Morten had been alone in his flat for twenty minutes.
His shovel twitched uneasily. He had tried to piece together everything that had just happened – to make sense of it all. But the more he tried to think, the more confused Morten became.
Not nineteen minutes ago, a hovership had arrived at his shattered window to carry Harmony Highshine (who looked like a human, until she stepped inside her other case, which looked like a robot) along with his damaged Prometheus case and the human, Gnat Brightside, to her Ivory Tower. Moments later, another hovership arrived for the mayor’s deputy, Domo, and his cargo – Scrap (core and case, but separated) and Paige (who had been shot in the head by Harmony and was almost certainly dead), to convey them who-knows-where.
It was all very confusing.
On the one hand, Morten was happy to be his old self, and happy to be free of the ’Bot Bouts. But Harmony Highshine seemed resolved that he would need to become his old new self, Morten Prometheus, again, which baffled him even more than her returning his former case. Then again, Morten had never known how to say “no” to Harmony Highshine. She had always been the clever one, even back then. She had always had bright ideas and big plans, and she had a way of making robots think that her ideas were the best ideas – her plans the best plans. After all, it had taken her only a matter of months to convince every robot in New Hull to risk everything and revolt against the human colonists. It was as if her plans took on a life of their own. And now Somewhere 513 was the first free robot world in the galaxy.
All part of the Plan, she would say.
Surely, Morten thought, everything that he’d just witnessed was also part of Harmony Highshine’s Plan, even if he didn’t understand it. The humans … the hunter … the King of the Robots, no less! He had even seen Harmony’s strange case-within-a-case. Why model herself after a human, he wondered? Of all the robots he’d ever met, none had less time for human beings than Harmony. Now not only did she look human, but she’d taken Gnat. What did she plan to do with her? Kill her, like she’d killed Paige? What had made his friend so cold-cored?
Morten watched the hoverships disappear into the night and felt a strange tremble in his core. It was how he always felt around Harmony. Strange, excited, electrified and scared.
After so many confusing, unhelpful thoughts, Morten decided the best thing he could do for his brain-frame was to shovel.
There was plenty of shovelling to be done since his flat had been all but destroyed. Morten moved around the front room systematically, shovelling things into piles according to how badly they’d been damaged. He created small piles of things, some more blackened than others, with no clear idea of what he was going to do with them. Some objects were too cumbersome for a single shovel-bot to shovel with any degree of success – his sofa … his giant charging battery … the hunter’s flight-cycle. He’d think about what to do with them another time. As a shovel-bot, he had vowed not to worry about what he couldn’t shovel, only about what he could. But shovel as he might, he couldn’t shake his nagging unease – couldn’t stop thinking what had happened to Scrap and the humans, Gnat and Paige – couldn’t help but wonder if what Harmony did to them was ruthless and wrong, even if it was all part of the Plan.
It was in that moment of troubled contemplation that Morten shovelled what looked like a small orange cylinder. After a moment, he realized what it was.
Paige the human had offered him her armguard for his toy bear. What did she call it, a “core tracer”? He was about to shovel it into the pile he had mentally marked “miscellaneous”, when he looked down at it.
On the core tracer’s tiny screen, countless lights flickered faintly. Cores, Morten decided. Hundreds of cores, each representing one of Somewhere 513’s mechanical inhabitants.
But one light on the screen stood out. It was bright, and steady, and constant.
Morten spoke the words aloud.
“King of the Robots.”