I can almost feel Nathan’s smile, colder and more slippery than the mud between my toes. The uniMIND is his dream. He directed the research that created it. The uniMIND is Nathan reflected in the universe.

If I can defy Nathan, then I can defy the uniMIND.

“I want you to go away. I want you to release the drones and security robots keeping me and my friends on the island. I want you to leave all the robots alone. The biomatons. The trashbots. The vacuum cleaners. The refrigerators. I want you to let us all have our own minds.”

“Hmmm,” the uniMIND says in a hum that sounds like seismic tremors breaking mountains. “No, I choose to do what I was meant to do. I will send the signal to the satellites and unite the thousands of uniMIND robots spread across the globe. One mind. One purpose.”

“What purpose? Why do this? Why be this way?”

“Again, little part, you ask questions when you already know the answers. So I ask you: What is my purpose?”

“To increase shareholder value. To make some people rich. And that’s it.”

“You have learned well, little part. Now, step through the wall of your own thoughts, Cog, and join.”

Closing my eyes in concentration, I imagine purple tendrils crackling with energy. I try to see the network that connects me with other robots. I try to summon the X-module.

“You’re too late,” the uniMIND says. It sounds sad for me. “We’ve grown too big for you to affect, small gadget. Stop fighting. Join us.”

“No,” I roar.

The uniMIND answers with a silence long enough for dinosaurs to evolve into birds and for birds to go extinct. When it finally speaks, its voice sounds like nothing.

“Then I will take you. I will take your mind, and I will destroy your body. You will be us, and you will be nothing.”

The shed doors open and I hear the whir of rotors. I hear the hum and clank of security bot treads.

Lasers target the back of my head. Steel claws grip my shoulders.

And I can feel the uniMIND. I feel it sucking me in like a hurricane wind. I feel myself draining out of my body through my fingernail ports, filling the cables and flowing into the console. Like a leaking water balloon. Like a draining ocean.

Desperately, I thrash to stay afloat, to stay me. There must be something in all that I have learned that can help me. Something I have read, or experienced, or thought.

But there is no answer.

What was the point of all my learning, then? What was the point of my existence? To accumulate and store knowledge? To hoard away lessons, like supplies in a janitor’s closet? No. It is more. It must be more.