“They’re just kids,” Donovan replied after the door shut securely behind him, ensuring the secrecy of his conversation with the Proctor.
 
“Do you want them to grow up or not?” the Proctor replied.
 
“Of course,” Donovan snapped. “I don’t spend years training them so that they don’t grow up. I don’t want to waste my time after that huge an investment.”
 
“As did their foster parents before you. As did the surrogates who carried them. As did the geneticists who made them.” The Proctor put her hand on the control panel. It lit up at her DNA and fingerprint combination, activating the drone. A door opened in the training room, revealing the black contoured thing Donovan had learned to dread. His student, Marshall, took an immediate fighting stance.
 
The drone scanned the room, ensuring that there was no one else to deal with. Marshall, his student, knew this was a test. Donovan knew that the drone’s programming calibrated to the student’s physical level. The drone began to circle slowly. The drone released several appendages into the air, mostly mechanical arms and a single stunner. First level. That Marshall would handle with ease.
 
“Why always first level to start with?”
 
“We have to make them get overconfident.” Her voice brought a sense of déjà vu, briefly and eerily familiar, which Donovan chalked up to synaptic leakage. No one he’d known even remotely in his prior life had survived the War. Nearly no one did.
 
Marshall progressed to level 2 within minutes. “We have to make them think it is easy to win,” Donovan commented.

“Superior ability breeds superior ambition,” the Proctor retorted, “and extreme ability brings extreme arrogance.”
 
“I know,” Donovan snapped. He hated watching, but he was compelled by fear for his student as much as fascination in the test of human limits. Donovan watched in silence as Marshall had to begin integrating gymnastics into his defensive maneuvers. “Have you ever had a student damage a drone?”
 
“The machine adapts.”
 
“Have they ever damaged it to the point that the student won?”
 
“That activates the second drone.”
 
So there is a spare drone, Donovan thought. Marshall was already jumping and whirling far faster than an ordinary human could. Pity I don’t have spare students. “Have you ever had a student die in there?”
 
“Only those who used drugs or other synthetic means to boost their physical abilities.” The Proctor snorted in disgust. “And given the advanced warning to be without any enhancement, any student who cheated should be eliminated from the gene pool. If they cheated like that for what they thought was a standard fitness test, they aren’t fit to live in the real world.”
 
Marshall did a triple flip as he sought to avoid the multiple blades the drone had produced. Level 4. When the risk of physical injury is introduced. At this point, Marshall had seen prior students get sliced up badly. If the machine was truly set to kill, most would not have survived past this point.
 
The sweat pouring down Marshall’s body made the shirt he wore stick to his body, revealing a perfectly formed body resulting from both advanced genetic and social engineering. Marshall had to cartwheel and twist simultaneously to avoid a barbed whip. A short stub arm thrust out abruptly, catching the boy in the chest.
 
Marshall fell backward into the window, making the plexiglass vibrate. From a camera among the forest of implements, the Proctor summoned an image of Marshall’s face. The boy was heaving for breath, nearing total exhaustion, his face red and strained. This was the hardest workout Marshall had ever had, Donovan knew. Their own drone’s blades were dulled by law, and their stunner was a mere device for discomfort. Marshall had been warned previously that this drone’s implements had no such limitations.
 
The drone scanned the boy again, checking his physical condition. Hidden heart conditions and metabolic disorders sometimes came to light in these tests, and the Proctor knew that. A brief medical scan done now to make sure that the student did not fail due to those physical failings was of little comfort to Donovan. A physical flaw like that would cost a student more than the careers they had been conditioned to desire; Donovan had only vague knowledge of what happened to them, and he did not want the specifics. The monitor flashed green. For all Donovan’s flaws, none of them were important according to the drone’s program. Marshall, too, saw a green light and nearly collapsed in relief.
 
The Proctor turned on a speaker. “We’re not done yet. Advancing to next level.” Marshall’s eyes were wide with disbelief. The woman’s tone made Donovan wonder if she’d been in media broadcasts; the way she said it sounded very familiar.
 
A blade combination moved threateningly slowly toward Marshall, prodding him back into action. Marshall, as some of Donovan's more leadership-oriented students often did, refused to budge. Donovan read his lips through the images; he yelled that the test should be over. A shallow slice to the arm made him start sliding sideways from the mirror. The threat of more bloodshed got him on the defensive again. Marshall was angry at being forced to go where he didn’t want to go, as they all were. A stunner began firing at random, set to agonizing, adding another element to the mix of things to avoid. Level 5.
 
“What is the highest level any student has ever achieved?”
 
“Level 8.”
 
“Is that as high as this thing goes?”
 
“There is no limit to how high this thing can go.”
 
“Shouldn’t there be limits?”
 
“The only limits in the world are those we all agree to impose upon each other and must agree to enforce. You should know that.” The Proctor’s eyes flicked from the sensor data feeds to Donovan before snapping back to her assigned task. She warned, “You should be teaching your students that, as well.”
 
“I do. With great ability comes great responsibility. But they so often merely seem empty words—”
 
“Which is why they must be tested so, to engrain it into them irrevocably.”
 
“I thought this lesson was to teach them about their vulnerability,” Donovan wondered.
 
Marshall was limping with a stunned leg as he blocked a spinning implement with his arm. Another implement, this one barbed, hit him so hard he spun and fell, more blood from a new injury splattering on the floor. “That, too,” the Proctor said absently.
 
“I wish it could be any other way.” The pain at his student’s pain threatened to make him intervene.
 
“Our teachers tried that with words and bonding experiences and community service. Yet being made to be the next step in human evolution, we saw ourselves as both invincible and irrepressible. The supposed right to rule the world nearly got us all — mundane and man-made — killed. The invincibility we thought we had did get many of our kind killed. Whether via foolish acts of free-hand rock climbing or deep sea diving or even murder and suicide from the universe refusing to give us what we thought we deserved, that belief that we were man-made gods, and should be treated as such, cost us so much. And everyone else.” Donovan’s heart caught in his throat when he saw Marshall’s body collapse on the floor. “He’s close.”
 
“Not yet,” the Proctor refuted. Donovan closed his eyes. “You had to have learned life’s lessons to be allowed to be raising them.”
 
“I almost died from an attempt on my life.”
 
“Human?”
 
“No. One of our own kind.”
 
So she is engineered, too. The drone paused. He heard the console’s beep of an affirmative scan. The boy wasn’t critical. He heard the high-pitched whine of a pain inducer. The drone began again because the Proctor’s monitors switched back to that set of sounds. The plexiglass rang out from another impact. The struggle had resumed.
 
“Over a girl?” the Proctor asked.
 
“Yes and no. Leadership struggle with a girl.”
 
“Is that why you lived? She couldn’t kill you in the hand to hand combat the gangs practiced?”
 
“No. She was fully capable of doing it. That’s why I almost died. I couldn’t get the full will to kill her first before she struck.”
 
“That compassion — and the mistakes you made from it — let you live. And it led you to where you can impart those values to the next generation.”
 
Donovan heard the observation window shake from yet another impact. The sound-proofing had to be drowning out Marshall’s screams of fear and pain by now. “How did you learn?”
 
“I almost drowned while pushing myself past limits that I arrogantly refused to admit to.”

Donovan opened his eyes and kept them fully trained on the Proctor, whose own eyes were locked on the sensor readings. “You don’t look impaired.”
 
“The only damage was physical and almost entirely repaired. My mind is unaffected.”
 
If she could witness suffering like this time and time again, how could she say that? Unless her emotional centers, too, were affected? Or if she lacked the capacity to understand what was lacking? Donovan saw from the sensor display that Marshall’s heart rate was approaching critical levels. Every instinct in his body screamed for him to slam buttons on the console in an effort to turn off the torture device. He knew intellectually that doing so would result in his dismissal and possibly execution for the interference. And that the controls were coded so that only the Proctor or her alternate could operate it. He wondered what kind of fail safes would prevent him from forcing her hand to the controls. But the Proctor had to have other command methods, perhaps sub-vocal or pressure point based, to ensure that only she — and only in ways she knew — could turn it off. His kind had designed the place; the off button wouldn’t be one of the primitive ones on the console.
 
Marshall was thrown into the window again; Donovan instinctively looked up. He saw the terrified eyes of his student, the boy’s hands clawing at the window, screaming, perhaps beyond words for help. Come on! Give in, and it’s all over! Stop making me make it want to stop! Donovan asked, “Does this thing kill the student if a teacher interferes—?”
 
“If you even have to ask, you have lost your perspective and should lose your position.”
 
Donovan’s mouth snapped shut. As much as he cared for Marshall, he cared for the right to teach his successor more. His life and livelihood depended on it. Marshall would come to maturity in there or not at all. If Donovan tried to save him, they’d both likely die. For life to go on, they all had to irrevocably learn life’s lessons.
 
Marshall’s body finally gave out on him. He fell limp before convulsing in cardiac arrest. The machine immediately ceased and gently lowered the boy onto the floor. The fighting drone retreated as the medical unit flooded into the room. The equipment encircled the boy. Sensors affixed themselves as an IV line was inserted into the boy’s arm. The voltaic panels descended to Marshall’s chest. The Proctor watched with vague interest as the boy convulsed as the device discharged.
 
Donovan threw himself onto the window as a second jolt was administered. The first discharge had not worked as it should have. A human medical team was admitted through the side door and evacuated Marshall out. He felt better knowing that there was, indeed, a human back up. They did, for all appearances otherwise, care about the boy’s life. Then he remembered his own words; I don’t spend years training them so that they don’t grow up. I don’t want to waste my time after that huge an investment. They’d have the human medical team as back up to the machine, their salaries a small price to pay to protect their investment in Marshall.
 
“I’m never going to see him again,” Donovan muttered viciously.
 
“You never see your students again. Why is this time any different?” the Proctor retorted. “Unless you’re regretting it.”
 
“No. I know he’s in the psychological team’s hands now.”
 
“That’s where they always go if they pass this part. They have to make sure he comes to understand the limits of his flesh — no matter how engineered it may be, no matter how superior he was intended to be. And he has to fully absorb the concept of mortality — something we share with everyone and everything, even the humans we tried to dominate.”
 
“I bet the psych team is human.”
 
“If you weren’t so blinded by your attachment to this student, you would have deduced that.”
 
Donovan wanted to race out after Marshall. He wanted to cradle the boy and tell him everything would be all right. He wanted to apologize for the pain he’d caused, though he knew he hadn’t apologized for his own training sessions that were nearly as painful and sometimes left scars. He ached, knowing that the boy would wake and want him there, only to realize that he was going to be living in the human’s world for the rest of his life. His last words to Marshall had been written by some psych expert he’d never met, and they came back to him as the medics closed the training room doors. You have to learn life’s most important lesson — that there are limits, that we all have limits, and we all have to abide by them if we want to survive. Just because we have greater physical brains or mechanical ones doesn’t mean we’re better at anything except the speed and efficiency at which we can kill. If you want to grow up to live in the real world, you have to learn where yours and everyone else’s limits lie... and learn to abide by them.
 
Donovan knew the human therapists had much experience in getting people past near-death trauma; even the War’s survivors nearly died of something. In the end, the calculation of the values for their new society had come to this answer. It was the same answer as that all survivors came to. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, his own doctor had told him when he’d been saved. Be strong for others, and you’ll make this world a better place.
 
In the end, his desire to make up for the lives he’d taken had led him to help teach the next generation how to live without doing so — unless it was to directly protect other, more innocent lives. Marshall might grow into a brilliant civil engineer on a reconstruction project or a programming wizard to recover all that data lost in EMP blasts. He wasn’t a medical type who sought to create cures for all the plagues that had been loosed, but then again, he might change course after this experience. Donovan had.
 
Donovan was kept in the locked control room with the Proctor until a signal came through on a screen only she could see. “He’s moved on to recovery,” the Proctor said.
 
“You don’t have to tell me that. They usually only tell me I can leave.”
 
“You seemed to need to hear it.”
 
Donovan trudged out the door, unable to bear the sight of the killing machine he had long ago helped design when life and death didn’t matter to him. What price, peace? It was used to nearly kill their children so that they understood the pain that they and their own creations could inflict; hence it was impressed upon them to never allow it to happen again. To be unwilling to allow the horrors to be repeated and that all were equally mortal in the end were the lessons they were all learning the hard way.
 
To say never again never lasted very long. Humans had finally learned that lesson from their own history. This pain I feel is the price of our peace. I do this so they won’t make the mistakes I did, we all did.
 
Donovan wandered through the empty halls, knowing it had been systematically cleared so that he wouldn’t run into any humans. They did all of this because the humans required it. This was the price of their survival. Teach the lesson the hard way for the sake of humanity’s survival, or no more of their kind would be allowed to be created anymore. He started to hate the Proctor for willfully participating in it all, though he knew that irrationality could get him killed.
 
And his surviving peers let the humans release their remaining embryos a few at a time. He knew from his students’ medical files they were placed in human surrogate mothers who volunteered for unknowable human reasons and foster families of their choosing to imprint the human condition on them. His kind were either sterile from the war or sterile by design. And natal machines were forbidden, as were so many abused technologies, so there truly was no other way if he wanted more of his kind to be born.
 
Donovan and the few of his kind allowed to train the young for these formative years lost them again to the human world they nearly destroyed. Did this pain equal that of the foster parents when they lost Marshall?
 
Donovan longed for one of his siblings to talk to. But he was the only one of the 18 batch mates to survive. Why was it that only those who had almost died of their own stupidity were the only ones to survive the War? Donovan sat in an empty waiting room, tears flowing down his face, the emotions beyond his control. He grieved Marshall’s loss more than he’d grieved the deaths of his genetic relatives, those made from the same.
 
The tears stopped at the memory of the dead. Donovan closed his eyes as if it would take away the sight of those he had once called friends. He hated them more for leaving him in the destroyed world they had created than he hated the humans for taking his students away in their desperate effort to repair it. There were humans who wanted them all dead, but there were too few people of any kind to not utilize good brains and backs to try to make it better. What price, peace? This pain — this price — for this peace.
 
Donovan heard the Proctor enter the waiting room. “I want to retire,” he told her.
 
“The supervisors who witnessed your reactions have already decided that.”
 
“What am I going to do?”
 
“You were the designer of lethal killing machines, you know.”
 
“I’ve been a teacher to them, too, both flesh and AI,” he said with only a hint of resignation. “My greatest challenge has been putting them both to productive uses.”
 
“You were good at your job. That is why your sentence was suspended so long. But you clearly can’t do it anymore.”
 
Donovan felt the pacemaker from his ancient injury go off. His heart faltered at the first jolt. He fell to the floor, the emotional shock making him unable to resist. The signaling device to cause the lethal discharge had been one of his inventions, too. A nice, easy, clean way to assassinate old people in your way.
 
“You don’t have to be here, to see this,” he whispered, not certain if his voice was on his lips or in his head.
 
“You needed to hear it,” she answered. It hasn’t been in his head. The second jolt made Donovan convulse as his engineered heart refused to fail. His eyes were locked on the Proctor, glowing like a mythical angel as his heart finally gave in. “And I needed to see this.”
 
With the fading of his vision, he remembered the girl who tried to kill him and failed. She’d been prone, and he’d been unable to deliver the final blow, and that weakness had had him cast out of the gang. She’d risen up and clubbed him on the head as he yelled at the angry mob of their own kind, making him the vulnerable one. She’d stabbed him hard in the chest, more angry that he’d bested her than the physical pain he’d caused. He was left to die of the gaping chest wound as the crowd dispersed. She remained, and eventually called an ambulance to his location. She stayed in the shadows as they loaded him in. They spoke silently, reading each other’s lips.
 
“You don’t have to be here, to see this.” And he’d only felt gratitude that she hadn’t in fact left him to die.
 
“And I needed to see this.” She grinned a victor’s smile. “Your emotions make you make excellent things that inspire terror, but they make you yourself weak. As long as you live, you’ll remember that I could have killed you and let you live — though you’ll probably only last a little while. You’ll have to remember that I’m better than you are for as long as you’re still here. And I promise you, I’ll be here long after you’re gone.”
 
She could have let Marshall fail and not revived him and let Donovan be there as he died. Instead, she revived him and gave him to the humans, and let them both live a while longer. All so she could see Donovan fail one final time. She was the victor, and would dominate any who did not yield to it.
 
The angel’s face grew into a menacing angel of death. Donovan wanted to scream out to the humans that she was a far greater danger than he’d ever been, but as life had already taught him, fate preferred to take people too soon.