KETTY'S SUBDIVISION Wattys2017

Chapter 22-Part II

She walked back down the hall, wondering what he meant by the last remark. She realized, in his head he was saying, 'Tell your pet Ketty I will be coming for the rest of my bots,' except the joke was on him. However, there were two things Belletine in all her ingenuity did not foresee, one of which was Harkentofor, young cock of the Baird roost, more capable than his own kind could have imagined. He was a force to be reckoned with, and even now he was converging on the planet. The second was Bromide's tainted blood, manipulated by her mentor Carlos. Belletine turned and headed back out the door as Mon-catasto got to work. The last words she heard him say were, "Ah, Bromide, come sit here while I extract the combat proven blood from your body."

Even as the nano-tap downloaded Bromide's essence into the mainframe, Belletine reached the checkpoint. Tychicknu was a solitary bot by anyone's standards, an enigma among artificial intelligence, yet he was robust and adapted to every circumstance. Perhaps it was the tampering with his base algorithm which caused him to follow the path he was on now, or it could be something simpler, grounded in the Three Laws of Robotics which were etched into the very fiber of his essence. To him personally, it boiled down to one thing. He loved Belletine and within that adoration, within that complex system of beliefs which lay at the heart of his robotic essence, he knew above all else, he would uphold her legacy no matter what.

"Tychicknu. Tychicknu? Tychicknu!" Belletine needed him now in the worse way, and he was distant, lost in one of his programming arguments.

"Tychicknu!"

"Yes, my lady?" He broke from his reverie, emerging from the redundant trail of code.

"What the heck is going on?"

"Sorry, my lady, I was having doubts, but I'm ok now." She took his hand and they threaded their way down long corridors, through the labyrinth of security doors and light tubes to finally emerge on the balcony where their ship awaited. He had made careful calculations and now Belletine stood with her back to the wind and nodded her head. It was a cool breeze and it felt good to be alive and in control.

Tychicnu mind clicked the switch.

He thought he would be far enough away.

He thought they all would.

He thought wrong, because Bromide's blood was tainted with alien DNA. Not DNA given readily, or as part of a master plan, but DNA which Carlos had exhumed from a dead Baird long ago on a secret training base deep in Gort territory. Until he fell in love with Belletine, who rejected him, he had no use for it. But now it caused a viral chain reaction throughout the capital's network. Every circuit of every computer on the entire planet acted as a conduit, sending the planet into a supernova explosion that shot white hot matter into space. The blast wave traveled faster than the blink of eye, outpacing light on its path of destruction, then clawed its way out of the planet's crust and incinerated every living and dead thing in its path. The destructive force of an exploding sun evaporated the atmosphere and consumed the millions of low lying spacecraft, then spaceward towards the pathetic aliens that Belletine should have been fighting.

Harkentofor was there watching, even as his eyes were scorched from the intense energy. If not for their distance and the quick thinking of a junior officer who erected the shields, they would have been an unknown casualty of the cataclysm. But even in his blindness, he was able to remain in control.

"Take us into deep space, our work here is done."

And so began the second bloody robot war which Belletine had unwittingly ushered in. It would be a misguided civil war, pitting the diehard tech savvy bot lovers against the ones who abhorred all robots to the point of death. Meanwhile the Baird could move forward with their own plans, unhampered by a society divided against itself.

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