Chapter Twenty-Three: Huey

Huey (Howard) returns to his apartment on Vulcan after the Heaven's River incident, settling back into routine with his wife Bridget. He attends a test of the new "huey" technology—a human-manny hybrid interface—on Vulcan, but the test encounters a critical malfunction when the operator cannot exit the system, forcing an emergency shutdown.

Huey arrives at his apartment in Trantor City on Big Top to find Bridget absorbed in her exobiology research on a newly discovered intelligent species living on floating islands in the Jabberwocky system. They discuss Bridget's upcoming detailed survey of the alien culture, which the locals call "dragons" (resembling large flying creatures with feathers). Huey mentions his tensor field printer project with Bill, which can produce living tissue, though Bridget notes the process still requires biological designs. They travel to Vulcan to observe a test of Huey's huey project—a control interface allowing humans to remotely operate android bodies while remaining paralyzed in their physical form. The test subject, a woman named Terry, successfully operates the huey body initially, but when attempting to exit the system using both the standard deactivation protocol and her configured "safe phrase," both fail. A technician is forced to manually shut down the device by removing the control cap, though not before Terry, panicked, demands the emergency termination. During lunch, project manager Mark Harris informs Huey that Romulus has preemptively outlawed flying cities under their newly elected FAITH government, which is also restricting mannies, post-life replication, and cloned meat. Huey resolves to alert his brother Will to expedite relocating family members from Romulus. The chapter ends with Huey acknowledging that the huey technology is not yet ready for public release.