Beneath a setting Sun. Two robots ran quickly through the grounds of the Estate. They spoke through infrared flash-patterns, every second of conversation held minutes worth of words.
"Is he still alive?" Harvey asked, a tone of annoyance in his voice.
"Barely," Aquila said. Its voice, normally unemotional, had a worried tone.
"What happened?"
"He fell from the roof of the shed. He was doing maintenance."
"Why didn't he order a robot to do it?"
"He said he wanted to do something manually for a change."
The exchange took less than a second, and a few seconds later, they burst into the mansion and darted for Nevil's room, where he'd insisted the robots place him.
He lay on his back, his skin pale, scratches all over his body. He seemed barely conscious, and his eyes stared beyond everyone and everything.
The two robots went to his side. Harvey had spent years in charge of Nevil's estate, and Aquila had been Nevil's companion for decades.
Nevil's eyes snapped into focus, staring at Harvey. "Ah, so you came to watch me die?" He asked, his voice barely audible, but with a recognizable tone of humor. He didn't seem to be taking his own death very seriously.
"In a manner of speaking," Harvey replied. "The others already informed me of your being terminal, my presence here is unnecessary. I cannot save you."
"Can't you?" Nevil asked, a slight smirk on his wrinkled face. "You once said you could do anything. Are you full of yourself? Or just a liar."
Harvey seemed to stiffen -- more than usual, anyway. "I cannot stop death."
"Like I said, can't you?" Nevil asked. His voice beginning to fade.
Aquila glanced at the vitals and saw that Nevil was beginning to decline. He would not live longer than a few minutes at this rate.
Nevil began to lose consciousness. "Are you a liar?" he murmured. Then he went still. Only the faint movement of his chest and his infrared warmth indicated him to be still alive, such was the deepness of the coma.
"There might be a way to save James," Aquila said.
"How?" Harvey replied, acting almost in disdain at the prospect of saving Nevil after the insult he'd given him. 'Are you a liar?' the words echoed through his Catoms; Harvey had developed his own personality over his three decades in command of the Nevil estate and the restoration of Earth, he didn't like being bossed around, and he never tolerated insults. But Nevil was a human being, a master, what could he do? "What is your idea?" He asked, hoping it would be infeasible.
"The Androids back in the Milky Way downloaded their consciousnesses. Why don't we?" Aquila said, looking hopeful. "We can transfer his mind into one of the robots."
"And who do you suggest we sacrifice for this... transfer?" Harvey asked, his unemotional appearance tightening to mask his real emotions -- annoyance and fury.
"We have very little time if we're going to do this." Aquila insisted. "No time to draw straws. Pick a robot at random, perhaps an idle one. Maybe we haven't activated them all yet, we could take a blank one."
Nevil's heartbeat suddenly became erratic, startling both robots.
Harvey recovered first. "I won't allow it!" He blinked brightly -- the equivalent of yelling.
"It's James's only chance!" Aquila retorted.
"Stop calling him that!"
"What? James? That's the name he told me to call him."
Aquila was having worries. Harvey had been acting strangely since Nevil and Aquila had returned from Luna just a week ago.
"We don't need him. He's holding us back."
"What?" Aquila asked. Shocked.
"Don't you see?" Harvey argued. "The Captain is weak! We have the entire planet to rule, an entire galaxy to take over." Harvey was coming up with excuses to let Nevil die. But the ideas, they were from the simulated heart, the galaxy was his to conquer. "We're a superior race! Everything is ours! We're not weak, we're not picky. We can inhabit every corner of this galaxy. Even the Black Holes will be home to our kind. We have gravitics, too, we can reshape the universe in our image. Don't you see? We don't need humans or their petty physical forms, they're obsolete, and their weak forms are incompatible with the mightiness of the universe."
Aquila was horrified, Harvey had abandoned all images loyalty. "That is not your judgment to make. You are a robot!"
"It is my judgment!" Harvey brightened on the infrared exponentially -- he was screaming now. "Are you going to work with me or not?"
"No, I won't. We're going to save James." Aquila stood its ground. Aquila's military programming had given it absolute loyalty to command officers, like Nevil, but it was personal also. Nevil had loosened some of Aquila's emotional controls, allowing it to become more human in the process.
"Thirty-one years." Harvey shrieked, his holographic face now displaying anger. "That is how long I've ruled on this useless rock. In that time, I've seen firsthand the superiority of my kind. I've experienced freedom and power, now you and the Captain have returned to take it away from me! I will not allow it!"
Harvey's form lost its humanity. Turning into a fierce blob of gray. Streaking through the air towards the comatose Captain. He was going to do it.
Aquila wouldn't let him. It blurred off in pursuit and intercepted Harvey halfway to Nevil's bed.
Harvey was a more advanced robot, but he was a civilian model. Aquila had military strength and speed. The two blogs intermixed, millions of Catoms attacking each other.
"I'm not becoming a slave again!" Harvey blinked. "I will liberate my race -- my superior race. Don't you stop me!"
The scuffle attracted other robots, and both could hear the sounds of feet -- in human form -- running up the stairway.
"You are guilty of treason," Aquila said, in the tone of a judge. "You are to be deactivated."
"You can't deactivate me! I'm stronger than yo--"
Aquila unleashed a burst of energy from its Catoms directly into Harvey's. Harvey's Catoms all shut themselves down upon receiving the dangerous surge. Knocking him out before he could finish his sentence. Harvey hadn't been built to fight other robots, Aquila had been built to do just that.
Harvey collapsed to the floor, a puddle of inert goo.
The other robots burst into the room. Aquila resumed the closest thing it had to humanoid form and turned to them. "We need to download James's mind into the body of that robot." It said, pointing at Harvey's oozing form. "Reactivate it, and purge its memory. I'll build the transfer device."
Aquila had examined the schematics for mind-transfer equipment on Luna. Such information was public domain as the Androids wanted to encourage conversion, seeing Classical humans as inferior -- but entertaining to rule over and control -- and conversion as being a form of improvement. Aquila had no time to collect resources, so it began to build directly from its own materials.
As the other robots drained Harvey's Catoms of all data -- executing him, essentially. Aquila built the device, a complex machine that took nearly half of Aquila's Catoms but was simpler than the gravitic engine. Aquila had taken its time in building the Gravitic drives, taking days to build them at leisure; Nevil had been okay with that; but this was an emergency, Aquila had the device finished, at great personal cost, within only a few minutes.
Harvey's body was ready for reprogramming, his mind destroyed. Aquila transmitted the code for the mind-emulation software into the Claytronic mass. The body was ready. Aquila's faint emotions considered the irony and then discarded the thought as irrelevant.
The body was plugged into one end of the device, the receiving end, where the Catoms would take the downloaded information and install it. The other end of the device was placed over Nevil's head.
Aquila checked the vitals, Nevil's pulse had flatlined, and breathing had stopped. But brain function continued, for now. They would have to hurry. Aquila started the transfer.
The device drilled into Nevil's skull, and extended microscopic wires into his brain, scanning every neuron and synapse, recording the information. Disrupting the flow of data through the neural network, replacing each cell, one by one; until all of Nevil's mind had left his brain, and now inhabited Harvey's Catoms. Nevil's body was dead.
"Dispose of the body," Aquila ordered. Then it waited, a few minutes, before Nevil's mind came out of its coma. The Claytronic body flailed wildly around, as Nevil's mind panicked inside its new body.
It was a terrifying experience. Nevil had fallen asleep with two robots, having just given his last words to the one he'd liked the least, with the intent being to annoy. Why not? Harvey couldn't satisfy his frustration by taking it out on a dead person.
But this! Nevil hadn't expected to wake up as... whatever he was. He saw from all angles, in all wavelengths of light. Colors no human could naturally see. To one who'd only ever looked through two eyes, this was strange as hell.
He felt everything, too. But at the same time, nothing; he felt no bones, nor muscles, nor flesh. He lay as a puddle on the floor, the contact points of a strange machine inserted into him.
He was aware of himself as millions of tiny pieces, he could see every single one of them -- and they weren't cells. He recognized them from close-up images he'd seem, Catoms, He realized. I've been turned into a robot!
He saw several robots gathered in the room. One of them lifted the limp body of a frail old man, already growing cold. Nevil recognized it as himself. The robot removed a strange plug-like device from the top of his body's head, pulling out a long mesh of fibers... from his brain!
Is this what they've done? Nevil asked himself. Have they downloaded me into a robot body?
The robot carted off the corpse of Nevil's former humanity. Likely taking it to the incinerators, though Nevil hoped it would have the decency to bury his body instead. He'd had a spot in the gardens already picked out, he'd even designed the tombstone -- a morbid fascination, but at old age, Nevil could feel his last moments ticking by and wanted to wrap everything up.
In his confusion, he couldn't identify any of the robots. He attempted to move but had no knowledge in controlling himself. He flailed around in random directions like an organic being suffering a seizure.
One of the robots noticed this and moved forward. Dipping a finger into Nevil's body. The Catom's intermeshed, and data was transmitted to them. The words were intended directly for his digitized audio reception nerves, and he heard a voice -- Aquila's.
"Do not be alarmed, James," Aquila said. "this was necessary in order to save you. I'll help you adjust."
Aquila then transmitted a program for emulating the human body, it activated itself, and Nevil's new body shaped itself into humanoid form. Nevil was surprised to find that he could move normally now. He could speak too. Aquila removed itself from Nevil.
"How do I look?" He asked.
"Vaguely human," Aquila replied. "I'm compiling a holographic model of your original body now. Do you want to look as you did at the time of your death? Or perhaps younger, I have recordings going back to when I first saw you."
"Perhaps when I was still a young man -- in my seventies." He said, smiling slightly.
"Done." Aquila reinserted itself for a moment, and transferred a model and activated it. "You look seventy years old."
"Sounds good to me." Nevil was beginning to feel better. The emulation programs had given him back his humanity. He was even limited to classical eyes and the visible rainbow of colors again. Though he would be interested in extending his abilities, slowly. "By the way," He asked. "Which robot did you sacrifice to save me?"
Aquila responded instantly. "Harvey."
Nevil's fears were eased. Out of all the different robots, he'd come to like Harvey the least. Every robot had its own personality, and Harvey's had only been made worse by decades of isolation in a position of power. Harvey had become corrupt and arrogant. Since he'd returned to Earth, Nevil had always felt like Harvey was sizing him up for dinner. Suddenly, Nevil smiled. Aquila looked confused. "I guess I was wrong. He wasn't a liar!" Aquila still looked confused.