Later, Roland paused outside their apartment door. He had come back. Frances had brought him back. World Brain was finished. He knew that. He could remember the subtle changes beginning to occur even as he came back through Worldcity. Soon the whole intricate structure would collapse.
The hall was still. He looked at the back of his hand against the wall. It shook a little. And the coldness came back. It crept into his muscles from his extremities, his hands and feet, and worked inward. He wondered why the loneliness should return here. There was a steady comfort, though, in knowing that behind that panel, Frances was waiting with her gigglings and her soft shoulders and promising eyes.
The photoelectric banks opened the panel and closed it behind him.
They were standing there together, looking at him. He stumbled back against the flat panel, resting his back against it. Something had happened to them. They made him feel alien and afraid. They—
And then Berti said, “Odd. It has come back. What went wrong with our charts, I wonder?”
Her voice wasn’t emotional now. It had never been, he knew that. Her giggling. The smile, the wet eyes. False. “Our calculations couldn’t have been off very much. It’ll die soon.”
Roland edged toward her. “Frances,” he said weakly. “Frances, you said—‘it’. You mean me? Fran. Fran?”
Berti said, “Our conditioning was most effective. Fran, it actually loves you. Remarkable.”
She didn’t smile now. She couldn’t. There was no feeling at all, never had been. All false. Nothing now but cold awareness of power.
He felt weak and dizzy. A hazy outline moved toward him. Berti. “I still regret seeing you die. You’re interesting. A peculiarly interesting experiment. If I had time—almost fifty years of trial and error to create you, Rolly.”