Beastchild

standing on his toes like a ballet dancer, faster and faster, his feet stamping smartly in a tight circle. His face flushed, and perspiration rolled out of his flesh, beaded on his miniature forehead, trickled down his doll's face. Still, he moved at an increasing pace until he was all but a whirl.
        Then his flesh began to grow soft. His facial features melted and ran together. He no longer had a nose or mouth. His eyes flashed and dribbled down his face…
        He did not slow his pace. From deep within him, the sound of his manic laughter continued-though the lack of a mouth denied the sound full egress. He bobbled, bounced, weaved, his smooth whirl becoming more erratic as his feet and legs began to fuse and obliterate the ankles.
        The glass sphere filled with licking green flames to replace the warm orange tongues that had been there.
        His arm fused with his side and ceased to exist, except for a thumb which stuck out just below his last rib. A moment later, the second arm disappeared as well.
        The emerald fire became all-consuming: the gnome was reduced to a thick pudding within the glass, a semi-living jell that gurgled and sloshed against the sides of the small sphere and was, at last, silent…
        The Isolator regarded the glass ball, juggling it on fingers of pure force. It began to shape the jell into another figure, but suddenly felt a wave of depression wash through it, battering the foundations of its being. It dropped the glass ball and watched the trinket splash down into the pool of its own temporal mass. It digested the thing and waited…
        Waiting had been what the naoli had designed it for- waiting and destroying. But there had been so little of the latter and so much of the former since the war had been won that the Isolator craved activity (and tried to satisfy the longing through toys like the gnome). Perhaps, the Isolator mused, it was not wise to build weapons which were alive. Did their designers know how bored a thinking weapon could get-when it had been designed only to think about its job and its job had become obsolete?
        Then it ceased to think about that. The naoli had made certain that the Isolator could not think about itself, as an entity, for more than a few seconds at a time. In that manner, they could be certain it would never get ideas of its own beyond those programmed into it The Isolator, gurgling within the huge vat that contained it, raised its alert to red station and began checking the monitoring posts in the outlying areas. Its pseudopods of plastic flesh thinned into two molecule thicknesses and pressed through the vat, beyond the Isolator station and into the warm sands of Earth's desert. In a moment, it had formed a net beneath the land for a thousand feet in every direction. Such first-hand data gathering was senseless when its mechanical aides could assist so dependably, but the only way to defeat the boredom was to do something.
        It pulsated beneath the sand, fifty percent of its body withdrawn from the subterranean vat. It wished it could go further and explore the surrounding terrain. But its physical bulk could not extend more than these thousand feet from the vat. It was not truly mobile. It was only a thing, not an individual, no matter how much it tried to bridge the gap into full awareness.
        A thing, nothing more.
        But a very efficient thing.
        The harsh sting of the alarms sliced through the Isolator from the monitors in the station. Quickly, it withdrew from the sand, back into the vat. It formed an eyeball of a thousand facets and examined the three-" dimensional vision on the bank of screens on the station's second level. For the first time in months, it knew excitement. It almost rushed the majority of its bulk through the wall into the screen room and managed to check itself just a hair this side of disaster (at least half of the Isolator must remain within the nurturing vat at all times). There, on the screen, was a floating shuttlecraft, fluttering along the sand, stirring clouds of dust in its wake. It had not issued the recognition signal; any naoli would have done that. Which meant it was more than likely a human…
        The Isolator tapped one of the monitoring posts which the shuttlecraft was approaching, released a spy-bee from the distant outpost's storage unit. As the bee spun out across the desert, the Isolator guided it, watching what the mechanical