Little Sasori was finding it difficult to hide his excitement. He squirmed in his seat and kept casting glances at Big Sasori.

“Are we there yet?” he asked once more.

“No. You can read the instruments yourself, little one. Their hideout is still 30 kilometers out.”

They had their own hideout. Little Sasori still found this amazing. He’d spent the past five years living on Sasori’s ship, which of course was now his home, and he thought about it as his own home, but still…

“Did they build it themselves?”

“No, of course not,” Sasori tsked. “Ame is nothing but abandoned structures—this place has drowned more human settlements than the rest of the Water Planets put together. They found a safe place and made it their own.”

This was a fact that Sasori had a hard time believing. The trio had been orphaned around the same age as he had, and left with nothing, no one, they’d found a way to survive on one of the galaxy’s most dangerous planets. On Suna, the desert could certainly kill you, but the heat, the venomous creatures and fearsome sandstorms were all manageable. Ame was endless ocean and endless rain, with barely a scrap of rock to cling to. How had the three orphans survived? How had they traveled? He was eager to find out. But he was even more eager to get away from this freakishly wet planet.

“They’re my age, right?” Little Sasori chirped, bouncing a little in his seat.

“You’ve asked that one before,” Sasori replied shortly. They were close. He could see it, the wide plateau of rain-sculpted rock, the jagged towers of stone, and built into the side of one of the larger ones, a little house of water-tight tile. There had to be somewhere he could land…

There, a wide gap at the base of one of the towers, almost like a hangar. Scanners detected nothing within, no shield or weaponry. The trio would not welcome them—from the stories Konan had told him, most likely he and Little Sasori would most likely find the hideout ‘empty’ if they approached.

“Okay, so they’re gonna fight in the Third Shinobi War, like you did?”

The A-75 stared straightthrough him, listening to the LED lights drone overhead. Everything in itsprogramming insisted that it be prompt, that it act quickly, that it not keep a user waiting. At the same time, the idea of mindless obediencetwisted its abdomen in the worst of ways.

The A-75 wondered if,somehow, a pest had gotten into its control panels, if a rodent was chewing athis wiring. It ran through the thousands of explanations, considering andcalculating each probability until only one explanation was left: That, at somepoint, its neat, impeccable binary had been corrupted by something lessintelligent, by something less perfect, messy and dirty and disgustingly human.

Its core clenched at thethought.

It had never done thatbefore.

Then again, A-75 had neverquestioned orders, before, either. Yet, here it was, face neutral and metalmyofibers seething with electricity. His fingers twitched against the chargingdock; then lay flat. It refocused its cameras on the administrator. Kakuzu.

“Powering off,” the A-75blandly intoned, before closing its eyes and uploading itself onto theinternet, switching its systems to standby. There, it began sifting through thegovernment archives for the late Dr.Sasori Akasuna, PhD., M.D., Nobel Prize Laureate, the genius who it resembled in face if not inpersonality, whom apparently shared some sort of relationship with theadministrator, vaguely defined by two year old newspapers and the emotionswhich crossed Kakuzu’s face when the A-75 answered a question too correctly, orstood too still for too long.

The A-75 did not know whyits presence upset the administrator, nor how to take it away. Not knowing wasirritating. Irritation was irritating, as it was further proof of errorsand corrupt coding.

It would rather be asubservient android, than a patchwork soul grafted into a cybernetic body, madeto meet expectations that it was incapable of meeting. It had tried, on someoccasions, to fill that doctor’s role—a wavering smile, a cold hand on a tallshoulder, carefully considered analysis—only to stretch itself thin anduncertain. Each failure stung more than the one before.