Michael Knight was out of his depth. The Knight Industries research and development building was a vast structure on two levels, honeycombed with laboratories, work stations and offices. White-coated technicians were hard at work all around him, their heads lowered over intricate circuitry or silhouetted against monitors. Why had Devon sent him here? The Knight Industries Two Thousand was one of the most sophisticated and advanced machines in the world, as Kitt liked to remind him on a regular basis, but the technology that made his partner run was lost on Michael. That was the domain of Bonnie Barstow, Kitt's technician.

Leaving behind the maintenance bays and test chamber, the only departments familiar to him from working with Kitt, Michael peered in at the clean room, a fluorescent hive of activity behind hermetically sealed glass partitions. This was the controlled environment where work on Kitt's CPU and other central components was carried out, he knew.

"Can I help you, Mike?"

Michael turned sharply to find a sandy haired man with horn-rimmed glasses peering up at him. "Uh – Bob, right?" he hesitated. Bob nodded. "I'm looking for Doctor Barstow."

"She'll be in her box," Bob replied affably, offering his hand.

"Her box?" Michael echoed, raising his eyebrows. He shook the technician's hand.

"Sorry – her office," he explained. "It just feels like you're working in a box. Bonnie has a space at the far end of the electronics lab, near the programming room. On ahead."

"Thanks," Michael told him.

"Not a problem," Bob said, and carried on down the corridor.

The route to Bonnie's 'box' was a maze of cluttered work surfaces and blinking screens, with wires trailing across the floor and a steady hum in the air. He could hear several raised voices having an animated discussion, but couldn't tell where they were coming from – everybody seemed to be engaged in their own personal projects. Grateful that he could pass through enemy territory unnoticed, Michael moved on.

He found her exactly where Bob had said she would be, in an oversized fish tank at the end of a row of similar cubicles. The glass walls were papered with posters and notices, hiding the occupant from view, but her name was stencilled on the open door. Poking his head in, Michael saw that she was also fixated on her work, typing commands into a green-screened terminal.

"Bonnie?" he called, rapping his knuckles on the door for good measure. "Devon sent –"

Without turning around, or even pausing, she held up a hand. "Come in, I'll be with you in a sec," she mumbled. "And don't touch anything!"

Michael pulled a face behind her back, but shoved his hands into the pockets of the leather jacket he habitually wore. "If I break it, I pay for it, right?" he joked, but she didn't answer him.

Bonnie's office was a relative oasis of order and calm, after the hi-tech jumble he had just passed through. Turning around on the spot, he took in the layout and tried to hazard a guess at some of the equipment. Two benches stood jammed together against the back wall, the work surface taken up with a monitor, oscilloscope, and a bulky power supply. Banks of storage trays and tool chests, labelled with shorthand code in Bonnie's writing, were perched on a row of shelving mounted at eye level. Michael noticed a stack of well-thumbed books balanced precariously close to the edge, and moved in closer to read the titles.

Minsky. Weizenbaum. Turing. He peered at the spines, picking out names he recognised and terms he had heard Bonnie talk about before, like knowledge-based systems and data-mining. One book caught his attention, and he freed a hand to pull it from the shelf.

"'Devon sent –'?"

Startled, Michael fumbled with the weighty hardcover and What Computers Can't Do fell from his hands, taking out a handheld scanner on its way down. "Sorry," he grimaced, righting the device and crouching to pick up the book. "Ah, Devon sent me –"

"Oh, for the diskettes, I forgot," Bonnie supplied. She swivelled a half turn on her chair and opened a deep desk drawer. "I could have brought them to the office," she said.

"He knows you're busy," Michael offered, watching her fingers flip furiously along a rack of sleeved disks. "I was happy to be volunteered!"

He let his eyes wander around the rest of the small space while she searched, glancing over a transistor radio on top of a squat filing cabinet, an old sci-fi illustration of a robot tacked behind the door, and a computer with its cover off gathering dust on the desk top. On second appraisal, he could tell from the scarcity of working equipment that Bonnie spent less time here than in the Foundation's mobile unit; her personality could be seen in the neat surfaces and reading material, but otherwise this office could have belonged to any Knight Industries technician.

"I'm not that busy," Bonnie told him. "Here they are," she announced, picking out two diskettes and pushing the drawer closed with her knee as she turned to face him. "These should help us get into Sterlacci's system." She held them out to him.

"Right, thanks," Michael said, accepting the proffered wallets. "I'll take your word for it."

"Ah, Michael?" Bonnie added. "This isn't a library."

He gave her a blank look. "What?"

"That book," she said, nodding at the textbook he was still holding. "You wouldn't enjoy it."

"What, this?" Michael looked at the cover, showing a picture of an electric plug dangling out of a wall socket. "What Computers Can't Do," he read, smirking, "the limits of artificial intelligence. Oh, I don't know – this could come in handy!"

"Put it back," Bonnie warned, trying not to smile. She felt disloyal encouraging Michael to bait Kitt, but his obvious amusement was catching. "Kitt is far beyond the kind of artificial intelligence that Dreyfus is talking about, anyway."

Dumping the diskettes, Michael opened the book. He started to flick through the pages, pretending to consider the headings and diagrams. "So what can't Kitt do, then?" he asked. "Does he have limits?"

"I was working on them when you came in," she hinted.

Michael laughed. "Got it," he said, then paused. Opening the book on one of the last pages, he picked a photograph out of the hinge. "Hey, is this you?"

Bonnie's eyes widened in panic. "Let me see," she said, slipping down from her chair.

"Looks like you," he told her, holding the picture out of her reach. "Long hair, white coat – lovely smile. Who're all these other guys?"

"Well, give it to me, and I'll tell you," Bonnie said, coaxing. He flipped it round in his fingers and showed it to her. "Oh, yeah, that's me and the old team from university," she confirmed with visible relief. "A friend sent me the book for my birthday last year."

Michael looked over the faces squeezed into frame with Bonnie's. There were five men, one with his arm slung companionably over her shoulder, and four of them had the youthful appearance of grad students. An older man, dressed in a shirt and tie beneath the obligatory white coat, was standing to the rear of the group, smiling stiffly at the camera.

Belatedly, Michael noticed that Bonnie and her 'team' were leaning into shot over a computer, its oversized monitor and keyboard forming the centre of the composition.

"And what's this in the middle?" he asked. Bonnie rarely talked to him about her past, professional or personal, and he wanted her to continue. "'Colossus'?"

Her lips twitched. "Hardly," she laughed. "Michael, that's Kitt!"

He stared hard at the image and then glanced at her, not sure what she meant. Kitt had become so constant a feature in his life that he was now a friend as well as a partner, but Michael still thought of him as the sleek yet powerful black Trans-Am now parked outside. The computer that controlled the car was a collection of circuit boards and microchips buried somewhere behind the dash. Michael had only handled Kitt's CPU once, under distressing conditions; he had no interest in viewing the brain, or perhaps the heart, of his partner again. Kitt was a cultured voice, an alert mind, a comforting presence, and the thought of him in a different 'body' was startling. Disturbing, even.

"Kitt was with you at M.I.T.?" he said, finally putting his confusion into words. "I thought he came online in Washington?"

Bonnie looked at him. "He told you?"

Michael shrugged. "Well, he was actually telling a guy called Bergstrom, a scientist from Sweden that Devon had me chaperoning last year," he explained, "but I was there, too."

"And the scientist was suitably impressed, I hope?" she asked. Her face was shining with pride in her work, in Kitt.

"Of course!" Michael replied, matching her smile. "I think they developed a mutual appreciation society based on a love of chess and a dislike of government bureaucracy. Kitt said he found the mainframe 'too stuffy'."

Bonnie nodded. "Washington was a mistake, for many reasons," she sighed. "But then Wilton Knight came along and saved us both – my career, and Kitt's life. I will always be grateful to Knight Industries for that."

"Is that why you came back?"

The question was out before he knew what he was asking. Bonnie's studies in San Francisco last year and her subdued return to the Foundation held awkward memories for her, and Michael usually tried to respect her privacy and her pride by steering clear of the subject altogether.

"Partly," she said quietly, looking away. "We belong here, Kitt and I."

He let the silence fall, staring at the picture, until a random association formed in his mind. "Hang on – the Knight Industries Two Thousand," he said, thinking out loud. "Knight Industries. If Wilton took Kitt on after his programming at M.I.T., then –"

"No, he wasn't always called 'KITT'," Bonnie finished for him. "The Knight Two Thousand is the car, Michael, you know that. KARR was the prototype vehicle, but he was deactivated."

Michael gave a snort of derision.

"Wilton didn't explain why they already had a vehicle designed to take Kitt's microprocessor, and there wasn't time to ask," she went on. "So I reprogrammed what I had, adding code for the car, and the Knight Industries Two Thousand is the result."

"Aha – the car or the computer?" he fired back.

"Both, I suppose," Bonnie answered thoughtfully. "The car defines who Kitt is, and Kitt is the strength of the car," she explained. "Candle and flame."

Michael regarded her. "Thank you," he told her.

"For what?" Bonnie laughed nervously. "I can't take credit for Kitt! He's – unique."

"For telling me about all this," he said, holding up the photo. "In the early days, I always used to feel like I was crashing a party around you two! Now I can see what you mean to each other."

She was silent for a moment, her eyes lowered. "Do you still feel that way?"

Michael shrugged. "Sometimes."

"Well, I do, too," Bonnie said. Before he could reply, she scooped up the diskettes from the bench and pressed them into his hands. "Here, don't forget these."

"Thanks." Slotting the photograph back into its pages, Michael handed her the book. "You can have this back. I'm better learning from experience."

* * *

Programmer and code, technician and machine, parent and child; Michael thought he now had a handle on the bond that existed between Bonnie and Kitt, but his own feelings for his partner were harder to define. Strolling back through the warren of corridors, he tried to evaluate the impact Kitt had made on his new life, but struggled to find the words, even to himself.

'I do, too,' Bonnie's low voice came back to him. Perhaps that was the best way of putting it – at some point during their two year partnership, the working alliance manufactured by a dying entrepreneur had become a genuine friendship, replacing even the intimacy of creation. Bonnie had told him once that Kitt was not restricted by programming – the choices he made, the people he trusted, were part of his personality. And he had chosen Michael, accepting Wilton Knight's choice of a driver, because they worked well together. Even in the early days, with Michael fighting Wilton, and then Devon, for control of his own life, Kitt had stood by him. Thinking, learning, adapting – feeling – the intelligent computer might have retreated into his CPU and stayed there, performing only perfunctory tasks like any other machine. Michael would still have the amazing capabilities of the car – incredible speed, the protective molecular bonded shell, Turbo boost – but without Kitt, the adventure promised to be lonely and possibly very brief.

He owed Kitt his life and his sanity. After Muntzy's death in Las Vegas, Michael had been afraid of taking on another partner. He didn't want the burden of responsibility or the pain of loss, and working with a machine had seemed like a safe defence against the risk of both. Now, like Bonnie, he knew just what he had in Kitt – and that not even a computer in a car was completely invulnerable.

"Hey, Kitt," he called out, approaching the reserved parking bays in front of the building. The low chassis of the modified car sat nose in next to the entrance, its polished skin glinting in the sunlight. "Miss me?"

The driver's door clicked opened. "I did wonder if you might have got lost en route," Kitt replied, "but that was curiosity rather than anxiety."

Michael rolled his eyes. "Thanks, pal."

"Did Bonnie have the programs ready for you?"

"Yeah, efficient as ever," he said, dropping into the seat. "She was just ... explaining a few things."

"Oh, I see," Kitt said. The engine fired into life. "And did it help?"

"Yeah, partner," Michael sighed. "It all made a lot of sense." He put the car into reverse gear and reached for the handbrake. "Now it's just me and you."

FIN