Not as a little child, no, that was all a blank.

She was in a hallway, green walls, a tile ceiling, fluorescent lighting.

Two people were looking down at her. She must be on a gurney.

One of the people was Dr. Turner.

The other was Mark.

“You,” she said, “you were there!”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You were with Dr. Turner when I was … was I born? Was that it? I can remember my birth?”

“I don’t have any memory of this.”

She came close to him. “Mark, who are we?”

He took her in his big arms. “I wish I knew.”

“We have a problem,” Linda said, pointing upward.

Overhead, a great mass of machinery, huge, was hanging just above the crowns of the redwoods.

“That’s it,” Kelly shouted, “that’s the thing!” She looked wildly around. “Where do we go? It’ll kill us all!”

“We keep moving toward the town,” Mark said. “We need transport.” Then to Gina; “Help that girl.”

Her mind was spinning. She couldn’t be a hybrid, she had feelings, needs, dreams, and surely you couldn’t design a program that dreamed.

He’d never responded to her love because he was a biological machine. She now understood that. But her feelings for him had been real, they had been deeply human … and so had the expression on his face just a few minutes ago.

She sucked back a sob of mixed horror and joy. Horror because she was facing the truth about herself—no matter what she wanted to believe, she was a biomachine, too. No human being could fight as she had. No human being could move as she had.

The joy came because she knew another truth: For whatever reason, these two programs—or whatever she and Mark were, in the depths of their minds—had feelings, and those feelings were for each other.

She could love him and he her, but what meaning did that have if, in the end, they were only programming?

Brushing away her tears, trying not to tremble, she watched as Richardson and Hicks prepared the Metal Storms with impressively calm efficiency.

Even as the Storms fired, the machine descended and Gina had no idea how to defend herself or anybody else against it. Kelly, who had been courageous on the difficult journey here, now panicked and, instead of staying near the blasting Storms, dashed off the road and into the woods.

“Get her back or she’s dead,” Mark snapped.

“Me?”

He did not respond, so Gina followed her.

Scrambling down the gravel shoulder and past the stand of pines beyond it, she had an immediate surprise: there were no hybrids here and she thought to tell Mark that. But it was also true that Kelly was well ahead and running hard.

“Kelly! Kelly, don’t do this!”

The girl went quiet.