2)

There had been no need for Zeta to awaken Ro the few minutes before the eastern sky lightened and stirred with the luscious colors of a new dawn. Ro awoke on her own, startling herself out of a hazy nightmare, dreaming of a time when she had been years younger, attached and branded by labels of an unforgiving society. She shook her head, running her thin fingers, with unkempt nails, through her blonde hair.
"I won't think of those things now," she told herself. "I won't think of them again, ever. There is nothing, really, to think about."
As long as you keep running from your past, though, you're never going to forget.
"I hate that voice inside my head," Ro mumbled, groggily, then let out a loud yawn.
The synthoid below, lounged against the door of a twentieth-century unused horse stall, heard the shuffling, detected the movement of a human, he quickly recalled Ro, the barn, the day before. He transformed back into Zee the human shape just as Ro was stretching down the ladder. A rung near the end of the ladder had shifted loose, and Zeta was able to detect it just in time to save Ro from a bone-jarring fall. He scooped her off the ladder as she was slipping on the broken piece, and set her carefully on her feet.
"I'd have fifteen broken bones if it wasn't for you," she told him. "I'm a klutz."
"No, you're just--" he paused, and shoved his hands in the pockets of his vibrant violet-blue great coat. He didn't want to provoke her.
"Well, go on, say it. I'm what?"
It wasn't too early in the morning for cranky Ro banter after all.
"You're human," he pronounced. "Humans are bound to take a stumble. It is only right, considering the gravitational pull of the earth."
"Wait a minute," Ro said, riled. "You can't say that getting into the occasional scrape is just a human thing. It seems I remember you hanging off a few high-story buildings, getting caught under boulders, and generally doing all the stupid things that humans do."
Zeta's typically stoic expression suddenly brightened. "Really?"
Ro was amused he'd be so pleased to hear he was closer to being human than he thought, especially in a way she wished wasn't human. She brushed off the idea and the grimy barn dust, and asked him what time it was. She could see for herself, through the cracks in the beams of the barn wall, the few open windows, and the ajar side door where they'd entered last night, that it was nearing dawn. The morning was appearing, silver and sleek, like a new bullet that brought sun and life to the dry, needy planet.
"Sunrise is soon," Zeta said. "As near as now."
"Good. Back to the loft, Zee. It's the best place, I think. Clear picture of the east. Come on." She started for the ladder, watching that tricky spot that had almost caused her a serious ankle problem.
"Ro?"
"What?" she grumbled.
"Why is this sunrise important to you?" He watched as the girl made herself comfortable upon the loft floor, just before the high hay gate. She defied human logic, he thought, when she set upon the edge of the window, dangling her feet outside, free in the chilly, damp morning air. "Of all the sunrises you have seen, why this one?" Zeta nestled himself into the stiff, nearly moldy hay, a foot away from the edge of the window. He was patiently awaiting a response that didn't seem likely to come.
"Of all the days I've ever seen," Ro said, "it was this morning, this day, years ago, that I decided my life needed a radical change. And I had to be the one to bring that about. See?"
It was all she dared say of the subject. She thought about those changes as she watched the sun rise slowly. She thought of home and her lost family, and recalled all the happy memories of her youth that she could, while the sun dripped over the horizon. The countryside slowly came alive with every passing minute, every new glimmer of fresh golden light eroded a night's mystery. Ro could still recall how the touch of her old wool blanket felt against her chin as she tried to sleep that first night on the road. The wool was rough, and she was not used to it. First nights are always the worst, she knew, and she eventually grew used to the scratchy wool. The first rays of sun fell upon the top of her brow, and she was blessed in its warmth. The wool blanket and that first night seemed like another lifetime ago, and that painful time made living for the present sunrise, the gentle caress of the sun, all the more fantastic.
"I see," Zeta said, easily placated. "The philosophy is not lost on me, nor the spirituality. You see each sunrise as a chance to change your life. To you it represents a freedom." He paused, even with words still formed in his analytical program. "Do I bore you, or can I continue to speak?"
"Speak. Don't speak. Whatever."
His lip twitched. For a moment she saw amusement in his otherwise pitted eyes--synthoid, robot eyes. It'd been a few days since she bothered to look anyone else in the eye--any human, that is. But she knew what was different between Zeta's eyes and any other humanoid. Looking into a human's eyes and you inevitably perceived some hint, whether vague or startlingly strong, some hint of their soul existing. But with Zeta there was no soul in his eyes. Ro was always surprised, startled even, when she would look at him and see an emotion. It was almost like, for just a fraction of a second, she could believe he had a soul. A fraction of a second was never long enough, and the feeling and hope she clung to faded.
Zeta could not contain his robotic intuition. "Is there something on your mind, Ro?"
"Yes," she said coolly, "and no."
"Why do you use a contradiction?"
"It's really funny, and I'm sure you'd be laughing--if you could laugh."
"I am capable of laughter," he threw in out of defense.
"It's funny because I've been thinking about what I was like when I was so much younger."
"And you were comical then?"
"No," Ro spat, sick of the constant literalism. "But I used to be a child, a little girl, with dreams and such. Now I've been wondering what's happened to that child, and what's happened to those dreams. Did I lose them? Are they still there? Do I even remember what they are?"
There was a long, still minute or two that passed. Birds, like magpies and some ravens--Zeta could name every breed--began to cackle through the new morning. The robot steadily gazed at his friend, observing frame after quick millisecond frame of her movement, or the way the invisible northwestern wind would shift her hair, or she would twitch her finger, a foot, or a miniscule fuzz on her black shirt would flitter. No movement did he miss.
"Ro?" he asked suddenly, breaking the passage of silence.
Ro lifted her head from the sill of the hay gate window. "Huh?"
"What do you want?"
"What do you mean?"
"Do you want to--to stop? To stop running. If you turn yourself over to the NSA, I'm sure they would be more than willing to give you a plea bargain. You could---"
"No, nothing like that." Ro sighed. He really wouldn't understand. "It'd be best if I tried to explain, I suppose. Don't you see? I couldn't leave you now."
Zeta shifted a little, like to become more comfortable. He felt no pain, had no blood circulation, no muscle, he could not be uncomfortable, only emotionally.
"It was a very long time ago that I gave up my little girl dreams. It's silly, anyway, to be a little girl. You wake up one day and then suddenly you're in another world, you're someone else."
Zeta was empathetic, for here was something he understood with uncommon familiarity, unknown to any other Infiltration Unit. He had "woken up" one day as well, deciding he would no longer be a synthoid of destruction.
"Well, since I don't have dreams of my own, I realize that all I have are your dreams now, Zee." Ro tilted her head against the frame again, blinking slowly, to push away the tears. "It's more important to me now that you get your freedom than it is that I ever--" she shrugged away the unspoken words.
Zeta tried to fill in. "Ever have a normal life?"
Ro's uncertain nod all but confirmed his suspicions. "But I think I kissed that possibility goodbye ages ago."
"Thank you, Ro, for your devotion to me. As long as you feel you're of some use, I appreciate your staying. But if you ever feel you're not living enough, we will find a way for you to return to the world."
Ro's cynical mind was hard at work, destroying any hope that the world was worth struggling for, and that the freedom and cleared name of a synthoid robot was all she had to live and die for. That, to her, was living enough. "The world is a shabby and doomed hole, Zee. I'm better off out of it. How do I know I'd make it better?"
"How do you know you wouldn't?" he challenged.
Ro had no answer to give him, not even a sarcastic one.
"Ro," he began, "what were your dreams, as a child? What did you most want? Do you remember?"
For a moment she managed a weak smile. "Sure, I remember. Breakfast." She rose to her feet, still sore from the six hours or so of walking they did yesterday, out of a city to the west, where they had left Agent Bennett cursing the air as they rode away on a hovercycle. Ro could then almost laugh at the look on Agent Bennett's square, leathery face. And how she wished they'd still had the bike! It'd been an unfortunate occurrence that the one machine they decide to "borrow" for their getaway purposes happened to come down with an electrical malfunction in the engine. She recalled the ache in her toe when she kicked the useless hunk of metal as she left it on the side of the road, some eight miles back.
"You are hungry," Zee summarized. "We will have to find something to eat." His stared off into the distance briefly, obviously scanning information from his database. "We're six miles from the nearest village. There's a stream not far from here. We could catch trout."
"You could catch trout," she said. "But you wouldn't have to eat the trout. I would. No thanks, Zee."
"And there is always corn," he said, not surprised Ro's rejection of the raw grain came in a disgusted "blech" from the back of her throat.
They began to head toward the ladder that would take them out of the loft and back into the wide open country. As she was about to step on the ladder, Zeta stopped her, pulled her back from the edge.
"Someone's coming," he said. "Get down."
Ro scrunched to the dusty floor, sparsely covered in stale hay. Zeta sprawled out beside her on his stomach, his peer just over the edge of the loft to the floor below. A shadow appeared in the doorway. Zeta observed the image, realizing it was none of the feared NSA agents, but he was not entirely convinced this stranger's presence was completely harmless. He set his fingers over Ro's forearm to settle her. She shivered and held her breath.
It was funny, she thought at that peculiar time, how often someone was fighting for their freedom, in simple little ways, like just trying to get out of a hay loft in one piece.

--

Note

"As near as now."
When I wrote this into the revised edition, back in September, I picked up on it, and decided to use 'near as now' as the title to the sixth book. Zeta's so clever.