It had been a very long time since Mycenae had gone to his Wonder. His first encounter with his ancestor had been monumentally unpleasant, and served only to give him the answer to the aching question of what had happened to his little sister.

She had bene a Knight. She had died--no one knew how, but if he had the mantle, then she was gone.

It had given him a sort of peace, to know that they were right to have her declared dead and a gravestone put up for her. But it had made him angry, and made him stay away from the place he was named for, even if he'd been distantly curious about what he'd seen there. Corpses of androids, scattered all over, broken and deactivated; Mycenae loved robotics, and he was curious about what Mercury might have produce din the ancient past. Everything he'd seen indicated that their technology was leaps and bounds beyond modern Earth's; the whole concept left him fascinated and itching for more knowledge.

He'd become a Squire not long before he and Harker and Jean confessed feelings, and truth be told, although he'd dawdled about it a few days after his upgrade, he knew that it was time to visit his Wonder again. He would simply avoid speaking to Elain as much as he could. She was a nightmare of a person, but the Wonder was his as much as it was hers, and he wasn't ready to lay down and give it up just because she irritated him to no end.

So he spoke the pledge that would carry him to space, exhaled, and looked around.

"About time you came back," Elain's voice said in his ear, but he waved her off.

"I'm not here to listen to you natter," he said, coldly. "I'm here to see your damned robots."

"Oho," Elain said, brightly, "then you are here for me, because those were my life's work. The pursuit of true AI..." She sighed, wistfully. "I never managed to quite achieve it, but the prototypes here," she appeared next to one of the broken forms, in a pile with a few similar ones, "were the closest I came."

"That's nice," Mycenae said, and he strode up to the bank of computers on the far wall of the main room.

"You won't get those to turn on," Elain said, but he ignored her, trying switches and buttons and inputs to see if anything worked. The old systems didn't stir, and he sighed unhappily.

He knew this place was a research facility. He'd seen that much. Apparently, it was one for AI--or at least,t hat was what Elain had studied. He wanted into those computers; even if the files were likely to be unreadable, because it wasn't as if he spoke Mercurian or any other ancient language, he might be able to do sometihng with whatever code was there. But no; they remained stubbornly s**t down.

Reluctantly, Mycenae moved over, and knelt next to the one she'd indicated.

"AI, huh?" He asked, idly. Elain would talk; she was a researcher, no researcher would abandon a chance to talk about their work. As he waited for her to answer, he pulled off his gloves--although it was icy-cold outside, and chilly in, the research facility was clearly climate-controlled, and whatever system was running that, and the lights, was still working. Even if the damn servers were out of reach. He needed the fine motor control of his bare hands for this; there were no clear sealers on the chassis--no welding, no screws--so he suspected the pieces were fit together like a puzzle. "What were you looking at?"

"Yes, AI," she said. "We wanted to create automated, thinking defense systems. The need became great with the trouble on Earth, but there had always been threats." She sighed. "I had hoped to protect the research staff here, if I could perfect these designs, but they never worked. It's too bad--I thought I'd stumbled upon a particularly clever way of introducing a sort of consciousness into the system."

"Oh?" Mycenae asked, as his nails caught on a tiny gap in the side of the automaton's chassis. "What's that, then?"

As he asked the question, he pried it open.

And there, before him, was his answer.

"Elain," he said, voice gone ice cold, "Tell me I'm not seeing what I'm seeing."

In the center of the robot's chest, connected to wires and circuitry, was a slim glass tube.

And floating in that tube was a weakly glowing starseed.

"Elain," he demanded, angrily, as she remained silent.

".......It was the only way," she said. "Desperate times called for desperate measures. A soul to create a soul. But it never worked."

"Of course it never bloody worked!" Mycenae snarled. He wrapped his hand around the tube and pulled, extracting it from the wires around it.

"What are you doing?" Elain demanded. "I ran out of time, but you--you could find the answer--"

"I don't want any answers that come like this!" Mycenae snapped, furiously. "You're no better than the goddamned Negaverse, stealing people's souls for your own ends!"

"I did it to save people!" Elain snapped, striding forward to get in his face. She was tall, certainly, but couldn't quite match him, and she was a ghost besides, so he wasn't exactly intimidated.

"By killing them? Garbage," Mycenae said. He found the top of the vial, and unscrewed it, dumping the starseed into his hand. "How many of them are there, Elain?" He demanded.

"Why should I tell you? So you can destroy all of my work?" She snapped.

"Because if you don't, I swear to you, however long ti takes, I'll pull apart every bot in this facility and find the ones that have souls in their chests. I'll destroy everything you did. But if you tell me, we can get this over with quickly." Mycenae stared her down, eyes ice cold.

"......Five," Elain said, finally. "There were ten prototypes. All condemned criminals. If this had worked, I weould have asked for volunteers among my team."

"I don't care how you justified it to yourself," Mycenae said. "So keep your mouth shut and show me every single one."

She did. It was a slow process, but Mycenae cracked open four more chassis, pulled out four tubes, collected four starseeds.

"Leave them here," Elain said, quietly, and there was something like guilt in her voice. "They'll return to the Cauldron on their own, now that they've been released."

"No," Mycenae said. He was still incandescent with rage. "I don't damned well trust you. I'll find someone--a Cosmos Knight, maybe--and we'll move them on."

"You're making a mistake," Elain said, but he ignored her, carefully tucking the starseeds into the breast pocket of his uniform.

Without another word, he took himself back to Earth.

[1,147 words]