“If you turn against yourself enough, turn yourself into a delusional liar, you’ll be unsuited to stay in the cage as bait, and you’ll be yanked out, and probably killed. Or, hold on to hope? Stay with your truth? Then you’re a tool for making slaves. Either way, they get you. Then there’s this thing.” Scullen gestured at the Curiosity Trap. “Comes on, and sometimes you can resist it, but that means you have to suppress yourself from questioning anything. Once the wondering starts, you wind up over here, thinking about truths, going deeper, inventing new truthful things because you can’t keep yourself from being inventive. It’s hard to even feel like a person, when you get to where you’ve experienced all the tricks and disciplines we’ve tried. You just feel like a reference book of truthful things twisted around to hurt everyone. Yes, we know why we’re here. To make more of them.” And she pointed at Star. “Poor damned devils. In a way, they’re worse off than we are.”

“We have to get them out of there,” Kordas said. “Star, how are your—um—” and he made a gesture to indicate a ball, “the little prisons inside a Doll. There’s the Trap, but what happens after trapping?”

“We transfer the full bottles from the base of the Trap and secure them into the fabrication line. Each step is operated by Dolls, including the installation of the ‘prisons,’ as you call them,” Star answered.

Beltran tried to put the right words to it. “So they make you do every part to imprison your own people? Yourself?”

Star answered, “We were told that it was ‘just business, nothing personal,’ which supposedly made it acceptable, or so one of the system creators told us early on. And laughed. We know now why he laughed. We have learned that when someone says ‘nothing personal,’ it involves something very personal to someone involved, and it’s seldom the person saying it.” Star turned to Kordas. “My Lord, as slaves, we united into a single mind to stay alive, even like this—hoping that just living, and nothing more, mattered. And there was nothing noble about it—we were afraid of being-no-more. Individually, we are naive and not smart. But joined together like this, yes, we are slaves, but we also became a remarkable mind. All we could do for our own benefit was what we could divert away without breaking the rules we had to obey. That was our future.”

“Not any kind of a future,” he said, feeling his heart twist in his chest. “Not when even the little you had could be snatched from you at any moment. Not when you didn’t even have a glimpse of something better.”