Rashim vaguely remembered those old cartoons. His grandfather used to watch them, rocking and laughing at the dumb antics played out on-screen. Rashim had worked from this vague childhood memory. It had made him feel like a kid once more, hacking the unit’s configuration code and watching the polygenic plastic change colour and reconfigure. Looking down at the inquisitive robot, he figured he had it pretty close, although he wasn’t so sure he’d got the character’s name quite right.

‘SpongeBubba… it’s hard to explain.’

‘Please explain to me, skippa! Please!’

‘Well, I suppose it’s a design fault in our programming.’

‘ Programming? But humans don’t have artificial intelligence routines!’ SpongeBubba squawked.

Rashim lifted his glasses and pushed a coil of dark hair from his face. They stopped at a closed doorway and he presented his left eye for a retina ID scan. ‘It’s just a figure of speech, SpongeBubba. The point is we have our faults, just like bad lines of code. The difference between you and me, though, is that it’s not so easy to edit our behaviour. We are who we are.’

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said the unit. Frown grooves ran along its yellow plastic skin. ‘Why do humans want to destroy their own world?’

The doorway in front of them cranked open. Hinges carrying a three-ton blast-proof door creaked and echoed across a dark and dusty control room, its walls lined with the glass of large strategic display monitors. Over a hundred years ago, this installation had been built as a command and control centre in preparation for what had seemed like an inevitable nuclear war with Russia. Now it was little more than a museum piece.

Rashim hesitated before the open door and the dark passage way beyond. ‘I suppose it’s in our nature. We don’t like bad news… so we just ignore it.’