HEAVY CLOUDS BLANKET LONDON, PALE GRAY IN THE predawn hours. Abel’s hopper descends through them, and briefly he’s enveloped in mist before, at last, he sees the lights below.

London. He knows the street patterns, the landmarks, all of it; he superimposes his last known map with what he sees now in order to learn how it’s changed. None of that is as important, though, as the strange exhilaration of homecoming. He’d known humans became sentimentally attached to houses, cities, places that they remembered fondly—but had never realized he could do the same.

Abel never got to come home before.

The once-famed fogs of London have returned in the past century, as subtly dangerous as they were before. The hopper draws swirls in the vapor as it settles atop a tall, illuminated platform that stands over most of the city. Abel peers through one of the small round windows, his face briefly painted blue by the searchlights, to see that a welcome party is waiting.

He looks back once at the X-Ray model that took the journey with him. After delivering Mansfield’s recorded welcome message, it went dark, sat in its corner again, and hasn’t budged since. Its mute, unknowing bulk disconcerts Abel, though he can’t explain why.

The hopper’s door opens automatically, folding out to become a gangway. As Abel walks out, the Item model comes forward to greet him. Like all Item models, he appears to be an East Asian male approximately thirty-five years of age, with the slightly greater sharpness seen in advanced models. Items handle skilled labor, more sensitive tasks such as scientific experiments. They can make assessments; they can even be discreet. Their smiles look genuine, like this one’s does now. “Model One A. Professor Mansfield welcomes you back to Earth.”

Even the air has the particular smoky scent Abel associates with London. “It’s good to be here.” Better if he’d come by his own will—but he’ll put that right soon. “Where is Professor Mansfield?”

“At home, waiting for you.”

Home.

The geodesic dome still shines with the same warm glow. The house still looks like a silvery castle on a hill, and the fog around them could be an enchanter’s mist. Additional security measures have been added to the gate and door, but as soon as Abel steps inside, he is enveloped in comforting familiarity: the smell of wood polish and leather, the crackle of the holographic fire, the self-portrait of Frida Kahlo staring intently from its elaborate frame.

And then, finally, finally—seated on the long velvet sofa—

“Abel.” Professor Mansfield smiles up at him through teary eyes, and holds up his arms. “My pride and joy.”

“Father.” Like a prodigal son, Abel falls to his knees to embrace Mansfield tightly.

But not too tightly. The comforting sameness of the house only underlies how much Mansfield himself has changed. He is elderly now, his pale skin crinkled into folds. What’s left of his hair has gone completely white. His arms tremble even in the hug, and he has lost so much weight that Abel can feel his fragile bones through the thick robe. No wonder a Tare model hovers in the background, waiting and watchful. Mansfield’s vulnerability moves Abel even more.

After nearly a minute, Mansfield finally releases Abel. His smile, at least, is unchanged. “Now let me look at you.” Mansfield brushes back Abel’s gold hair, then frowns as he sees the small cut left from Abel’s fall. “Did that fool Queen do this? You can only add so much sense to a combat mech, it seems.”

“I fell. It’s not bad. But, about the Queen—did you order her to stand down as soon as I had been retrieved? Otherwise, she might go after my rescuer.”

Might have gone. By now, whatever has happened between the Queen and Noemi is long over, and Abel has no power to affect it. He can only find out what might have taken place. How afraid he needs to be.

“The Queen ought to stand down. Hasn’t reported to me, so I’m assuming she followed standard procedure.” Mansfield gestures toward the Tare, who quickly steps forward with a strip of skin sealant. Instead of letting her apply it, Mansfield takes the strip, smoothing it tenderly over Abel’s cut with his own shaky fingers. “She should’ve shipped you off and walked away. Assuming that upgrade I gave her didn’t jinx the works.”

“She deleted the upgrade,” Abel says. Maybe he should reveal why—that the Queen had felt both the temptation and terror of free will. But that conversation can take place at some other time. Other issues take precedence. “Absent specific orders, she wouldn’t have gone after Noemi. Good.”

“Noemi?” Mansfield raises an eyebrow. “This is the girl you were spotted with?”

“Yes, sir. Noemi Vidal.”

“From Genesis, I assume. Not likely anybody else could’ve found you.”

This is of course correct, but Abel doesn’t want to emphasize Noemi’s status as an enemy of Earth. He sticks to what really matters about her. “She boarded the Daedalus in an effort to save a fallen comrade, which failed. But in the process, she restored power and freed me from the equipment pod bay.”

And decided to destroy the Genesis Gate—this is what Abel should say next. But if he does so, he will only make trouble for Noemi. Nobody has asked him directly about her plans, so for the time being he can remain silent.

Mansfield’s gaze takes on a faraway look. “That’s where you were, wasn’t it? Jettisoning the hard data. You were trapped in there the whole time.” He shakes his head, visibly regretful. “So many wasted years. So many.”

“Not wasted.” Abel can hardly believe he’s saying this, but as hard as this truth is, he must admit it. “That time had value for me. While I was there, I had to review my data files over and over again. Come up with new connections, new things to think about. I slept more than strictly necessary. New neural connections began to form. I’m smarter than I used to be. I feel things more deeply. When I sleep now, sometimes I even dream.”

“Dream? You can dream?” Mansfield laughs in happy disbelief. “Dreaming! Are they just memories or true, bizarre, carnival-of-the-id dreams?”

Abel isn’t sure how to answer this. “Well, once I dreamed that you turned into a bear, and I had to carry you on my back into a Gothic cathedral.”

The laughter turns into a cackle. “Real dreams! Oh, my brilliant boy. My ultimate creation. You’ve exceeded my wildest hopes.”

These words bathe Abel in the simplest, most uncomplicated happiness he’s known in a long time. But even this glow doesn’t distract him from what’s most important. “Can you send word to Stronghold, to find out what’s happened to Noemi? She was in danger. We were helped by a doctor who wanted to protect us. We all made it to the hangar before the Queen and Charlie stopped us, and after that—I don’t know if she got off-planet, or was arrested. I would feel more at ease if I knew the outcome.”

This doesn’t produce the galvanizing effect Abel would’ve predicted. Mansfield sits back on the sofa, regarding Abel with amused pride. The Tiffany lamp behind him jewels its light into tangy orange and vivid green. “The girl got to her ship, didn’t she?”

“She should have been able to—”

“But what?”

“If she’s been arrested, you could see to her release.” Abel feels certain Mansfield has more than enough political influence for that. “If she’s free, but hasn’t yet returned to Genesis, maybe she could come here.”

“Would a Genesis soldier want to come here?”

It’s a fair question. And surely Noemi’s top priority will be obtaining a mech for her plan to destroy the Genesis Gate. Why should he have such an illogical need for her to visit Earth?

It doesn’t have to be a visit. Abel says, “I need to know that she’s safe and well. That’s all.”

Mansfield tilts his head, wondering. “Tell me about this Noemi Vidal. What she’s like?”

How can he describe her? Abel sits down on the richly patterned Turkish rug to consider. The only sounds are the ticking of the grandfather clock and the pop and crackle of the nearby fire, which is close enough to share its light. “She’s… brave. That’s the first thing I knew about her. She’s also resourceful, smart, but she has a terrible temper sometimes. She can be impatient, and she’ll laugh at you if she thinks you’re too proud. She always thinks I’m too proud. But after a while I didn’t mind her laughing. By then she knew what I could do and—and she respected me. Once I knew she respected me, that made it all right for her to laugh. Is that customary?”

Mansfield shrugs in the way Abel knows means continue.

So he does. “It’s important to me that Noemi be safe, even now that she’s no longer my commander and my programming doesn’t require continued loyalty. I preferred to be with her, or at least near her, to being alone. For some reason I often think about her hair, which is unremarkable by any objective standard but seems to suit her extraordinarily well. I want to know what she thinks, and to tell her everything that’s happened to me, and I—” He breaks off when Mansfield begins to chuckle. Frowning, Abel says, “I didn’t mean to be humorous.”

“I know, I know. I’m laughing because I’m delighted.” Mansfield’s hand pets Abel on the shoulder. “You’ve fallen in love, my boy. I made a mech capable of falling in love.”

Abel’s astonishment is so great it takes him nearly three-quarters of a second to restore normal conversation. “I have? This—this feeling—this is love?”

“Or something very like it.” Mansfield sits back, weary from even these small exertions, but still smiling. “A bit of a complication, but I daresay it can be worked around.”

Leaning against the sofa, Abel allows himself to consider some of his memories of Noemi in this light. Did any one event awaken this feeling? He can’t choose just one. But some of his stranger behaviors the past few days—the way he would touch Noemi’s hair, or the wrenching wrongness of seeing her so sick in the hospital—only now does he grasp the explanation.

He’s not broken at all. Instead he’s better than he’s ever been. More human.

Mansfield coughs once, then again, and suddenly it’s as if he’s overtaken. His entire body shakes with each wheeze. The Tare model hurries forward again, this time with an oxygen-enriched mask. She cups it over Mansfield’s face for the few seconds it takes him to start breathing normally again.

Finally Mansfield waves her off, leaning back on the sofa once more. “As you can see, I haven’t been enjoying myself as much as you have, my boy.”

Exciting though the past several days with Noemi have been, Abel thinks they shouldn’t outweigh the previous three decades of loneliness, during which he was not, in any sense, enjoying himself. But he understands that this is only a conversational segue, clumsy but irrelevant. “Are you well?”

“I’m old, Abel. Older than I have any right to be.” His rheumy eyes close. “But I couldn’t go, could I? Not while you were still lost out there. I’ve been holding on. Waiting, hoping. All this time, I waited for you.”

Abel takes Mansfield’s hands, a spontaneous kind of affection he’s never shown before. “I waited for you, too.”

“And now you’re home.” When Mansfield opens his eyes again, he seems to have regained his focus. “Give me your arm, Abel. Let’s go outside.”

Mansfield leans on Abel’s arm, and together they make their way outside, into the gardens Abel remembers so well. But he doesn’t remember them like this. None of the flowers are in bloom; although it’s still early in Earth’s spring, at least a few should have blossomed by now. Instead leaves droop and vines wither. Green still dominates brown, but not by much. Even the lavender is gone. Abel always loved the scent of the lavender, the way the breeze would carry it around—

“Sad, isn’t it?” Mansfield says, shaking his head. “We can’t even buy beauty any longer. Can’t even work for it. Sometimes I think Earth has no more to give.”

Touched, Abel pats Mansfield’s hand, which tightens on his arm. They share a sad smile. “Where will you go?” Abel says. “After Earth.” It seems possible—probable—that Mansfield won’t live long enough to be faced with this challenge. However, pointing out his creator’s imminent death seems unkind.

Mansfield doesn’t acknowledge his frailty either. “I expect to have plenty of options. Come on, let’s take a look at the workshop.”

Downstairs, in the basement of the geodesic dome, is Mansfield’s workshop—an old-fashioned word for a highly sophisticated laboratory, but it fits. The walls are brick, not polymer; the tables are wood, not plastic. When Abel, brand-new, first passed the initial tests of sapience, Mansfield celebrated by having the windows replaced with stained glass, so much like his treasured Tiffany lamps. The boards of the plank floor have been worn down by decades of footsteps, tracing pale, scuffed pathways between the main computer terminal and the tanks.

Many more tanks, Abel sees, than there were before.

The long tanks now stretch along the entire basement perimeter, six on each side. Within the swirling pink goo are the indistinct outlines of mechs growing toward their point of activation. Some are very nearly complete—a foot bobs against the glass, revealing five perfect toes—but others are still nebulous, hardly more than an opaque blob congealing around the artificial frame.

Mass manufacture takes place elsewhere. The workshop has always been reserved for research projects, for the mechs Mansfield considers special. Abel woke up here.

“What are you working on?” he says. “New models?”

“Potentially. People have been asking for child-size mechs. Harder to freeze the organic components short of full maturity—but maybe not impossible. At any rate, I intend to try.” Mansfield sighs. “Better to wear out than to rust out, my boy.”

“Of course, Father.” Abel has always considered that an odd phrase for humans to have come up with, but it applies very well to him.

“I had these tanks put in within weeks of losing the Daedalus.” Mansfield totters to the easy chair set up before the broadest desk. “Spent decades trying to re-create the greatest accomplishment of my career, and failed every time.”

Abel knows what Noemi would think of his next question, but he has to ask. “Are you saying that you attempted to re-create… me?”

Mansfield looks surprised. “Of course I did. You’re the greatest leap forward cybernetics has ever taken, and I thought I’d lost you forever. All other considerations aside, it would’ve been a crime against human knowledge not to see if I could make another.”

“Of course.” This makes sense. But Noemi was right about Abel having an ego, because it is now definitely bruised. Mansfield hoped to replace him, and now, perhaps, he is no longer the most advanced mech in the galaxy.

Yet his disappointment fades next to new, brighter curiosity. Losing his singular status hardly matters if that means he’s no longer alone. If other Abels exist, might they be brothers of a sort? “Are there other A models now?”

But that short-lived hope dies immediately as Mansfield shakes his head. “I said I tried. Never said I succeeded. You were so perfect from the get-go, I guess I thought I could always make another if the need arose. But I was wrong. The same plans, the same materials, but not the same results. Always, always, something was out of balance. That spark you have is yours alone. They came out so physically like you, and so clever—a few of them so close—but none of them could match you. None of them had the mind I was looking for. Had to deactivate them, one and all. Finally I gave up.”

Other mechs who looked like him, who had enough intelligence to possess a sense of self—and they were all deactivated. All found wanting, instead of being appreciated as the miracles they were. The idea is profoundly troubling, but Abel doesn’t know how to say so to Mansfield, or whether he even should. What’s done is done.

But those lost brothers haunt him.

For now, they have more urgent matters to discuss. “Will you send the message to Stronghold now?”

“What message?”

Perhaps senility has begun to set in. Abel explains, “To make sure Noemi departed Stronghold safely instead of being brought into custody. If she is in custody, then to free her.”

“You want your ladylove brought to you by a bunch of security mechs?” Mansfield chuckles. “I doubt she’ll find that very romantic.”

“I would never want her brought anywhere against her will. That’s exactly why I want to be certain she’s free. So she can go where she needs to go.” Once again, Abel thinks about the impending destruction of the Genesis Gate, but says nothing.

Mansfield waves him off. “All in good time, Abel. Let’s take a few new scans, shall we? I want to map this newly complex mind of yours.”

Abel wants to press his point, to make Mansfield understand, until it sinks in that he already does.

Mansfield knows Noemi could be at risk; he knows how deeply concerned Abel is for her.

He just doesn’t care.

Abel had discovered that he could disagree with Mansfield, even that he could criticize him. But this is the first time he’s doubted his creator.

Still he must obey Mansfield’s every word.

Slowly, Abel sits in the examination chair and allows the sensor bars to curve around his head. When Mansfield smiles at him, he smiles back.