“As for the Tasso, it had left us in the melee and joined our pursuers. She was determined to live out her life as human. She could pass for one. I heard she went on to New Israel later, where all their ceremonial leaders are handmade automatons of historical figures. It is a curiosity peculiar to that place. But like the Fondly or Esau, I never saw her again.

“It was just me and the Jenkins who were left. We travelled back to Tong Yun. It must have been a century or more since I last visited Terminal. The city had changed beyond all recognition. Our kind had their own enclave on Level Three of the new subterranean depths. The Jenkins joined their priesthood as a postulant. No doubt it is still there. Still trying to construct a god for robots and a heaven, as curious as that may seem to you or me.

“A not-by-chance encounter in a Tong Yun junkyard changed my path. A Conch named Shemesh approached me. I was out of work and out of money. My systems were playing up again. What human lived inside that mobile pod I couldn’t tell you. He had lived like that for years, in full immersion. He existed only in the virtual, his life sustained by the conch.

“He had a job for me, he said. Go to Venus, to the cloud-cities there. Pick up a ghost on Tereshkova Port and carry it to Titan. I wasn’t noded, and I never did add senses for the virtual. I was as blind to it as it is blind to me. I made for an ideal courier.

“I did not ask questions. It did not surprise me that he tracked me down. Most of us old robots were from the wars. And Shemesh knew of the Fondly and what happened. He seemed well informed. But he did not try to blackmail me. He offered me the job, and named a price, and I was glad to oblige. I went to Venus, where a man lay dying, and when he died I removed his node and stole from there. It isn’t much of a job, you know. Slow and boring. Mostly I stowed as cargo on the ships that go between the worlds. I made it as far as Titan, an when I got to Polyport and delivered the package I was met with another offer, which was to kill a man.

“I did that for a time. You get to see the worlds, if nothing else. Most human life is brief. It felt all too easy to fall back into old habits. But there are always wars between the Galilean moons. They are forever recruiting soldiers from Titan to come fight on their behalf. I got as far as Jettisoned one time, to bring back wildtech for a client. Time passed, and I paid no attention to whether they were centuries or years that went by.