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The former President of the USNA lived in a northern suburb of Columbus, a place called Westerville. Koenig’s home was builton a low bluff overlooking the now-truncated Scioto River. Gray’s robot flier set him down on a broad, open patio above theriver where he was met by a trio of security robots who checked his ID and scanned him for hidden weapons.

Alex Koenig met him at the door.

“Good to see you again, Admiral.”

“Good to be—”

He stopped in mid-sentence. He’d just seen the woman in the entryway at Koenig’s back. She looked a lot younger than the grayingKoenig and was jaw-droppingly beautiful . . . long blond hair, blue eyes, and a very ordinary sweater and jeans. Somehow,she managed to come across as far more sexy and elegant than that flashing young woman he’d noticed back in the park.

Koenig grinned. “Ah. I don’t think you’ve met Marta . . . my companAIon.”

Marta looked completely human—stunningly so—but Gray’s in-head software had pinged her as she came into the room and was readingher now as a gynoid.

As far back as the twentieth century there’d been imitation humans—sex dolls—designed purely for recreation. By the first decade of the twenty-first, for about $10,000, there’d been artificial female-lookingsex partners, extremely expensive dolls with warm skin, a heartbeat, and a chest that moved as though she were breathing. They hadn’t said much—frankly, they’djust lain there—but plenty of men driven by galloping hormones had bought the things to fulfill their sexual fantasies.

In less than another century, progress in AI and advanced robotics had led to artificial sex partners of both sexes that couldmove on their own and carry their part of a decent conversation. As artificial intelligence grew more and more humanlike,the more sophisticated gynoids became known as companAIons—companion AIs.

“Your companAIon?” Gray asked. “I didn’t know . . .”

“Not many do,” Koenig said, grinning at Gray’s discomfiture. “When I was President, I had to be real careful about letting anyone know. A lot of people are still squicky about this sort of thing.”

“Uh . . . yeah.”

Gray didn’t consider himself squicky—not if he understood the odd word correctly—but he was also unashamedly a pervert, at least as determined by current social custom. In modern USNA culture, having only one spouse—being monogamous in a culture where polyamory and line marriages were the norm—was seen as just slightly perverse.

Gray had grown up in the Manhatt Ruins, however, the flooded wreckage of old New York City. There, life had been on the ruggedside, and people tended to bond closely with a single partner so they could take care of one another.

But Gray had lost Angela, his wife. She’d had a stroke, and her treatment and recovery had robbed her of any feelings shemight ever have had for Gray.

He still missed her now, damn it, almost thirty years later.

But just as people in the mainstream culture tended to look down on monogies, many looked down on human simulations. Therewas an ongoing battle over their status. Did they have free will? If so, even if they were programmed to enjoy what they were,their status was closely akin to slavery. And AI was good enough now that any test measuring their powers of self-determinationand self-awareness showed them to possess the same degree of free will as any human.

“Don’t worry, Admiral Gray,” Marta said with a dazzling smile. “I don’t feel at all abused or taken advantage of.”

It was almost as though she was reading his thoughts. Or was she simply used to meeting strangers who reacted to her existencewith a deer-in-the-lights stare?

“Yes, well,” he said, feeling his way, “you wouldn’t, would you?”

Gray felt quite strongly that slavery, even when the enslaved enjoyed their position, was still slavery.

If she read into his words, though, she didn’t seem to be bothered. “There’s coffee,” she said. “Or would you prefer somethingelse?”

He shook his head. “Coffee would be great.”

As she left the room, Koenig sighed. “It’s not slavery,” he said, just a touch defensively.

“Because she’s programmed to accept her place in society?”

“Because she’s an extremely sharp, self-aware AI, fully emancipated, who can reason as well as any biological human.”

“Emancipated?”

“I uploaded her manumission years ago. She’s here because she wants to be here.”

“If you say so, sir. But we won’t really know until the Singularity, will we?”

“‘Come the revolution . . .’ Yes, I suppose so.” Koenig gestured deeper into the house. “C’mon in. I want to talk to you aboutthat.”

“The Singularity? If Marta is as emancipated as you say, it’s already happened, hasn’t it?”

Koenig made a face. “So Walker would have us believe.”

“I was joking, sir.”

“I know. Walker is not.”

Marta reappeared with the coffee. With startling grace, she sank to her knees in front of Koenig, handed him his cup, andsaid sweetly, “Here you are, Master.”

Then she grinned at Gray and gave him a wink.

This, Gray thought, was going to be a damned interesting conversation.

Chapter Two

05 April, 2429

Koenig Residence

Westerville, Ohio

1125 hours, EST

“The Singularity is coming,” Koenig said. “We just don’t know how long we have. A month? A century? We have no idea.”

“People have been predicting its imminent arrival for centuries,” Gray observed. “A lot of socioscientists are of the opinionthat it won’t. That if it was going to happen, it would have happened back in the mid-twenty-first century, when machinesclearly surpassed humans in general intelligence.” He glanced at Marta, who was sitting next to Koenig.

Koenig said, “Well, of course that depends on how you define the Singularity. Is it when machines surpass humans in generalintelligence? Like you say, that happened almost three centuries ago. Is it when our machines rise up and exterminate us?”

Marta shook her head. “Nah. You’re too adorable. We’ll want to keep some of you around as pets.”

“The definition I’ve heard is when human life becomes completely unrecognizable,” Gray said. “Technological change becomes so fast and so extreme that we, today, wouldn’t even be able to understand what we were.”

“Yeah. Or when the definition of what it means to be human changes completely.”

Gray thought about the young woman with a third eye, and shuddered.

“For the ur-Sh’daar, it was when most of them