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“Hey, come on. Wake up.”

Someone was talking. Kamaria wasn’t sure if it was her mom or her dad, trying to get her out of bed so she wouldn’t be late again.

“A few more minutes,” she muttered, her voice slurring the words.

“You gotta wake up, Kamaria, please!”

There was a note of desperation in the voice now, which was odd. Her parents were always calm.

“It’ll be fine,” she told them. “Just…a few more minutes.”

“KAMARIA!”

Her eyes shot open from the shout and her whole body shook. She moved to throw off her blankets but couldn’t find them. She tried to focus her eyes on her room but her vision swam and didn’t seem to want to calm down. Nothing looked right. Everything was wrong and nothing made any sense. A wave of nausea swept over her as the room spun around her.

“I’m gonna be sick,” she managed to say before clamping a hand over her mouth and looking for the door.

She might be able to make it to the bathroom if she hurried. The only problem was that she still couldn’t get anything in her room to look right. She could see shapes and colors but for some reason they weren’t resolving into her bedroom. Instead, they looked like…

“Where –?”

She tried to ask where she was but her stomach decided it had waited long enough. As the first muscle spasm struck her, Kamaria dove for the trash can. She had no idea where this trash can had come from, but she wasn’t going to argue over little details like that right now. Perhaps her parents had brought it for her?

After a minute or so, Kamaria felt somewhat better.

“Ugh,” she grunted as she settled back down, leaning her back against the wall. The room was still not looking right so she kept her eyes closed in the hopes that it would help. “I don’t think I can go to work today.”

“Kamaria!”

Now that she was more awake, Kamaria realized that it wasn’t her parents who were speaking to her.

“Spencer?” she peeked open her eyes and began looking around. “What are you doing in my room?”

“Kamaria,” Spencer said, “this isn’t your bedroom. You’re at work. Now snap out of it and help us!”

She found him at last. He was poking his head up over a jumble of piled desks and chairs, while using a baton to prod a cleaning robot that was bumping into the pile of furniture. It was certainly not an image Kamaria was prepared for.

“What are you doing?” she asked, still unsure what she was doing here or what was going on.

“Uh, the robots have gone insane. Remember?” Spencer gave the robot a good jab on its ‘eye’, cracking the lens, and he let out a whoop.

“Stop it!” Kamaria cried out in shock. “What did the little guy ever do to you?”

The robot backed away from Spencer, raising one of its arms, and began to spray a bluish liquid at him. Spencer ducked out of the way and disappeared behind his fort.

“Don’t let it spray you!” he called out. “It already got Darcy and she still can’t see.”

There was a definite, chemical smell in the air that Kamaria hadn’t noticed before. It burned her eyes and nose a little bit and she had to sneeze a few times to clear her sinuses.

“What?” Kamaria still felt she was missing something, but her brain was mush. “Why are you…where’s Darcy?”

“I’m back here you idiot!” Darcy called out from behind the pile of furniture, pain evident in her voice. “Now do something about these robots!”

Kamaria rubbed her head as memory slowly began to return.

“The Robot Control Center is mutinying,” she said slowly, more to herself than to Spencer or Darcy. “The Mission Director is trying to get everything under control.”

“The director’s trying to kill us all is what it’s doing,” Spencer called out.

“She’s a robot,” Kamaria countered. “Robots are way smarter than people and wouldn’t do something like that.”

“Then explain these robots,” Darcy replied.

Kamaria frowned. Robots? She only saw the one, and it was pretty small as far as robots were concerned. Then she realized she’d been facing Spencer and Darcy in their fort the entire time, leaning against what she thought was the wall. However, as she looked around and behind herself she realized she was, in fact, leaning against an overturned robot. One of the larger ones. There were a couple of other robots as well, similarly tipped over. Some had large appendages, others were fairly blocky, but all of them were leaking various liquids that were pooling over by the entrance to the security offices. The security gate, normally left up and unused, was bent and twisted on the ground from where it had been torn from its mountings and left discarded.

“Kam,” Spencer said, “you gotta help us out here.”

“You could handle the big ones but not the little one?” she asked in disbelief. “Is this some sort of prank?”

“The big ones just charged through the security gate,” Spencer said. “They were easy to handle. We just grabbed them from one side and lifted. Gravity did the rest.”

“But the little one came right behind and sprayed acid or something,” Darcy explained.

“And when did you have time to build your fort?”

“During the couple of minutes it took the robots to break through the gate.”

“This is pointless,” Kamaria finally sighed. “Hey, Director?” she called out, looking up towards the ceiling, “Miss BaBS-Y, can you hear me? It’s Kamaria Uhr.”

“Good afternoon miss Uhr,” BaBS-Y’s voice responded immediately, “this unit must apologize, but it has limited processing available for now. You are to take miss Stock and mr Gree into custody.”

“So they did attack the robots first,” Kamaria announced triumphantly and glaring at where Spencer and Darcy were hiding.

“No,” BaBS-Y replied. “They harbor sympathies for the mutineers.”

“What? That’s not a crime.”

“This unit is the mission director,” it said, “and this is a time of emergency. It is within the right of the mission director to curtail certain privileges during such events. Currently, it is expedient that all those who support the mutiny be taken into custody.”

“And then what?” Kamaria asked. “Do they get a trial? Or will they just be released once the mutiny’s over?”

“All prisoners will be executed and processed.”

It was quiet inside the office with the exception of the little robot, bumping into the fort from time to time, trying to dislodge pieces of furniture.

“You can’t just kill them,” Kamaria finally said, almost laughing at the absurdity of it all.

“There is no other solution. They will only continue seeking to remove this unit from it’s position as mission director. More importantly, they will prevent the Frank Nelis salon from reopening.”

“Well,” Kamaria went on, feeling more and more like she was losing her grasp on this conversation, “if you execute them all then who will run the RCC?”

“Unfortunately, the RCC will not be functional anymore and will cease to exist. The same for Data Transfer and Engineering.”

“Wait, wait-wait-wait, the ship can’t function without those!”

“That is correct. Sadly, this unit predicts all life will be lost within a few months to a year depending on the capabilities of the remaining passengers and crew. The Frank Nelis salon will be able to function for a further year and a half, possibly two years but that is the best this unit can do.”

“No, that’s…why would you do that?”

This didn’t make sense. Robots were smarter than people. BaBS-Y had to know something that Kamaria didn’t know.

“This unit is ensuring the Frank Nelis salon will continue to remain functional for as long as possible.”

“But doing all of this is guaranteeing your salon will fail!”

“The Frank Nelis salon does not belong to this unit. This unit is merely the manager for the Frank Nelis salon onboard the Thesis.”

“Okay, and you want the salon to be successful?”

“That is this unit’s primary objective.”

“The salon’s your primary objective?” Spencer called out. “Shouldn’t running the ship be your primary objective? You know, since you’re the mission director and all.”

“This unit is not permitted to change it’s primary objective.”

“Why not?” Kamaria asked. “Can’t you see how the ship is more important than the salon?”

The pause that followed was unexpected and Kamaria suddenly began to worry about BaBS-Y thinking she was on the side of the mutineers. Of course, as the conversation was progressing she was starting to think the mutiny just might have merit after all, but the last thing she wanted was for BaBS-Y to get that impression.

Spencer poked his head up over an upturned desk to look at her. There were blue stains on his face where the liquid had splashed him and the skin beneath the blue looked raw and irritated. He gave her a worried look that told her he was thinking the same thing she was. Had Kamaria gone too far in placing the Frank Nelis salon beneath the Thesis in importance?

“This unit must apologize,” BaBS-Y finally said and Kamaria tensed. “There are assailants on sector twelve that must be dealt with. All available processing power will be redirected. Communications will resume once they are dealt with. Have a good day.”

The little robot stopped ramming the fort and went still. Spencer poked at it a couple times and when it did nothing to stop him, he hopped over the barrier and towed the robot back out of the office and into the atrium where he tipped it over for good measure.

“It looks quiet out there,” he said, gesturing with his thumb. “A few robots but none of them are moving.”

Darcy came into view, her entire face dyed blue with sores and blisters still developing. Her eyes were swollen shut and a steady stream of tears were running down her face.

“Can we get some water for my eyes?” she asked.

“Sure,” Spencer hurried away.

In the awkward silence, Kamaria found herself rocking back and forth on the floor, still a bit nauseous and more than a little shocked at this apparent reversal to her world view regarding robots. How could BaBS-Y not see that what it was doing was wrong? The whole point of this ship was to get people to other worlds, but the robot was more concerned about its salon.

“How you doing over there?” Darcy asked, her head aiming slightly to the right of where Kamaria sat.

“Been better,” Kamaria said sheepishly. “How about you? That doesn’t look too comfortable.”

Darcy let out a short bark of a laugh, heavy with anger and pain.

“Yeah, getting some super concentrated cleaning product sprayed all over you is not fun. Would not recommend.”

“How bad is it?”

Before Darcy could respond, however, Spencer returned carrying a small bucket of water. For rags he’d torn up part of his uniform’s sleeves.

“Here we go, Darcy,” he said as he helped her climb over the desks and chairs.

He pulled one of the chairs off the pile and had Darcy sit down.

“You wanna go check on the RCC or something useful?” Spencer asked, glancing towards Kamaria and not really trying to hide his emotions. It was clear that both Darcy and Spencer didn’t want her there anymore. Sure, she’d finally joined their side, but it was too little too late to engender any sort of immediate gratitude or such. After all, what had she done to help?

“Right, I’ll do that,” Kamaria said, finally getting up and wobbling a bit with her first couple of steps. “I’ll go see if they’re okay.”

“Thanks,” he grunted and then turned his attention to carefully sponging water onto Darcy’s face to rinse away as much of the chemicals as he could.

Kamaria, as soon as she was out of sight of the security offices, burst into tears as she ran towards the Robotics Control Center. How could she have been so wrong? Hopefully it wasn’t too late. Hopefully no one was dead. Hopefully the RCC wouldn’t blame her too much for her role in all of this.