As Blues came up from the foyer into the house, he heard a faintly whistled tune: the chain of descending thirds from the beginning of Brahms's 4th symphony. With halting steps, he followed the sound to its source. Dr. Wily was sitting on the living room floor with his lips pursed, his back against the wall, and his legs splayed out in front of him. He cradled a whiskey glass in his hands. The bottle beside him was almost empty.

Dr. Light was leaning onto the low table with his chin in his hands, head down. A second glass sat in front of him, containing just a few bits of half-melted ice. When he glanced up at Blues, he seemed to shrink deeper into himself. Next to his elbow was a white envelope, embellished with a little bow fashioned from gold ribbon and bearing Blues's name.

"Welcome home, Blues," said Albert.

Blues didn't answer. Behind Dr. Light's pale and cowering figure, big brutal flakes of snow dropped into the garden. Hypnotized by the sight and wishing he was somewhere else, he froze. When at last he came back to himself, he realized he was staring into Dr. Light's shame-filled eyes and squeezing the sides of his generator with a force that made his fingers sore.

Judith dropped her handbag in the doorway, rushed into the room, and crouched beside Tom on the floor. He turned to meet her, and the two of them shared an embrace as Albert looked on with mild amusement.

For the first time, Blues had the notion that the two of them were somehow more than colleagues, or even good friends—but the exact nature of that "more than" was a facet of human life which he would never fully understand, not having experienced it himself. He didn't know then about their failed plan to save him, and that they'd actually hoped not to meet again for years. At the time, however, he was disturbed that, despite the apparent strength with which Dr. Light clung onto Judith, he didn't look at all happy to see her.

"Tom..."

Dr. Light was the first to loosen his grip. When he leaned back and his face came again into view, he was staring off to the side with a faraway look.

"Tom," said Judith again, with distress in her voice. "It went well. Blues is a little shaken up, but he says his evaluators were kind... they were the best we could have hoped for..."

Slowly, Dr. Light turned. "What I've put you through, Blues..." he said, and his voice cracked. "I'm sorry..."

But Blues, without thinking, took a step backward.

Judith squeezed Tom on the shoulder. "He's angry, of course," she said. "Give it time."

"Time?" said Dr. Wily, and crossed his arms. "They haven't got any."

Judith shot him a dirty look.

But Albert was unperturbed. "Hi, Yuichi. How's family life treating you?"

"...It's all right." Yuichi shifted uneasily where he stood. His youth, and his subordinate position, made him a fifth wheel. He had nothing to do with the awkward atmosphere of the room, so he remained where he thought he could best be of use: in the doorway at Blues's side.

"Should I ask Blues to make you some tea?"

Tom gave Albert a hard stare. Yuichi, on whom the reference was lost, glanced sideways at Blues and shook his head.

"No... No, thank you."

"Well, I'm glad to see you in good health again, Judith," Dr. Wily said with a bittersweet grin. "Too bad I can't say the same for all of us—right, Blues?"

"Albert," Judith said, "you're..."

"Not supposed to be here?" said Albert, with a great upward lift of his eyebrows. "What a strange idea. I have every right to be here as you do.

"Did the two of you really think it would be so easy to get rid of me? I know you asked me not to visit tonight, but I didn't want to miss anything... important."

He took a sip of whiskey, set the glass down on the floor, and looked up at Blues. "Well, did you pass, young man?"

Hesitantly, Blues nodded.

"You've been drinking," said Judith.

"True, although not as much as he has." Albert pointed at Tom. He gave his own whisky glass a fond little shake, and the ice cubes clinked together. "I know my limits, at least. This is an occasion that calls for a high degree of... coherence.

"I came here to give the kid his birthday present, of course.

"You're going to like what's in that envelope, Blues," he said, and glanced down at the object on the table, "but I got you something even better: the frank and honest answer to every question you've ever had."

Tom cast an anxious look in Blues's direction. "Albert..."

"Well, go on," said Dr. Wily. "Ask me why you're here."

Albert's calm and affable half-smile was wildly out of place among the other dumbstruck faces in the room. Wide-eyed, Tom shook his head—but Blues, terrified though he was, was determined to defy him.

"Why am I here?" he said.

"Well, that's complicated." Albert crossed his arms and cast a nod toward Catherine's shrine. "You may have heard by now that she had something to do with it," he said, "but it wouldn't be fair to blame the whole thing on her.

"It's true that she had some interesting theories about consciousness, and that she wanted us to help her build you. She was there at the beginning—and it's really too bad for you that she died before we finished any of your sensory inputs." His gaze floated up to the ceiling, and he let out a low sigh—and Tom glared at him with narrowed eyes. "After that, all we had left was that dream of hers.

"But something happened to that dream on its journey from Catherine's beautiful mind into manifest reality: we ran out of money. The rough first iteration of your CPU sat on Tom's desk gathering dust for a few months while our grant proposals were turned down one after another, and that should have been the end of you—but that's when Nurtech came forward. They offered us their generosity and their patience—and we didn't think it through. Especially Tom here. He was so desperate to keep a piece of Catherine alive that he barely read the contract before signing—nevermind the fine print.

"Then again, it's not like you owe your existence to one momentary lapse in judgment. We had nearly twenty long years to mull things over, and could have turned back any time—but we kept at it anyway, and even ended up activating you. It was fun, after all. Oh, what a wonderful dream it was."

With a wistful sigh, he raised his glass toward Blues. Then he took another drink, set the glass down on the table, and turned to Tom. "Well," he said, "that wasn't so bad, was it? I imagine you would have said something similar.

"But now we come to the next question..."

Judith raised her hands. "Albert, please..."

"...Which ought to follow logically from the first."

Blues stepped forward. "What does Nurtech want now?" he said.

"Right." Albert winked. "This question has some urgency to it, doesn't it?-considering that they're waiting outside to collect it as we speak. Well, all that money they gave us—you probably know by now that they didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts..."

Just then Judith rose to her feet, and with wild gesticulations let loose a flurry of speech which to Blues was incomprehensible. Albert, listening with his arms still crossed, raised his eyebrows at her.

"You know I love it when you speak French, Judy," he said, "but I'm going to answer you in a manner I see fit—namely, in one of his preset languages." He nodded toward Blues. "So, you say he's a child, and that no decent parent troubles a child with information about scary things beyond his control.

"But you would have had to tell him something tonight. How, exactly, were you going to try to nice it up for him?"

"Yuichi," said Judith, and clenched her teeth together, "take Blues into another room. Tom, Albert and I—we need to talk about this first in private."

Blues gritted his teeth and backed away. "Don't," he said. "I'm not going anywhere. I want to hear it—I want to know everything."

Yuichi looked at Judith, and then at Blues, and remained frozen where he stood, apparently torn.

"Well, I disagree with you, Judith," said Albert. "He's not a child. No one does to children what Nurtech did to him this week while he was unconscious—at least, not under the approving eyes of the law."

Blues looked down at his wrinkled shirt, and tried to imagine his own unconscious body wheeled through Nurtech's laboratory on a stretcher, undressed and opened up by unknown hands. "What did they do?" he said, at that moment feeling angry, and ashamed, and very small.

"Research." Dr. Wily let out a sigh. "Linking our schematics with realia. It was their first step toward figuring out how to replicate your design, and a framework of knowledge they can now build upon to make any future modifications they desire... perhaps, eventually, to facilitate mass production...

"This is only your body I'm talking about." He paused. "They now have the shell, but they still need the ghost: I mean, the code with which we programmed your mind. That which makes you you. Without it, the shell is useless.

"Tom keeps the sole copy of it in that room in the basement you've never been allowed to enter—and when this conversation is over, he's going to give it to the people waiting outside."

"You mean..." said Blues, and felt his own eyes widen, "they're going to make more... of me?"

"Um, not exactly," Albert said with a half-smirk. "Entertaining as it is to have you around, there's just not much profit to be made from consumptive artists like you.

"What Nurtech probably has in mind is going to have weapons attached... or tits—as good as artificial can get, at least."

"Albert, you're disgusting," said Judith.

"Woman, don't play dumb. I know you have an imagination.

"Your successors, Blues—however Nurtech plans to market them—are going to be slaves."

Blues stared down at his generator, struggling to make sense of Dr. Wily's words. He had no clue what it meant to make a profit, or what "tits" had to do with anything, or why artificial ones were somehow not as good as real ones. At last his mind settled on "slaves," the only word which had any bearing on his experience. To be a slave meant to be forced to obey, and he was certain he wouldn't want to be one—or for anyone else to be one, either.

"Slaves?"

With a wry smile, Albert lifted the bottle of whiskey from the floor, unscrewed the cap, and with a flourish poured the remainder into Tom's empty glass. "Terrible, isn't it?"

Silently, Dr. Light slumped forward toward the table and put his face down in his hands. Beside him, Judith ran her trembling fingers through her matted hair and shook her head.

"We... don't know that for certain," she said.

"That's right," said Dr. Wily, and gave her an incredulous look. "We don't know! Blues, the deal we made with Nurtech years ago gives them the rights to the technology. And they won't tell us how they plan to use it. But if making a profit is their goal, then we can hypothesize, can't we?

"It's true you've been... difficult to handle, and your successors will be too, but it doesn't matter. Human spirits can be broken.

"The whole business is rotten. All of it. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is laugh."

Blues raised his head. "And me..."

"Well, I suppose a little self-absorption is natural. Not to worry. The contract guarantees we can keep the prototype—that's you, by the way- although not without a few caveats."

"What if you just don't give the code to them?"

"That's one of the caveats. In that case, they'd take the next best thing: you." He cast a weary glance over at Tom. "Rest assured, he has no intention of letting that happen."

Just then, they heard a ringing from Dr. Light's pocket. Tom jumped at the sound, then with a look of silent dread pulled out his netphone and held it up to his ear.

"Yes..." he said in a low voice. "Of course. I'll be there in just a minute." Then he stared down at his hands as he placed the netphone onto the table.

"Getting impatient out there, are they?" said Albert.

"Dr. Light," said Blues, and was surprised by the conviction in his own voice. "Don't give it to them."

"That's very noble of you, Blues," Dr. Wily said, "but they're going to get that code one way or another—either directly from Tom's hands tonight, or by extracting it manually from your CPU.

"But it's time for another question." He cleared his throat. "Ask me whether your core flaw can really be fixed."

"Albert, no..." In a burst of exasperation, Judith pulled at Dr. Light's arm. "Tom," she said. "Help us. Get up. Stop thinking about the future. He's still here, and he needs you. Fight for him."

Dr. Light cast a furtive glance in Blues's direction, and then turned his head down toward his lap. "It's over, Judith," he said. "I haven't got any fight left in me."

"Blues," said Dr. Wily, "what she's fighting for is to keep you ignorant and calm—and easier to control.

"'The future...', 'it's over...,' They're referring to the fact that your memory of this conversation—along with every other memory you've ever formed..."

"Albert, don't..."

"...Is soon going to be wiped out... probably, right after you enjoy what's in that envelope."

Blues stared at Albert, then in turn at each of the other dumbstruck faces in front of him, and clutched his generator more tightly against his chest.

"You're a horrible man," Judith said.

"If telling the truth makes me horrible, then I'm guilty as charged."

"It's horrible to tell him all this when there's nothing he can do."

"She's right." In the midst of the silence in the room, Dr. Wily pierced Blues with a long stare. Then his eyes darted off to the left, toward the direction of the door to the lab at the end of the hall. "There's nothing you can do. Nothing."

Just a few weeks ago, Blues might have interpreted his words in their literal sense, but his world since then had been colored by shades of increasing subtlety. He was now able to detect the tone of irony in Dr. Wily's voice, and he knew unequivocally that there indeed was something. And as he pieced together what that something was, the box in his hands began to rattle.

"The answer, Blues," Dr. Wily continued, "is that your core can be fixed—and indeed it will be, very soon—but you won't survive the procedure."

Yuichi reached out to put a warm hand on Blues's shoulder, but Blues yanked it away.

"Sorry, Blues," said Yuichi, as he crossed his arms and looked down at his feet.

Since the afternoon in November when Dr. Wily had first told him he probably couldn't be saved, Blues had suffered quietly under the weight of that knowledge, all the while holding out hope, fueled by Dr. Light's words, that it was a lie. Now, as he watched Tom's terrified face turn in his direction, in his mind's eye Blues saw the man's recent behavior—the sighs, the blinked away tears, and the breakdown at Mt. Fuji—in its proper context, and his heart dropped.

"Dr. Light..."

"It's not just a matter of taking out the faulty part and putting in a better one," said Albert. "We'd also have to redesign the components that interface with it, and some of those components are responsible for your temperament, your memory storage... And unless we can come through with a miracle cure, which would take a lot more time and work, you won't be the same when we're finished.

"The situation was already bleak enough before Nurtech decided to throw a wrench into the works with their 'March first' deadline. They've waited twenty years already, they're eager to see a return on their investment, and your core flaw is now quite an inconvenience for them. If the deadline passes and we're forced to give you up to their technicians, they're not going to be delicate. As soon as they discover that the quickest way to fix your core would require snuffing out your little life, they'll do it without batting an eyelash.

"Theoretically, I suppose it could be possible for us to repair your core while keeping you intact," Albert said, "but not within two months. You might as well ask us to build a ladder to the moon.

"Kid, you're a carp on a cutting board." He widened his eyes. "That means you're doomed."

Blues stared down at Tom and Judith where they huddled together on the tatami floor. "But you said..."

"They lied because the truth would hurt you, or make you do something impulsive and stupid that would compromise the contract." Albert sighed. "They're not bad people. They're dreamers, and now they're having a hard time accepting that the dream is over."

Blues felt his mind being pulled back to the morning he had awakened one year ago, and heard the first words Dr. Light had spoken to him.

"You've been sleeping," he repeated, in a voice that seemed to come from outside of himself.

Albert cast him a knowing smile. "I played along with their game, too. I was good at it. But there's a point at which the act became unsustainable. This is about respect. I, for one, believe you have a right to know what you're in for."

"So I'm going to... die?"

"Die?" said Albert. "That's an interesting question. I was never any good at that metaphysical stuff. We're not sure what you're going to experience, exactly—whether the person who wakes up in your body will bear any resemblance to the you of a year ago, or if it'll be someone new entirely.

"But I suppose you could look on the bright side. There are plenty of humans—some of which are right here in this room—who'd be grateful for the chance to do it all over again.

"Truth be told, your core flaw was a rather convenient development for them: since it isn't possible for them to take back their mistakes, at least they can clear away your memories of them. You'll never have to know how foolish they were..."

Dr. Light raised his head. "Stop, Albert..."

"...And in spite of everything, at least they still get to keep their robot son—even if it's not going to be you..."

"Stop." Blues was startled by the percussive bang of Tom's fist as it slammed down onto the table. "You've gone too far." He cast a fearful look up at Blues. "That was a lie. What he just said—the thought has never crossed my mind. It was a lie."

He turned back toward Dr. Wily with narrowed eyes. "Now, you shut up and listen to me," he said. "Appointing yourself a truth-teller, a necessary bearer of bad news: that's one thing. I hate it, but I get it. What I can't understand... is why you've been trying to drive a wedge between him and me since day one.

"For you to imply that my feelings for him are anything short of..." His voice cracked, and he looked away. "Hurt him with the truth if you must—I can't stop you now—but if he's only got a little time left, I'll be damned if he doesn't spend it knowing how much he was loved.

"And you were." He locked eyes with Blues—and Blues, realizing his eyes were wet, blinked and looked away. "Are.

"Blues, there's something you need to know about him. His involvement in your life so far has been... greatly out of proportion to his contribution to the project to build you. Your code—of the four of us in this room, he probably understands it the least." He turned toward Albert with rage in his eyes. "Over the years, I lost count of the number of times I had to fix his coding errors—careless amateur mistakes which could have sabotaged the entire project. To think I put up with it all this time for the sake of our friendship...

"He's not the genius he likes to think he is. He's a hack."

Dr. Wily leaned back against the wall and let out a low whistle. Blues didn't understand what had just happened—and he didn't care. He was only thinking about how he didn't want to let Dr. Light see him cry. He blinked again and turned his head.

"So, Albert," said Tom. "Why are you doing this? Is it jealousy?"

Albert sighed. "On the contrary, friend," he said, "I think it's the other way around."

"What would I have to be jealous of?" He pointed a shaking finger at Blues. "I gave him life."

"Death, too, by the looks of it." Albert put on a meek smile. "But at least you took lots of pictures."

Just then the doorbell chimed. Blues jerked his head around toward the noise and, suddenly aware how close he was to the front door, shrank away into the living room. As soon as the sound had faded, Dr. Light's phone began to ring.

"Go ahead, Tom," said Dr. Wily. "Don't keep them waiting."

Tom stared down at his netphone with haunted eyes. Beside him, Judith bowed her head.

"Remember what you stand to gain from this," said Albert. "You're going to be famous—even more than you are now. And perhaps before long, when Judith tires of you, you can put in an order to Nurtech for something to make the nights a little less lonely..."

Tom, his face contorted with rage, heaved himself to his feet and lunged across the table. Judith jumped to her feet, and Yuichi ran forward. There was shouting, the sound of striking hands, the sight of Albert trying to shield himself from Tom's blows, and Judith's screams—and for a split second Dr. Wily glanced in Blues's direction and mouthed the word "go," and Blues saw his chance.

Still clutching his generator, he turned on his heels and ran. Seconds later he heard a pair of feet sprinting down the hall behind him.

"Hey, Blues," called Yuichi in a shaking voice. "What are you doing?"

But Yuichi, fast though he was, was too late. Blues flung open the door to the lab, yanked it shut behind him, and turned the lock.

A novel sound escaped him—a sob—as he bounded down the stairs. He came to a stop in front of the red jugs of kerosene, and knew what he had to do.