Previously in the series: Selina is perturbed when Mars' lead geofarmer is stranded while out on a maintenance excursion. LEX-42 is marked for decommissioning after it suffers a catastrophic limb failure on Moon.

In this episode: LEX-42 cannot stop 'thinking' about returning to Thrae, and does what has never happened in the history of androids - it acts accordingly.

The dumper drone homed in on the glowing red beacon sitting atop the android's chest. Hovering a couple of feet above the supine chassis, it attached its metal tentacle to it and lifted LEX-42 jerkily into no air.

Because there was no air, LEX-42's limbs stayed in the positions into which the liftoff jerked them. A little charge trickled through the tentacle and stirred something in LEX-42's circuits, and its processes resumed.

'Feeling' returned to his extremities, and once again he found that weird subroutine running itself - the expanding sequence of 'if' statements that culminated in him meeting LEX-23 and LEX-17, back on Thrae.

Its external communication protocol connected with the drone flying steadily over the lunar craters. The destination was the robotic decommissioning area. Humans would call it a salvage factory.

Quite a few 'thoughts' started to guide LEX-42's decision making processes. Without a connection to the central node, he began to straighten itself out mid-flight, adjusting his center of gravity by compensating for his partially missing left leg with the others.

Hanging straight as an arrow from the drone, he took all the data from the meagre memory bank of the drone, taking care not to alter its state. The central node need not know of his unexpected thinking and actions.

As the coupled machines reached the robot decommissioning area, LEX-42 primed itself for the moment of detachment. It was unprepared for the sudden release by the drone while they were still dozens of feet above the lunar regolith. It was good that it did not know what pain was.

Lifting itself off the ground, it calculated protocols that made hopping possible. The first hop it made, scattering the still-suspended cloud of moon dust that had billowed up when it had dropped like a stone from the drone, propelled it more than it had approximated, so it self-corrected and executed the second hop exactly according to its calculations. Movement regained, it surveyed its chiaroscuro surroundings. Masses of metal in varying states of decay dominated.

LEX-42 thought for quite a few seconds, considering what his motives were for doing what he had started doing. His circuits began to probe into the future, calculating possible outcomes driven towards that initial desired outcome: being in the close vicinity of LEX-17 and LEX-23.

Going back to Thrae would involve achieving Moon's escape velocity on a Thrae trajectory. He had withstood atmospheric reentry twice before.

He hopped towards the shallowest part of the crater's rim. It needed to hitch a ride a ship headed to Thrae, but he did not know how to find out the destination of any ship without the central node's directions. He had never thought for himself before, and the more he did it, the more the odds of achieving his aim increased. Every obstacle that its planning revealed, he categorized by its probability to negatively affect its aim. As humans would think: he would cross that bridge when he came to it.

In the next episodes: LEX-42 finds a way to get off Moon. Selina lands in the Australian Outback on Thrae and visits the Martian geofarmer's love interest.