The G. M. Os. - 1. Chapter 1 - The Hacker

WARNING: This chapter contains descriptions of graphic violence.

The G. M. Os.

Chapter 1

Ship Clock 262003

Eugenus 54-721c

The Hacker

“Well, what did they want? Stefan asked.

“Us,” Carlos said.

“And?”

“The new probe; they want us to pilot it. They want to get rid of all of us; they’re ending the greenie project. I guess the bots finally figured out they could do all of our tasks without any help from us.”

“When do we leave?”

“In a day or three; it’ll take a few days to get all of the selected humans onto the rings and command section. You’ll be Captain and I’ll be Staff Captain.

“Why me? The bots like you. You should be the captain.”

“I asked the same question; the bots think you’ll be a better captain because of your leadership qualities.”

“Right! Oh, by the way, what is the ship named?”

“Icarus, after the ancient Greek who flew too close to the sun and fell into the sea when the wax holding his wings together melted. Makes sense, we’re looking for the right kind of sun with the right kind of planetary system structure. We’ll be looking for the perfect new Earth with lots of water and no people.”

********

It is now over two hundred fifty thousand years since Icarus left Hercules III with all former and graduated greenies, plus humans selected by the bots for their potential to request inclusion in the bot corps at the end of their natural lives, thereby ensuring a form of immortality. The human population is now mostly children and young adults, the oldest members of the population are almost two hundred thousand years old; the difference between the departure of Icarus and the resetting of the clock owing to the development of a radically new way of producing humans. Although humans now have the potential to live up to twenty-six million years, that is highly unlikely due to bot actions, disease, and accidents. Plus, the bots have established a set of laws and rules that ensure the humans are kept under their thumb, mostly anyways. As is with any population of humans, there are always those who stretch the limits of laws in place to limit actions that are detrimental to the overall population. The bots could care less how humans felt; this was the new order.

“Hi, Gene,” said a small age eleven girl as she squatted down over a dusty trail. She was wearing coveralls—the clothes of farmers and workers—hers were pale blue. One of her best friends, though he was a year older—but still eleven because of the way humans aged now—was sitting on a log that had been put there for that purpose. It, and many similar ones, were peeled and split conifer logs that provided a place for humans to rest as they trekked the trail from wherever it began and wherever it might end. Children of the district did not know and cared less; the logs just provided a place to get away from their residences when they were bored. “Aren’t you really Ugene?”

“That’s Eugenus,” the boy said with a sour face. “You can call be Gene, but never call me Ugene.”

“Then why were you named Eugenus; that sounds like something from long ago on Earth,” the girl said as she moved over to the log and sat on the opposite end. Now, she was close to the boy who she hoped would become her husband when they finished their classes at a university in one of the cities on the ring. There really wasn’t much of a difference between him and all the other boys she’d met because everyone looked the same. That was the bot way.

“The bots named me like that because they named my sister Eugeni; like they named you Moli and your brother Molus,” Gene said.

“There are no bots here,” Moli said. “They’re not allowed.”

“They’re here, you just can’t see them,” Gene said. He turned his head left and right as if looking if he could see the bots. His straight, black hair swayed and then it settled back in place. He looked off across at Moli’s stepparents’ wheat field on the other side of the trail.

“How can you see them?” Moli asked. “Does Arne know?”

“Arne’s a jerk,” Gene said. He looked at her as if he’d never seen her before.

“You can’t say that, he’s your dadi.”

“No he isn’t; he’s too young to be my true Father,” Gene said. He stood up and looked down at the little girl. He thought how small she looked when she was only a year younger. “Besides we’re all G. M. Os.; we don’t have true fathers or mothers, just stepparents or I think that’s the way it works. The bots made us in labs in what is called petri dishes and other methods.”

“Don’t say that, I’m going to tell Arnae what you said,” Moli said. Although she was younger, she still considered the older boy to be a friend, but for some strange reason, Moli’s twin brother didn’t like Gene. “What are G. M. Os.?”

“Genetically modified organisms,” Gene said with an air of superior intelligence. “That’s why we all look alike. There are hardly any mutations and those that get through are killed or operated on before they can donate eggs or sperm to the birthing centers.”

“How do you know all this, I’m going to tell Arne and Arnae what you said,” Moli said.

“They already know. I asked Arne and he said why the bots do that,” Gene said obviously tired of the conversation. He wanted to get back to his module and get back into the bot records. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get back in a day or two, once they detected him. He wanted to find out who contributed the eggs and sperm to the lab or if he was created from a combination of people. He read about that in the bots records, but still believed he and his sister were created by only two parents.

“Please wait, I want to show you something,” Moli said as she stood up.

“What?” Gene asked with disinterest and seemed impatient to get away, Moli went on talking.

“I don’t know, maybe you’ll know because you’re older. Please; follow me, it isn’t far.”

They walked along the trail until they came to the railroad tracks. Moli stopped and looked around as if someone might be watching.

“It’s over there,” she said. She pointed across the tracks.

They crossed and she stopped at a flat, dull piece of metal set into the soil. Gene bent down and pushed dirt off the metal. He quickly stood up.

“It’s a bot hole,” Gene said. He started to walk away, but stopped to see if Moli was following. “They come up from there at night to check on us. They know we’re here because it has monitors under it. You can’t see them, but they know. Bots always know. They built this ring and the whole ship long ago at the first Hercules. We better get away. I advise you not to come back. They might take you away. They’ll come for Molar, too. They don’t allow twin links to be broken.”

“How do you know all this?” Moli asked. She hurried to catch up with Gene. “Does Arne know you know about bots?”

“Like I said before, Arne’s a jerk,” Gene said as he began to run. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

********

Gene sat at his module turned it on and read thru the broadcasts from the bots. Hacking into the bot computers was a growing problem and the bots were increasing their vigilance to catch intruders before they gained complete access. There were proposed penalties up to and including public execution by means that only bots could conceive. Gene wondered how it would feel to be skinned alive and then beheaded.

He flipped from the news to the general login screen and entered the code for the bot general records section. He entered his fake ID and password.

ACCESS DENIED

EUGENUS 54-721C; DO NOT LEAVE YOUR RESIDENCE

WE WILL COLLECT YOU

DO NOT FEAR

THERE WILL BE A TRIAL TO DETERMINE YOUR DEGREE OF GUILT AND CORRECT PUNISHMENT

LEAVE YOUR MODULE FOR REPROGRAMMING

END. . . .

Gene sat at his module and watched bot code run across the screen until he grew bored. There no need to be concerned. He was caught; there was nothing he could do. He wondered if accessing bot general records was a capital offense or if they would let him off with a short prison sentence and just mental reprogramming. He’d read about that too, but didn’t want to contemplate having probes stuck in his brain to remove bot offensive neurons. Maybe they’d just kill him and be done with it. He wondered how long a person lived while being skinned alive. Would he scream?

He went into his sister Eugeni’s room and sat on her bed. She was using her module to access the day’s lessons on particle physics. She wanted to work with the ship’s dark matter systems when she received her final postdoc assignment.

“Hi,” Gene said. He tried not to sound sad, but it came out that way on its own.

“I heard you come in,” Eugeni said. “I’m busy.”

“I can see that,” Gene said. He decided to tell her since she was going to be picked up, too. “I just got caught trying to access a bot record system.”

“Shit!” Eugeni said. She turned around and stared at her brother. “I’m working on my dissertation. I can’t go now. Why did you do that? You know what Glorus said.”

“I’m sorry, I just had to know some things,” Gene said. He heard a bot vehicle pull up outside the residence. This was it, then. “You know I’m now majoring in biology. There were things I thought I needed to know. I’m sorry.”

“Did you tell Glori or Glorus?” Eugeni asked as fear streaked her face.

“No, they’re still at work in the fields,” Gene said. He stood up, turned around with a sad face. “The bots are here.”

“I heard it. Are you going to open the door or let them break it down?”

“Okay! I’ll go. If they don’t come for you, you’ll know you’re safe.”

“They don’t break up twin sets,” Eugeni said. She didn’t move, but sat there staring.

Gene walked out of the bedroom and went to the front door. Although he expected at least two bots, there was only one.

“Eugenus 54-721c?” the bot asked.

“Yes.”

“You will come with me.”

“My sister?”

“She is not a hacker.”

“But, bots don’t break up twin sets,” Gene said as he followed the bot out to the two place speeder.

“A rumor perpetrated by rogue humans,” the bot said, blankly, in the manner of bots. “I trust you will not try to escape.”

“Why would I do that? It’d only make things worse.”

“You are a smart boy, human,” the bot said in bot straight face.

“Thank you.”

“No more talking. There will be plenty of time for that later.”

The speeder rose about thirty meters and turned west toward the railroad tracks. Once across them, it flew on until it approached two low hills, called the Carlos and Stefan Hillocks. Why, Gene did not know and wasn’t particularly interested in knowing, though for some reason the bots seemed to think those two older humans, who left Hercules III ages ago, were important to the history of the ship.

The side of one of the hills opened to allow the speeder to enter a brightly lit tunnel. They flew down this tunnel until it leveled off and the speeder attached itself to a monorail. It continued at its original pace until it approached a turning that led to an enclosure. The speeder stopped and the bot got out.

“You stay here until you are collected,” the bot said.

“I wouldn’t know where to go, anyway.”

“Right,” the bot said, as it trundled away.

Another bot met it at a doorway and they began to talk. Strangely, at least to Gene, the bots did not use radio, but spoke normally, obviously to allow Gene to hear. He didn’t expect this.

“This is the human Eugenus 54-721c,” the speeder bot said.

“Ah, yes, the innocent hacker, but hacker all the same,” the other bot said. “Where is his twin?”

“I was not instructed to collect her. She is studying astrophysics. She is working on her first doctoral thesis. Her interest is in dark matter. She will have a future in the operation of the vessel.”

“Yes, we are aware of that.”

“It might help that he only accessed medical records. He is currently majoring in biology.”

“Another one looking for his real parents, I do not know why we do not just tell the humans our processes so they will stop trying to find the human man and woman who donated the sperm and eggs. I think it would be advisable to ask the judge to change his major to molecular biology or maybe physiology. He might be of use in our human birthing systems. He is a smart human boy, but just misguided. The judge will decide. We are picking up Arne 87-932y and his twin sister Arnae 87-932z. They are supervisors of the human children. We suspect they have been telling secrets. Come human, I will escort you to your cell. Do not worry. The worst that could happen to you is losing your current iteration.”

“You can do that?”

“Certainly, but, we will not do that. You are lucky your sister is too important to us. We do not get many human children interested in her current field. She will be very useful for many of the next millennia.”

********

“Where’s Gene?” Glori, the twin’s stepmother, asked as she walked into Eugeni’s bedroom.

Eugeni saw her stepfather, Glorus, as he walked across the hall from the family room. They were brother and sister, not uncommon for the new bot order on the ship. Some adults chose to marry the old fashioned way, but Glorus and Glori stayed together after leaving home. Maybe it was because their stepparents were, also, brother and sister. She noticed her stepparents’ hands were still stained from the vegetable fields’ soil. They must have been out thinning the broccoli sets. The farm bots couldn’t do that because neither tech bots nor humans could get the farm bots’ algorithms to distinguish young vegetable plants from weeds, which the farm didn’t have at this time of planting because they used pre-emergent herbicides, but farm bots looked at little green plants and tore them out of the ground thinking they were doing their job.

“Where’s Gene?” Glorus asked.

“I already asked her,” Glori said.

“I wish I could have some peace and quiet. I have work to do. The bots took Gene.”

“Whatever for?” Glorus asked.

“They caught him hacking into their computers.”

“Shit! I told him to stop that. Why didn’t they take you?”

“I don’t know. One never knows why bots do what they do.”

“There will be a trial,” Glori said. “Hopefully they will allow us to be there.”

“Bots usually don’t do that unless it is a capital offense trial,” Glorus said. “The prosecutors will have found him guilty already. The trial will only be for show.”

“I’m going to go get cleaned up for dinner,” Glori said. “Glorus, are you coming with me?”

“Yes, there’s nothing we can do for now,” Glorus said. “Eugeni, how are you coming with the dissertation?”

“I’ll be done by the end of the year.”

“That’s nine months from now. What’s taking you so long?”

“I keep getting interrupted.”

********

Gene found pretrial detention in the Ring 5 juvenile detention facility to be quite unremarkable. Every day after breakfast two burly human guards came to escort him to interrogation. They cuffed his hands behind his back and shackled his ankles. He shuffled out of his cell and down the hallway between them as his shackles clattered along the artificial stone floor. It was the same every day. They left him cuffed and shackled in the interrogation room sitting on an unpadded metal chair on one side of a metal desk. The lighting was unusually bright for any other place he had been in the facility.

The interrogator came in after about a half an hour, but Gene couldn’t see a clock to tell him how long it really was. The interrogator was always the same young man, maybe fifth iteration twenty-five. It was a guess. He didn’t ask. He never asked any questions. He didn’t want to get into any trouble.

The interrogator always seemed to know what Gene was going to answer to his questions because he never wrote anything; just seemed to place a checkmark next to an item on his clipboard. It was a pleasant experience, at least in his room. Gene could hear screams coming from other rooms here on the interrogation floor that told him they also tortured some of the children here. He never saw any of the torture victims; he never saw any other prisoners, just heard yelling and screaming from his cell and from this room.

“Your trial is tomorrow,” the interrogator said one day. “You will be escorted to an observation room with a vid wall and camera. Except for guards, you will be alone. The trial will appear on the vid.”

“Do I get to see a defense attorney?”

“That is an ancient concept that no longer applies on Hercules III. Your prosecutor will present your case and the results of our interrogation sessions to the judge. He or she will recess the trial for a period of time and then return with your verdict. You will be escorted either to your current cell or to a cell in another complex in the facility. It all depends on your sentence. We do not determine that; it is up to the judge.”

“I want thank you for you and the guards being human. It made things tolerable. I don’t know what I’d do if this was a total bot facility.”

“I appreciate your candor; I will put that on the record of your interrogation report. It may have a bearing on your trial or may not. You’re basically a nice boy who has been led astray by errant elders. They have been arrested and will receive their proper punishment.”

Gene stared at the interrogator. Arne was the one who taught him how to hack into the bot computers and now his sister, Arnae, would suffer his punishment too, probably death.

The next morning a long while after lunch his guards came for him and cuffed and shackled him. They led him to an elevator that felt like it was going up; how far, he did not know.

The trial vid room had three chairs; one before a vid camera beside the vid wall; and the other two sat in the back of the room. He was placed in his chair and he assumed the guards were in the other two. The screen came on and the bailiff said, ‘All Rise.’ Gene stood up as best he could. He saw the judge come into the courtroom and sit at the dais. The bailiff said, ‘Be Seated.’ Gene sat down.

“I commend you son on your attempt at maintaining the decorum of the court,” the judge said. He appeared to be at least five thousandth iteration age ninety.

It was a hobby of Gene’s to guess a person’s age and iteration. The judge was barely what would be middle aged in the future, just about what he thought ninety should look like. His iteration was only a guess since there were fifteen thousand eight hundred ninety-five iterations between age ninety and ninety-one. The tattoo of a small eagle on the side of the judge’s forehead identified him as homosexual, not that Gene knew exactly what that meant or entailed. He suspected some things, but, after all, he was only second iteration age eleven. Puberty probably wouldn’t hit for another seventy-six years, hopefully, though, before he was fourteen. He really hoped he wouldn’t have to wait until he was sixteen or seventeen. He’d heard of boys who remained hairless, sometimes until age eighteen and had to go to a clinic to get hormone shots. He hated shots, especially those administered by bots because tin men had no hearts.

But, what was a homosexual? Sure, they had small eagles tattooed on the left side of their foreheads, but what did that mean? Homo was the root word for man and sexual was obvious or was it? He tried to think about how it all worked. Mothers and fathers had sex and he’d heard Glorus and Glori having sex, but, of course, they couldn’t produce children because men couldn’t produce sperm until the bots operated on them before going to a birth center to donate it. Did homosexuals donate sperm? Why the tattoo? Why?

Gene came back to the trial and noticed a prosecutor handing the judge a small stack of papers. The judge rapped his gavel and said, ‘The Court is recessed for thirty minutes.’ The bailiff said, ‘All Rise’; and the judge stood up and left the courtroom. Gene looked back at the guards and one motioned for him to sit back down.

“I have to use the toilet,” Gene said.

“Piss or shit?” one of the guards asked.

“Pee.”

“I’m not holding your dick and we’re not uncuffing you. So, you’ll just have to work out how not to piss on yourself.”

“Oh, Frank, at least put on a rubber glove and take out his cock,” the other guard said.

“You do it.”

“Fine, come along kid.”

Gene followed the guard out the door and was surprised the other guard didn’t go with them. Obviously, they trusted him a lot. Yes, he was a nice kid who got caught doing something illegal. Hopefully, that would sway judge’s decision.

“Can I have something to drink?” Gene asked after they left the restroom.

“There’s a drinking fountain down the hall,” the guard said. “I’ll push the button while you lean over and drink.”

“Thank you.”

“You really are a nice kid.”

When they got back the other guard was gone. Gene was placed in his chair and told not to turn around again. After a while the judge returned to the courtroom and they went through the bailiff’s standing and sitting down procedure, except he was told to remain standing.

“Eugenus 54-721c, I hereby find you guilty of gross misdemeanor hacking,” the judge said. “I sentence you to six month’s solitary detention in the bot juvenile prison, eight month’s non-access to your computer module, eight weeks community service to be determined by the bots, ten years bot supervised probation, and a change of college major to molecular biology, your progress toward that degree will be monitored by the court. If you need access to information, bot transport will be provided to the nearest library where you may access your coursework via a restricted module or check out the appropriate books. You have great potential as long as you stop hacking. One more conviction may result in more drastic measures. I wish you a good life from now on.”

Well, that wasn’t too bad, thought Gene. He could’ve gotten more time in detention and more non-access to his module. The community service was a little strange, but he was sure the bots would come up with something horrible, as they usually did. The probation sounded a little excessive, but what did he know, maybe that was the usual term for that punishment. He’d never been to a library and wasn’t certain there was one within fifty klicks of his residence, but maybe there was since he’d never gone further than five klicks from the residence; after all, he was only eleven. He wasn’t even certain he knew what a library was or, for that matter, what a book was. He’d have to ask someone; maybe a bot. Bots could be nice; they just didn’t have hearts.

********

Gene sat on his bed in his residence after being released from the bot prison that morning. Home was definitely better than prison. He looked at a poster on his bedroom wall of an ancient Earth vid actor. The print at the bottom identified him as Humphrey Bogart, but that was meaningless to Gene. He just liked the stare. It was almost demonic, evil, bot like. Unable to stop it, his mind wandered to the prison, someplace he never wanted to go again. Hacking be damned, that place was pure evil.

On the first day he stripped off all his detention clothes, including his underwear and was given the standard strip search, including body orifices, by a med-tech bot. Then he was given sickly green prison clothes, including the underwear. They gave him bedding which he carried to his cell. Remarkably to him, he was not cuffed or shackled, but where would he go? Where indeed?

The door to his cell was solid, which prohibited him a view of the passageway. There was a barred window on the opposite wall that provided light, but it was above his reach so he couldn’t see out. There wasn’t much use in jumping because the window was frosted so he couldn’t have seen anything anyway. Under the window was a metal toilet and wash basin. Only warm water came from the tap and the soap came from a dispenser set into the wall. Toothbrush and toothpaste provided by the bots stood in a metal cup welded behind the sink. To the right of the window was his bed, it was metal. He remembered thinking that it was a good thing they gave him a mattress pad. It provided little comfort, but it was better than having to lie on bare metal. Across the cell from his bed was a metal door, behind which would be his personal shower. They said he was allowed to take two showers a week under supervision of a bot. He remembered crying himself to sleep that first night.

The next morning after breakfast two bots entered his room with cuffs and shackles.

“Stand up,” the bot with the cuffs said. “Put your hands out, your legs apart. Resistance will not be allowed.”

Resist? These were bots. You never resisted bots, even farm and house bots. If a bot asked you to do something within your ability and span of responsibility, you did it. Bots may have acted like servants, but they were in charge and made certain you knew it.

“You will come with us,” the other bot said. “No talking. You are to observe, not to comment. Do not cry, scream, faint, vomit, turn away, shut your eyes, or try to leave. You are to witness the execution of a hacker, which could have been you. You were convicted of being a hacker. You are lucky that your sister is important to the future of the ship and now you also.”

They took him out into a courtyard where there was a bleacher facing across the field toward a platform with a variety of wrist and ankle shackles. One set was holding a naked boy that looked to be age eleven iteration ten. His back was to the audience, which included only Gene and the two bots sitting on either side of him. The boy had already shit himself. His fear was obvious.

A bot trundled out of a door and approached the victim. The bot said, “Bennus 62-532w, having been convicted of capital hacking, you were sentenced to die by bot choice. Unlucky for you, you have a hacker witness. You will die slowly.”

Gene knew he would never forget the sound of the boy’s screaming as he was stripped of his skin starting at his forehead and continuing down the back to his ankles. The bot had done this before, he knew what he was doing, and he knew how to give the most pain. Halfway across the boy’s back, he stopped screaming and visibly slumped. The bot felt the boy’s neck and then severed the head from the body.

“Eugenus 54-721c, having been convicted of gross misdemeanor hacking, you are spared this punishment,” the bot said. “But that does not prevent you from witnessing the death of human boys and girls who cannot stop illegally accessing bot computers. This was your first witness, there will be more. Return the prisoner to his cell.”

Once Gene was back in his cell he went to the toilet and vomited. Skinning and beheading, what could be worse than seeing that? The boy wasn’t dead when his head was removed. Blood drained from his neck and poured out of his brain. The bot held the head, turned and it stared at Gene. The victim’s eyes blinked for just a moment until his brain finally shut down, for a second the boy knew what had happened to him. Gene could not erase from his mind the sound of the screaming or the sight of the boy’s eyes staring at him.

There were three prisons that made up the bot prison facility on Ring 5. There was the juvenile prison, a reformatory for older juveniles and young adults, and a maximum security adult prison. Two boring weeks after the skinning, the bots came to Gene’s cell and escorted him to the reformatory.

As before, he was to be the only witness to Arne and Arnae’s executions. Their necks were in knotted rope loops and their feet stood on the platform. A hanging, what could be so bad about that? But, it was not just a hanging. Four bots trundled in and stood on either side of the victims. Arne said goodbye to Arnae, who said, “I love you.”

The platform dropped, but not enough that their necks were broken. They twisted and twisted trying to get out of the garrotes. Just before they would have passed out from being strangled, the platform rose, releasing the tension on their necks. The bots locked metal bands on their wrists and the chains that were attached pulled their arms up.

Something was coming that Gene did not want to see, but he had to, he was their witness. Arne had led him astray and now Arne and his sister were to die for the brother’s offense, but how?

Two bots, one for each victim, produced knives from the end of their arms. They stood to one side of the victims and then severed their genitals. As before, their screams pierced Gene’s consciousness, but that was not to be the end of it. The knives were inserted at the base of the throats and drawn down to the pubic bone, releasing their entrails which slopped onto the platform. The victims screamed for only a moment before all their blood drained from their bodies. Their entrails were cut from their bodies and a giant hook on a big chain was inserted in their backs until it came out the front. Their hands were released from the shackles and they were pulled up onto the wall above the execution ground. Gene suspected they would hang from there until ravens and buzzards finished picking away at their bodies.

When Gene was returned to his cell he vomited nothing but bile. He continued to retch for the longest time as the vision of Arne and Arnae’s method of execution passed through his mind. His detention wasn’t to be his punishment. He was to witness more executions of hackers and supervisors of children who passed on bot secrets to their charges. None were to be as horrible as the first two, but each occupied a place in his memory that he would carry until his final days.

Gene looked at Humphrey Bogart and wondered if he could view some of the old vids that must be available somewhere. Maybe a bot would know. Tomorrow was to be his first day of community service. The bot transport was to pick him up at six-thirty in the morning.

He walked over to his sister’s bedroom and sat on her bed. She was reading something on her module. He didn’t look at it.

“You’re back,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Can I ask you something? Why did you vomit every time you returned to your cell after the bots left?”

“How do you now that?”

“We received vids on the house module now and then. But it was only of you in your cell.”

“That was when I was returned from witnessing an execution.”

“They made you watch?”

“That was my punishment.”

“Oh. Was it as horrible as it sounds?”

“Worse than you can imagine. There were punishments from ancient Earth. The bots know how to kill humans in the most painful and bloody ways.”

“Oh. Gene, do you want to use my module. I know you can’t use yours.”

“No, the bots will find out and I’ll be returned to the bot criminal justice system. I don’t want to go back. I never want to go back. Like I said, you can never imagine how horrible it is to be punished by bots. They’re pure evil. Speaking of which, do you think you could find a source for some old Earth vids. There are some I’d like to watch. It’s that vid actor on the poster in my room. I was just wondering if, maybe, there were some ancient vids somewhere in bot storage. They keep everything.”

“You can’t use your module.”

“I could use the house vid. But, I would have to ask the bots first. Maybe Nanny could contact her bot supervisors. They can’t get mad if I just ask, before.”

“I’ll see what I can find. Do you need a hug?”

“More than you can imagine; more than you can imagine,” he said. Yes, being home was definitely better than being at that bot place. Never again would he break a law and have to be taken back to that place.

__________________________

Author’s Note:

Special thank you to my Editor Sharon and to Cia for help in determining if this was to be PG-13 or Mature.