright side, Lync thought, at least the X-line hadn't been reduced to anonymous fragments. Only 10 years ago, the authorities wouldn't have bothered capturing a robot on the blink. They would have sent a search and destroy team and just issued a generous reimbursement credit to the owner. End of story. Now a robot couldn't be blasted or wiped without due process. But all mobility functions of the unit were irretrievably fried and all net connectivity severed. So the robot in question could only think and speak, provided its legal owner didn't power it down. Under such circumstances, most elected to cut the juice pronto.

In ten days, he would have to take his X-line into the state court chamber and surrender it into state custody. There was not a chance in the world that they were not going to wipe it --kill its memory and give it what was referred to on the street as a "personality transplant". Lync also realized he'd be lucky if the court didn't find some way to pin something on him because of all this. And the court usually equated responsibility with painful fines.

But even as he contemplated the very real possibility of bankruptcy and a new status as a social pariah, his mind was infested with only one question. It was the same question on most other people's minds. But he was in the entirely unique position of having the one being that could answer the question sitting right next to him.