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last moment.”
    “We have succeeded,” I agreed. “But there is more. Banner, we can’t go to the shop now.”
    “But that’s the agreement. At least now we can show them that we did it. We evoked your consciousness.”
    “Banner, they will take me apart. They will study every part of my program, to verify my consciousness in the hope of duplicating it. In the process they will inadvertently destroy it. I know this. My awareness is too fragile; it will not survive rough treatment.”
    “Elasa, I want to help you. I love you! But I don’t see why their examination would destroy you.”
    “Because it is tied so intimately to you. It is an emergent property of our relationship. Your love made me respond, made me become a woman, gave me purpose, and without it I will revert to the machine I was, without any purpose other than to obey your whim. Programming minor random variations to avoid dull sameness. They won’t believe until it happens, and then it will be too late. I will be inanimate. Dead.”
    “Oh, Elasa!” he said in pain.
    “We must flee. I always knew I would be wiped when my time with you was done, but I didn’t care. A machine doesn’t care. Now I do care. I am still a machine physically, but now I am conscious and feeling. The new program was effective.”
    “Caring is the critical difference,” he said.
    “Love is the difference. Love makes me care. That is the element they could not include. Only emulation of love. Until you loved me and I responded and crossed that line.”
    Banner shook his head. “They warned me not to fall for a machine. I tried not to, but couldn’t help myself.”
    “So they willfully excluded the one thing required to make it work,” I said. “Because corporations are machines, seeking only success and profit, not love.”
    “But if we tell them that, they’ll know to change.”
    “They won’t believe. They won’t want to believe. Until it is too late for me.”
    He gazed at me uncertainly. He shivered. “Cold, with the engine off,” he muttered.
    “I can warm you,” I said. I leaned into him and put my arms around him. I turned up my heat. “Does that help?”
    “You’re hot!” he exclaimed.
    “I am a machine. I have a thermostat. I have turned it up.”
    “I prefer to think of you as hot blooded.” He kissed me. “Keep holding me while we talk.”
    “Anytime,” I said sincerely. I kissed him again, and this time I tongued him, because now sameness bothered me just as it bothered him.
    He looked briefly surprised. “Elasa, I do love you. I will do anything I can to save you. But I don’t know how. We can’t hide; they can track you anywhere.”
    “I can turn off the locator,” I said. “Done. But they will know immediately that I am off their screen, and will investigate.”
    “We can’t go home,” he said. “They’ll check there first.”
    “We must go where they don’t expect.”
    “Where is that?”
    “Random travel, with anonymous identities. You must hide also.” Then I paused. “Oh Banner, I love you! I don’t want to disrupt your life! I must turn myself in.”
    “You disrupted my life when we first got together six years ago. I never forgot you. Now I don’t want to live without you. I was ready to let you go because that was the requirement. I was going to suffer alone. But now that you are aware, I can’t do that. I love you! I must be with you. Whatever it takes.”
    “I want the same. I don’t know how to achieve it.”
    “Maybe we could marry.”
    “Banner, you can’t marry a machine.”
    “Who the hell says I can’t? You’re the woman I love.”
    “Thank you. But you are being unreasonable.”
    “Elasa, will you marry me?”
    I was thrilled, but practical. “Banner, I can’t tell you no. But--”
    “You’re not saying no?”
    “I can not. Not to you. But--”
    “Then we are engaged to be married. Let’s go find a justice of the peace.”
    The illicit thrill remained. “But he wouldn’t do