“I knew him.
“And I—I—”
Still staring at her hands, she clasped them together suddenly and squeezed.
“And I loved him,” she finished.
She looked up at Mike then. “Can you see that?” she asked tensely. “Can you understand?”
“Yes,” said Mike the Angel quietly. “Yes, I can understand that. Under the same circumstances, I might have done the same thing.” He paused. “And now?”
She lowered her head again and began massaging her forehead with the finger tips of both hands, concealing her face with her palms.
“And now,” she said dully, “I know he’s a machine. Snookums isn’t a he any more—he’s an it. He has no personality of his own, he only has what I fed into him. Even his voice is mine. He’s not even a psychic mirror, because he doesn’t reflect my personality, but a puppet imitation of it, distorted and warped by the thousands upon thousands of cold facts and mathematical relationships and logical postulates. And none of these added anything to him, as a personality. How could they? He never had a personality—only a set of behavior patterns that I drilled into him over a period of eight years.”
She dropped her hands into her lap and tilted her head back, looking at the blank white shimmer of the glow plates.
“And now, suddenly, I see him for what he is—for what it is. A machine.