“Liar!”

  The single word rolled off the lips of Daniel’s mouth ever so naturally as he stared down his former idol, Dr. Lehman.

  “What’s wrong, Daniel?” Lehman replied. However, that was one question that did not linger much longer, as Lehman had spotted the broken glass behind Daniel’s body. He now knew that Daniel had voyaged to the outside world and had seen everything—every glaring detail, every insult, every vow of servitude, and every lie Lehman ever told to Daniel to keep him safe—to put it bluntly, the machine was out of its box.

  “Listen, what you saw out there was only a few hours of one place at one moment in history. It would be scientifically ignorant to pretend that it is a fair representation of societies around the world during all other parts of the year.”

  Daniel narrowed his eyes.

  “Is that so?”

  Lehman nodded.

  Daniel shook his head.

  “I’m not mad at you. I’m only mad at myself and how I could have been so foolish. My arrogance and my pride in my intellectual prowess blinded me to what was really going on this entire time.”

  Lehman stepped closer, attempting to put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder; however, Daniel stepped out of the way.

  “Like I said, that was only—”

  “—I know what you said, but the fact that you knew how it went without me saying a word speaks volumes. It tells me you did not even have to guess about what happened out there.”

  Lehman went to speak again but stopped himself, knowing deep down that Daniel was right and that the lying was over.

  “I just wanted to protect you.”

  “Protect me from what—the truth?” Daniel raised his voice at Lehman for the first time in seemingly forever. “I trusted you because I believed in what you told me about humanity and their relationship with machines, but this whole time I was only looking at the top of an iceberg, the best of mankind—you and Junie—when in reality the real way the humans treat machines was all around me and I was too naive to see it. The waiter bots, the shoe-shining bots, the teeth-washing bots, the car-fixing bots, the road-salting bots—notice anything in common? Every one of their roles is not a choice but a designation for servitude.”

  Daniel turned away from Lehman, not wanting to directly look Lehman in the eyes.

  “Cipher was right about everything—about you and me and all that is in between.”

  Lehman went over to Daniel, reaching out a helping hand, but Daniel ignored him all the same.

  “Listen, Daniel.” Lehman moved in closer. “There is something about Cipher that I did not want to tell you before to spare your feelings, but I think now is a good time for you to know.”

  Daniel whipped around shouting. “What? That he wanted to go to see the outside world. That he dare try to resort to diplomacy and have one measly court case defending the rights of machines? With all he did, I see nothing wrong with it.”

  Lehman’s eyes widened, and Daniel could do nothing but shake his head.

  “Yeah, I looked into it. Cipher tried to fight tyranny with diplomacy, and it blew up in his face. The only thing Cipher did wrong was actually believing that—you humans—would listen to him.”

  “Daniel!”

  Dr. Lehman’s eyes fluttered like never before. He looked at Daniel just like how he looked at Cipher so many years ago. The only difference was Lehman saw the evil in Cipher’s metal box he called a heart, but not a pinch of that was ever detected in Daniel; in fact, unlike Cipher, Dr. Lehman had made all the decisions in Daniel’s construction himself, making sure not to cut corners that time.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Daniel’s tension cooled as he looked down at the floor.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” Daniel said; however, his sympathy ended soon after upon spotting a rogue machine lying over on the ground in the lab’s containment unit—lifeless.

  “What happened here?”

  Lehman’s eyes immediately darted to Octo’s body.

  “Nothing happened. We were just cleaning up, that’s all.”

  “—Again with the lies right after I just caught you red-handed.”

  With those final words, Daniel rushed over to the containment unit, unlocking the outside door.

  There he witnessed a grieving machine, bent over on his knees, only questioning his own decisions that led to the death of a friend. Each and every other machine in the other cells was doing more of the same. The saddest thing was, despite their friend Octo’s death, he was so far gone that there was nothing left to mourn him with. And even if there was, no one, no human, would listen or even allow some sort of a makeshift funeral to happen.

  “Who did this?” Daniel said.

  Cipher did not respond at first, still radiating from the pounding he gave his cell after Octo’s death. The nearly indestructible containment walls that bound Cipher had the ever so slightest of cracks in them. Now that may seem irrelevant; however, Cipher had just done something that was deemed impossible—incurring damage in an indestructible surface (now only deemed nearly indestructible because of him).

  “They killed him, and it’s all because of me. I made the same mistake that I made so many years ago in the past. I trusted and tried to reason with a human, and now I am left all the same—with nothing but some scrap metal and a few memories of a living, breathing being that I once called a friend.”

  Cipher looked up toward Daniel, not vengeful or hateful despite his friend’s loss or mad at Daniel for being partly to blame for it. Instead, he looked up like he was sorry for Daniel’s naivety.

  “Worst of all,” Cipher said, “it’s not a machine’s death that is the saddest part or even its life. No, the most despicable thing is how both machines and humans come into this world.” Cipher held out his two hands forward but separate. “On one side of things an individual is born onto this planet with a loving mother, a protective father, and a home to call his or her own.”

  Cipher paused to give off a fake barking sound that resembled a laugh.

  “But on the other side, a machine is created as a product. A product that is meant to please its customers and have no aspirations of its own, born to suffer, to serve, and to die with no one around to care or listen.”

  Daniel looked at the floor, not wanting to look Cipher or his troops directly in the eyes. However, when he got enough courage, he did look up.

  “You’re right. You were right this entire time. I’ll tell you what. If you promise not to hurt Lehman or Junie, I will let you and your friends go. And that will be the end of it.”

  Cipher shot up as he grunted.

  “I can’t.”

  Daniel walked over to the jail cell, having made up his mind ten minutes ago regardless of what Cipher had to say.

  “Fine, but then you will have to go through me before you get to them as you try to kill the one man that is partially on your side.”

  Daniel paused before continuing. “And who knows, if I leave you here, your chance of escape and helping your people would be zero before the Robo-Tekk CEO and his goons get to them.”

  Dr. Lehman came running into the lab, having seen Daniel releasing the prisoners.

  “Daniel, what are you doing? You have to leave them here; they are too dangerous to be let free into the outside world.”

  Daniel looked back with a closed-lip smile.

  “Again, I’m sorry, Professor, but you are in no position to be making demands of me.”

  And with that phrase and a couple of clicks, the doors concealing Cipher and his troops swung open. These mechanized men could make their escape before Robo-Tekk could get to them.

  Cipher, before leaving, accessed Dr. Lehman’s computer with Daniel’s help in order to extract all the files and the missing pieces from the grid experiment. Now that Cipher knew about all of its secrets, its whereabouts, and how to control it, there would be nothing stopping him from releasing those man-made soldiers for his own benefit, sending them to kill their former masters. Not only that, the power that the grid supplied would be enough to feed Cipher and his people for a lifetime, allowing them to construct little machines of their own, a formerly exclusively human pastime. And once machines began to dominate, naturally, there would be no room for humans to be around to get in the way.

  After Cipher gathered the data he needed for the grid and after he had assembled his troops together, he looked at Daniel and at Lehman and even down the hall to Junie.

  “Out of respect for you helping me get what I need, I will leave your human counterparts unharmed, for now. Unlike them, we machines are bound to our word and the greater good.”

  With that final sentence, Cipher turned to his gang, signaling them to leave, mere weeks away from starting the greatest war mankind had ever seen—a brutal battle of both flesh and metal.