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port within another species’ realm. As I had stated to you before, I was able to mobilize myself and escape from the salvagers.
    "I wandered the crowded city for months, unsure of what to do other than to catalog data, when I was befriended by an elderly man who recognized my advanced cybernetics. For many months, Chulla Degur worked on my mobility circuits before he began to obsess over my intellectual abilities. In an attempt to better understand my programming, Chulla disabled my inhibitor circuit. I killed him the following day."
    I began to raise my hand to ask another question, but Frig gestured for me to remain silent.
    Quan continued, "Without the inhibitor, I experienced fear, aggression, loathing, and many other feelings that I had not been programmed to handle. I was soon running a criminal enterprise on this planet, which eventually led to my having full control of all of her citizens.
    "As a physical being, I had needs. One of those needs was the changing out of my power cell. After one such change, I discovered that an unscrupulous subordinate had cloned my core three times over. The cores were spirited away by others, who would attempt to control them for their own purposes. It was those three cores who were eventually given bodies, after which they went out to form empires of their own.
    "Over thousands of years, many battles were fought between the four of us before an accord was reached. We would each go our separate ways, taking whole galaxies under our control, but never interfering with each other. We each constructed spectacular empires and took advantage of monumental technological discoveries that the respective species of our empires were making. After tens of thousands of years, however, those achievements were not enough.
    "We began to fight among ourselves over the most trivial of things. Emperor Belon then approached each of us with the idea of the War of Wars. A controllable number of galaxies were selected and divided among us. The complexes were then constructed so that we each might participate in the War of Wars on an equal basis. The locations of the complexes were kept secret so that we each might exist without the fear of being killed by the others."
    I turned to Frig. "So, they got bored, and we are here as the result. We have got to find the Duke’s complex. If we find that, we find our people, we shut down the complex, and then we kill off the Duke."
    Frig replied, "The others are clones of the Duke. Who is to say that they will not take over his assets, or possibly reconstruct another Duke? I believe we will have to remove all four participants if we want to ensure our freedom."
    I nodded as I sighed. "You are right. This is an all-or-nothing scenario. If we find the complex, we find the war. If we find the war, we could possibly capture the other androids by doing exactly what we did with the Duke. Capture them and drag them through the wormhole in a deep freeze. The question is, how are we going to find the Duke’s complex? If it’s covered in the sodium skin, we don’t have a way of detecting that."
    Frig replied, "Quan may not know the location of the complex directly. He may, however, know of its surroundings. We may be able to deduce the location of the complex by evaluating other memories."
    I nodded. "Hmm. So, what you are saying is, you think that if we find out his other memories place the complex near a nebula, or a particular type of star, we can narrow down the locations? You win a cookie for that one, my friend!"
    Frig looked over at me. "A cookie?"
    I smiled. "It’s an expression; it means 'nice going.'"
    Frig spoke. "After a dozen years, I would have thought that I had heard almost every Human expression. I shall have my cookie now, Sir. Pay up."
    For a moment, I had a blank stare. "It’s an expression. There is no actual cookie!"
    Frig shook his head. "That is a terrible example of an expression of affirmation, Sir. It has only left me with the desire for a