It was a silent recording made by someone who, according to the slight sway of the filming, was walking down a long empty corridor. The walls were covered with bone-colored laminated plates—the same ones Juzo had seen in the photographs of that destroyed operating room. There were about five or six doors on either side of the path, all closed, and he could see the pipes and air ducts that ran along the ceiling. The light from the rod-shaped lamps that ran along the walls was a bit dim, but they served their purpose.

“This is one of the few recordings we recovered from Alfred’s memory,” Rigel said.

In the video, one of the last doors on the right of the corridor, a swing door, opened its two leaves, letting out a couple of men dressed in lab coats; scientists, for sure, who advanced toward the camera. One of the men in the video had some printed reports in his hand and, from the way he was shaking them, he was discussing something with his partner, another man who walked slightly hunched forward as if carrying the weight of years or severe back pain. Perhaps it would have been easy to tell which of the two options was correct by looking at his face, but something constantly blurred the heads of both men in the footage.

“Automatic facial override system,” Rigel said. “I told you; these people took being anonymous very seriously.” He then pointed to the door these two had come out of. “That’s the operating room. Now look.”

There was a glitch in the footage, a flash, and a warning appeared at the top of the frame, announcing that the android’s system had begun to draw on its emergency power supply. The soft rocking of the recording stopped; the Cyclops Alfred had stopped advancing—as an animal would, he had detected danger a few seconds before it arrived. Then the lamps on the sides spat sparks, the lights went out, and the corridor was left in darkness. The scarlet flash coming from the camera, the very eye of the android, and the sparks that jumped from the lamps were the only things that prevented that place from turning into complete darkness.

Startled, the two men who were arguing turned toward the door of the operating room as if they had heard something coming from there, perhaps an explosion... Or a scream. A woman emerged from another of the doors—judging by her silhouette, since her face was also covered in a blur as she entered the frame. She dressed as a nurse and seemed alarmed; she asked the men something, then turned back to the camera, probably waiting for the android to clarify what was happening.

The image moved slowly forward again: the Cyclops had resumed his steps. The swinging doors opened and vomited a flash that lit everything in white. And in that chaos of lights and shadows, from inside the room, some things jumped out and hit the front wall of the corridor and fell to the ground.

Juzo frowned.

“Pieces of a leg and a hand,” Rigel pointed out.

The scientist with the reports in his hand made a gesture, as if trying to protect himself from whatever was happening behind him, and ran toward the camera, accidentally hitting the nurse and knocking her to the ground. His papers fell to the floor. The other man, the one who walked with a stoop, helped the woman to her feet and together they hurried away. The three of them crossed to the side of the Cyclops and were out of camera angle; none of them cared much that the android stayed there, in the middle of the corridor, walking toward where all hell had broken loose.

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“If it was an electromagnetic burst,” Juzo wondered; “Why is the Cyclops still...?”

“Working?” Rigel finished. “Because he had a reinforced four-frequency emitter in his head to withstand electromagnetic pulses. I guess they knew something like that was within the possibilities.”

And, all the while, in the video, the camera continued to approach ground zero of chaos, and as it did, the interference drew more and more rainy bars across the image.

The operating room was thirty or forty feet away, and the flashes from there had eclipsed the sparks from the lamps in the corridor and the glare from Alfred’s eye. Some smoke was spreading around the place. To the left of the corridor was the open door from which that woman had come out, and on the floor, the reports that the scientist had dumped in his eagerness to escape from there. With the advance of the android, those things were soon out of the frame. Then there was an explosion of light, stronger than the others, and a new figure was revealed on the threshold of the operating room. Another man in a lab coat, as far as Juzo could see; someone who, staggering, began to walk away from the disaster site and toward the camera. He did it slowly, though, as if he wasn’t in a hurry, as if the chaos around him didn’t exist. There was little one could see of him; the pulsations of light that came from the operating room hit his back and turned him into a dark silhouette; however, his right arm… Well, it was torn. A piece of it was missing and his hand was dangling by his tendons. There was also something weird about his face; an unsettling shining that triggered Juzo’s suspicions. Until a cascade of sparks rained down on him, exposing him to light.

Here there was no blurred face thanks to the facial override system, because there was no face to be blurred out. The oval-shaped red light turned Juzo’s doubt into a certainty.

“Another Cyclops,” he pointed out. “An old A60-R8.”

“No matter the shape of their eyes, that red light gives them away, right?” Rigel said.

Soon, it became clear why this A60 in a coat didn’t move with the same grace as the others of his kind. His right leg had stopped working, and he was dragging his foot; his right arm, indeed, was a mass of loose parts dangling from wires, while his left arm flashed as if short-circuited.

The damaged A60 approached the camera, and the footage shook a bit; he had just pushed Alfred aside. The recording ended.

“Y’know?” the Detective said, “last year I had the case of 6241.Pepe, an android that should also have gone out of use two models ago. Pepe disassembled cars in a factory but suffered a malfunction that altered his Directives, killed a technician, and left another without arms by mistaking them for the crane controls. And that wasn’t the first violent accident involving a Cyclops; there have been many more just like Pepe.”

“Do you think something similar happened to this android, and it ended up killing those people?”

“Using some kind of electromagnetic weapon,” Rigel deduced. “That A60 was the only one who walked out of that room. And lemme tell you something, from the state we found the geology students in the Canyon and Alfred, just as torn to pieces as those scientists ended up there… Well, I know when a massacre was committed by the same hand. What we do know about the A60 is that he periodically went to the bunker to give maintenance to Alfred. We know this thanks to the logs of Alfred himself, although we found no trace of him. I’ve got a team of officers looking for him.”