The facts:

The educated passerby of Windmount were at a loss to explain anything as simple as the art of dancing. They had books on it, of course, and most knew *how* to dance. But that was all done in private or studios.

Lucca and Robo were not dancers. This was clear to all, even the ones who had not studied dance and did not know the slightest thing about the correct movement-to-measures ratio. What was not clear to the finest philosophical and artistic minds was the reason for the dance.

Money was piling at their feet. This was a concrete fact, one that was provable whether your means of doing so was biting the gold or analyzing it under a microscope. What was not so concrete or provable was the reasoning behind it.

The economist faction present at the impromptu session saw the cavorting girl and the robot doing his best to imitate the wild, free-form movements and knew that like all things, art was a commodity. Commodities were precious things, not given away freely. Therefore, they decided, what they were witnessing was a sort of showcase of new talent. Indeed, it was very unlike the recitals and studio shows they were used to paying for.

They knew, too, that new things were valuable. The art, taken together with the fact that it was new art, seemed to them to be something worth paying for. Grudgingly, they opened their wallets and tossed coins at the feet of the dancers. Though they had not expected to pay for seeing someone dance in their path as they walked to their places of study, they did it because not doing it would mean the collapse of the economy and--the economists shuddered to think of this--federally subsidized art.

Most of the crowd were not economists. This did not mean that they were not equally confused regarding the motives of the girl and android. Things seemed to fall into place for them as they noticed the men throwing money at the pair. Ah, they thought to themselves, those men are throwing money. That must mean these people are performers. So, little by little, the rest of the crowd tossed what meager coins they were carrying with them to the pile. They did this purely on assumption that the other men must know what they were doing; and furthermore that what the other men were doing was indeed the correct thing to do. They, like the economists, were not entirely happy with giving up their personal finances for these strangers. Oddly enough, this heightened rather than detracted from the experience. A communal spirit of sacrifice, of helping the needy arose in the group. They decided that they threw the money because the people who even now continued their gyrations needed it, unaware of both their true motives for donating the cash as well as how on-target their perceived reasoning was.

Lucca and Robo, for their part, knew nothing of the crowd's actions nor their real or perceived reasons until a coin, bouncing off what was now accepted by the gathering as the official pile, struck Lucca's leg. She stopped her lead position in the dance, causing an absent-minded Robo to continue and step on her foot once again. She looked down at the coin, her eyes slowly widening as they took in the awesome sight of the golden mound. What first began as token pittances from the economists had grown into a full-fledged heap of wealth. Lucca gazed at it, her mouth open. In the face of such vast amounts of money, the only thing she could do was to think about exactly how much it was. Her eye drifted to the face of one of the coins, and before her rational mind could observe what she was doing, she had already begun to equate the very real coins with an abstract sum of "cash."

Robo looked at her, confused, as the equally bewildered crowd began to disperse. Lucca did not take her eyes off of the stack, instead busying herself with noting the mean currency of each coin, the proportionate thickness of a single wafer to the height of the mass and figuring out exactly how much coinage was in it. Once again, Logos had arrived unannounced.

"Is anything wrong, Lucca?" Robo looked at her curiously.

"Nothing," she said without a pause to think about her response. The action reminded Robo of his "brothers" in the R series. The other opened her eyes, "I was merely thinking." Robo stood there, wondering what to do next. He was about to ask what she had been thinking of, when his eyes caught sight of the heap. The first coins had been thrown into Lucca's helmet on the ground, but no trace of the headgear was now visible. "It appears that we've earned quite a lot of money."

Lucca followed his gaze. "Excellent." She kneeled down and stared at all the different coins. "This will be quite useful."

"I hope it will be enough for a meal, we don't know how much each coin is worth."

Lucca fished around in the pile for her helmet and brought out, putting it on her head in the same motion. Without looking at Robo she asked, "You do not think this will be enough?"

"I don't know for sure. We have never been here before."

"Apparently not." They turned around to see a man who could easily be a grandparent, but still looked strong and healthy. Feelings of guilt and partial fear flickered into Robo. "Windmount does not encourage any of these... these demonstrations. I would ask you to leave, but first we have a few questions to ask of you."

"Who is the "we" you are referring to?" asked Lucca automatically,

"Oh nothing much. Just a group which I am a member of, and would like to know more about outsiders such as yourself."

Lucca's memory wandered back to when her friend Marle had chased by the soldiers of Gaurdia. She had a similar feeling then--the instinctive need to run without asking questions, but it was irrational. The man had done nothing to indicate hostility. Windmount was an amazing city, and she could surely find out more if she followed him. But could he be trusted? If not, she and Robo could defend themselves aptly.

"Very well."

They walked down the streets, ignoring any onlookers staring at them. The buildings ranged from simple white domes to tall bronze spirals. Each place had its own design, its own unique quality, which was a contrast to the nonrandom patterns the streets were laid out in. Lucca noticed that the best structures were made from geometric principles: Triangles tesselated at certain angles, circular pillars and symmetrical blocks supported them; while the ones that were based less on geometry and more on creativity had a weaker structure, but were just as and often more beautiful than the others. "Where are you taking us?" Lucca pushed her heavy glasses up her nose as they had worked their way downward as she walked. "Are you part of Windmount's government?"

The man turned his head towrds her, "What? No, we work among ourselves. We call ourselves the Listener's Guild, and what we basically do is discuss theories on all sorts of broad and specific subjects."

Lucca's eyes glittered slightly in response. "That sounds very interesting. What was your name, by the way?"

"Chilmru. It's an odd name, but I've been given some other aliases if you want to use them," he mentioned in a friendly tone. If any sign of hostility was suspected previously, it was gone by now.

"I'm Lucca, and this is Robo," she said while walking. Robo looked at her but she did not return his glance or look at him at all.

Robo walked alongside the two, maintaining the same walking pace as well as lifting his feet so they wouldn't make as loud a clunking sound as they sometimes did. "How far is your building?" Robo realized his question was somewhat out of place in the conversation, and he regretted saying it.

Chilmru sized up Robo, trying to conclude what he was made of and where he was from, but there would be plenty of time for those questions to be asked later. "Not far, it's only a few more blocks."

Elsewhere, high in the Norerian coastal mountains outside of Windmount, the wind flows around and through the pits and holes in the surface of the summit. Directly in the stream of the wind, the faint outline of a humanoid begins to appear. The outline glows a brilliant silverish-white, bathing the surroundings in an angelic-looking aura.

What appears a moment later, though, is not exactly a messenger of the Maker.

The creature quickly discerned that it was in the mountains above Windmount, the exact coordinates he had entered. It walked over to the cliff and leapt off the edge.

After an hour's worth of climbing and jumping, he had reached the bottom of the range and proceeded into town. He halted at the outskirts and made a quick infrared scan. Four unique paths lead from the range into town. He followed the left-most one first...

To the left, something caught Lucca's eye. She abruptly stopped, staring at the sight in wonder. Robo, Chilmru, and the entourage kept on their way, not noticing that they'd lost a member. If she'd moved, they might have seen her out of the corner of her eye just as she'd seen this, but she was still and remained undetected.

The sight was akin to holy ground in Lucca's view. And indeed, sacred things were entombed here. Words bound six millimeters under hardbound covers were all she could see, row after row of books. Stepping forward slowly, she walked to the center of the vast library and looked around her. It was a circular room, with a tile floor done up in a mosaic of a quill pen and bottle of ink. The thirty-foot walls of the room were stone, and the platforms had been hewn into them rather than erecting wooden bookshelves. Not a space was empty. Lucca had never seen so many volumes in a single place, not even in the biggest library on her world. It was like gazing up at the stars, an infinity of knowledge.

Her eyes flitted from one sign to the next. Here there were books on zoology, over there were some on political theory, in a crate on the floor were stacks of paperback novels. She hardly knew where to begin. Closing her eyes, she reached out a hand and pulled out the first book she saw. Dusting the cover off revealed it to be a work called Engines of Creation, by one K. Eric Drexler. She put it aside and scanned the spines of the next books on the row. Beside the first book was another titled The Applied Science of Magitek Enhancement. It had no author credit. When pulled out, the cover was simply stamped "Classified--Lab Use Only." She carefully replaced it and looked down the row. Heart of Gold by Freinburg. Humanity and Metahumanity by Grendele. On and on, she read down the row. Her eye stopped on one book, not for its title but its author.

Machine and Man--Their Common Future, by Linda and Troy Cicone. The hardbound cover was charred at the edges, and Lucca hypothesized that it had been saved from burning at some point. Pulling it out, she mused on people who couldn't understand genius. Was it jealousy or simple ignorance that caused people to lash out at what they couldn't comprehend? She looked down at the author credit again. It hadn't mattered for Troy and Linda. All that mattered was that they were hounded, driven out of society when they very well could have been its saviors.

She sat on the floor, her spine resting against those of the books, and began to read of two people's courage to advance in the face of an ingrateful and uncomprehending world.

The trail had ended suddenly in the middle of an alley. It was a dead end, and unless the quarry could fly, there was nowhere to go. After hearing the hum of an energy coil springing to life, he realized that it was entirely possible that his quarry had doubled back.

"Exactly who are you, and why are you following me?"

Turning around, he saw that it was in fact an offworlder, but it was not his quarry. The technology he was carrying and wearing was of a comparable level to that the Technorgs had developed, however the style was completely different.

"I demand an answer!"

The offworlder was becoming irritated. A low-level scan revealed that he was a threat, but that he was completely humanoid. Thoughts of absorbing him were terminated when a further scan indicated that he was a DNA3 class species. The serum would be completely inactive in his body, the two-stranded virus just couldn't work with tri- stranded cells.

"Alright, you're toast a--shit!" Before the offworlder could finish his thought, the Technorg had knocked the gun away in a blur of motion and quickly subdued him by pinching a pressure point on the wrist.

Finishing him off was out of the question, as the local law enforcement _might_ be able to overpower him if they tracked him down later. Stripping the man of his technological belongings, he stored them in a trash receptacle two alleys over. They might prove interesting to study after his current mission..

"There was nothing to do after our endeavor but study. Instead of studying our already-perfect technology, though, we read books of sociology. Gradually, we began to realize our mistake.

"People do not appreciate change. They don't realize that unless change happens, unless stagnation is prevented, all is lost. We did our best to promote change, sacrificing ourselves and anything else necessary. Perhaps we did break the law. But we were adhering to a higher law, one that ignores such petty things as statutes and ordinances. They just didn't understand true genius.

"Things will be different this time. We will not be weak. Wherever we go, we will not disobey the law. We will become the law, the only law that matters. The edict of survival of the fittest.

"The shapers of the world, we have discovered in our studies, must not interact with the shaped. They must remain separate, a guiding hand at times. We will construct our dwelling away from civilization wherever we go. And then, we will watch. When we judge the time is right, we will go forth and bring peace to the world by any means necessary. Perhaps it will be by the methods described elsewhere in this book. Perhaps we will be forced to adapt to the problem when it comes. Whatever happens, we shall be prepared. Woe to those who try to stop us."

Lucca closed the book. The first ten chapters were interesting to her as was all knowledge. But the last chapter was more than interesting, it was -right-. That was exactly the reaction she'd come up against, it seemed, every time she tried to make things better. Brick walls and dead ends. Mu was fast approaching, she knew that, but for the first time she wondered whether it was worth the trouble to try and alert other people to the danger. Wouldn't it be better to come up with a plan that would work and just enact it? If other people were necessary, then it could be more efficient to use them instead of enlist their help.

Reality came back to her, and she sighed. There was no way she could use people. She wasn't strong enough. If only there was a way to become powerful enough to strongarm anyone she needed to.

A small rat scurried across the slick surface of her memory. She sat up, bolted wide awake by the recollection. There -was- a way. It would take her a few days to get back, but there most certainly was a way to become strong. To become like Linda and Troy Cicone. And she would achieve it by any means necessary.

The second trail led into a warehouse. Boxes of different sizes were stacked endlessly up to the ceiling, and were scattered about here and there.

The source of the trail had been all over the warehouse, weaving around the various stacks, and even doubling over itself at times. This quarry was either trying to lose him, or was very confused.

A blur of motion flew across a gap just within his perimeter of view. The Technorg moved to intercept, intending to head the runner off at the next gap...

...but when he got there, there was no one in sight.

Quickly, he formulated a search plan that would allow him to cover the surrounding area in the shortest time. Before he could put the plan into effect, however, someone shouted at him from behind: "Bang! Bang! Bang!" The Technorg quickly spun on his heel and hit the target with a stun bolt.

What the Technorg hadn't expected was that the target was a child. After a moment he noticed standing in the center of several boxes was another kid, wide-eyed with terror, who quickly bolted for the exit.

The Technorg looked back down upon the target. The child was human, which made him an excellent candidate, but was also several years away from entering the maturation process, which made absorption problematic at best. Sometimes there were unforeseen reactions with the biological changes in the body.

With nothing more to do here, he left to find the sources of the remaining two heat trails.

Unfortunately, the trail back out of town proved too difficult to pick up. While walking with Chilmru and Robo, she hadn't been paying attention to her surroundings and was now hopelessly lost. Discouraged, she went back to the library to look for a map.

She crossed the threshold, eager to get lost in the shelves again, when she stopped short. While she was away, someone else had entered the library. Her eyes narrowed as she watched the man who had his back turned. How dare he invade her privacy? She crossed the room, her footfalls on the cold mosaic floor alerting the man to her presence.

He turned and smiled pleasantly at her. He looked to be somewhere around twice her age, with close-cropped golden hair and a bristling beard without a moustache. His clothes were uniformly brown and baggy, looking something like the garb of the Earthbound Ones. Yet his manner and bearing were as far removed from those outcasts as possible as he walked coolly toward her, with a clean and unblemished face. "Hello," he greeted her conversationally, as he she were an old friend, "have I seen you before?"

"No," she replied shortly. Realizing that her response may have been less than polite, she hastily amended it to "No, you haven't."

He grinned charmingly at her. "Pleased to make your acquaintence, then. My name is Andian. How do you like my library?" He punctuated the last statement with a sweeping gesture that encompassed the entire room. "I collected all the books myself," he continued as Lucca listened dumbfoundedly. His neck craned as he seemed to try to take in every shelf at once with his eyes. "It took me more time than you can probably imagine, and it's still not as well-stocked as Nyo's. But it's the second-best collection in Windmount, and I'm very proud of it." His eyes followed their invisible track again, settling on Lucca. They squinted a little suspiciously before he said, "It's also closed today. Didn't you read the sign?"

Lucca was at a loss for words. It was going to be a problem enough getting him out when he had been merely polite, if he owned it and the place was closed, running him out like a misbehaving child was unthinkable. But she had to try anyway. Linda and Troy would never let themselves be pushed around this way, she reminded herself grimly. She opened her mouth to speak.

"...No. No, I didn't see it. I apologize." The words were out before she could stop herself. Where had that come from? That wasn't what she had meant to say at all. But it was too late now, Andian was smiling gently and motioning subtly toward the door. She nodded to him and turned, seething inside with rage. It seemed that on her own, she was too weak to accomplish the smallest of tasks. The sooner she made the changes, the better. Determinedly she walked down the corridors of Windmount, eager to leave the city and go on to better things.

Once he had reached the outer limits of the town again, the remaining two heat trails had dissipated. A memory call gave the general direction, but if he were not able to pick the trails up again soon, he would have to resort to other means of finding the Lucca.

After some time, he did find the trails again. The odd thing was that they followed the same path, and when he reached the end they led to a robotic entity.

While backtracking, the Technorg pondered how a single robot could create two distinct heat signatures. It shouldn't be possible.

Passing a library, his visual enhancment scanners picked up something he had missed previously: a single strand of violet hair. While true that the hair could have come from any number of people or animals, the fact that it was on one of the infrared signature trails led him to believe that the Lucca had been here, and could possibly be in the libarary. Intensification of the infrared, and dropping out the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, confirmed that a humanoid lifeform was inside the building. His tactical sub-processor came up with the appropriate response to a closed door immediately.

The Technorg kicked the door of the library inward, ripping it off of its hinges since it was an outward swinging door. The library was empty and only two heat trails remained. Quickly the creature's visual sensors noticed a small violet hair on one of the infrared tracks and began to follow it.

The Lucca should be taken within the hour.

She'd been out of the city proper for almost an hour before she realized that if she didn't tell Robo that she was leaving, he might go after her. And if he did that...it was best to find him first. So she took up her things and turned around, off to find her mechanical friend.

It stood there next to the signpost where they'd arrived, silhouetted in the setting sun. The mountains where Windmount was nestled stood mightily in the background, at once dwarfing and giving stature to the figure's form. The dust path below both of their feet took on a reddish pallor in the dusk, causing the kicked-up dust to radiate eerily. It continued to stand, watching her, taking in every detail. She knew not whether it meant to act or if it was simply noting her the way it noted everything for posterity. Nor did she care. It was like a gift from God to her; she had just been planning to make a trip to the other side of the world to meet just such a being. But here it was in front of her. The same color, same reflective glint, everything she remembered was here. This was her goal.

She took a step forward.

The Technorg, for his part, knew nothing of her intentions or goals. He only knew that his goal stood here in front of him. His scanners worked overtime at assessing the girl. She was so perfect. She had intelligence, slightly above-average physical skills, and at least -some- magic, if the archives had been correct. Any defects she had, such as her poor vision or moralistic viewpoint, would be corrected by the change.

Unexpectedly, the girl began to move toward him. He reacted instantly, bringing his stun weapon up to bear. He did not fire, as she had drawn no weapon yet. She continued to walk toward him, always covered by his internal aiming sights. He stood there and waited, ready to respond to any sudden move she might make.

The sun disappeared behind his head the closer she got, and finally she could clearly see his features. In his own way, he was the most handsome man she'd ever seen. His eyes were beautifully unexpressive and cold, his lips a wonderful bloodless white. She moved up to him and raised her hand to his face, her eyes never leaving his. Her fingers stroked his cheek tenderly, feeling the cracked, dry skin. A feeling something like desire rose up in her and she quickly tried to quash it, not wanting to have everything ruined now. She took one step back, closed her eyes, and steeled her will.

Yes! Take him, you want him! a voice screeched desperately in her head. Do what you know you want to! Now!

Lucca shook her head violently, much to the Technorg's confusion. I most certainly will not. I'm here for one purpose, and one purpose only. Don't confuse me or try to save yourself, it won't work. Her admonition lacked conviction, however. Her other had slipped through the defenses once again, and now threatened to destroy everything she'd come all this way for.

And why did you come all this way, again? Because you wanted it, didn't you? Because you actually had a little desire for something!

Nonsense, she thought irritably. I need it. I need it for...

You need it to do what you want! And that was true, Lucca thought to herself. It was perfectly true, but that didn't mean she had to acknowledge it or listen to anything else her other said. It would all be meaningless, academic, after this one last thing was done.

She threw her hands out toward the Technorg desperately. No more! I'll finish this now! she thought triumphantly. Her eyes wild, as if the demons of hell were right behind her and about to close in, she cried wildly to the creature. "Give it to me! Take me with you! Now, goddammit!"

The Technorg was confused into inaction. He didn't know what he'd expected, but it wasn't this. First the quarry walked toward him without the slightest threat, unlike every human he'd encountered so far on this hunt. Then she moved up to him in such a proximity that they almost brushed up against each other. He was still trying to figure out what the appropriate reaction to this behavior was when she actually touched him. This startled him so much that he actually lowered his his arm that he'd kept trained on her.

Then her behavior became truly bizarre. She stepped away from him and appeared to suffer a migraine headache. Her lips moved silently as if she was reading a truly engrossing novel, and then her eyes snapped wide open. The mechanical man knew he had only a rudimentary, academic knowledge of emotions, but he recognized paralyzing fear in her emerald eyes. She tottered toward him and screamed a request with such intensity that anyone would think her very life was at stake.

Fortunately, it was a request that the Technorg recognized and was eager to fulfill. Any reasons, any fears, were quite unimportant. She was here and she wanted it. He raised his hand once again and a small sterling needle protruded from beneath the skin of one fingertip. At last, the moment had arrived. He was inches away from achieving his goal.

Lucca wanted to scream at the Technorg's plodding slowness, but her mouth was dry and her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth like a spoon in molasses. His arm was moving at a rate of speed she'd previously only seen before in drawbridges. The very fact that she couldn't gauge just how fast his arm was going was a sign that this had to end quickly. Her eyes darted to and fro. The sun was now a huge ball of purple fire, just beginning to slip behind the uppermost peaks. It's so pretty, she reflected, and with that thought knew she was lost.

Lucca's hands flew to her holstered Wondershot and tugged at the weapon, trying to free it from the notch on the belt. In one jerking motion, she drew it forth and brought it to bear. She managed to squeeze off one round before the Technorg noticed what was happening, but it was her exquisitely bad fortune to miss. The Technorg was slightly confused, but he knew what the correct response was to a direct assault. Lucca had dropped to her knees immediately after firing the first shot, and now ducked and rolled as he let fly a short barrage of stun bursts, pelting the dust and causing a series of radiant dust devils in the maroon sunlight.

She came up again firing. Most of the shots went wide without proper aim, but one bolt of energy caught him in the elbow, sending golden sparks spraying across the landscape. The arm with the needle and taser went limp, rendered ineffectual by Lucca's shot. She grinned a terrible smile of hatred and rose shakily to her feet.

"Bet you didn't know you were going to kill someone, whoever you are," she sneered. "I know Technorgs try to avoid murder when possible, so I thought I'd inform you. If I hadn't arrived just in time, it might have been the death of me. Somehow, I doubt you care much about killing," she said, barely masking the fury underneath her tone.

"Guess what?" she asked, now making no effort to hide her true feelings as she raised the Wondershot in her shaking hands to his temple, positioning the barrel on the bridge of his nose between the eyes, letting some of his flaking skin fall away. He seemed to be caught in some loop of indecision, his eyes were blank as ever but now held some quality of confusion.

"Neither do I," she hissed, pulling the trigger. It made a quiet electrical noise as the tiny generators took their fuel from the internal sunstone and let loose an equally small shot of heat energy. The insubstantial blast made only the faintest of hissing noises as it burned the parched skin off of the Technorg's temple and passed through the rest of his skull, fusing the delicate silicon wiring of his brain together instantly and shutting the automaton off permanently.

In Lucca's opinion, the only negative aspect was the clutter of the road that his corpse would present.