Blues woke up in a blind panic. Five faces surrounded him—all of them unfamiliar. He blinked up at the rows of fluorescent lights in the ceiling, and his shoes scuffed against a hard linoleum floor. He struggled; but two men, one on each side of him, locked their hands around his arms and pushed him back down into his chair.

"No, no..."

"Blues," said one of the faces, a woman`s. "Do you know where you are?"

He stared down at the two pairs of hands squeezing into him, and gave up all hope of freeing himself. He closed his eyes. A flood of memories came rushing back: the way he`d attacked Takayama, his sapped energy reserves, his creators` betrayal, his feelings of helplessness and panic, and his newfound knowledge of the company that had ordered his construction and held sway over his life and his future—to what degree, he still didn`t know.

"Nurtech, right?" he said, and felt his heart sink.

"That`s right," said the woman. She had dark, straight, chin-length hair, and deep creases at the outer corners of her eyes. She and the two men beside her wore white lab coats, something which Blues hadn`t seen since his first day of life. "And I`m Riko Morita, computer science department chair of Tsukuba University." She pointed to her left. "This is Hide Ogata, professor of robotics at Carnegie Melon University, and Eiichi Ando, one of the top psychologists in the country. And these men on either side of you..." She paused. "...Well, they`re here for our protection.

"So now you know who we are. As for you..." She took a step forward, and he shrank a little under her gaze. "We already know your name is `Blues,` but our goal today is to get a better idea regarding what, or who, you are.

"By the way, I`m curious about the meaning of your name. Is it an acronym?"

It took Blues a full minute or more to answer. Overwhelmed by these strangers surrounding him, and the cold, harsh whiteness of the room, he stared down at the floor in an attempt to stay focused.

"No," he said. "Or... I don`t think so, anyway. Dr. Wily once told me it was a joke that just took."

"A joke?" Out of the corner of his eye, Blues saw Morita smile a little. "Interesting. Could you explain it to us, then?"

"Well..." He looked up. "Dr. Light... he was depressed—or so I heard—when he was building me, and Dr. Wily can be... glib sometimes, I guess." He paused, unsure what else he could say. "It`s not really a funny joke, is it?"

"No, not really," said Morita, and gave him a slightly puzzled look.

Blues looked down at his body. He was still wearing the same white dress shirt and black trousers he`d put on the morning of Takayama`s visit, but his clothes were wrinkled, and his tie had been taken off and draped loosely around his neck. It was then that he remembered Dr. Light`s last words to him before rendering him unconscious.

"You opened me up," he said.

"Not us," said Ogata, a stocky, boyish-faced man with thick gray hair cropped high against his forehead. "Some of Nurtech`s in-house technicians did that. Would you... mind it, if we had?"

"Yes, I would," said Blues.

Ogata and Morita looked at each other.

"Don`t you work for Nurtech?"

"No," Morita said. "The company invited us to come here to assess you today, and we jumped at the chance—especially Ogata here, who traveled all the way from America for the privilege. We're going into this mostly blind, except for a page of notes we received from Dr. Light about how to make you more comfortable... which in itself is interesting, to say the least." She cleared her throat. "You know, Nurtech has made some rather ambitious claims about you. Has anyone told you what those claims are?"

Blues glanced down at the hands clutching each of his arms. He didn't have a clue what Nurtech thought of him, but he knew what his creators did.

"I guess so," he said. "That I'm conscious, and that I have a human mind... or something like it. Is that it?"

"Yes, it is," said Morita. She leaned in close. "And if those claims are true, it`s going to turn our world upside down."

There was tension in her voice. Behind her, Ogata was fidgeting with his hands, and Ando, tall and bespectacled, who so far had been silent, was standing a little to the side with his arms crossed and staring at Blues with a look of poorly masked incredulity.

"But Dr. Light said it can`t be proven."

"Well, I suppose he`s right," Morita said. "The `proof` lies in how much you can manage to fool us into forgetting you`re not human—and though I`m going to try my best to be impartial, I have to admit I`d like very much to be fooled."

Ogata put his hands behind his back. "We—at least Morita and I—are quite familiar with Dr. Light`s early research, of course. He`s world famous. We thought some of his ideas were only meant to be theoretical, but when he dropped out of the public eye years ago, we and our colleagues knew he had to be working on something big." He pawed at his nose. "`Consciousness` and `strong A.I.`: these concepts were abandoned by the field long ago—but if Dr. Light says he`s built a conscious robot, we`ll sit up and listen."

"I..." Blues didn`t know what to say. There had once been a time in his life when he`d accepted his own existence as a matter of course. His world was composed of the sensations he perceived and the feelings he felt, and he had a body which did mostly what he asked it to do—he didn`t experience himself as an oddity or a marvel. He didn`t care whether any of the claims about him would be "proven" today or not. He already knew how he, and his creators, felt—the only people whose opinions mattered to him, anyway—and he had no desire to turn the world upside down.

Acutely aware of their eyes on him, he sank deeper into his chair. He wanted to disappear, but there was nowhere to go. Deprived of the freedom to move his arms, he couldn`t even hide his face in his hands.

"So, you`re going to test me?" he said.

"We`d like to," said Morita. "But we can`t do it without your cooperation."

"And what if I don`t cooperate?"

"Nurtech said they`ll keep you here until you do," said Ogata. "And I suppose we`ll all just have to wait—but don`t keep us waiting too long, okay? We`ve got families, you know."

"What happens if I pass—or if I fail?"

"I`m afraid we don`t know that," Morita said. "That`s for the company, and your creators, to decide."

"And when the test is over, I can go home?"

"That`s what we`ve been told."

Blues closed his eyes. He imagined the sights and sounds of Dr. Light`s house: the thin lines of sunlight that peeked in between cracks in the curtains, the cawing of crows out in the garden, the armchair in the study where he slept after a long night of piano practice, the oak dining table where he and Dr. Light played gin after dinner, Catherine`s shrine and the hush of the darkened living room, and his soft futon where he`d once felt warm and safe.

Now that he`d been awake for a few minutes, he felt the pain in his middle returning. With it came the memory of the stinging in his cheek, and an aching realization that the home he was going back to wouldn`t be the same as the one he`d left.

"Home," he said, and opened his eyes again. "Dr. Light... I wanted to trust him, but I don`t think I can. It hurts..."

But the faces stared back at him with blank expressions, and he realized they had no idea what he was talking about.

From a point up near the ceiling, a blinking red light caught his eye. There it is, he thought. All his life up to now: the slow and steady course of his development since his activation, and the decades of dreaming before that; the hundreds of disks filled up with video files whose accumulation he`d at first accepted unawares, then tolerated, and at last begrudged; Dr. Light`s logs, Dr. Wily`s notes, and Judith`s netscreen chats; the contract with Nurtech, and the failed negotiations with Takayama—it had all led to this.

He resigned himself. The only way out was through.

"Blues, hang in there," a familiar voice called out to him, the beloved voice from the future.

The room, and the people in it, faded momentarily out of view. "If I can hear you, then none of this is really happening," Blues said.

"You`re right," said the voice. "It`s only a memory, and you can stick me into any memory you want."

"Thanks. I need you in this one."

"All right. But, Blues?"

"Yes?"

"Just remember: you made it through the first time without me."

Everything came back into focus. Morita, Ogata, and Ando were casting sideways glances at each other. He raised his head.

"Okay," he said. "Tell me what I have to do."


They took him to a room equipped with a netscreen on a desk; beyond it was a row of tables stretching to the opposite wall, each outfitted with apparati whose purposes he couldn`t guess. The sight of it all made him want to flee. He must have looked frightened, because Morita gave him a reassuring smile.

"In this room, we`re going to check your vision and hearing, your nervous system response to stimuli—things like that. The point is for us to learn how you take in sensory data. Nothing to be afraid of. Humans undergo these kinds of examinations all the time."

The security guards released their hold on him, and he was allowed to move around freely on the condition, they said, that he would follow where Morita led him. Ogata lingered just behind, taking notes on a portable netscreen, and Blues looked around to discover that Ando was gone—at some point, he`d disappeared without explanation.

Morita guided him from table to table. She tested his visual acuity, depth perception, color vision, and hearing. She held strips of paper up to his nose and asked him to identify their scents. She showed him pictures on the netscreen of rooms filled with various objects, then asked him to close his eyes and name as many as he could remember—which was, of course, all of them.

The answers to her questions were by nature short, and required little conscious thought or feeling. When Morita had first introduced herself to him, he`d had the vague impression she was going to ask him to draw a picture, or talk about how listening to Chopin made him feel, or something otherwise similar to the "evidence" he was accustomed to producing for Dr. Light and Dr. Wily. Blues completed test after test in a daze, all the while wondering if this was all there was.

At one of the tables she blindfolded him, placed various objects into his hands, and asked him to describe their textures: a seashell, sandpaper, spun wool, a feather. Then, while he was still blindfolded, she took one of his hands in hers, and a sharp pain pierced one of his fingers—he yelped, ripped off the blindfold, and saw his own feelings of shock reflected in her face. She was holding a needle.

Ogata, who had been watching Blues in silent fascination, put down his netscreen and wiped his hand across his forehead. "Jesus," he said.

Morita dropped the needle as if it was hot. "I... apologize for that," she said. "Nurtech said that you have a pain response."

Blues drew back and turned away, feeling he`d been wounded in more than just his finger. "If you wanted to see how I respond to pain," he said, and put a shaking hand on his stomach, "all you had to do was wait a while."

Morita went silent, and Ogata sucked in air through his teeth. "Jesus," he said again.


Next, they led him to a room across the hall that was mostly empty. In one corner was a desk and three chairs, beside which Blues saw a closed cardboard box.

"Well, it`s my turn now," Ogata said, and waved him toward a chair. "Here, Blues, come and sit down with me." He flashed a sheepish grin. "Don`t be shy—I promise I don`t have any needles in that box."

One of the security guards gave Blues a little nudge, but he remained where he stood in the doorway. "What are you going to do?" he said.

"Have a better look at how you move," Ogata said. "I`d like to see your fine motor skills first: I`ve heard your creators put a lot of work into getting your hands just right."

With reluctance, Blues stepped into the room and seated himself across from Ogata, and Ogata gave him a good-natured smile which put him slightly more at ease. Morita entered the room behind him and stood off to the side with the netscreen in hand.

Ogata instructed Blues to put both his hands palm-up on the table and wiggle each of his fingers one at a time. He then asked Blues to squeeze his hand as hard as he could.

"My hand, not my neck, all right?" he said.

Blues laughed.

Next, Ogata handed him a series of manipulatives. At the man`s request, Blues opened a jar, turned a key in a lock, wrote "My name is Blues" with a pencil and paper, used his fingernails to pry open a soda can, unbuttoned and buttoned his own dress shirt, laced a length of yarn with tiny colored beads, and rotated the sides of a Rubik`s cube—which he then solved within a minute.

"Show off," said Ogata, and put the items back into the box. "Well, I`d like to see your gross motor movements now. Could you take off your shirt and trousers, please?"

Blues stared, and Ogata, mirroring his discomfort, leaned back. "Er... I need to see how your joints move, and I can`t do that if you`re wearing clothes. Ever heard of something called biomimetics? No need to feel embarrassed... would you? I mean, would you feel embarrassed?"

"A little," said Blues, impassive.

"You`re kidding me." Ogata let out an unnerved sigh, turned to the side, and muttered profanities to himself. "I`m sorry," he said at last. "It`s just that I'm not used to working with robots with skin—or opinions. You`re... a bit unorthodox, you know? This is new to me."

"Me too," Blues said.

"Well, nevermind," said Ogata, and coughed into his elbow. "Don`t worry. I`m not going to make you run around in your skivvies. Now that I think of it, it`s a ridiculous idea. Erm... you wear skivvies, do you?"

Blues didn`t answer.

After a few moments of hemming and hawing, Ogata suggested that Blues roll up the legs of his trousers past his knees and his sleeves above his elbows. Grateful for the compromise, Blues did as he was asked.

Then, under Ogata`s directions and the watch of Morita`s netscreen camera, he walked, jogged, jumped, and ran laps around the room, all the while feeling a vague sense of humiliation which he could not yet put to words. Years later, when he would first learn about performing animals in circuses, he`d find an apt comparison.

He looked back once in a while to see Morita and Ogata casting long stares at each other.

"Private funding," said Ogata to himself, and sucked in more air through his teeth.

"Every last penny," added Morita.

"Please," said Blues, and wedged himself between them. "Tell me what that means."

They looked away. "We don`t know what it means," said Morita, and with an apologetic look raised the netscreen and asked him to walk another lap.

He was relieved when Ogata asked him to stop much earlier than expected. The man crossed his arms and let out a long sigh. "Well, Blues," he said, "that`s enough of that. How about something a little more... befitting?" He reached down into the box and, after a bit of digging around, produced a pair of well-worn baseball gloves and a ball. He rose from his chair and took an eager step forward. Morita managed a slight smile.

"Ever play catch before?"


After noon, Morita and Ogata began to talk amongst themselves about lunch, and there was a brief debate concerning what to do with Blues. They`d been instructed by Nurtech to keep him in shutdown mode for the hour, but he protested so loudly that in the end they gave up and arranged for the security guards to take him to one of the staff break rooms instead. Once he was in, the door was pulled shut behind him and locked from the outside.

Blues knew what he wanted to do, and he got straight to work. The rage he`d struggled to hold back all morning burst out of him. He hurled a chair across the room, then another. He upended the tables one by one. He tore into the cabinets above the sink, smashed glasses and teacups against the wall, and dumped out the contents of a huge cannister of ground coffee onto the floor. Then he set upon a bookshelf packed with magazines, ripping out pages by the fistfull. He then turned his attention to the netscreen mounted on the wall, which was broadcasting a news program at low volume. He picked up the remote control, swung his arm back, and let it soar—and the screen shattered with a percussive and satisfying crack.

He realized he`d run out of things to break. Surrounded by fragments of glass and ripped paper, cringing at the chill of the fluorescent lighting beating down on him, a surge of fresh pain pulsed in his stomach—and he tilted his head back and screamed.

"Oh my God, Yuichi, that sounds like..."

Somehow, in the midst of the commotion, Blues heard a distant familiar voice—a woman`s voice—and he fell silent. Many pairs of rapid footsteps came pattering across the hall, and moments later he felt a presence press itself up against the other side of the door. There was frantic knocking and futile twists and pulls at the doorknob.

"Blues, is that you in there?" Judith`s voice called. "Are you okay?"

He drew closer to the door, then shrank back again, caught in the grip of alternating feelings of excitement and terror. "Yeah... it`s me," he said at last. As he spoke the words, a wave of hope propelled him back toward the source of the voice. She came to help fix my core, he thought. And she promised she`d tell me why I`m here... She came, she finally came...

He pushed Dr. Wily`s warning out of his mind. He didn`t have a clue what Judith had planned for him, but for the moment, meeting her seemed to him like a better alternative than staying in this room alone with his pain until the end of the lunch hour.

"I`m not okay," he called out, as an afterthought. Then, unable to contain his feelings any longer, he pounded his fists against the door. "Dr. Sorensen! I`m not okay... I want out!"

"Don`t worry, Blues," she said. "We`re going to get this door open. Just sit tight."

"Help me!"

"Mr. Harada, please hurry..."

"Almost got it," said an unfamiliar man`s voice, which was followed by the clanging of multiple keys jostling together. "Yes, this is the one..."

"Oh, Yuichi..." Judith`s heels clicked against the floor outside in a nervous rhythm as though she was pacing back and forth. Blues heard a key going into the lock. Then the doorknob turned, and he took a few anxious steps backward.

The door opened. Judith and Yuichi were staring down at him with looks of concern.

"Happy birthday, Blues," they said.