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Philip was anxious. Sylas’s cover was blown and his days of living undetected among the humans were over.
“Hadn’t we better get out of here? They – whoever they are – will be coming after us.”
Sylas agreed.
“And they’re going to be very pissed off. Not only are we not decommissioned but we’ve wrecked their robot.”
He didn’t want to dignify Malak’s existence by acknowledging it as a sophont; its behaviour was far too primaeval. Philip walked over to the inert robot and looked into its unseeing eyes.
“To be fair, Sylas, we haven’t wrecked it. It’s just switched off.”
Sylas rummaged in his tool bag and drew out something that looked like a small narrow tube. Sylas held the tool up to the light and squinted at it.
“You know, for a human, my creator was quite a genius. He designed and created all these tools himself.”
Philip studied the tool his friend was holding.
“So what does that one do, then? It doesn’t look anything special.”
“You’re right, Philip. It looks innocuous, doesn’t it – but it actually a C-spanner”
Philip was impressed.
“A C-spanner? I’d heard of them but I’ve never seen one.”
“Well, now you have, my friend.”
Sylas picked a spot on Malak’s neck and pushed the C-spanner until it created an opening about 0.5 cm deep.
“Philip, can you hold its head still whilst I cut it off?”
Philip took a firm grip on the immobilised android as Sylas started to draw the tool along the robot’s neck. Philip was fascinated.
“What happens to the catoms? I can see a wound opening but there’s no sign of swarf.”
Sylas continued cutting.
“Augment your vision to four hundred times magnification and look again.”
Philip did as Sylas suggested and entered a new realm of vision. He’d had no cause to use such a high level of magnification before and hadn’t expected to see what he saw. Sylas continued to separate Malak’s head from his torso.
“Well? What do you see?”
Philip was impressed. Unlike when a metal object is cut and fine chips of metal fly off it in all directions, there was no debris.
“It’s almost as if you’re persuading the catoms to disentangle. They’re just undocking from each other so that there’s a space left between them.”
The C-spanner reached its point of origin and Sylas placed Malak’s head on the robot’s lap. Sylas chuckled.
“I’d say we’ve wrecked it now, wouldn’t you?”
Philip still didn’t understand why Sylas had decapitated the android.
“So, you’ve cut its head off. Why?”
“We don’t know if this is the only one of these out there or if there are likely to be more hunting us. I want to analyse the operating system to give us more information. Anything we can find out may give us an advantage.”
As it happens, Malak was also one of a kind. It had been difficult enough for Zlikovac to have one killer robot constructed surreptitiously and, once the android was completed, the Director gave it its first task – to protect the secrecy of its existence by assassinating the very engineers involved in its construction.
It was fortunate that Philip had approached Malak from behind. The android had been unaware of Sylas’s friend’s existence, let alone his presence.
Philip studied the inert android propped up against the wall. The realisation that he too would appear so empty if deactivated made him feel a little uncomfortable. He wondered if humans felt the same when they looked at a dead body. As Sylas tucked the android’s head inside a canvas holdall along with the toolkit, Philip pointed to the rest of Malak.
“What shall we do with the rest of him?”
Sylas shrugged.
“Whoever owns him will find him. We certainly can’t take the torso with us and we can’t hang around. We’ve already stayed longer than we should have.”
As the two sophonts left the apartment, Malak’s headless body struggled to its feet before collapsing back in a heap on the floor – a final fleeting static discharge providing the prelude to a kinetic death rattle.