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By Root 1053 0

had done very little, and he intended to do even less. He did very little most of the time. Nobody cared, least of all him. Once he had recovered from his breakdown they had asked him whether he wanted to go back to his old job in the Company security division and he had said yes because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. He could have retired on a sickness pension but who in their right mind wanted to admit to themselves that life was over and all that was left was to wait for death? That was the special irony of course: he wasn’t actually in his right mind. The truth was he never had fully recovered from the breakdown. The nightmares had stopped and he could just about bear to be in the same room as a robot. But a whole chunk of his life and all the details of that last undercover assignment were gone. He simply couldn’t remember any of it. So how did you go back to your old job when you couldn’t remember what your old job was? Not that that seemed to be much of a handicap. He had been promoted several times without anything obvious in the way of justification. Quite the contrary really. He was alive and he turned up for duty on a reasonably regular basis but that was about it.

He sniffed and smiled sourly. ‘Perhaps it’s my charming personality,’ he muttered and stared through the glass partition which separated him from the rest of the operations gallery. That was all bustle now. Something was going on. Something involving the central service facility apparently; which made it a robot-related problem; which put it beyond his scope. He dealt with humans. Just humans. Security Section Head (Humans) it said on his door. There was no section as such which was probably why the divisional budget could stretch to paying him very well for doing nothing. It didn’t explain why, of course...

‘Are you going to help with this or what?’ Stenton ‘Fatso’

Rull loomed bulkily in the doorway.

‘I think "or what" probably,’ Poul said.

The Operations Supervisor scowled. He had no authority over Poul and they both knew it but that didn’t stop him trying to exercise it anyway. ‘Get up off your idle backside, Poul. That scum from the ARF has taken a major run at us. We need all our bodies out there.’ He jerked a chubby thumb over his shoulder.

‘As far as I can see,’ Poul remarked peering past him, ‘you’ve got all your bodies out there. Apart from those splendid specimens you hire to patrol the sites. And I imagine that right now the cut-price killers are doing just what you pay them to do, aren’t they?’

‘Which is more than can be said for you.’

Poul smiled. ‘You don’t pay me, Rull.’

‘I don’t know why anybody does,’ Rull said.

‘It’s because I’m handsome and charming and universally loved.’

‘A pleasure to have around in fact.’

‘Exactly. Now leave me alone, Fatso.’

‘You’re going to make me, yes?’ Rull sneered and stepped further into the room.

Poul got to his feet. He took his jerkin from the wall hook.

‘Excuse me,’ he said politely, squeezing carefully past the large man.

He walked out through the operations gallery, barely registering the disjointed images on the normally coordinated monitor screens and the urgent voices of security operatives trying to maintain contact with the ground troops.

The ongoing struggle with the ARF was a pointless ugly little war that seemed to be escalating suddenly and rather unexpectedly. He could only suppose that the Company’s undercover section, of which he had once been a part apparently, had failed to do its job. Routine infiltration of the Anti-Robot Front should have given some warning of all this.

Even without a spy in the organisation the intelligence section -

what a misnomer that was - should have been able to track the ARF. Hell, they were predictable enough. As was the Company’s response to them. It was all depressingly predictable and predictably irrational. And a total shambles as usual. Whatever was causing the increase in violence, though, it couldn’t have come out of nothing. So someone should have been in a position to see it coming. Someone should have been paying attention.