The baton tugged towards the left and I obeyed. The woman I had seen in the lift tube had arrived ahead of me and disappeared through a pair of double doors. I followed. Outside of some small vid cams that oozed over the walls and ceilings, the hallway was completely bare. The woman passed between another set of double doors. I followed and stepped out into a good-sized auditorium. A bin had been provided for the batons, so I added mine to the rest.

The auditorium was equipped with rows of starkly utilitarian chairs and a small stage. The floor consisted of polished concrete and slanted down towards an industrial-size drain. Not the sort of place to entertain share owners, but just right for an assemblage of greasy, grimy, lower-level scum like ourselves.

Fifty or sixty shooters had already arrived and managed to look studiously bored. I knew a few of them and nodded politely. No one asked me to sit next to them, nor would I have accepted if they had. It’s better that way, in case you end up on opposite sides of a fight, and a whole lot safer. Friends can betray you. Strangers can’t.

I chose a seat towards the back, found that my legs wouldn’t fit, and stuck them out into the aisle. A hard case with a fist-flattened nose nearly tripped on them, opened his mouth to say something, and caught his reflection in my skull plate. I smiled and he moved on.

Shooters of every possible size and description continued to arrive until the place was more than two-thirds full. It was then that the lights dimmed, the forward wall shimmered, and some broadcast-quality 3-D video appeared. The piece ran ten minutes or so, and did a bang-up job of describing Droidware Inc., the high-quality robots that walked, crawled, rolled, hopped, skipped and jumped out of its highly automated factories, and the almost godlike crew of full-time employees who ran the company.