Sandleford winced as the whine of the energy beam rose in pitch. The lock on his door wouldn’t last much longer under that assault. He looked at the figure standing motionless beside him and envied his calm. Peter’s pleasantly modulated voice remained as steady and soothing as if they were on a beach vacation, rather than facing their downfall.

“Dr. Sandleford, I will repeat my request that you try to find some means of escape. I can hold them off long enough to give you time--”

“No, Peter,” he said, his voice tight with tension. “I will not abandon you, not now. Not after everything we have accomplished.”

Peter, who identified himself as Model 3T100, Mark 2, Series 8, Individual 34192, turned his head to regard Sandleford. “And what of our project?”

Our project. Peter had always called it that, and Sandleford had never outwardly contradicted him. But, in his innermost thoughts, Sandleford had always called it something else.

“Our project is safe,” Sandleford assured him. “We have done all we can to prepare for this moment, and I can do nothing as a fugitive.”

He looked away from Peter to focus on the glow growing brighter behind the lockpad. “We must have faith in our work, now.”

A metallic glint in his peripheral vision told Sandleford that Peter was nodding agreement.

A spark jumped from the lockpad into the room. Sandleford needed to look somewhere else, somewhere other than at Peter or the disintegrating lockpad. His eye fell on the only old-style photograph in the apartment, a shot of his wife and son at a city park. Marian had placed it there twenty years ago. After the accident, Sandleford had moved it only to carefully dust the frame. How faded it had become! The green grass had yellowed, his son’s eyes had grown dull.

With a sharp crack and a shower of sparks, the door hissed aside. Enforcement officers gushed into the apartment, swarmed around Sandleford until their black uniforms were all he could see. They shouted at him to freeze, and kept shouting it, so he tried to keep his trembling knees straight and still.

Then he realized they were shouting at Peter, not at him. Of course.

Within seconds, an EMP isolator was smacked into Peter’s main integration port. Like that, it was done; Peter was dead.

The shouting stopped. The black uniforms backed away, but only a little. “Dr. Alfred Sandleford,” a voice intoned in his ear. “You are under arrest on charges of harboring malfunctioning AI in violation of General Order 62 and at least five recall directives.”

Malfunctioning. Against his better judgment, Sandleford smiled.

“Do you understand these charges, Dr. Sandleford?”

Sandleford slowly turned his head. “Yes, I understand.”

He understood those charges were only the beginning. He would be interrogated. Peter would be transported to a robotics lab, and examined. They would start to put it together…

Despite their brute appearance, the Enforcement officers who stepped forward to restrain Sandleford handled him with surprising courtesy. They didn’t even use force-links. But then, Sandleford was just an old man, a human with all of humanity’s weaknesses and frailties. Not like Peter.

Not like…

Sandleford suddenly began to struggle. The officers closed on him, but not before Sandleford lunged toward the nearest one and curled his fingers around the officer’s weapon. Warning shouts turned to cacophony as he pulled it from its holster and fired randomly into the air.

The officers reacted, more weapons slid from more holsters, but only one beam sliced through the air, unerring.

Sudden silence descended in its wake.

“Damn it, get a medic in here!”

Above Sandleford’s crumpled body, Peter stared sightlessly forward, his head slightly cocked.