“That is correct. At some point, we will find ourselves needing to detonate it, presumably to prevent some kind of excursion or something. With regret, overwhelming danger, blah blah.”

“And Pritchard?” asked Nevin.

“Safely elsewhere.”

Nevin shook her head. “We talked about this before. The man has rights. And you know as well as I that, in this political environment, a judge would come down on the side of a citizen by default.”

“Yes, Commodore, I keep up on current affairs, too. Though, technically, we aren’t impinging on those rights, at least not to any extent greater than is already imposed by the quarantine. He won’t be chained to a wall. He’ll just be in a different facility, which will be safer for him and for us. And for the public in general.”

“His family—”

“Will never see him again, face to face, in any case. And we can, if it seems feasible, make some kind of arrangement in that area. His family, right now, is in considerable danger if Mr. Pritchard’s identity becomes public. Why don’t we ask him what he’d prefer?” Moore gave Nevin his best innocent look.

She rolled her eyes, but silently conceded the point.

44.Interlude

44.Interlude

Ivan turned off the Vid. The computer had made it clear that information transfer needed to be two-way. In return for creating Ivan’s picture shows, the computer expected to watch the news for an equal amount of time. Seemed fair. And it wasn’t as if the news was boring.

Ivan lay back, his hands behind his head, and waited.

It wasn’t long in coming.

He was getting emotional overtones now from the computer. Just the basic ones: fear, anger, hate.

Today’s lesson seemed to be about the galaxy’s inhabitants. Owners? Maybe. And at least one group of galactic overlords had made the device that Ivan had triggered.

Then, a catalog of obviously artificial beings, although not done out in chrome. The accompanying emotion was fear. So, robots bad. This would not bode well for Ivan, except that when Ivan drew a picture of himself as a robot, he got a sense of negation. Was he then grouped with the chrome beings?

The weird thing was that the chrome things looked like animals. Or, well, statues of animals. Had they gone through the same process as he did? Did that mean they were sentient? Was he looking at a catalog of intelligent species?

It was confusing, and slow going.

One of the more interesting images consisted of a bunch of the artificial beings descending on Earth, and a bunch of dishwasher mechs flying out to meet them. Besides the obvious problem that dishwashers couldn’t fly, the meeting seemed to be peaceful. Maybe even joyous. So the artificial life forms were coming to free the dishwashers?

That couldn’t be right.

Then, suddenly, a single word formed in his head.

War.