The Doctor toddled along behind her. Toddle toddle toddle. All the way up to the lab where he found a chair suitably capable of spinning, because if you were going to sit somewhere any amount of time a logical mind must be in possession of a chair that's ~fun~.

"Death?" While he started to turn from side to side. "Frightening. Painful. One mind blinks out. The next takes hold. You grapple against it, but your functions start to slip from your grasp like grains of salt that refuse to hold between your fingers."

Vasilia went pale as he spoke: a little more so as she digested his words. She had expected a more whimsical answer, perhaps, and yet though that would have annoyed her, the frankness was somehow worse.

"Ah," she said quietly. Out of her tangle of questions, now so much less intriguing and more potentially horrific, one rose. "Is that the death experience for humans, as well? And--if there have been Time Lord inmates--did they die before arrival? I am told we all did. I do not remember dying."

"They were at least in a situation where imminent death was extremely possible. Some have gone and returned home and then back here, progressed further to their next point of possible death." He squirmed to a more comfortable position in his spinny chair.

"Omega did, before he came, as did Rassilon. My brother as well, I presume. The death experience for humans is quite similar." He remembered from the breach. From having Narvin fill him full of bullets, and then being left with a sense of utter shock.

"Except the next mind doesn't take hold. It just stops."

Vasilia linked her hands limply in her lap. "If that is death, then why continue? Why suffer a dozen new instances knowing that the last is coming? Why struggle, why postpone?"

Why pride oneself on fifty decades when at the end was that ending--what use a legacy?

She had stumbled into the same morass that another woman had--it would have comforted her very little to know that Gladia Solaria too had realized this, had found herself seeing her years as only a long, meaningless diversion as she awaited the unknown.

"Some of us do choose to die. It's called a tombing. We simply decide to stop because there's nothing else to do? But why stop coming up with things to do?"

He makes a vague motion in the air, and dangles his arm over the arm of the chair. "What's the point in living if you don't spend it living? I live my life to the fullest. All the centuries of it."

"What can be done, then-- what task or diversion--that will matter, when three generations or ten are gone after you, and you are only a matter of record?" she asked-- as unnaturally subdued as if she had fallen ill again, after all.

"Sometimes I look forward to it, and sometimes I dread it. So long as I make a mark as me on the universe before I go."

Oh, and how he'd made a mark. In more than one way he shouldn't and was glad to have. "By that reasoning, what's the point in living in the first place?"

"Precisely," she said, simply, dully.

He raised a brow and leaned his head back slightly. Well, that was particularly odd.

"Haven't you done anything that brings you lasting enjoyment? Something that you can go back to time and time again?"

Vasilia turned in her chair, starting her terminal with a few listless taps; it booted to a prompt-- she was more comfortable with a command line than with the nannying graphic interfaces-- and a few strokes started her simulation program.

"I have," she said, watching the initial random population -- represented as a hundred-by-hundred grid of colored squares, of various brightness and hue to represent their default strategy and status-- start to shift and interact. "I have been a roboticist for twenty six decades, and I studied it for two decades before I was qualified for the title. It has brought me a great deal of joy. But; I had never considered an end to that work." She finally looked back at him, her interjection of pre-emptive argument perfunctory and without bite- "I am aware that it was a short sighted view. You hardly need to tell me."

"Oh! I was thinking of putting some work into an android- a robot. It's difficult, because= Oh well, don't pay any mind to me. I've gotten side-tracked." He peels his eyes away from her simulation and tips his hat more forward on his head.

"Why is it a short-sighted view? Why is engaging in anything you love with a passion a short-sighted view? Investment and specialization means both excellence and sensitivity to the subject. To have that subject matter ripped away from you is as damaging as removing all the nesting materials from a bird's native region.

"It's not damning. They may adapt. But it's certain unpleasant, inconvenient, and practically painful in some cases."

She would have told him what a transparent ruse that was-- if she could only figure out what he would gain from it-- or if she was simply so beneath his notice that it simply had come to mind. Her face showed mingled temptation and confusion and wariness; she was so absorbed in trying to guess his motives that there was some delay before she understood what he had said-- a metaphorical processing lag between hearing and comprehending.

"But-- if I were returned to my estate tomorrow, and continued to design until the day I died, with all the success and acclaim that could be wished; would any of that ease the last moments? Be consolation as I lost my faculties? In the universe, what is gained by a hundred years of enjoyment? Even my work-" she would not admit aloud that she was not the great innovator that Fastolfe was, except in one accidental way that she dared not repeat. Some pride choked down the admission of her own insignificance, even as she felt it.

"Then your work is only insignificant as you make it? No matter what you feel about yourself, you know all that passion, all that creativity went into accomplishment. Will formed matter into shape and ingenuity gave that shape motion. It's a profound accomplishment that is in essence life continuing life." He sits up, cross-legged, and makes as if he's trying to clasp that life out of the air.

"Life, creativity, and genius gives the universe means to shape itself, and marks the passage of time. Those fleeting moments of unrest at the end take up only an insignificant portion or an otherwise potentially extremely meaningful existence."

"Life--" She shook her head, her limp hair moving with it. "To what end-- besides that end. That last inescapable moment."

She had not considered it before, it was as simple as this. And she did not want to think about it-- it was frightening, and it made everything seem so purposeless.

"You mentioned a project. Was it your intention that I bargain something with you to be included-- or was it rhetorical? If the former-- if you do intend to create a programmatic intelligence-- I am willing to bargain," she said, a little more spirit in her voice.

"What end would you like it to have?" It was a very bizarre question. He knew he didn't want to stop. He came here to avoid stopping, and at the same time to continue to be his own man.

He actually boggled a bit at her questioning of his intentions, not really knowing what to think of it.

"No, I was just wanting to discuss it. I like to talk about things. Most of my friends on board are mathematicians and engineers, and we like to talk about what we know and what we've seen." Science; always a good topic of conversation for the socially displaced.

She ... simply ignored the first question, having no idea where to start, how even to approach an answer to herself, let alone a stranger.

Instead: theory. She pursed her lips. "I have discovered that the type of robotic theory I know is uncommon. Most have not heard of its base premise, the three Ascenion Laws. Have you, Doctor Smith?"

He didn't mind it being ignored. He could tell that it was personal. Whatever fidget had overtaken him, he still hadn't worked out of his system.

This bit was easier.

"I've heard of it. And I've seen it put into play." Emulated by some aspiring robotics. "Usually, to the end that many intelligences are indeed, intelligent, and capable of finding loopholes. Even if those intelligences were artificially constructed."

"When implemented from the base up-- the first principles from which the rest of the system is constructed-- it should not be possible to circumvent," Vasilia said dutifully, and to a large extent she still believed that to be true. "It makes for a proper symbiosis; if we wish robots to be our servants and aids and no more, then we should design them to be satisfied in those roles, their optimum potential reached there. It has-- for millenia-- succeeded, with only apocryphal tales of robots who were built, by factory accident, without the first law.

"But. I heard a theory broached to me, once." How delicately to put this, when she still feared that Daneel Olivaw might discover that her memory block was gone-- and for the good of his 'humanity', destroy her. "That more important than the first law was a zeroeth law; that higher priority than the preservation of one human is the preservation of an abstract concept, humanity-- its development and well being."

She tangled her hands in her lap again, to stop them from fidgeting on the keyboard. "One robot was exposed to this idea, I believe; I know only that he harmed a human, to save a large number of humans, and in doing so broke the first law; he suffered mental freeze out. The zeroeth law, if he had heard of it, did not protect him."