Not a flicker in a single eye. They looked at him with that same empty stare that they always displayed. But they had only vestigial personalities, except for Alpha with his more subtle officer’s mind, and Gamma with her medical interest. Not even Alpha and Gamma reacted, though, and he found that their indifference to their own death sentence was extraordinarily oppressive.

“We will carry out your termination via the use of drugs.” He knew that this would immobilize them but not kill them. Not even a massive dose of potassium chloride could depolarize their cardiac muscles. Founded in the reptile and insect worlds as they were, their organs were phenomenally resistant.

He knew what he had to do. He had to flood them with sodium thiopental via cannulas into the carotid. That would knock them cold, but only for a time.

He did not say anything more because the rest of it would need to be a lie, and they would detect that at once, with possibly dangerous consequences.

If they tried, they could escape this facility. They could reach the streets, and a threat such as this, with a human origin, might cause them to regard all human beings as the enemy.

There would be carnage in the streets above, in his beloved San Francisco.

“Please return to your duties,” he said.

Without a sound, they went back to their various seats. Alpha picked up his Iliad; Beta, Delta, and Epsilon returned to Hitler; Zeta to his Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. They were studying surrealism as a foundation for asymmetric warfare, and this exercise in the improbable was an ideal text for discussion, or so Zeta had been asserting. In regard to surprising methods of attack, they were also working in meteorology and gravitational theory. He thought that they understood both. He thought that they could probably master both.

And then he thought, perhaps the senators were right. Maybe they would eventually come to challenge their programming, maybe they would seek to end human domination. If so, they could certainly replace us, just as our ancestors had replaced the Neanderthals.

Alpha said, “The interesting thing about Achilles is that it’s a defeatist emotion, arrogance.” He looked up at Tom, his eyes as empty and relentless as a cobra’s. “If we had been allowed to survive, it would have been valuable to emphasize our machine elements in any public unveiling. This would induce arrogance in the enemy. Useful.”

Was that all? Was that the beginning, middle, and end of their reaction to being given a death sentence?

Instead of returning to his office, he took the elevator topside. He needed to call Emma, and he needed to be way out of their hearing.