He thought about death as he watched the Shaper robot at its task. Ceaselessly, tirelessly, it loaded ore into the distended guts of the decoy wetware. After the two of them had smothered, this machine would continue indefinitely in its hyperactive parody of life. He could have shut it down, but he felt a kinship with it. Its headlong, blind persistence cheered him somehow. And the fact that it was pumping tons of frothing plastic into the launch ring, ruining it, meant that the pirates had won. He could not bear to rob them of that useless victory.