She looked fairly lost at the news. She sat down slowly in her chair and blinked once, twice, maybe just because she knew that was one thing her body was supposed to accomplish to appear normal. Maybe it was just automatic. We never knew. Ever since that day though, she's been frozen in time, she has never moved from that chair, even her position, sitting on it sideways with one arm across the top of the back rest, has remained unchanged. How she did it, just turned off, I don't know.

We were running on a gang of underage teenage boys who thought they knew how to get away with a simple case of smash and grab. Unfortunately, they forgot to take their fingerprints with them, their hair follicles, the condensation from their breath on the windows, several shoe prints, a weapon, and some gravel from the outside which they had brought with them in the tiny wells of the soles of their shoes. It was a work of minutes. We put all the physical evidence we had into a small plastic bag, things like hair and water extracted from the condensation on the windows, and their skin samples in trace amounts found in the fingerprints. The DNA machine printed out a neat list of everyone's genetic material found in that sample, including names, addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and, if they had it, car registration and accompanying driver and criminal records. It was all compacted into shorthand that police could easily decipher. The sirens were put out and we picked them all six of them up, one by one.

Funny thing was, back at the station, it seemed as though none of them really had any idea what had gone on in the random smash and grab. They said they weren't there, everyone single one of them, which is nothing unusual, but the way in which they spoke seemed one of disbelief, as if they knew they hadn't been there, but couldn't prove how, because their memory was deceiving them. I then presented them with the genetic material and its accompanying results, explaining the shorthand of the DNA machine, and since it is uncontestable in court, they had to agree that they had been there within the period that the machine had dictated. I was becoming frustrated with their surprisingly unified protestations of innocence, that they could not remember committing the act, even though picked up by separate squad vehicles and never once seeing or speaking to each other after their arrests. So I casually dropped a hint to each of them about the weaknesses of their various co-offenders and left the room, allowing them time to stew in their own cowardice and fear at who might break first.

Robert Marks was the first and the last of the group to drop. I came back into the room and his head was down on the cold metal table, body shaking while he wept. They were all of them just 17 years old and his eyes, when he looked up at me, screamed his innocence. I was not moved; I had seen guilty men put on acts just as convincing.
'We did it, then.'� He spoke in his thick cockney, smelt like cigarette smoke but not of whiskey, seemed like he would have been an all right kid, in that part of town anyway. Wouldn't have stayed in school, few of them ever do, flying off the walls with the rest of their crowd, but he didn't seem like the main perpetrator. A follower, maybe. And the weakest link.
'Who was there?'�
'The boys, I guess.'�
'You guess? Robert, if you're not going to be straight with me, this won't look good when we're trying to figure out how we should punish you.'�
'I know, I know, I'm trying to explain it. But it's hard, innit? I dun know where we came from, why we was there, but we had'ta done it. I can't even say hows many o'us there was, and I dun remember who exactly was there. Don't ask me why, cos I don't remember.'�
It went on like this for an hour. Every time I approached a question his memory would fail him. He must have done it, he kept repeating, the machine doesn't lie, but he couldn't remember how, or why, or when, or what he'd stolen. The police hadn't found any of it in his room. None of the other boys had cracked, obstinately sitting tight, accustomed to the ways of the police station.

The DNA machine didn't lie and the boys were booked regardless of their lack of confessions and Robert's failure of memory. Robert did, however, get a slightly lighter sentence due to his co-operation with the police. It was his first offence, and afterwards, he seemed wary of the boys down in Copper Street who didn't care for him anymore.

Just before this incident there had been a new member of the workforce introduced to us, a desk worker, pretty, intelligent, quiet, and her memory processor was light years ahead of our old computers. The Police Evidence Data Account was a system that served as the super-memory for the police, able to call up every old file in the blink of an eye, revolutionising the old way of typing in a search on a servant computer and finding several examples which would fit your query. This new machine was not a servant computer. She thought for herself. Anyone could ask Peda a question, to look for a specific case or any with a specific act or ruling, and she would find exactly what you wanted, gifted with the new AI intelligence. Rather than just matching up responses to your question, she understood what you were asking for in a way which completely outstripped all data machines of her time. She was the link between the human and the artificial sets of intelligence, and she unified them very well. She could process and carry all genetic evidentiary information with her and repeat it when required.

I first met Peda when I was into my fifth year as an officer, and she was alarmingly pretty. All hardware technicians still cling to the games console era of computer characters as freakishly beautiful beings with bountiful breasts and tiny waists, blonde hair and doe-like blue eyes, and this was Peda. She was not human, the artificially-warmed, plastic feel of her skin was enough to tell you that, but lonely desperate men had been driven to paying for 'cold' sex before. Robots like Peda understood sexual deviancy and the proper morals required to fit into society, but for robots it was not something to which they seemed to give its proper aura of caution. Sex was an area of human life; it was not a robot component, but the money from this, from acts meaningless and easy for a robot to accomplish, could always supply the finances needed for back-up drives, spare parts, an upgrade to a faster, more efficient computer system for themselves. The programmable desire for improvement was usually installed into every simulated being.

Peda was not a sexual deviant. She found better pay and more electrically stimulating work as an officer of the law, for which she was programmed. She had pre-installed Coffee&Biscuits v.3.7 and Laughter! v.12.8, and she sat around quite happily with my fellow officers, sipping hot black coffee with sugar, and dipping her chocolate biscuit with practised, mechanical regularity.

Peda was useful and invaluable, so I was more than delighted to hear that we were soon to get another one like her. His name was Edd, the Evidence Documentation Distributor. His RAM was almost as large as Peda's but his AI abilities were somewhat heightened compared to hers. His expressions and feelings were more expansive; sometimes it looked as though he could really almost become angry, before computer logic overrode all insensibility programming and he became the calm robot he always had been. Edd was a figment of a female hardware technician's gamer fantasies; tall, with jet black hair that sat everywhere on his forehead, a soft tan, and crystal clear blue eyes which gave the illusion that he seemed to look deeper into you than any robot could possibly have done.

He was basically a walking printer and administration centre. If we needed a warrant straight away and we were at a crime scene, we could call a judge, get the warrant and have it in our hands without moving away from the scene of the crime. It made raids and arrests more efficient and effective. The prints issued from just below his ribcage, or the mould of what his ribcage would be, had he been human. He knew when he was running out of ink and refilled when necessary by dipping his smallest finger into an open bottle of purposely-made printer ink. If we needed a document shown up on a screen Edd would project it through his eyes and onto the wall, holding perfectly still for hours on end and changing to the next slide on command. He had downloaded Sarcasm v.6.9 and seemed to enjoy it, so he never moved onto the latest Laughter! program. He also seemed content with Anger&Rage 1.2, a very late development in the computer world, and having satisfied the basic requirements of social interaction and acceptance, downloaded no more, finding ways of improving himself by other means, like regular and meticulous self-cleaning and hardware updating.

Peda and Edd were specifically designed for each other. The robot technicians responsible for Peda had been asked to create a second robot for our station. We found things even easier to accomplish. If Peda was asked to get hard documentation on a DNA report she had stored in her massive memory bank, she would connect her palm to Edd's, their mutual docking port, and print out her information through him in a matter of seconds. If too great a distance separated them, Peda could email the information, although with the clogged nature of cyberspace in those days, simple physical connection was the fastest and simplest way to get the task done. While Peda could recall any known available file on record, Edd could erase unnecessary information from anyone, anywhere, as long as he had the proper authorisation. It also worked to a degree on humans, although he was specifically programmed never to use his erasing program on any human person under any circumstance. Edd was such a powerful erasing device on robots that people were pre-warned and stayed well away from him while he was cleaning up his counterpart. Such strong electronic signals could also meddle with the brain cells of innocent bystanders.

Peda was put in a partnership with me and from day one I began to cherish working with her. Her responses were immediate due to her staggering RAM capacity. She didn't want to know about my personal life, which I preferred to keep to myself in a police station full of gossips, and she knew what case in her huge database would be useful to us and which would not. She could speed-read at a page a second, and it only took her a whole second because she had to manually turn the page, that in itself taking up time, and report back anything useful to me, all the while storing every single word she had read in that staggering memory bank of hers.

So when we came upon this bizarre case of lost memory, Peda began to struggle with the concept.
'Memory is memory.'� She said, simply, as if it explained everything. I tried to tell her about the slightly more unreliable nature of human memory, and she blinked, processing.
'Humans have an incredible ability to store material information in their brains. It should be utilised. It is inefficient. If they have created a machine as efficient as me, they must know how to improve themselves.'�
'We improve ourselves by producing robots to increase our efficiency.'�
She seemed satisfied with a simple answer and I walked off to get a coffee. Another great thing about Peda was that she could not get offended. She understood manners and was programmed to use them, but if anyone swore at her, spat at her, called her a slut, whore, tried to attack her, nothing could enrage her and she would stay as calm as ever and thus torture the person, or more often the perpetrator, into submission.

If it were possible, Peda seemed to enjoy her job as much as a robot could enjoy anything. She had only recently downloaded Interest v.1.1, a new program, and got Edd to erase her Boredom 5.6, since she had got bored of the program itself ever since she had had Curiosity 7.8 installed. She was now brimming with an endless list of questions, and since they were not about myself, a subject I never dwelled on, I answered them while we were out driving in the squad car on various jobs.

'Why is sexual intercourse so important to the contentment of humans?'�
I paused for thought, trying to explain it in a way a robot might comprehend.
'Because it is a social and emotional releaser; we like doing it. It makes us feel good.'�
'Do you like doing it?'�
I gave her a look her social perceptor understood to be Annoyance and she didn't wait for an answer.
'What do emotions feel like? I will download Female Emotions 10.0.'�
I shot her a Wary Glance.
'Why would you want to do that? Peda, you'd be so god damn annoying if you had a woman's feelings. You would keep bugging me with your sensitivity issues and how I don't listen to you enough. You'd insist on driving. Don't get it, it's not worthwhile.'�
'But it is an investment. If I download this program, even though it is expensive, I should be more compatible with the human vessel, I could engage people more, I could extract confessions more perfunctorily.'�
'You are perfunctory now. You'd be anything but perfunctory if you had that program.'�
'What about Pain 12.3?'�
'No! Don't get that program. You don't know what pain is and you don't want to know, Peda. It hurts. Very much. Much like emotions would hurt, were you to have them.'�
'Well, I have to choose one or the other for the moment because both are very expensive.'�
I blinked in disbelief, avoiding an old lady with a shopping trolley as it wheeled her across the road in the front seat, towards her waiting car, already automatically started. Much as Peda was willing to drive, I still forbid it, knowing the SatNav systems in any robot were never any good.

'You robots want to experience pain? Don't you know the definition of it? It is not a good thing. Humans don't like it. If we could, we'd probably stop feeling it.'�
Peda looked towards me again, trying to decipher my body language with her analysing gaze.
'We don't understand what feels 'good' and what feels 'bad'. We don't feel. So of course, if we have the requisite programs, Curiosity being one of them, we feel an inherent desire to improve ourselves through experiencing human emotions to the greatest degree possible. This includes all negative experiences. Without them, we miss an integral part of our understanding of the human race.'�
I merely nodded, knowing there was nothing logical I could offer to change her decision. This kind of argument made sense to robots.
'Enjoy Pain, then.'�
'I may not. Emotion would be of greater benefit to me. I think I shall download Emotion 10.1 first.'�
'I thought it was 10.0?'�
'They upgraded the program 2.6 seconds ago.'�
'I see.'�
We pulled into the site of the crime we had been called to. It was not 200 metres from the site of the smash and grab. We were a suburb, a mere twig on a branch of the mega metropolis; a murder was not a common thing, and there were two other squad cars present, one carrying Edd. I thought of the sickened feeling in my stomach, churning at the prospect of what lay ahead.
'Do me a favour; don't download Emotions today.'�
Peda blinked.
'Too late. I downloaded it 128.9 seconds ago.'�
I cursed, but we moved towards the crime scene anyway.

It was a young boy of about 17. He lay on a pile of garbage behind an abandoned newsagents store, run out of business years ago. His body was rigid, his fingers lying simply beside him. He had red curls spattered with a large quantity of blood that sat back away from his face. Hat hair. The cap lay about five metres from where he had fallen back from the force of the assault. He had been shot in the face at very close range, and it was one of the most brutal, cold things I had ever seen. DNA would identify him, and the parents would probably be strongly advised against viewing their dead son.

The coroner lifted up the DNA machine and looked at the name.
'Henry Wesson. Seventeen years old. Residence: 52A, Copper Street. No known criminal record.'� He punched the machine off angrily, disappointed at such a wasted life.

I shall never forget the moment I turned to Peda, because it was the first time I ever saw sadness, sickness even, on her face.
'What have they done?'� She murmured quietly. Obviously Emotions was overwhelming her system. It had not been the best time to introduce herself to the reality of human functions.
'Someone killed him with a sawn-off by the looks of it. No one called the police, obviously, because we aren't all that well liked around here, and guns going off aren't uncommon. I'll extract the bullet back at the lab and run it through the Identifier.'�
'Anything on the killer?'�
'We have some fibres found on the ground near where the boy was shot, but they don't register on the DNA machine. I'll take them back to the lab and Identify them too.'�
'Any chance this boy could have been with the gang from the smash and grab?'�
'I'd say it's likely. As you can see, he's wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and sturdy running shoes, and the weather has been right freezing since Tuesday morning, the day after you collared them all. But surely if they had feared for him they would have said something.'�
'If they remembered him at all. The one kid who broke couldn't recall much, and the others seemed defensive, but still bewildered.'�
Peda remained mute throughout this entire conversation, but I knew even though she was overcome with the basic experience of feeling, she had registered every word, somewhere in her recording system.
'Peda.'�
'Yes.'�
'Turn it off. We need you on the ball today. Deal with the new program later.'�
Peda blinked; it was done. The horror faded from her face and she was herself again, blank and simple, just the way I liked her.
'Emotions 10.1 saps my battery supply.'�
'It saps ours, too.'�

Back at the station, Mike, the resident lab rat, put the mysterious fibres into the Identifier. We had our answer in a matter of seconds; nylon, simple nylon. There were only two strands of fibres, and we had been lucky to recover them at all. The crime scene had been sheltered by three walls, and so had provided a wind break. Peda searched her database, her eyes glazing over as she processed internal information.
'There are several accounts of strangulation by nylon cord. Was he strangled before he was shot?'�
'Coroner says death by gun shot wound. No other injuries present.'�
She began to reel off keywords and I waited patiently for anything that might be of use to us.
'Synthetic polymer, peptide bonds, coal, water and air, nylon allergies, nylon fabric, nylon packaging, nylon toothbrush bristles, nylon parachutes, nylon hair, nylon skin...'�
'Nylon hair and skin?'�
Peda blinked and looked at me.
'Yes. I myself have nylon hair and skin.'� She put out her arm and I touched the rubbery, dully warm outer-covering of my partner.
'I need a transaction of your whereabouts for the whole of this week.'� Peda nodded, and immediately began reciting her movements starting from last Tuesday. The boys had robbed the store on Monday night, and the coroner said the boy had been shot at least 16 hours ago. Peda had been in the police station the entire time or else accompanying me, or so her records had shown. Truth is, despite her unhuman state of being, I trusted her. I had come to notice that robots began to gain personalities of their own, despite the fact that they were merely blank sheets with downloadable human assets. Each robot experienced the world in an individual way and thus their views of that world were bound to be different. Peda had been treated well, had not seen much violent crime, and was not an amoral machine, merely a logical one. It was not her fibres we had found. Why I had suspected her I didn't know, since the fibres were black.

We emailed Edd and told him he had to stay at the police station for the night. Robots do not ask why, they obey, and Edd went to the Robot Storage Room and put himself away. Peda was under strict instructions to communicate as per normal with him, but say nothing about the suspicions we had, nor make available to him any further information regarding the murder of Henry Wesson.

The boys had been robbing a computer parts store. Hard drives, huge memory disks, printer ink, upgrading programs with monumental capacities. The shop had been robbed before, kids wanting to get the latest game or quicker Internet speed without paying for something they couldn't afford. We had not suspected a robot itself had been involved.
Peda voluntarily turned Emotions 10.1 back on, insistent that she would not learn without experience.
'I feel I need to.'� She said, and smiled. 'I feel.'� Her artificial innocence was angelic.

From studying Edd's Internet interactions, we knew he had only ever downloaded Sarcasm, Ambition 3.7 and Anger&Rage. Peda herself had downloaded Sarcasm and rarely used it, but found it invaluable to her sense of understanding the human being.
'As if I ever need to use it.'� She grinned, giving her Jokes 3.9 a good workout.
'What about Anger&Rage?'� I asked, ignoring her lack of GoodTiming programs.
'That program?'� Emotions was really kicking in to give her tone of speech a boost. Her hand came up and waved the subject away dismissively.
'I do not currently find it to be of use. It is, of course, a seminal part of the human psyche, but I had heard on the Robot Integrated Chat system that is was not as yet a program on which a robot could rely.'�
Peda had this annoying habit of talking in the third person about robots when she meant herself, because a robot couldn't specifically rely on anything; it did not rely. It was a mere formality of speech to convey the right sense of meaning.
'What was wrong with it?'� I demanded. She looked hurt at my gruff intonation, but then I had been used to her inability to be offended.
'It was, as a I said before, unreliable. It had a tendency to override Asimov's Three Laws.'�
She meant, of course, the three laws of robotics, which eventually culminated in the rule that no robot was ever permitted to harm a human.
'But if robots knew this why would they be able to download it?'�
'I only heard it in chat systems. If you weren't connected, you wouldn't know that it was a dangerous program. If you had Ambition 3.7 or Amoral 7.9, which it is illegal to have, these programs would also tend to override those laws to complete their purpose. Anger&Rage is basically an overriding mechanism, like a bug, because that is exactly what human rage is. It overrides everything else.'�
'So, if Edd couples Ambition 3.7 and Anger&Rage 1.2, the latest version and not all that well developed, what is likely to happen?'�
Her probabilities prompter churned out facts and figures in a matter of seconds.
'It is not a good recourse for improvement.'� She said slowly, the realisation dawning on her quick operating systems. 'But I only know this because of Web chat. Edd would not know. He is connected to the Internet, but he erases, he does not remember everything that it is not necessary to know to complete his job. He is constantly erasing.'�
'Could he erase human minds to forget his presence?'�
Peda blinked, once again processing probabilities rapidly.
'Yes, it is. But it would not be completely effective, it would be insufficient to create complete memory loss. He would not be able to replace the lost memory, merely damage most of it.'� Her face once again sank into one of horror. Her programs were working overtime. Emotions 10.1 was burning every fuse. It was dangerous for a robot to function so fully. Her skin was almost hot to touch; it meant her artificial warming underlay was being overworked, and neglected by a RAM which could not support everything at once. It was Information Overload, a dangerous symptom of robot distress.
'Peda, look at me. Turn Emotions off for the moment.'�
'No, I can't, I won't! I can't make myself not feel again!'� She burst into tears, or began sobbing at least, since she had no tear ducts, and left the room.
I cursed loudly, and no one heard me. The Emotions program was going to destroy her, and she would let it. Her Emotions forbid her, her Feeling stopped her from wanting to turn it off. And so she was trapped in a conundrum every human wished they had; the ability to switch hurting off.

I knew I had to interview the boys, and I took an unhappy looking robot with me. Again, we picked them up one by one and took them to the station. Robert Marks looked like he had a few old bruises still lingering on his body, but he never complained.

'I don't 'member nothing, I told ya this before!'� he shouted, frustrated and lonely. Evidently, the boys on Copper Street hadn't been treating him well ever since he had spoken to the police.
'You must remember something, Robert.'�
'Stop calling me that stupid name. Me name is Marks, Marks it always 'as been. Lemme go.'�
'Marks. How many boys were there that day?'�
'Six.'�
'No, I told you there were six. How many do you think were there?'� He looked up at me with a gut full of hatred, and I didn't blink. I leaned towards him confidentially.
'Look, the sooner you answer my questions, the sooner we'll be out of here. I'll make it look as if you were as holed up as the rest of them, and they won't bother you any more.'�
Marks seemed comforted by this, and his mouth began to betray him.
'Are they talkin'?'� he demanded bluntly, but quietly.
'They soon will be.'� I thought of Peda and her new emotive intuition. It came in handy at this point, a beautiful robot appealing to uneducated, daft young boys.
Marks sighed.
'Look, I think there was seven of us, but you've only got six of us, ain't you? I keep thinking red, a lotta red, but its makin' no sense. Something like being scared, like breaking glass because I had to, and then runnin', real fast like. Running so fast a bullet could no' get me.'�
I thought of the sawn-off shotgun. We were onto something here. Marks wasn't looking at me, he wasn't looking anywhere, he was inside his own head, trying to remember and reconstruct his half-mangled memory. Edd could erase data, but human memory was much more complex and far less systematic.
'I want the biggest hard drive, the best upgrading system. I want a new fan as well. Get them for me and return here. He can wait with me.'� Marks spoke in a hollow monotone, but he was not speaking for himself. It was the voice of Edd, the voice of demands. Terrified acquiescence, one lone young boy at the back of a shop. Edd knew the criminal system back to front, and he knew better than to go into the shop himself. He needed people to do the job for him, and leave their scent trail behind them. He wanted new things, fast, and this was the way to get them, fast-tracking the money earning method. Anger&Rage and Ambition overrode the three laws of robotics, illegal and dangerous programs that a human would have known better than to use. He didn't take a sawn off shotgun. He just took a few bullets and used his arm. Robots had been known to kill bears with arm-thrown bullets.

'I don't want to do this.'� I whispered to Marks on impulse, following the trail. He looked at me again with hollow eyes, unseeing. Edd was bursting through, his dirty nylon fingerprints all over the minds of six damaged young boys.
'You will do it, or I will not let your friend go. I will not let you go.'�
'But we don't want to!'� I murmured softly, not wishing to wake Marks from his trance.
Marks blinked, then jumped as the bullet ricocheted through his mind. One bullet, and they were running to meet demands, running from an AWOL robot, circumventing the classic laws they had come to know and trust. And when they returned with the stolen goods, leaving their fingerprints and the impression of a guilty conscience behind them, they forgot all about that night, and who was there, and how it had come to be.

I gave Marks a lemonade to drink and closed the door quietly behind him. Peda was waiting for me outside.
'All five of the boys have had nightmares about bullets, and all of them were pathologically afraid to go near me. They know the truth, but their minds do not.'�

I sighed. Peda caught the look and, for once, understood the impulse.
'Do you think it's enough?'� I asked her. I generally didn't ask her questions, but I desired a second opinion.
'It is enough. If I had an erasure device myself I would remove the programs.'�
'That wouldn't erase what happened. You know what I have to do, Peda.'�
'Yes, I do.'� Her wide blue eyes hesitated painfully, and then glanced away.
'Did you download Pain as well?'� My tone was almost gentle, sympathetic. She nodded, mute.
'It hurts so much. The truth is a painful thing.'�
'Such is life.'� It was all I could think of to say.

I immediately called the Director of Robot Operations in the city. It was an emergency call and I had dragged him away from his golf game. But when he heard what had happened, he understood my urgency.
'Very well. I'll start emergency shutdown procedure. You know what to do.'�
'Thank you, sir.'�

Peda physically restrained Edd while a second servant robot with no AI capabilities was brought in to manually disengage him. We couldn't allow humans near him for fear he would wreak havoc with their memories. Peda herself was damaged in the struggle as Ambition overrode Ed's basic robot principles and he struggled for his own survival over the safety of his creators. Yet finally, we managed to maneuver the servant robot to unscrew the right bolts, open the hard metal door underneath the layer of skin on his chest, and switch of the Central Processing System. He screamed as though he'd been shot, every noise processor going off at once, and then fell completely limp. As a precautionary measure, even the unit itself was removed. There was an irrational fear prevalent in the office that a robot that dangerous, and a robot so greatly resembling a human, could have determined how to operate without the CPU in place.

Peda let him go unceremoniously, having no concept of emotional attachment at present, and Edd fell like a rag doll to the office floor. Everyone emerged from their safe places, relieved that the threat had been removed. Still, I noticed the wary glance everyone shot Peda and I'm sure, with her social perceptor still functioning normally, she noticed it too.

'Evidence Data memory erased.'� She muttered, in a monotone voice, then snapped back into herself again.
'You've lost all the Evidence Data?'� I cried, shaking her. Our efficiency in work would be pathetic. Work levels would fall dramatically, along with productivity and general worker satisfaction. We hadn't realised we needed Peda so dearly.
'Evidence Data?'� she blinked, unable to recall such a concept. It was gone. Edd had destroyed her purpose. We could always get it back again, but I knew that was a pointless act. We were going to lose her anyway.
'By now you've probably received the Web bulletin.'� I said as a precursor to bad news. Peda did not blink.
'My communications processor is currently malfunctioning. I am not able to get in contact with the Internet or Web-based chat.'�
'You have to be turned off, Peda. You're not safe for us anymore.'�

For just a moment, I truly felt sorry for a creature that couldn't really hurt, love, rage, hate, or be pitied. It was all artificial experience and plastic reconstruction. But she had, in a way, become human to me, and had humanised herself in my presence, so that I grew to appreciate every new program she installed. I was going to miss her presence, her usefulness, her complete disinterest in my private life. I would be given a human partner who would badger me, who would get angry and annoyed with me, who would annoy me in return, but who would feel what a robot could only simulate. Yet I knew how I would miss her.

Peda blinked as she processed. Emotions 10.1 still worked well enough for her to feel fairly lost at the news. She didn't understand human farewell rituals; she sat down on the chair, her arm resting on the top of the back of the chair, and began to shut down, closing off all her programs, senses, sight, hearing, feelings. Just when I thought she was gone, she blinked once, twice, as if to take her last glimpse of a world she had enjoyed downloading, and then the animated spark in her eyes was snuffed out.

Ever since that day, she's been frozen in time. No one at the office really wanted to get rid of her. Despite being suspicious and afraid of her potential for a few weeks after Edd's disposal, we did secretly want her back. Work was far less proficient and the animated, inhuman simplicity of Peda was something we had enjoyed when co-workers became too personal for our tastes. So we let Peda sit in her chair, to wait for the day when robots would be considered safe for human use and unable to contradict the three laws of robotics under the strict new robot regulation scheme. So far it's been a decade, and the light in Peda's eyes is still waiting to be rekindled. She sits there and silently waits for the day when humans, the stupid, fallible creatures that we are, can create her perfection.

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