One Kiss in... Miami: Nothing Short of Perfect / Reunited...With Child / Her Innocence, His Conquest

“I wouldn’t do that,” she assured him. “Honestly, I wouldn’t. I might give you a hard time because I know you can take it. But not Pretorius.”

Her sincerity must have come through loud and clear. He gave a single sharp nod, then gestured to the left. “I have a number of labs down this way, as well as my private quarters.”

Good Lord. “A number of labs?”

He shrugged. “For measurement and instrumentation. Another for research and development. A computer lab. A test lab. It isn’t as specialized as the Sinjin complex, but it works well enough for tinkering.”

“I want to see the robot lab.”

He actually grinned. “Okay. I’ll let you see the nonsterile one.”

“You have sterile labs?”

“Yes, but you have to be naked and sterilized before you can go in.”

One look assured he was kidding. Excellent. She’d only been here a few hours and she’d already infected him with a sense of humor. “It must not do a very good job sterilizing,” she retorted. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have a daughter.”

He placed his palm against a plate outside one of the doors and then requested admittance. “Maybe we don’t have to be sterilized,” he admitted while they waited for his security system to run his palm and voiceprint.

“And maybe we don’t have to be naked, either?”

The door to the lab slid silently open. “No, I’m pretty much going to insist on nudity.”

She stepped into a huge room that looked very much like a workshop. Long tables spanned one half of the room and lined the walls. Predictably, they were a crisp, painful white. Instrumentation—none of which she recognized—clustered in a half-dozen stations perched on top of various tables. Each station also possessed its own computer system. At the opposite end of the room were endless cabinets and shelves and banks of drawers, most on rollers. Supplies, at a guess. Everything was ruthlessly organized which didn’t come as much of a surprise considering Justice’s propensity for neatness.

Dead center in the middle of the room stood a huge, sturdy workbench, possibly the messiest section of the room, not that Daisy found it all that messy. To her amusement, one of his Rumi spheres had been left there, and like the one in the office, this one had been transformed into a daisy, as well. She started to comment on that fact, then thought better of it, something in his expression warning her to tiptoe around that particular subject. Instead, she turned her attention to his work project.

Resting on the table squatted two odd devices on treads, presumably to give them mobility. She studied the first which combined dark metal and light gray plastic in a round shape the approximate size of a canister vacuum cleaner. Specialized arms spoked the device and what looked like a ring of aquamarine eyes dotted the circumference. A small helmet capped it, the helmet studded with lights and buttons and a display screen. Beside it squatted its more sophisticated twin.

“What are they?” she asked, fascinated.

“That’s Emo X-14 and X-15. Short for Emotibot, X for the tenth generation, fourteenth and fifteenth versions.” Justice frowned. “At least, that’s what they’re supposed to be. Right now they aren’t much of anything.”

“What are you hoping they’ll become?” She shot him a questioning look. “Is that a better way to phrase it?”

“Much better, I’m afraid.” He blew out a sigh. “Eventually I’m hoping Emo will be the next generation lie detector. A feeling detector, I suppose.”

She stared at the robots, intrigued by the idea. “Why would you want to create a feeling detector?”

“I’m attempting to design a robotic that can anticipate and respond to human needs, not just based on what is requested verbally, but also to nonverbal cues. In fact, I’d like to use the in-house videos and cameras to photograph everyone’s various emotion responses to stimuli over the next several weeks in order to help teach it. Assuming none of you objects.”

“Huh.” Intriguing. “I’ll check with the others, but I have no objection. So, let me get this straight. By using photos and videos of us coming unhinged, or whatever, Emo will figure out when we’re happy or sad or hungry or thirsty and do something about it?”

“Exactly.” A smile danced across his mouth. “Although it isn’t necessary for you to come unhinged in order to teach it appropriate emotional responses.”