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him. He wouldn’t want to make his friend turn him down.
    “Let’s go,” he told the bot. “Exit.”
    “Confirmed.”
    The robot charged across a clearing toward a concrete blast barrier with a steel gate. He hoped this bot had a way to get through. The gate was designed to withstand mechanized assault.
    Half a dozen combat robots raced after them, firing their own blasts at Syd. As the dirt kicked up around him and the shock waves nearly knocked him off his feet, he realized that they were not using nonlethal weapons. They weren’t shooting to incapacitate him. They were shooting to kill.
    “Focus,” he told himself. No time to think about dying. This was a time to think about living, about staying alive.
    At least five of the other Arak9’s were closing in. He would never make it to the gate in time, let alone through it. He jumped onto his bot’s back. He was going way beyond the instruction manual now, but it was his only hope.
    “Leap over the obstruction!” he yelled.
    “Leap confirmed,” the bot responded, bent its six legs and sprang into the air. The ground beneath them exploded with blasts from the other bots. He shut his eyes as they flew over the wall. He didn’t know how well this model would handle impact on the other side. He braced himself.
    They hit the ground with a jarring crunch that jolted Syd off the bot’s back and knocked the wind out of him. His bot seemed undamaged. Syd stood to get back on, but he saw the others bots leaping over the wall after them.
    “Damn,” he said, panting, and glanced to the tall buildings around him. He hoped the lower floors were empty, given what he was about to do. “Confirm full core destruct. Five second delay.”
    “Full core destruct confirmed,” the bot said, as the others landed around them in a circle. “Meltdown with five second delay.”
    They didn’t teach this in Mr. Thompson’s Robotics class.
    “Sorry, pal,” Syd muttered, patting the machine on the back. Then he crawled under it and curled into a ball. He hoped he was right that the epicenter of the blast from the core meltdown would be safe, like the eye of the storm in a hurricane. The other bots tightened in around him. Surrounded.
    “Five. Four.”
    He covered his head with his hands. He squeezed his eyes shut. The whole system worked on background radiation, so the explosion from a combat bot’s meltdown should vaporize every machine in a fifty-yard radius and temporarily disable every network in five hundred yards. He’d get a head start and he’d inflict some serious damage on the way out. He just hoped the explosion wouldn’t kill him in the process. He’d never even had his first kiss.
    “Three. Two. One.”

[11]
    THE MOUNTAINS WERE DARK against an impossibly star-studded sky. The Milky Way made a smudge over the horizon.
    So it was supposed to be night.
    Knox hit a button on the bed, and the 3-D mountain scene was replaced with a large digital display: 11:43 p.m. 64° Fahrenheit. Air Quality Index: 97.
    Funny, he thought, it wasn’t even midnight. It felt later. He took a deep breath. His ribs didn’t hurt anymore. His head didn’t ache. The biotech they’d been pumping into him must be top-notch to work so quickly. He looked under his hospital gown, relieved to see that he was still all there. He wasn’t even bruised. To tell the truth, felt pretty good. Energized, revitalized.
    But bored.
    He tapped his projector on the table beside the bed, brought up a holo for “entertainment.” He swiped through the menus. Sports and movies and short comedy and long comedy and reality drama and reality comedy and reality classics and news.
    Boring. Boring. Boring. And boring.
    He chewed his nails and spat the little flakes onto the sheets.
    An image popped into his head, uninvited, of Sydney, hanging on that chain. Screaming. He had looked up, right into the hospital room it seemed, right into Knox, except it wasn’t Sydney’s face. It was Knox’s. His own green eyes