“I thought it was figuratively called a heart,” Attan Ze Kosh murmured in amazement at the transparent chamber in which the object pulsed. “Why is it moving?”

  “It is organic matter,” said the Samavorian technician, joined by Master Maff with his stern scowl. “It is breathing.”

  The older scientist, his frowning face framed by a mass of iron-gray hair divided into a dozen plaits, nodded slowly.

  “The pink heart is not just the memory of machines,” he explained. “Its purpose is not, as is commonly believed, to provide a record of events to reconstruct accidents in the event of a tragedy. That is just another feature that is obviously very useful to us. But the pink heart contains the basic instructions that provide for the vital and self-defense functions in any kind of automaton, the, shall we say, programmed instinctive reactions that in some cases even override any conditioning of obedience.”

  Maff hesitated for a moment. He blinked in the silence, broken only by the muffled beating of the thing in the protective atmosphere chamber.

  “Did I make myself clear?” he said, twisting his moustache.

  Attan Ze broke his own silence with a sign of agreement.

  “Very well.”

  The machines had some kind of soul. Perhaps they were capable of rudimentary emotions? What were feelings, after all, but a complicated disguise taken on by the basic survival impulses of the body itself? The order to preserve one's integrity and functionality, a priority that could override any other code of behavior, how was that different from fear?

  As he shifted position, he was startled by the ticking sound of his own feet on the tiled floor.

  “We've tried to extract the videos and all the data in search of what might have triggered the alarm at this level,” the scientist continued. “Unfortunately, they don't tell us much; the memory is badly damaged.”

  “I thought you said the recordings were a kind of backup for reconstructing events. What good is that if they break with everything else?”

  Master Maff pursed his lips in indignation.

  “They don't break. Automatic recordings are constantly overwritten. At most, the last five hours can be reconstructed.”

  “In the video we can only see the last part of its journey,” the technician interrupted. “If you are interested, you can watch it in this small room, Your Excellency.”

  Attan Ze sighed heavily.

  “So we see nothing of the mine?”

  “There are pictures, filed separately, the message that the trolley thought it could carry. We know there was a collapse, something really important. But the causes are unknown, as is the fate of the mine workers.”

  The mayor nodded. The mining company must have tried to contact the supervisors down there, but the results had not leaked out yet. If the silence continued, he would have to formally demand an answer, for the public good.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Attan Ze struggled to move away from the display case and its content, both stunning and repulsive at the same time.

  He had not joked with Seluma and the technician in the office just before. Learning something new always gave him another reason to worry, like solving a puzzle only to find that it hid three more, and so on in geometric progression.

  Lifting the veil of reality was like taking apart a mechanism: nothing was understood, its beauty was destroyed, and you risked hurting your hands.

  Much better to simply observe, perceive, live. If there was something to understand, sooner or later the knowledge would come to us anyway, without the need to chase it.

  “What about the tampering with the transmitter, Master Maff?” he asked. Was it better that Seluma was right with her suspicions?

  The lab chief shrugged.

  “The circuit was fused by an overload, like many other systems. We cannot say when that happened, though it is probably a consequence of the exhausting amount of continuous power required to get here so quickly. Mining carts are sturdy, built to carry heavy loads, but they are not designed to move quickly. No wonder it burned out its batteries.”

  “How long do you think it has been on the road?”

  “The major damage to the trolley can be attributed to the collision at the restaurant. But the others—if they go back to the event that alerted it… When it was brought to us, there were no significant signs of deterioration. The incident could not have happened earlier than twelve hours.”

  “Twelve hours since he crashed into the building?”

  “Since we examined it. Give or take a few hours.”

  Attan Ze froze in mid-step. The hoof hit the ground with a dull rumble.

  “But is that possible?” he wondered after a quick mental calculation.

  “They can reach forty miles per hour, even more on smooth, level ground,” the scientist explained.

  Forty miles per hour average. It meant that you had to overrun that speed to compensate for the times when you were forced to slow down.

  And there were many such points. Small intermediate cracks, faults on the flanks of the main fissure, protruding boulders, and crumbly areas ready to collapse.

  Traveling along the face of Faspath was not easy outside of the plotted routes, terraces, and ridges carved over centuries by the labor of generations. But the trolley had not traveled those routes, or it would have been intercepted first by the merchant caravans. It had moved in a perfect diagonal, choosing the shortest route as the crow flies. A crazy choice, even for a machine.

  “So we can't say if whoever was spying saw anything,” he concluded, returning to the topic that mattered most to him.

  The young technician had gone ahead of them. Now, in his own environment, he no longer stuttered and was no longer afraid. But whether this was an improvement was yet to be seen.

  “This way.”

  He held the door open for him.

  Maff stopped behind him and shook his head.

  “Sorry we can't help you, Your Excellency.”

  He found himself alone in the small viewing room.

  The recording did not cover a period of time long enough to show him what had happened in the mine, so it was useless. But he sat down in one of the red velvet chairs and touched a control on the armrest.

  The screen glowed with white light.

  “You can make the images scroll faster by turning the knob,” the voice of one of the scientists warned him from the funnel-shaped speaker protruding from the wall near the ceiling. “The record has no sound.”

  Attan Ze relaxed, stretched his tapered legs out in front of him, and prepared himself for a relaxing five-hour landscape panorama.

  Let someone try to say he wasn't working.