“You said you liked that I wasn’t like the humans you had heard about,” Wilson said. “So, no, I’m not going to lie to you. But you have to know that the truth is going to be hard to hear.”

I am a brain in a box. The truth is already hard to hear.

Wilson smiled. “That’s a very philosophical way of looking at things.”

When you’re a brain in a box, philosophy is what you have.

“There’s a bomb in your box,” Wilson said. “It’s attached to the power buffer. As far as I can tell, it has a monitor that tracks power input. The Urse Damay’s power system is integrated with its emergency power systems so that when the first goes down, the second is already running and there’s no interruption of power to critical systems, including your box. But if we remove your box from the system entirely, the monitor is going to register it, and the bomb will go off.”

It would kill me.

“Yes,” Wilson said. “Since you asked me not to lie, I’ll tell you I suspect the real point of the bomb is to make sure the technology of that box you’re in isn’t taken and examined. Your death is an incidental result of that.”

On second thought, maybe you can lie to me a little.

“Sorry,” Wilson said.

Is there any way to remove me from the box?

“Not that I can see,” Wilson said. “At least, not in a way that keeps you alive. The box is, if I may say so, an impressive piece of engineering. If I had more time, I could reverse-engineer the thing and tell you how it works. I don’t have that time. I could take you out of the box—the part that’s actually you—but I couldn’t just then take that part and hook it up to a battery. The box is an integrated system. You can’t survive without it.”

I’m not going to survive long in it, either.

“I can reattach the batteries we’ve removed from the system,” Wilson said. “It can buy us some more time.”

Us?

“I’m here,” Wilson said. “I can keep working on this. There’s probably something I’ve missed.”

If you tinker with the bomb, then there’s a chance you’ll set it off.

“Yes,” Wilson said.

And when the power goes out, the bomb will explode anyway.

“I imagine the bomb will use the energy in the buffer to set itself off, yes,” Wilson said.

Do you dismantle bombs on a regular basis? Is this your specialty?

“I do technology research and development. This is up my alley,” Wilson said.

I think this is you lying to me a little.

“I think I might be able to save you,” Wilson said.

Why do you want to save me?