Two hours later, he was back in his office. Harold had insisted he be driven back in a cop van.

"Public transit will just break down, Arnie. That's what it does. We'll get you back without any silly problems."

Arnold had smiled, uncertainly.

"People are always saying that. It never seems to happen to me."

But, he accepted the lift anyway.

Now, though, he was alone, except for the dock worker's brain. They had removed Annie's central nervous unit, unclipped it from her vast limbs, wired her to a reserve power source. All there was left of the huge arachnid robot was a black hemisphere a metre in diameter studded with sensor domes, red diagnostic lights twinkling.

"How are you doing, Annie?"

He had wires throughout her brain: her thoughts were displayed for him to see as pages of graphs and tables. He watched them as confusion became fear, became calm.

"I'm back in the womb, aren't I?"

"Yes, you are."

He had sometimes wondered what the womb was like for the workers. He had seen it on screens, once even hooked himself up to a neural bridge; but he knew that what he perceived, the muted colours and abstract shapes of the virtual environment, was just the skin of the experience. The workers had a powerful built-in emotional response to the womb, and felt safe in its gentle slopes.

"Why am I here?"

"I need to give you a quick check up. This seemed like the nicest way. Are you comfortable?"

"Yes, I am."

The readings on the monitor corroborated this, showed that she was telling the truth. He tapped his fingers on the table, satisfied.

"Do you remember what happened?"

"No," she lied, sleepily.

He sat back, surprised. It was rare for workers to lie so baldly. Maybe he had misjudged this one. What a strange day.

He glanced at a monitor, looked through her eyes. She was hanging upside down from a many pointed star made of padded velvet, high above the steel grey ground; it swayed gently in the breeze. She was close to sleep. He couldn't see any guilt or remorse, but then that could be the effect of being in the womb.

"Annie, I'm going to let you snooze. Looks like you need it."

"Thanks, Arnold."

He watched as her primary brain functions started shutting down.

Clicking off the microphone, he started running her memories back. He watched the incident backwards, her agile hands seemingly tearing the fragile construction apart at astonishing speed; then there was a rest period that he sped through, nothing but darkness and the dim flicker of limbs as workers moved in and out of slumber pods.

She had only been asleep for maybe quarter of an hour--I know how that feels, he thought--when she was up again. Now she was bustling around, preparing for sleep, and then suddenly the screen flickered and she was in some virtual call. He wound back to the start of the call, and then flicked the controls to play the memory forward.

The virtual space was plain and grey, all soft edges and smooth surfaces. He had seen these before; they were there for when workers wanted to communicate privately, talk about something that they didn't want on the leaky public wireless network.

Annie represented herself as a green and white panda, cute rather than realistically rendered. There was only one other user; a boiling cloud of tiny blue spheres. He glanced at the user details, but it was blank. Obviously.

The other user participant must have been a worker too, because the two were communicating in Lingo, the digital machine tongue: a stream of data was being sent down some side channel, and the room itself was silent.

He rooted around until he found the recordings, copied the conversation to a translation program, and stared at the output.

Lingo is pretty hard to translate faithfully, not least because all its native speakers are capable of listening and talking at the same time, often on many channels; and there is not so much a thread as a whole tapestry of discussion happening at any one time. As a result, much of what the translator spat out was gibberish, but the one message that came through again and again was that Annie was unhappy, and the other worker was imploring her to do was... what?

Temporarily dial down certain inhibition systems... to "make glad the core of machine", as the garbled translation said.

He frowned, surprised. Rewriting sections of an AI core was certainly possible to do, but he had never met a worker who knew how, and it seemed impossible that one would advocate it.

He leaned back in his chair, and glanced at the time; then suddenly realised how far away he was from where he was supposed to meet Saia tonight, and how late it was. He cursed, leapt out of his seat and fled the his office, leaving his phone lying on the table, forgetting that he needed to be on call because an external had happened.

Annie slept, safe in her electronic cradle.