Hero’s house was just the same as all the others, a little dome in a row of little domes. George walked in gingerly—he had been in lots of odd places before, but an igloo-shaped inflatable home was something else. It wasn’t much cooler inside the house. Perhaps now that the whole world was warmer, nowhere could now cool down enough to feel normal.
Hero floated along ahead of him, throwing down her school backpack, kicking off her boots, and discarding her jacket. Empyrean looked on disapprovingly.
“I’m not picking up your things,” he said.
Hero sighed. “Why do I have the only robot who doesn’t want to do my chores for me?” she said, going back to collect all her bits and pieces and piling them up in her arms. She disappeared into a room off the central circular sitting room and came back empty-handed. “Everyone else’s robot is happy to do tasks for their person,” she said.
“Mine isn’t,” said George. He had decided that for now he just had to go with the flow until he could work out what to do next.
Boltzmann nodded happily. “I wouldn’t pick anything up off the floor for him,” he confided, before sitting himself down rather heavily on a sofa. The sofa, which was inflatable too, squeaked under Boltzmann’s weight but managed not to pop.
“You can’t have everything,” said Hero’s robot snootily. “I’m the most intelligent and most powerful robot known to humankind.” A faint bell rang in George’s mind. He had once known a superintelligence who spoke exactly like that.
“Yes, yes, I know,” said Hero. “Blah-blah-blah! All the kids in the Bubble are special, so we have to have special robots assigned to us by Eden. But, honestly, I know my guardian found you in a recycling facility and repurposed you instead of getting me a nice new, shiny, helpful bot like the others.”
“Special?” said George. “Are all the kids in the Bubble special?” His friend Annie had been the smartest kid he had ever met. Was Hero as clever as Annie? If Hero was so special, how come she couldn’t see the gaps between what she said and the reality around her?
“We’re called Future Leaders,” said Hero proudly. “It means we’ve been carefully chosen to carry on the future of Eden. We are the elite. Except we need to get really, really old before we can be in charge.” She sounded like she was repeating things she’d been told.
“Why do you have to be so old?” said George.
“These children are the flowers of Eden,” said Empyrean in a very neutral voice. “Hence they must be tended by the very best of the robotic population. It takes time to grow an oak tree,” reminisced the robot cryptically. “Up to nine Dumps of the sun, in fact. Then they must leave the Bubble, as all our Future Leaders go on to Wonder for further study. It is very important to nurture our future.”
Hero wasn’t listening. “I’d rather you did my tidying up than going on about nurturing or whatevs,” she grumbled.
She threw herself down on a sofa opposite George, who noticed that, as she did so, the sofa changed color to become a beautiful sea-green turquoise. Above her the wall suddenly showed a gorgeous view of waves breaking on a beach while the room filled with soft music.
“That’s pretty!” exclaimed Boltzmann. George was momentarily surprised that the enormous ugly robot knew what “pretty” was.
“How did you do that?” asked George, looking at his sofa, which had stayed an unremarkable shade of gray.
“Do what?” said Hero, who didn’t even seem to have noticed.
“Your sofa changed color!” said George. “And the music! And the picture.”
“Oh, that!” said Hero. “It’s a smart house with smart furniture so it reads my mood and changes the environment around me.”
“It’s not changing anything to my preferences,” complained Boltzmann. George thought this was probably a good thing—he had no idea what a house decorated to Boltzmann’s preferences would look like, and at this stage he didn’t really want to know.
“Gets kind of annoying quite quickly,” admitted Hero. “Sometimes I wish the house would stop playing me music and showing me pictures. It never really gets it right. I mean, do I look like a breaking wave to you?”
George felt someone watching him and glanced around just in time to catch Empyrean observing him with a gleaming eye.
He decided to address the robot’s attitude. “Is something wrong?”
“What do you mean?” asked Hero.
“Empy keeps watching me when he thinks I’m not looking,” said George.
“And me,” said Boltzmann with feeling. “And he doesn’t seem to respond to my efforts to connect robot to robot.”
“He’s just like that,” agreed Hero. “His eyes follow you around the room. I wish my guardian would let me get a different model, but she just won’t.”
The robot’s gaze didn’t flicker. But somehow George had the feeling that every detail about him and Boltzmann had been carefully logged away for closer scrutiny later.
“It’s time for your repose,” was Empyrean’s only reply to Hero.
“Don’t you need to have dinner?” asked George hopefully. It had been a long time since his final dehydrated meal on board the Artemis.
“No,” said Hero in surprise. “I have had my nutritional allocation for the day. But, if you want something, we can mix up a smoothie for you, can’t we, Empy?”
“Yes,” said George slowly. “I would like a smoothie. And then I think Boltzmann and I could both go to sleep. If that’s okay with you.” He was getting desperate to get rid of Hero and have some time to himself. Boltzmann, he could see, would be no more use to him tonight—the big scruffy robot was starting to run out of power and needed to recharge. But George, who had traveled across the Universe, experienced massive time dilation in an incredibly fast spaceship, returned to Earth having only had the briefest of contact with his family and best friend during his journey, and now found himself in a world he did not recognize at all, needed time to think.
“Affirmative,” said Empyrean. George held his gaze just long enough to see him give the tiniest of smiles.
*
Much later that night, George was woken by the noise of someone new entering the inflatable home. He and Boltzmann had been tucked up on the two sofas with lightweight blankets, which looked as though they were made of foil. Hero had found George an old jumpsuit belonging to her guardian, who still seemed to have no name. And Empyrean had mixed up a beaker of a gluey-looking substance that, to George’s surprise, had tasted delicious and left him totally full and no longer hungry or thirsty.
“I got your message,” the new arrival murmured to Empyrean.
Boltzmann, who was enjoying a power charge—arranged by Empyrean, to Hero’s amusement, since she had never before known a personal robot that needed to be attached to a power source to recharge—was totally inert and unaware of what was happening in the circular room.
The new arrival definitely seemed to be human—a woman, by the sound of her.
“Is the comms shield up?” she murmured.
“As always. As ever, I am running a fake feed from the inside of this house and a parallel one for you. Currently it shows that you are relaxing in your accommodation allocation in a virtualreality experience, enjoying the analogue world.”
“Such a relief!” She gave a small giggle. She sounded very excited. “This is the only place where I’m free to have my own thoughts! I spend all day forcing myself to have thoughts like Trellis Dump—”
“May he live forever,” interjected the robot solemnly.
“He will if he keeps taking the medications!” replied the woman. “But it’s so bad having to think Trellis is awesome while he shouts at me for not making the sun shine less brightly. You have no idea how stressful it is!”
“Well,” replied Empyrean, “I have spent days erasing things from Hero’s feed that might draw attention from the authorities of Eden. So I think I do know.”
“Yes, you have been the most faithful of guardians.” The woman sighed. “If I hadn’t tracked you down to that trash camp, I would never have been able to keep Hero safe and remain in deep cover at the same time. I would never have chosen to bring a child into this.”
“You’ve done so well,” said the robot. “And we are nearly at the beginning of the end. If only things had moved a little quicker, then Hero could have left the Bubble and entered a world you would wish her to live in. But at least the authorities believed that she struggled with her studies and needed to stay here for the maximum time allowed, a time in which we have been able to help her grow and be more able to face what now lies ahead for her.”
“We’re so close! We’ve nearly done it. My father’s plan—we’ve almost made it happen.” The woman sounded overjoyed.
“Which means that now is the most dangerous time of all,” Empyrean reminded her. “What’s the mood like inside the regime?”
“Scared and suspicious. No one trusts anyone. They’ve raised the threat level again,” said the woman. “We’ve gone from Dumpability to Dumptastic to Dumpothermonuclear.”
“Just as Hero is about to turn nine years old.”
“Don’t you mean nine Dumps of the sun?” said the woman with a giggle.
“Apologies, Minister,” said Empyrean gravely, but George could tell that this was some kind of shared joke.
But the woman didn’t laugh in reply. She had just noticed something.
“What,” she said, in cryogenically cold tones, “is that?” George knew without a shadow of a doubt that she had just spotted him and Boltzmann through the gloomy darkness of the nighttime inflatable home.
“Well, that is a boy,” said Empyrean calmly. “And that is his robot.”
“A boy?” said the woman, in tones that would have frozen the core of the sun. “What is a boy doing here?”
George guessed that the invitation to stay over had not come from Hero’s guardian after all. He tried not to panic. Breathlessly, he waited for Empyrean to respond.
“He is your savior,” said Empyrean.
George exhaled. Empyrean was on his side.
“Excuse me?” said the woman. “Since when did I need a savior?” She sounded very put out.
“Your daughter does,” replied Empyrean. “Her hatchday is only the day after tomorrow, Minister, and therefore you know that the time has come when she must leave the Bubble. To go to Wonder, where she will be beyond our ability to protect her . . . or, if the authorities pay too much attention to our past fiction that her potential is so poor, to a work unit where we would have no more contact with her. And we are aware that the situation has deteriorated faster than we thought. It’s much more dangerous out there than it was when we made our original plan, and your daughter now urgently needs someone to accompany her on a journey to a place of safety. We only have this one chance to get her out—we must get it right.”
This was news to George! He felt that Empy, or whatever his name was, could have told him about this earlier. But the woman replied and he was glad Empy was in the firing line, not himself.
“Yes!” said the woman, her voice coming out with the force of a controlled explosion. “And that person—or robot—is you! You are to leave the Bubble with Hero on her authorized journey to Wonder Academy! Except that she will never arrive, because you will divert the transport to end up instead in na-h Alba, the nonaligned zone, where you will request asylum for her. Meanwhile the machines finally manage to overthrow—”
“Nimu,” said Empyrean kindly. “Daughter of—”
“Shut up!” hissed Nimu. “Don’t you daughter me! This is the plan. Why are you going back on it?”
George gathered from this that Nimu was a force to be reckoned with. He was glad it was Empyrean going toe to toe with her and not him on his first meeting, having just flown across the Universe in order, it now seemed, specifically to disrupt her best-laid plans.
“Do not fear,” said the robot. “Let me start from the beginning.”
The woman took a deep breath. “Where has this boy come from?” she asked.
“The past,” said Empyrean. “This boy comes from the past.”