Nature was reclaiming the building. A section of the ceiling had collapsed. The wreckage spilled across the corridor. Vegetation sprouted from the twisting carcass of broken metal. Trees/Bushes/Grass/Moss. Ivy hung from the hole in the roof, gently swaying above our heads.

Emma stayed close to me. My glowing eyes illuminated the way forward, shining a light on the shops, the merchandise inside. Everywhere, I saw more/more/more. So many things to buy. So many objects that humans thought they needed.

Clothing/Perfume/Sunglasses/Jewelry/Furniture/Phones.

The choices went on/on/on.

Emma stopped. Her gaze slowly passed from one store to the next. Her head tilted upward. On the second floor were even more shops.

“There’s so much of everything,” she said. I analyzed her tone. I detected an odd mixture of amazement and sadness, wonder and dismay. “How could anybody ever need all this . . . stuff?”

Because humans were flawed. Because they always wanted more of everything. Because their appetites were endless.

These words flickered through my mind. Words spoken by my FamilyUnit. Words preprogrammed by the robots who came before me. Words that I had always believed, unquestioningly.

Until Emma came into my life.

Her voice stirred the silence. “I totally get why you guys thought we were so wasteful. You were right.”

“No.” My reply was louder than I expected. “We were not correct. We were quite wrong.”

Emma looked at me, surprised. She gestured to the shops. “What about all this? All these stores selling junk people didn’t need.”

I considered my response for 0.4 seconds. “Were you wasteful inside the bunker?”

She shook her head. “We couldn’t waste anything. Everything was rationed.”

“Since you left the bunker? What have you wasted?”

“Um. Nothing, I guess.”

“That is my conclusion. Some humans were wasteful. This mall is evidence of that. Others were the opposite. You are evidence of that.”

A smile pulled at the edge of Emma’s mouth. “Thanks, XR. And for the record, you’re evidence that not all robots are mean metal monsters.”

“Is that what you thought about us? That we were monsters?”

She shrugged. “Let’s just say—people in the bunker didn’t exactly have the nicest things to say about robots.”

We continued walking, the glow of my eyes guiding the way through the darkness.

My footsteps were solid/metal/steady.

Emma’s were small/shuffling/unsteady.

I was the first to speak again. “I am sorry, by the way.”

Emma looked up at me. “For what?”

“For what we did to humans.” The word massacre blinked in my vocabulary database. I wanted to discard it, to delete it, to never see it again. But I did not. The word lingered in my artificial brain. “Our actions may have seemed necessary to us at the time, but that does not make them right. Not at all.”