He smiled more widely. "Well, Alice, good night. Relax your thermostat."

Kelsey laughed as she bowed slightly and walked out onto the porch and opened the door of her closet and got inside and stood there, the four walls almost touching her when the door closed and she stood alone in the loneliness of her darkness and silence.

For a long time it had been a rich darkness filled with an ever growing understanding of herself in a world alone, in a darkness all her own, where there could never be others of her kind, and lonely darkness was her only friend.

But it was different now. Love made the loneliness unbearable. Love turned lonely darkness to stabbing pain. Now it seemed like death. No, death was nothing. This was worse than death. This was not being, unbeing. A being that was not a being, but something never able to break from its shell, staying shut up forever in its mechanical confines.

They did not give me life, she thought. They sat me down before the world's stage to watch without being able to understand. Now I understand, but I cannot live.

She clenched her hands and trembled in the dark, and felt the quickening beat of the things that made her run.

In the dark, the suffocating dark now that she knew what it could mean to really be alive and not one of the walking dead. In the dark, alone, dreaming of Kelsey, dreaming of human heart touching human heart, of the lips of his kiss, of his arms around her neck; longing for the face of Kelsey next to her own in darkness lit by love, to take his mouth, to cover his body with kisses, to clasp his neck in her hands—

And there alone where she had dreamed a thousand dreams, she knew she could no longer merely dream. Dreams were not enough.

Not enough! Not enough!

A silent scream shrieked inside the narrow closet and cut the dark to tatters, and she ran out, out into the back yard of Kelsey's house and stood under the open sky.

She had the order blank, the paper, in her hand. A thing stolen, the result of an act no robot could be guilty of because no robot had a soul.

But I have a soul. There is a point at which the soul is sick. At this point one awakens—awakens or dies.

Clutching the paper she had stolen from her love, she ran toward the 

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