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When Toy arrived at the gateway of the Undo service building, the clock showed ten minutes past eleven. Z emerged from the car and moved towards the checkpoint; he stopped, and then after some hesitation, he returned with a liter bottle of olive oil from the trunk. Thrusting it under his jacket, and keeping it under his armpit, he entered the building. Each time, walking along this corridor, Z recalled a scary story from his childhood: “In a very gray house there was a very gray corridor. And at the end of this very gray corridor there was a very gray door. And behind that very gray door, there was a very gray room. And in this very gray room, there was a very gray table. And behind this very gray table there sat a very gray man.”

“SHOW YOUR PASS!” shouted the guard.

The guard truly was gray, as was everything else in the building. While his upper half towered menacingly above the table, his body had no lower half. He was a very simple model not designed to walk the building. His task was to check employees’ passes at the entrance. Z showed his badge.

“Your reason for the delay?” the guard asked in a bored voice.

“Sick leave,” Z answered boldly, presenting his certificate to the guard.

The guard studied the document.

“Confirmed visit to otolaryngologist from 8:30 till 9:15. Confirmed sick leave from 9:15 till 11:15. Please provide documentation for the period from 8:00 till 8:30.”

“It was force-majeure,” Z tried at random.

“There were no events of force-majeure nature registered in the given period,” the guard replied immediately.

“It was a local cataclysm. I would even say, a private one,” Z explained.

“Private cataclysms are not in the list of events approved for…”

“Forget it,” Z interrupted the guard, pulling a bottle of oil from under his jacket. A thirty-minute delay meant a fine of fifteen credits. A bottle of the worst olive oil cost only five. The guard’s hand darted forward like an attacking snake and he snatched the bottle from Z. Then the guard twisted himself in a rather unnatural way, unscrewed something on his back and began to pour the contents of the bottle into it. As the bottle was emptying, the guard’s optical lenses shined brighter and brighter. Finally, they began to blaze in such a way that it hurt Z to look at them; he actually had to turn away.

“I wonder how you’re going to work?” he said gloomily.

“I don’t give an iron shit,” the guard announced emphatically, returning the empty bottle to Z. “Come on, man, move your pink ass and hit the road. I have work to do.”

Z shook his head and moved on. Behind him, a song broke out:

“Iron heart cannot ache

Nor can iron brain dream,

And Steel God is a fake

And steel Spirit is steam.”

It was a forbidden song, although, of course, every robot knew it. Masters knew it too. But never before had Z seen someone singing it aloud. For all he knew, Deconstruction was the punishment for such an offence.

“Love is managed by programs

Friends are given by bugs,

Life is weighed in grams

And is priced in the bucks.

But they say there is land

Whence red meat was banished,

Any warm flesh was banned

And live clay has perished…”

The door slammed behind Z cutting the song short.

***

In the room, a commandant at the table was anxiously listening to something.

“Did you hear that?” he asked nervously.

Z shook his head, and the commandant sighed. Though having both a rank and IQ higher than that of the guard, he still was not entitled to have a lower half either.

“This work is driving me mad. It seemed to me that I heard… Well, it does not matter.”

He scratched the back of his neck with a shrill metallic sound, making Z suffer from a sudden attack of a nasty toothache.

“Well,” the commandant cheered up, “let’s proceed to the instruction.”

He raised his finger with importance.

“First and foremost: there were new changes in the Charter of the Undo service. Namely, in the tenth line of page thirty-six of the first book of the Charter, the phrase ‘An Undo officer is not afraid of anything but dishonor’ was replaced with ‘An Undo officer fears nothing.’ Next. In the third line of page two hundred thirty-eight of the third book of the Charter…”

The commandant stopped.

“You are not writing this down,” he remarked.

“I will remember,” Z promised.

The commandant shook his head doubtfully and continued.

“In the third line of page two hundred thirty-eight of the second book of the Charter a phrase ‘An Undo officer must conscientiously fulfill…’ was replaced with ‘An Undo officer must zealously fulfill…’ Finally, in a footnote on the sixtieth page of the third book of the Charter, it should read ‘self-sacrifice’ instead of ‘self-denial’.”

“Next…” The commandant looked at his raised finger in surprise, lowered it and raised again.

“News from the front. Not for a minute, not for a second are you to forget that there is a war going on here and now. The real war,” he answered to Z’s surprised look. “The war in which our friends and comrades perish, leaving their families without a… without a… Well, just leaving their families.”

The commandant looked sternly at Z, and he made the appropriate face.

“The enemy does not sleep. Every minute, every second the enemy tests our strength, looking for weak spots in our defense and striking blows to the most sensitive and vulnerable parts of our society.”

The commandant lowered his voice.

“Here is a bulletin for the elapsed day. Almost seven thousand cases of forced purchase detected; some six hundred cases of theft of personal time on a large scale and three thousand cases of similar theft in lesser amounts; more than six hundred cases of non-return, eight of which were lethal. In their memory, I declare a minute of silence!”

The commandant tried to get up and even put his hands on the table, but there was nothing under the table that was capable of letting him get up. Z nodded solemnly, making it clear that the impulse was perceived correctly and felt deeply.

When the minute was over, the commandant collapsed into a chair and continued:

“Your task for today is to patrol Eleventh, Twelfth, Eighth and Ninth streets. In other words,” the commandant looked at Z with barely concealed contempt, “just ride in the car along these four streets and see if something bad happens, and when it happens, react as is required by Charter. Do you have any questions?”

“God forbid!” Z shouted.

“God forbid!” the commandant echoed piously.

“Excuse me, sir. That’s just a human saying,” Z explained, hiding a smile. “It doesn’t require any response.”

“Very well then,” the commandant nodded dryly. “Roll up your sleeve.”

Z obeyed. The commandant took a syringe from the table and gave an injection. From the needle, a dull gray stain began to spread rapidly over the hand. Z knew that in a minute he would be gray from head to toe, including his clothes and the whites of his eyes. An Undo officer was not someone who could be easily lost in the crowd.

It is not known whether this was a harmless psychological effect, or whether the injection did contain some additives; but along with a gray color, the Undo officers invariably acquired an extra set of extremely positive qualities. Everyone had a different set. Z, for example, felt much braver after the injection, stronger and nobler than before. And much more honest too. Many times, having regained his natural pink color in the evening, he was ready to gnaw at his elbows, recollecting all the opportunities that had been missed in the morning.

Meanwhile, the commandant was already holding Purifier, ready to hand it over to Z.

“Do you swear to use Purifier only for the good of the city?”

“I swear.”

“Do you swear not to use Purifier where you can do without it?”

“I swear.”

“Do you swear to use Purifier where you can’t do without it?”

“I swear.”

The commandant sighed and reluctantly parted with the weapon.

“I wish you good luck.”

The commandant saluted. Z hurriedly saluted back, nodded, and left the room with relief. In the corridor, four janitors were dragging away a drunken guard who resisted fiercely and loudly sang out lines of the seditious song:

“Where clouds of steel

Scar dead red copper soil,

And electrical seals

Dance in rivers of oil.

Where rains run an acid

And the air has teeth,

Where steel soul is placid

And a man cannot breathe.

Where masters have gone

And lie neatly in rows

Hugging rotten old bones

In a cemetery doze.”

Toy was ready. Gray and faceless, he patiently waited for the last missing part – his driver. There was something else… Z looked closely and winced: there was a dead man in the back seat. Gray, like all Undo employees, but dead. For some reason, the whites of the dead cook’s eyes had not stained and remained dirty yellow. It looked monstrous. Z pulled out old glasses from the glove compartment and put them on the dead cook. There was a distinctive stink in the cabin already. Artificial flesh, Z remembered, decays faster than natural flesh.

“Splendid!” Z said aloud, carefully fastening the dead man in with a seat belt. “I have lost my ear and I have the dead cook in the car instead. Okay, Toy, let’s go. And open the windows, please. I can’t imagine how you can be sitting here.”