We were not to be afraid of the pain that mammals could inflict. We were not to be afraid of them, loathsome and unpredictable and hateful as mammals were. And we were to remember in all our dealings with mammals that we ourselves were not really mammals and had this vastly different neural circuitry.

However, we had been grown to be warm blooded and to have mammalian emotions. We had been grown to think and feel and experience the sensual world and the visible world as mammals do, through a filter of emotions.

It had to be this way, the Parents explained, or we could not pass for mammals ourselves. Mammals were quick to recognize robots or mechanical beings who did not share their emotions. So we must understand that that is why we had been given human emotions.

Now as all this was imparted to us or awakened from our stores of memory, we were shown a great wall with a living picture of the city of Atalantaya, a magnificent metropolis of towers of varying heights beneath an immense dome, the whole city anchored securely in the sparkling blue waters of an endless sea in brilliant sunlight. We saw countless small white craft journeying to and from this city of Atalantaya, and we saw vibrant evidence of life inside the city itself, with myriad tiny beings living in these splendid towers, and myriad tiny beings alighting from craft to enter the domed city.

I remember thinking how beautiful Atalantaya was. But then everything I saw was beautiful to me. Derek also spoke out as to the beauty of Atalantaya.

The Parents said, “It will be beautiful to us when it is melting and in flames and perishing.” The Parents explained that the dome of Atalantaya blocked their ability to see what went on inside, and that the living pictures we were viewing had been taken within the dome by an earlier Replimoid some time ago.

I could see all this deeply affected Derek, and the Parents pointed out to us at that time that Derek had been made to feel things infinitely more strongly than the rest of us, in order to alert us to danger, or stress, or conflict in ways that our cooler nature did not allow us to perceive. After all, we weren’t genuine mammals. We were carefully grown Replimoids, creatures wholly different from mammals.

We were always to travel together, to seek to be together and to protect Derek as best we could because Derek suffered in ways that we couldn’t or wouldn’t suffer. But Derek was indispensable to the purpose—as they called it—and we would see this over time.

How many minutes or hours were involved in our coming to know these things, I’m not certain. But we were soon told that we would learn a great deal about Earth and its mammalian people from studying the endless moving-picture walls that filled Home or our dwelling.