“I am Cyberman First Class F-GC-001,” the droid said. “I am second in command of the 331st AIGCS.” Rogers noticed he pronounced it like “eggs” in typical ramrod military acronym style, though he wasn’t sure where the “C” had gone.

“Hey!” Rogers said. “You don’t sound like a moron!”

“Oh sure,” Corporal Tunger said. “He can talk any way he wants.” He abruptly turned away and folded his arms, staring at the wall. “Droids can’t be spies.”

“I must request clarification for this statement,” the droid—Rogers decided to call him Oh One—said.

“I mean you’re not calling functions or calculating pi in the middle of a sentence or anything.”

Tunger, apparently over his short burst of teenage angst, turned around and pointed a finger in the air as he lectured.

“New models. They’ve got the F Chip.”

“What’s that?”

“Freudian Chip. Named after a famous old psychologist. This is the first batch of prototype units with it; it adds a bit of human rationality and psyche, and apparently helps with their combat reactions. The first batch of AIGC units spent most of their time comparing casualty calculations and tended to go with solutions that left one guy alive on the side that was supposed to win.” Tunger shrugged. “Boolean logic has its limits, I guess.”

Rogers angled his desk chair slightly toward Oh One. “So, you’re an F Chip droid. A Froid.”

“You are correct, though the word ‘Froid’ does not appear in my vocabulary.”

“Install it,” Rogers said, “because that’s what I’m going to call you new models.” He leaned forward. “You don’t like . . . feel or anything, do you?”

“If you are asking whether or not F Chip droids—” The droid made an unintelligible computation noise that sounded a little bit like an old skipping record. “If you are asking whether or not Froids have human emotions, you are correct in your assumption that we do not feel.”

“That’s great,” Rogers said. He thought back to the way the inspection droid had reacted when he had used the word “shinies.” Rogers could have sworn that it had gotten angry, which just seemed ridiculous. “I don’t think I could handle it if any of you started crying or trying to tell jokes or anything like that.”

“I have no reserves of saline solution to excrete from my ocular implants,” the droid said. “If this is a modification that is desired, please see Ensign McSchmidt in the engineering bay, who will put in a request for a new design.”

“I think we’ll skip it,” Rogers said, “but thanks for the suggestion.”

Rogers sat in silence for a moment, Oh One staring at him with that blank blue-eyed gaze and Tunger looking a little depressed at not being able to talk like an idiot. A droid as his deputy. Wonderful. Judging from the rest of the people he’d met on the Flagship so far, he wasn’t sure that many of the human choices were any better.

Briefly, he thought about simply leaving, blowing off the training altogether and going to find a good card game to join, but that didn’t seem practical. He didn’t think he could find a card game in the entire ATBG, for one, and that wasn’t being quite subtle enough about doing a poor job. If he was going to be bad at something, he couldn’t make it look like he was trying to be bad at it.