My coworkers were beside me. SkD glided close to the ground, carried forward by a pair of rubber treads. Ceeron’s heavy footsteps thumped against the concrete.

This must have been just as difficult for them. They were like me. Built for one—and only one—purpose. To install solar panels. It was all we had ever known. All we had ever done.

Until the human showed up.

Without slowing my stride, I glanced in the direction of Ceeron’s backpack. Emma was inside. As I thought of her, a question raced through my mind.

Is all this worth it?

Because of Emma, I was keeping secrets from my FamilyUnit. Because of Emma, I had disrupted the functions of my fellow robots. Because of Emma, my coworkers and I had abandoned our jobs.

But was she worth it?

My memory drive sparked with the moment Emma grabbed my hand. The first time human skin ever contacted my sensors. The strange buzz that vibrated through my circuitry.

In that instant, I knew two things with 100 percent certainty:

[1] I need to help Emma.

[2] Helping Emma is a violation.

How could both of these things be true at the same time?

The answer to this question pinged inside my vocabulary drive.

Because Emma is a paradox.

00100110

We disabled our location tracking. This made us invisible to the Hive. The larger mechanical mind could no longer see us. Of course, there was still the risk of being watched. Drones patrolled the sky. Satellites orbited Earth. But unless we did something to raise their suspicion, they would ignore us.

Hopefully.

We made our way south. Toward the range of snow-capped mountains that loomed over the horizon. Toward the destination marked on Emma’s map.

As we progressed, the robot population dwindled. The signs of our civilization faded. The factories/power plants/storage facilities. We saw fewer/fewer/fewer of them. Until eventually, there were none at all. And the concrete path came to an abrupt stop.

We had reached the edge of our settlement.

Ahead of us, we saw nothing but nature.

I performed a scan of our surroundings. We were alone.

“It is safe to come out now!” I knocked on Ceeron’s backpack

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Emma’s head popped out. “Okay, cool it with the knocking! It’s super loud!”

I replayed her words. “What does ‘cool it’ mean?”

“It is human slang,” said Ceeron. “It means she wants you to stop.”

“If you want me to stop, why not simply say stop?” I asked. “That would be more precise.”

Emma let out a sigh. “Because unlike you guys, humans don’t have microchips for brains.”

SkD chirped. I watched symbols appear on its screen.