Eric and Keith watched Jon leave the room with Karyn. They knew that he was going to come over to the lab and started to prepare, which mostly meant reading their notes about robots and making sure the camera in Jon's house wasn't on screen when Jon arrived.
Eric then draped a cloth over the robot case and waited for Jon to arrive. Soon there was a knock on the door.
"Hello?" said Keith.
"It's Jon!" said Jon. "I'd like to talk to you."
Eric opened the door and let Jon and Karyn in. He'd have to do most of the talking, the whole robot thing was his idea anyway. "Hi Jon, Karyn. How have you been?"
"I'm fine. It's Karyn," said Jon.
"What's wrong with her?" Inwardly, Eric was laughing.
"Well, she's... a robot. I didn't know there was such a thing. She always seemed so human."
"I guess you've discovered it," said Eric. "It must have been a terrible surprise. Now that you know, I can tell you the whole thing." He led Jon over to the robot case and threw off the cloth. "This is Project K--the most advanced artificial intelligence research project in the world."
Karyn and Jon gasped. "That's me!" said Karyn. "But younger." It was more of a dummy than a person--no expression was on its face and it just stood there, but the detail on it was incredible.
"Of course," said Eric. "We had to create several bodies so Karyn could seem to age. Let me show you--we still have memory backups." He plugged in several of the USB memory sticks and pressed some buttons.
There was a loud hum from the machine, some lights flashed, and then the hum stopped. The glass on the opening slid back and the 14 year old Karyn inside sat up, a wire coming out of her back.
Eric then said directly to the figure. "Karyn, I order you to unplug yourself and get out of the machine."
The younger Karyn in the machine reached for her back and unplugged the wire from beneath her clothes, then got out. She looked like a perfectly normal, younger, Karyn. When she saw her older counterpart, she said "You're me!"
"That's-- unbelievable!" exclaimed Jon.
"How can you be me?" said the younger Karyn. "I'm not that old."
"It's because you're robots," said Jon. "You were made at different ages."
Jon looked at the machine's control panel. It was amazing--technology that he had no hope of understanding. Then he noticed something that looked out of place on the metal panel. It was a reddish colored stone. "What's that?" he asked.
Eric replied "Oh, it's a wishing stone," laughing. He was just playing with Jon--he knew very well that nobody would believe he had a wishing stone just because he said so. And Jon didn't remember that the stone was real.
Except that in his mirth Eric didn't know that Jon had found the letter from his grandfather, so he had indeed heard of the wishing stone and would believe it enough to give it a try.
Before Eric could stop him, Jon picked up the stone and said 'Oh, really? Let me try. I wish...'
