No Marigolds in the Promised Land

by T S Hottle

  Or find Julie Seding to thank her for modeling for an AI interface.

  She might actually be touched by the gesture, John Farno.

  Really?

  No. But keep telling yourself that, meat bag.

  I love you, too, Julie.

  LOG ENTRY: 1526 25-Sagan, 429

  Well, that felt like a wasted afternoon. For the first hour working on the hyperdrone, it challenged me as to why I wanted its list of coordinates. The hyperdrone does not qualify as artificial intelligence in the normal sense of the word. AI, as its currently implemented, will mimic human thought and attempt to reason why someone is trying to do a thing. Hence, I have the illusion of a woman named Julie talking to me when, really, she’s just facilitating me in automating my own survival. That is why she warned me about overriding her lockouts on certain functions. There’s enough of Julie Seding in her to tell me, “Hey, we don’t let this type of machinery think as much as you want it to think right now. Be careful.”

  The hyperdrone, on the other hand, would likely be right at home in the early days of commercial space travel. It’s basically a big calculator that does Boolean algebra. I find such machines a pain to deal with because AI has tools I usually use to get a task done. The drones scurrying about the dome outside this building are like that, but Solaria has a central AI that can coordinate them all. It stores all the security certificates and has the decision-making power to turn a drone on and off. These machines are little more than search engines full of primitive commands and algorithms. They act needy because the AI itself is confused. (That’s why Julie is so useful, but at the same time, so annoyed.)

  The hyperdrone is worse. To me, it’s being stubborn and refusing to do my bidding. In reality, it’s looking for the magic word to make it download its secrets. And there’s a reason for that. When all that existed in the world were these billions of devices that displayed pictures of cats, vacuumed your floor, and balanced your accounts, they were easy to hack because everyone else in the world had a machine on their desk on in their lap that did the exact same thing. Now, everything’s AI, and these primitive machines are still throwing back things like “Syntax error” or “Command not recognized” or something about root users or whatever. It’s cryptic, and even the AIs, if not provided with a dictionary to talk to them, can have trouble.

  And they don’t provide dictionaries for hyperdrones to any AI or person unless they’re on an orbital station.

  Farigha’s orbital station is currently forming a lovely debris ring around the planet, so that’s out.

  Here’s the other problem. AI mimics the human brain, even if it’s supposed to be “nice and stupid,” a five-hundred-year-old mantra that’s kept us from perishing in a machine uprising. Primitive bots think in databases. This hyperdrone, for example, uses a language called “SQL,” pronounced “sequel.” It’s an archaic data storage language, but it works.

  Or maybe it doesn’t. There’s a version called “NoSQL,” which makes absolutely zero sense. Then again, anything from the early days of computing is esoteric nonsense. I mean they named the first home terminals after fruit, and the system that ran them was called “Windows.” Really? You guys patted yourselves on the back for your ingenuity, and you name the hardware after fruit and the software after part of a house?

  This is what I spent five hours trying to coax into downloading its secret list o’ hypergates for me.

  Unsuccessfully.

  LOG ENTRY: 2148 25-Sagan, 429

  I’m tired. My feet stink. And I don’t love the universe. If there’s a Hell, I’m probably in it right now.

  Julie helpfully pointed out to be that, even though the drones have basically become eyes, ears, nose, and limbs for her, they still need a bot wrangler. So, shortly after my last log entry, I had to drop what I was doing and go wrangle bots. It’s what I do for a living. I’m good at it, but it’s tiring work. We in the business describe it as “herding cats.”

  The drones are designed to function semi-independently. Normally, someone like me sits at a console and watches them on a map, feeding instruction sets to them. They’re barely smarter than the hyperdrone. However, while doing their tasks, they might see something that needs to be addressed before it can finish its work. Fortunately, some guy named Asimov came up with three laws to keep such contraptions from developing delusions of personhood. So, it can’t just kill a person or shove them into a crevice because they’re in the way. But they still need to function without human intervention. The net effect is drones with flaky attention spans. It will see something that needs done, realize that human intervention is a last resort, and start working on said task without bothering to tell its human masters. Then I have to intervene and get the drone back on schedule.

  Bot wrangling is more than that. Most of the construction and maintenance bots are not the nimblest devices out there. Sometimes, they flip over, get stuck, or even lock up their little brains. Guess who has to go out there and set things right.

  Since Julie is a disembodied simulation of an engineer and not the actual engineer herself, she can’t physically rescue the bots or unlock their brains. Sometimes other bots come to a drone’s rescue, but not always.

  Today, I had a spider, an eight-legged machine that carries its own supplies to construction site, fall off a building onto its back. Normally, I like the spiders. They right themselves ninety percent of the time, and they seldom suffer brain freeze.

  This one did both. It fell, landed on its back, and worked itself into such a tizzy that it lay there flailing its legs in some sort of maintenance mode. This meant I had to suit up, go out and find the damn thing, and restart it. Finding it wasn’t hard. I had video on the thing looking very much like a giant spider that had gotten itself into a predicament, a predator suddenly become potential prey or a target for a human’s boot. Restarting it would be nothing. Pull the power pack and reseat it. The spider would run through its startup routines, then Julie would feed it the last thing she had it working on. In essence, it would resume being an extension of Julie.

  Only a flailing spider on its back in maintenance mode is not an extension of a well-simulated human mind. It’s a mindless machine kicking mechanical appendages out of some sort of badly designed or calculated diagnostic. The spider would kick until it found purchase and could right itself. It might even reboot itself and log an event to explain why it had done so.

  The big black monstrosity lay on its back unable to find solid ground or something to grasp. This put its primitive brain into that most ancient of computing perils, the infinite loop. It would kick each leg until it found something to grab or push off of, and it had nothing but air to work with.

  I would have to reach between those kicking legs to shut it off, then flip it over, before starting it back up. Under normal circumstances, I would simply use a remote device to immobilize it. Then I would flip it, probably with the help of another drone, and restart it. If it still didn’t work right, I could make it go back to its berth where I would perform the only manual labor I do in my job.

  I’d take it apart and replace whatever I found wrong with it.

  Julie herself tried to use three different drones, one of them aerial with a grappling hook beneath it. The first two drones were smashed, costing us two drones we could really have used on the life support system. The third, the aerial drone, found itself speared on the spider’s mindlessly kicking legs.

  So, by the time I reached the kicking thing, it had a rather large piece of scrap that once was an aerial drone attached to one leg and was smashing it with two others.

  I called up Julie on my helmet com, something I hadn’t used in almost two weeks now.

  “Can we kill it?”

  “We could,” said Julie, “but we’d be down to two spiders, and that’s going to make repairing the life support harder. We’ve already lost the aerial drone unless you can repair it.”

  Day 12, 26-Sagan, 429. Dear Diary, I have drone guts all over my apartment.
Happy days!

  Nope. Don’t want to write that log entry. “I take it the remote is with one of the crews.”

  “The last crew to come here left the day before the event and went back to Equalia.”

  Well, shit. “Do you see anything I can use for leverage. Maybe if I flip it, it’ll figure out that its broken.”

  “It’s in brain freeze, John Farno,” said Julie. “And I’ve already lost two bots trying to right it.”

  Sure enough, one of the meter-high welding drones someone had dubbed “daleks” lay smashed against a nearby wall, its domed head several meters away. Or, maybe that was from the second one, lying on its side with no head, its motivator skirt gone, and its manipulator boom snapped off.

  The spider itself lay on its back like the video showed. Each leg kicked wildly, one of which had an aerial drone speared on it. The aerial drone would never fly again. Maybe I could strip if for parts.

  If the spider kicked each leg in succession, it would be easy for me to climb into the middle and open its access panel. Unfortunately, the spider kicked each leg as though it were walking on some phantom treadmill. That’s what normally made the spiders so stable. They moved their legs for maximum support, not in some predetermined order. The pattern was likely based on the last thing it stood on before it fell. First, I needed to determine where the front of the thing was, its “carapace,” so to speak. Then I needed to number the legs so I could get the pattern.

  I thought I had it after each leg kicked once. It kicked in a random pattern starting with Leg 1 (Well, I started with Leg 1) and actually went through all eight legs finishing with Leg 2, which had the aerial drone speared on it. Then it started a new pattern with Leg 3, finishing with Leg 8. And then…

  I sat watching for fifteen minutes before I saw it repeat. There was no way I could memorize all the patterns this thing used. They were designed to be fast and able to adapt almost instantly to lift heavy objects. Nothing like a metal pole lay around that would let me flip the spider onto its side. That wouldn’t work anyway. The aerial drone stuck on Leg 2 would freak its already scrambled brain out and possibly cause it to flip again.

  “Julie,” I finally said, hoping she was in my helmet still, “can you give me the best time to jump onto its belly?”

  “It’s going to think you fell on it,” said Julie, “and try to grab you. You might get crushed.”

  “Well, that would end the survival mission really fast, now, wouldn’t it? I’m going to try to pull its battery out.”

  “I’ll try,” said Julie. “You may want to stand on its right to avoid the speared aerial.”

  I stood on its right and waited.

  “Get ready,” said Julie. “Now!”

  The spider began kicking its legs on the left in succession. I jumped through a gap between its right-hand legs. Sure enough, I landed on its belly.

  And sure enough, that got the spider’s attention. It stopped kicking and tried to wrap me in a hug. Holy shit, those legs were powerful. It felt like it was trying to squash me.

  Wouldn’t that be an ironic headline when humans finally came to investigate.

  LAST MAN ON FARIGHA SQUASHED BY BUG

  I groped around beneath me, but the spider was pushing down harder, almost pinning my hand under my body. It didn’t help I was in an EVA suit. I had to find the battery latch quickly, or the suit would rupture. True, it was less dangerous than a rupture outside the dome, but the dome was still not habitable outside the buildings. I heard a rip, then a hiss.

  Uh-oh.

  “Warning,” the suit’s own systems helpfully said, “suit breach. Return to pressurized environment immediately.”

  The spider had other ideas and pressed down hard. My hand was pinned beneath me. I would never get the battery. I had only one chance to survive this, and even that was a crap shoot.

  I started rocking the spider on its back.

  Three tries later, the spider tipped almost onto its side, enough for its left legs to let me go and kick into the momentum. The last thing I saw before everything went black was the underside of the spider as Leg 2, now on my right, shook the ruined aerial drone off. The spider was lowering itself onto me as I passed out.

  I came to inside what looked like a parking garage. The spider now sat next to a rover, which I recognized as good ol’ 57, Leg 2 sticking out and showing serious damage, the rest folded under it.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Hypoxemia,” said Julie, still speaking through my helmet. “Your suit vented most of your oxygen just as you got the spider righted. Fortunately, that also let me reboot its systems and order it to carry you back here before permanent brain damage could set in.”

  “And the spider?”

  “We’ll need to replace its number two leg, but it’s functional. It saved you, didn’t it?”

  “After it nearly killed me.”

  “Can you walk?”

  Slowly, I got to my feet. I was dizzy, and I’d look like I just got home from a weekend bender. Yet, I could still walk. “Sure. I need to lie down.”

  “I’ve adjusted the environmental controls to increase oxygen levels inside the building. Also, the temperature will be thirty degrees Celsius in your apartment. I suggest you take a hot shower, then go lie down.”

  “So, you’re the building now,” I said, setting up the obvious joke.

  Julie sighed. “Yes, John Farno. And since you’re injured, I’ll say it.”

  I must have had a shit-eating grin on my face. “Say it, baby.”

  “I want you inside me, John Farno.”

  I could not stop laughing.

  “You’re delirious, John Farno,” said Julie. “And mentally fifteen years old.”

  She only now figured that out.

  So, here I sit in bathtub in an empty apartment in a pressurized building inside an unpressurized dome. I’m bruised, still dizzy, and aching all over.

  But I’m alive. Screw you, Farigha— I mean, Farno. I’m going to beat you.

  DAY 26

  Solaria

  LOG ENTRY: 1823 9-Mandela, 429

  Hallelujah, brethren and sistren, the life support is finally online. I can walk around Solaria’s abandoned streets in shirt sleeves. And it only took two weeks.

  The first week was spent manufacturing or retrieving parts. My trick of turning Rover 19 into a trailer translated well into doing the same to a newer, larger rover, the freshly delivered Rover #114. 114 is longer, has a fresh fusion core which did need some coaxing to life. (First time’s always a pain. That’s why we never take out rovers until they’ve been in the motor pool for almost a month.) It’s AI protested when I plugged in the umbilical and let Julie have her way with it.

  I am a newer artificial intelligence installation, it rather snottily informed me. Actually, the voice was that same dull interface 57 used until I loaded Julie. The use of a locally created interface is not recommended as I have vastly superior…

  “Yeah, yeah, Jeeves,” I said. “You’ll be running with no life support, minimal heat, standing by to store some rather large life support equipment. You’re the trailer to Rover #57.”

  That is hardly normal operation. I was manufactured in Galileo of this year and…

  “You’re a trailer. I need to keep 57 running as my main vehicle. All my stuff is in there, and the AI has a better pornographic interface.”

  Mr. Farno, this is most irregular. I shall protest this to the highest authority on Farigha. Who is that, anyway?

  “Oh, Julie.”

  Soon, Julie’s dulcet tones filled Rover 57. On 14-Sagan, 429 at approximately 0100 hours, the terraforming colony of Farigha suffered a catastrophic attack against its domes, hypergate, orbital station, and communications arrays on both moons. John Farno is the only known surviving human on the planet. He has provisionally renamed the planet Farno and declared himself Farno I, King of Farno and Emperor of 2 Mainzer, pending approval from the Citizens Republic of Mars. Regardless of his status as
monarch or head of government, he is, in fact, the only authority on Farigha, hereinafter called Farno, until the arrival of OCD personnel or the Compact military.