29
“Red_Bati” © Dilman Dila
Originally Published in Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora edited by Zelda Knight and Oghenchovwe Donald Ekpeki (AURELIA LEO: August 17, 2020)
Red_Bati’s battery beeped. Granny flickered, and the forest around her vanished. She sighed in exaggerated disappointment. He never understood why she called it a forest, for it was just two rows of trees marking the boundary of her farm. When she was alive, she had walked in it every sunny day, listening to her feet crunching dead twigs, to her clothes rustling against the undergrowth, to the music of crickets, feeling the dampness and the bugs, sniffing at the rotten vegetation, which she thought smelled better than the flowers that Akili her grandson had planted around her house. Now, she liked to relive that experience. With his battery going down, he could not keep up a real life projection and, for the first time, she became transparent, like the blue ghost in the painting that had dominated a wall of her living room. Akili’s mother had drawn it to illustrate one of their favorite stories.
Granny laughed at the memory. “That ghost!” she said. Her voice was no longer musical. It was full of static.
He could not recharge her. He had to save power, but he did not want to shut her down because he had no one else to talk to. He did not get lonely, not the way she had been: so lonely that she would hug him and her tears would drip onto his body, making him flinch at the thought of rust. She would hug him even though she complained that his body was too hard, not soft and warm like that of Akili. He did not get lonely like that, but Akili had written a code to make him want to talk to someone all the time, and he had not had a chance for a conversation since the accident, twelve hours ago.
He had resurrected her after her death, while he waited for a new owner. He used all recordings he had made of her during their ten years together to create a holographic imitation of her so he could have someone to talk to. It was not like walking with her in the mango forest, or sitting at her feet on the porch as she knitted a sweater and watched the sun go down. Technically, he was talking to himself; but it was the only chance he had for conversation.
“I would have enjoyed being an astronaut,” she said, floating a few feet in front of him, her limbs kicking in slow motion the way humans moved in zero gravity. She was careful to keep behind the shelves, out of sight of the security camera. “This is the –”
She stopped talking abruptly when white-cell.sys beeped. A particle of ice was floating about like a predator shark. If it touched him, he would rust. He jerked, like a person awaking from a bad sleep, though the ice was ten meters away. Steel clamps pinned him onto a shelf. He could not get away.
The half-empty storage room looked like a silver blue honeycomb. They had dumped him in it after the accident ripped off his forearm. The Captain had evaluated his efficiency and, seeing it down to 80%, tagged him DISABLED. They could not fix his arm on the ship, so they shut him down and dumped him in storage until he got back to Earth. Entombed alive. Left to die a cold death.
“You won’t die,” Granny said, laughing. She sat on a fuel pod in a cell on the opposite shelf. “It’s just a little ice. It’s not even water.”
He had lived all his life dreading rust, watching his step to avoid puddles, blow-drying his kennel every hour, turning on the heater all the way up to prevent dew from forming. He knew it was irrational, for his body, made of high-grade stainless Haya steel, was waterproof. He never understood his aquaphobia. Had Akili infected him with a program to ensure he stayed indoors on rainy days? Very likely. Granny liked playing in the rain as much as she liked walking in the mango forest. Yet every time she did, she got a fever, sometimes malaria. Akili might have written a code to force Red_Bati to stay indoors on rainy days, and so Granny, who used him as a walking aid and guide, stayed indoors too. Red_Bati could have searched for this code and rewritten it to rid himself of this stupid fear, but he did not. He loved it, for it made him feel human.
“I’m not worried about the ice,” he said. “It’s the temperature.”
He was in Folder-5359, where temperatures stayed at a constant -250o C to preserve fuel pods. Technically, the cold would not kill him. He had a thermal skin that could withstand environments well below -400o C, but it needed power to function. Once his battery ran down, he would freeze and that would damage his e-m-data strips. Though these could be easily and cheaply replaced, he would lose all his data, all the codings that made him Red_Bati and not just another red basenji dog, all his records of Granny. He would die.
“That won’t be a bad thing,” Granny said, chuckling. “If you were a true dog, you’d be as old as I am and wishing for death.”
He was not a dog. He was a human trapped in a pet robot.
Granny chuckled again, but did not say anything to mock him again. She watched the ice and tried to touch it, but it passed through her fingers and floated upwards. It would not touch Red_Bati, after all. He relaxed. If he had flesh and muscles, this would have been a visible reaction. Instead, white-cell.sys reverted to sleep mode, the red light in his eyes vanished and his pupils regained their brownish tint.
His battery beeped, now at 48% for white-cell.sys had used up a lot of power in just a few seconds. In sixteen hours and forty-three minutes, it would hit zero, and then he would die.
“You’re not a human in a dog’s body,” Granny finally said, still watching the ice as it floated towards the ceiling.
“I am,” Red_Bati said.
“Humans have spirits,” Granny said. “You don’t.”
“I do,” Red_Bati said.
“You can’t,” Granny said.
“Why not? I’m aware of myself.”
“Doesn’t mean you have it.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not a natural-born.”
Red_Bati wanted to argue his point, to remind her of things that made him human, like agoraphobia; to remind her that he got consciousness from a chip and lines of code, just as humans did from their hearts, and brains. He was not supposed to be conscious, much less super intelligent; but Akili had wanted Granny to have more than just a pet, so he installed Z-Kwa and turned Red_Bati into a guide, a walking aid, a cook, a cleaner, a playmate, a personal assistant, a friend, a doctor, a gardener, a nurse, and even a lover if she had wanted. She could live her last years as she pleased rather than suffer in a nursing home.
After she died, Akili had put him up for sale along with all her property and memorabilia. For a moment, Red_Bati had feared that Akili would remove Z-Kwa and wipe his memory, but Akili contracted a cleaning firm to get rid of Granny’s property and either forgot or did not care to tell them about the chip. Red_Bati was too smart to let them know he was more than just a pet. Nor did he show it off to the people who bought him, Nyota Energy, an asteroid mining company that, rather than buying miner-bots, found it cheaper to convert pets into miners. They gave him a new bios and software, a thermal coat, x-ray vision, and modified his limbs and tongue to dig rocks. They did not look into his ribcage cabin so they did not see Z-Kwa, otherwise they would have removed it. When they shut him down after his accident, Z-Kwa had turned him back on, aware that if his battery drained, he would die. He had self-preservation instincts, just like any other living thing with a spirit, and he wanted to tell her all these things, but she was draining his battery.
“Sorry,” he said. “I have to conserve power.”
“That’s okay,” she said.
He blinked, and she vanished. His battery life increased by two hours.
He examined the three clamps that pinned him to the cell. They had not expected him to awake, so they had not used electronic locks. With his tongue, he pushed the bolts on the clamps and they snapped open. He could escape. The room had only one camera, at the front, to track crew who came in to pick up fuel pods. If it saw him, the ship would know he had awoken and service_bots would pounce on him and remove his battery. To hide from it, he needed the id
entity of another robot.
He checked the duty roster he had received before the accident. He did not expect the fuel roster to have changed since his accident only affected the cleaning roster. The next pickup was due in an hour, a karbull dragon-horse. It would not do. Six hours hence, it would be a tomcat, and then in thirteen hours, a robot that looked like him, a basenji dog. He wrote an identity-stealing app and hibernated.
He awoke ten minutes to time. His battery was down to 35% and would last for another ten hours. He slipped out of the cell, staying behind the shelves to hide from the camera. He floated to Shelf-4B and hid inside Cell-670, where he could see Cell-850, which had the fuel pod to be picked up next. He heard the outer door open and close. Then the inner door opened. The two doors ensured the temperature of Folder-5359 stayed at a constant -250o C, while the ship was a warm 16o C.
The basenji floated into view, riding a transporter tube. It saw Red_Bati but did not raise any alarms. It adhered strictly to its programming and ignored anything out of the ordinary, assuming the ship was in total control. Astral-mining companies stopped sending self-aware and self-learning robots many years ago after a ship had developed minor engine trouble and its crew, seeing their chance of returning safely to Earth had dropped to ninety-nine percent, landed on an asteroid and refused to move until rescue came. Fearing to incur such needless losses, the miners resolved to send only ‘dumbots’ incapable of making vital decisions without human input.
For a moment, Red_Bati wondered what had happened to the owner of this basenji. Its jaw was slightly open, its tongue stuck out to imitate panting, a design that little boys favored. He hoped its owner had only grown tired of it and had not died. He did not feel empathy the way Granny felt whenever she saw a dead ant; she felt so terrible that she would bury it. Granny had thought a dead child more horrible than a dead ant and Red_Bati wanted to feel as she might have felt.
He waited until the basenji turned its back to him as it positioned the tube to suck the pod out of the cell. He turned on his x-ray vision to see the basenji’s central processor and the comm receptor chip, both located just below the backbone, and on which the basenji’s serial number and LANIG address were respectively printed. Two seconds later, his app was ready.
It would take ninety seconds for the pod to enter the tube, and in that time, Red_Bati had to take over the basenji’s identity. He aimed a laser beam at the other dog’s left ear, which was its comm antennae, to disable it. He activated his comm receptor at the same moment that he fired the laser beam. There would be a delay of a thousand micro-seconds, between the basenji’s going offline and Red_Bati’s assuming its identity, but the ship would not read that as strange.
Red_Bati went into hoover mode which consumed a lot of power but allowed him to move quicker. He tapped on the power button at the base of the basenji’s tail, and the basenji shut down in three seconds. He grabbed it by the hind legs, guided it into an empty cell, and clamped it.
He raced back to the carrying tube and ten seconds later a beep came. The pod was inside the tube. He pushed it to the door. The tube had a temperature-conditioner that kept the pod chilled at -250o C to keep it from decaying. If a decayed pod ended up in a fuel tank, the engine’s temperature would shoot from 80o C to a blistering 300o C within fifteen minutes. Fire would break out in the Ma-RXK section while there would be explosions in the Ma-TKP section. With eight engines, the ship would not stop if one was damaged, though its speed would drop. But fire in the engine made the ship vulnerable to hijacking.
Red_Bati turned a dial on the tube, turning off the temperature-conditioner. It would take two minutes to reach the fuel tank and by then, though the tube’s temperature would have dropped by only two degrees, the pod would have decayed.
The ship was logged onto the tube, so the moment decay set in, the ship would be alerted and service_bots would not allow the pod into the fuel tank. Red_Bati had written an app to fool the ship into thinking the pod was still good. Hiding from the cameras, he had secretly fixed a finger into one of the tube’s data rod to infect it with his app.
Stealing the ship, his calculations told him, was a very bad idea. The asteroid mining companies would not rest until they understood why a ship suddenly went dark. They would send probes to all corners of the solar system and Red_Bati would be running for the rest of his life. The other option, to hide until they reached Obares, an asteroid in the Kuiper belt rich in kelenite, did not seem possible. He could not hide his missing arm from the ship’s cameras for the next two years of the journey. If he managed to, and got on the asteroid, he could sneak away with enough supplies, a tent, machines and spares, and he could use the sun to recharge; but that would mean growing old alone, with no one to talk to other than a holograph.
The ship was worth the risk. It had enough resources on board to sustain robot life for eternity, to create even a whole new world. It had VR printers that could give birth to new robots, who would be conscious like Red_Bati. Nyota Energy could have printed for him a new arm, but the cost was equal to buying another second-hand basenji, so they reserved VR printing to fix critical damages to the ship and to replace worn-out engine parts.
Once he had the ship under his control, he would take it somewhere far from human reach, maybe beyond Earth’s solar system. He could hop from one asteroid to another, mining minerals to make fuel and VR cartridges, until he found a place big enough and rich enough to be a new home. The VR printers could give birth to new robots, to other VR printers, and even to new spaceships. He would not be lonely anymore.
Red_Bati kept his body close to the tube to hide the missing arm from the cameras and opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue to imitate the panting basenji. The storage section was on the lowest level and the engines were in the midsection at the back of the ship. He followed tunnel-like corridors and did not meet other robots until he neared the engines, and the three he passed did not notice him: their eyes were focused in the distance. If they were humans, he would have exchanged nods with them in greeting, maybe even a cheerful “How’s it going?”
He reached Engine 5 without raising any suspicion. The fuel tank was in the first room. Its floor looked like the swimming pool which Granny had in her backyard. Things that looked like purple ice cubes swirled in a mist in the pool, under a glass lid. Red_Bati placed the carrying tube on the edge of the glass and pressed a button. The tube opened, the glass parted, and the pod slipped into the pool. The moment it touched the mist, it broke apart and thousands of ice cubes floated about. They were not a deep shade of purple like the others: they looked desaturated, but the ship would not immediately pick this up because the steam swirling above the pool gave the cubes fluctuating shades. It relied entirely on the tube to alert it of a decayed rod.
Red_Bati hurried out of the engine, still shielding his body with the now empty tube. When he reached the Supplies Folder, he did not shelve the tube, for he needed it to hide his missing arm. He settled in a corner, and five minutes later got the first message from the ship, which had noticed that he was not going to Docking for his next assignment. The message had a yellow color code, indicating low level importance, inquiry only. If he were any other robot, he would have auto-responded by sending the ship an activity log and system status, and the ship would have analyzed it and notified the Captain to take action. Z-Kwa blocked his Comm_Sys from sending the auto-response. The ship sent another message two minutes later, with a blue color code and an attachment to auto-install a program to force a response, but Z-Kwa deleted the attachment. The ship waited another two minutes, and then sent a third message, in white color code. It had notified both the Captain and Nyota Energy on Earth about his strange behavior, and it had told them that two service_bots were on their way to take a physical look at him.
Before they could reach Supplies Folder, the ship sent a message in red color code to everybot: A Red-Level event has occurred in Engine 5. Red_Bati could not hear the explosions. The ship was silent, as though nothing was ha
ppening. The ship would know that decayed fuel was responsible and would associate Red_Bati’s strange behavior to the crisis, but all service_bots would be needed in the engine to contain the disaster and none would come after Red_Bati.
The first sign that the ship had become vulnerable to hijacking came in the next red message, hardly ten minutes after Red_Bati got the yellow message. Kwa-Nyota is going into sleep mode. Once in hibernation, other engines would shut down, all non-essential programs would shut down, all auto functions would cease, and all robots, apart from the service_bots and the Captain, would go to sleep too. Seventy-five seconds after the message, the lights went out.
Red_Bati activated infrared vision and made his way to the heart of the ship, where the data servers glowed in the dark like the skyscrapers of Kampala. When he was sold to Nyota Energy, he had scanned the internet for everything about the company and its space crafts. He did not have any particular need for the information but was only responding to a very human instinct: know your employer. He had blueprints of the ship, a Punda Binguni model built by Atin Paco, a Gulu-based company that had pioneered low cost space travel. He had the source code of all its software and its operating system, Kwa-nyota. First, he went to the Comm Control Panel and flipped several switches to OFF, cutting communication with Earth. Now, Nyota Energy could not stop the hijack by sending the Captain direct instructions, nor could it track the ship.
The Captain would notice that it had lost communication with Earth, but would not send a service_bot to check, for all fifty service_bots were in Engine 5.
It took Red_Bati fifteen minutes to write a program to convince the ship to take instructions from him rather than from Nyota Energy. Then he used a jiko data cable to connect physically to the ship’s mainframe, making him a part of the ship. It took him another ten minutes to deactivate the security programs and install the hijacker. When he unhooked the cable, he had control of the ship.
The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021) Page 37
