Chapter Twenty
Some disguises run deeper than any form of perception.
—Noah Watanabe
At the Inn of the White Sun, cleverly constructed inside the orbital ring over a jewel-like planet, only a few machines remained after Jimu and Thinker took sentient units to join the opposing forces of Doge Lorenzo del Velli and Noah Watanabe.
The orbiting way station was not as exciting as it had been in past years. However, since it lay beyond the war zone, podships still came and went, though with a different mix of races, and far fewer Humans or Mutatis. The sentient machines often said they missed those two races, for their abundance of exotic personalities, capable of interesting and unpredictable behavior.
Down on the glassy surface of the planet Ignem, the machines were still constructing their army—robots building robots—but they no longer had the same enthusiasm for the project, no longer had the same altruistic goal that had originally been instilled in them by Thinker. Previously, their cerebral leader had motivated them through reminders that they had been abandoned by their Human creators, discarded on junk heaps. He convinced the robots to build a machine army to serve Humans, with the goal of proving to them that the robots had worth after all, that they still had dignity. It was revenge in a sense, but with a loving touch, a desire to excel despite tremendous obstacles, despite being overlooked and tossed away. It was also ironic, considering how poorly they had been treated by Humans.
Now, far across the galaxy the machines serving the Doge and Watanabe were proving themselves, showing their value by performing work once limited to Human beings. On each side, Thinker and Jimu were adding to their numbers as they had previously on Ignem, building more and more sentient fighting machines.
Word of their successes got around the galaxy, even this far from the Canopan battle zone, despite the podship problem. Travelers who had heard nehrcom news reports on fringe worlds brought bits and pieces of information back to the Inn of the White Sun. The two opposing machine leaders on Canopa were developing stellar reputations, or “interstellar” reputations, as one of the travelers quipped.
According to the reports, the two machine forces had clashed in brief skirmishes when Watanabe’s Guardians made guerrilla attacks against their enemies. To Ipsy, one of the left-behind units still at the Inn of the White Sun, it seemed unfortunate that robots had to fight their own kind, or that Human creators had to fight robots, either, for that matter. Ipsy was extremely proud of his machine brethren but felt deep sadness as well.
A small robot, Ipsy had reconstructed himself with advanced computer circuitry. His real love was for combat, and if podship travel was ever restored to the Human-ruled worlds he wanted to join Jimu’s forces, since he had always admired the ferocious fighting methods that robot had espoused.
The feisty Ipsy frequently picked fights with much larger opponents so that he could test his personal combat skills. He won a few of the frays, but lost many more by wide margins and was frequently forced to repair himself.
O O O
From Canopa, the Doge broadcasted orders to every planet in his Alliance, requiring all inhabitants—without exception—to submit to medical testing and thereafter to wear a micro-ID embedded in their earlobes, certifying that they were Human. Previously there had been testing, but it had been sporadic, with too many opportunities for shapeshifters to elude discovery. This time the Doge had his military and police leaders set up stringent systems to ensure that there would be no opportunities for anyone to escape the nets of detection.
On Lorenzo’s newly christened capital world, a surprisingly small number of Mutatis were rounded up in this manner and thrown in his dreaded prisons—and it was the same elsewhere. But there were many suspects. It was reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts of the seventeenth century on Earth, as people constantly turned in their neighbors and personal enemies as suspects.
All across the merchant prince empire, anti-Mutati hysteria ran rampant, with widespread fear that shapeshifters could be hiding inside the bodies of anyone, impersonating people.
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