As soon she shouted, Justine brought her finger down on the keyboard, backing up to a screen before her password had been required. Highlighting a file at random, she pressed the Enter key.

A small confirmation window opened.

XYZ-00 turned its head back toward her. Justine could hear the whine of the motor to which the gun was mounted.

Justine quickly highlighted the word “Yes” and tapped the Enter key.

Blue light flared in the barrel of the gun and then died away. The green glow of XYZ-00’s optical sensors faded.

Breathing a sigh of heartfelt relief, Justine focused her full attention back on the keypad before her. She needed to find a way of passing along the change to the other robots, causing their own deletion subroutines to take effect and wipe out their programming. However, as Justine tapped the keys, she realized that the keyboard was dead, linked to XYZ-00 in the same manner that the gun was.

Quickly, she dove to where she had dropped her gun before. Coming up with her weapon in hand, she turned toward the ramp, fully expecting the robots from below to be on their way up.

There was nothing, no sound and no movement.

Carefully, Justine crept toward the ramp. Still there was no sign of any activity. She moved on, starting down the ramp. She was most of the way down the ramp when she saw the robots.

There were all as motionless as they had been when she and Sloan went by them the first time. Looking closer, Justine saw that there were no glowing optical sensors in evidence anywhere. She moved on down the ramp, stepping onto the floor of the second level of the dome.

The nearest robot to her was one of the tall, humanoid ones. Justine kept her weapon trained on it as she inched up to it. When it did not move she gave it a hard shove.

The robot toppled over noisily, landing atop one of the little spider-like machines, crushing it. The spider-like robot’s mechanical legs stuck out from beneath the larger robot’s greater bulk.

The altered program had already been passed on to the other robots. They had all been linked to XYZ-00 and the altered program had been passed on to them as soon as it effected XYZ-00. Which meant that their own programs had already deleted themselves just like XYZ-00’s had done.

The realization struck Justine like a physical blow. She let out of whoop of pure joy and raced back up the ramp to the third level. Sloan was stirring. She ran to him and knelt down to help him sit up.

“What happened?” Sloan asked. His voice was thick and slurred.

“We won,” Justine said in an awed whisper.

It seemed to take a moment for her words to sink in. Then Sloan’s eyes widened and he focused on her face. “What?”

Justine hugged Sloan closer to her. “We did it! We won. We’re free!”