“Oh my God, I have got to get out of here,” Maria whispered.

“It’s okay, baby,” said Eric, watching the bot with a queasy expression.

“It’s not okay, it’s a fucking zombie!”

The bot slid out its tendril again. It felt at the water, then opened a third panel, reached in decisively and brought out a small triangular flag. It planted this firmly in the puddle and turned around. It moved on.

“We’re not really staying here, are we?” Maria asked. She was trying to laugh, but it was the kind of gape-faced laughter that sounded more like someone working herself up to a scream and no one joined in. “Come on, people! We’re not…We’re not really going to sleep here?”

Outside, a crash of thunder answered in unequivocal terms.

The bot came to the pile of broken concrete and bark. It felt at it, paused, and felt at it some more. It made another soft, electronic sound—a sound that struck Amber as one that was almost distressed. Someone’s been sleeping in my bed, she thought, a nonsensical accusation gleaned from some forgotten fairytale back in those bygone days of state-care. Someone’s been sleeping in my bed, oh dear, oh dear. Someone’s been sleeping in my bed and she’s…still…HERE!

It ran out a second tendril to join the first and slowly, methodically, began to stack the debris back into a neat heap, talking to itself in its worried way.

“No,” said Maria, backing rapidly away as it went about its fussy work. “Seriously. I will sleep in the rain. I don’t care. Get me away from this place.”

The bot retracted one of its tendrils and ran out a brush, cleaning the concrete chunks. It began to hum.

Without warning, Eric picked up a basketball-sized chunk of concrete and brought it smashing down on the bot’s head. The bot caved in on itself without resistance, smooth sides bursting to spew out guts of wire and jelly. One fat, blue spark spat out from its core, leaving a plume of greenish smoke and some ungodly, hot stink in the air behind it. There was no last metallic cry, no dying grope of its tendrils, no planting of a final caution flag to warn people not to slip in its spilled oils. It was dead.

“Thank you, baby,” said Maria.

Eric checked the mess under the chunk of concrete and then brought it down again, giving it a little twist and shove this time. He wiped his hands unnecessarily on his shirtfront; the concrete had been quite clean.

“I don’t see why we have to wait around in here,” announced Scott, striding forward to stand in front of Eric. “It’s out of the wind, but it’s just as cold and not a lot drier.”

“And it’s creepy,” muttered Maria, eyeing the bot’s leaking, smoking corpse. Eric put an arm around her, watching the spiders instead. Amber found herself watching the ‘soap’ as it made its way doggedly across the glass wall. And when it reached the end, she wondered, what would it do? Would it just cluster up and wait to be collected? Or would it come trickling across the floor to crawl back inside the broken husk of the bot and sit there forever?

“I’m going in.” Scott waited, either for protests or applause, but there was nothing and his awkward hesitation looked so much like the bot’s that Amber actually shuddered.

He noticed. He blushed. He gripped the flashlight like a weapon and marched over to the door, which slid itself open as obediently as any automated door back on Earth. Scott walked through. The door slid shut.

Dag followed. Then Eric and Maria. Crandall. Mr. Yao. And then all of them, shuffling along in a subdued line past the spiders and out of the rain.

It was cold out here. And wet. “Come on, Nicci,” Amber said, following.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Meoraq?”

Amber spared the (murdered) bot a final glance, unsure just why it bothered her so much. It had been a creepy little thing and a part of her was very glad to know it would not be rolling up next to her in the middle of the night to clean her while she slept. “He’ll know we were here.”

They went through the door.

And like some magic door in a fairytale, they came out in Earth. Or so it seemed to Amber, as she found herself confronted with an ancient alien civilization that was none of it ancient or alien enough. Whoever the lizardmen of yore were, they kept keepsakes on their desks. The decorative pot for some sort of plant still stood in the corner of one office, its occupant long turned to dust and swept away. There were pictures on the walls, but after so many years exposed to light, their images had faded entirely out to white. There were trophies in a glass case in the hallway, monuments to the office Lizardball league. There were no aliens here; there were only people, and they were all gone.

She knew that she was being left behind as she lingered in the halls, but someone had to look at it, someone had to witness. She drifted from room to room in silence, until she came to a door, just another door. Recessed lights in the ceiling came on with a drill-bit whine when she opened it. On the other side, she found a bathroom.

And that was the end for her. That was where it all swelled up and shut down. Seeing the sinks and the stalls and the corroded mirrors, recognizing them in spite of the little differences because no matter the minutiae of design, the function was still the same. Aliens gotta pee, after all. Lizardmen were going to want to wash their hands before they put them back on their keyboards. Lizardladies were going to want to touch up their cosmetics and adjust the lie of their lizardish clothes.

Skyscrapers and bridges, offices and bathrooms, desks and chairs and coffee cups—none of it was the product of uniquely human invention. They weren’t special. Forget the vastness of the universe and the infinite potential of its diversity, they weren’t even significant right here in this room. The lizards had built all this—plumbed their pipes and wired the lights and programmed the cleanerbots and even fired off the bomb that had ended it—without any human help at all. If there was some great cosmic entity floating out in space, puking up planets and scraping people together out of mud, He was doing just fine without them.

“Hey, Bierce!” Crandall was coming for her, his flashlight bobbing as he jogged up the hall. “You die back there?”

‘Yes,’ Amber thought, still staring into the bathroom. There was a dead bot next to the sink; it had been cleaned so often and so thoroughly that its hull had been worn away entirely in several places. ‘We’re all dead. This place is haunted and we’re the ghosts.’

“Hey.” Crandall glanced into the bathroom without much interest and thumbed back the way he’d come. “Space-Scout says to stay together.”

So had Meoraq. Amber backed up and let the bathroom door slide shut. She stood there for a few seconds, then opened it again. The lights, which had been dimming, whined back to life. One of them popped, throwing one of the stalls into darkness and puffing out a little plume of bluish smoke. Shards of whatever the bulb was made of tinkled down over the floor. She wondered if there were any cleanerbots left to come sweep it up.

Crandall was still there, watching her with half a puzzled smile. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I don’t know. This place…”

“It’s fucked up,” he agreed at once. “Come on.”

She let him take her away, past a dozen other doors to the T-section at the end of the hall. There, instead of a directory or a motivational poster, was a door, with what was probably a bot’s charging pad pulled out into the middle of the floor in front of it. Crandall just stepped over it, turned right and moved on, but Amber stopped. After a lengthy internal debate, she opened the door to find a maintenance closet. As with the bathroom, it was easily recognizable. Here were the shelves for cleaning supplies, there were the various tools too large or specialized to come standard on a cleanerbot, and there, where the bot’s charging pad used to be, there were sixteen bodies’ worth of bones.