Mutiny's Bounty

Alien Visitor ~ Boris Vallejo

As far as she could tell the end result bore no relation to the thought seed that sparked the original action. She wondered what perverse law of the universe dictated the pitfalls of intent. The moulding of her face, with the benefit of age, seemed perfectly rational, yet what accidents had befallen the process that had formed that face? Perhaps, she thought, she was sitting too close to the fire, her understanding distorted by the heat of the familiar.
Mutiny rose from her seat at the mirror and, leaning toward her reflection, wiped the perspiration from an eyebrow with a backward arc of her thumb. She could hear the approaching phalanx as it interrogated the environment; its rapidfire query routines bouncing off her ice program with greater and greater urgency. They knew she was somewhere in the building; it was just a matter of narrowing the location by a process of elimination – as soon as the blank space created by her ice had become the only space in the building not accounted for by official binaries, she would have run out of time and options.
For the Phalanx the distinction between intent and result was superfluous, since doubt was not installed as an option there was never any question of the objective not being fulfilled to the letter. It stopped At the mirror, oblivious of its own reflection, and loaded Mutiny's dust remains into an evidence container.