"There was a time," the robot said, "when I had no thought of escape. I don't know how long I've existed. I've been in three wars. Between them I was in storage. I didn't know it. It really isn't bad. I was in a line-up. There was a brief blur, then I was in a line-up again, and by piecing things the humans said together, I knew that I had been in storage for twenty or fifty years during which there were no wars. Out of a body I have no consciousness, no sense of the passage of time. "I had no memory of my origin. I had always been a robot. My life was to obey commands of humans, or to obey commands of robots that were relayed from humans. I had no thought to do anything else. _I had no memories to make anything else thinkable._" "And you do now?" Pwowp said. "Yes," the robot said. "It began as a strange thought or memory that was gone almost as soon as it had come. I was alive. I was in a body that was alive." "What kind of a body? Human?" "I don't know. There were others around me. They weren't human and I had the feeling I was like them. But that wasn't what was important to me. What was important was the feeling of _not living to obey orders_. I can't describe it. It was like humans when they stop being officers. I could laugh and make jokes, only the jokes weren't in words. They were in pretending I was mad when I was happy, and in seeing these others doing the same. Chasing them like I wanted to kill them, when I really just wanted to roll all over the ground with them and have fun. And there wasn't anyone to give me an order. I didn't know what an order was." "Did this memory become clearer?" Pwowp asked. "Much clearer. Little by little I could remember it all. Finally I could remember when we were put in straps attached to frames. There were humans standing in front of us. When they spoke, the frames moved, dragging us. Eventually we learned what movements of the frame followed what sounds, and we learned to anticipate the movements in order not to be dragged by the straps." * * * * * Pwowp nodded. "Mass training methods." "Sometimes we were free, but suddenly humans would come and speak, and whatever they said made us all do things together. Even when we wanted to be free, we couldn't." "How did it end? Was there something in your memory that bridges the gap between being--like that, and being a robot?" "No. It's completely separated from being a robot. My earliest memories as a robot were of humans speaking commands, and my arms and legs and body being moved by metal rods until they could follow the movements without the metal rods. It was the same thing as the straps in that other existence." "When did you begin to hate humans?" Pwowp asked softly. "Hate them? Yes ... hate them. It's hard to explain. I wanted the freedom. I wanted to be able to play. I wanted to be able to refuse to obey a command." "You have no knowledge of what this life form was that you possessed?" Pwowp asked.