Squee, no longer locked in her prolonged flashback, trotted across the table and sniffed at Lex’s food.
“Oh no you don’t, Squee. That’s mine. Come on, we’ll get you something,” he said.
He stood and set off toward the steam trays, Squee faithfully in tow. The first two trays were filled with red beans and rice, as they always were. He grabbed a plate and scooped up a proper serving for the little creature, then fetched a bowl and two bottles of water.
“Mitch, you want anything?” he asked.
“What is there?” she asked.
“Red beans and rice. Also, burritos with red beans and rice in them.”
“I’ll pass. Wait, where did you get chili, then?”
“Ma made it for me special, because we’re pals.”
“The computer is your ‘pal’?”
“That’s right. And Squee likes me, too. I’m very likeable.”
“Maybe she only likes you because she doesn’t realize what an idiot you can be sometimes.”
“I know for a fact Squee doesn’t care if I’m an idiot. What about you, Ma?”
“My opinion of you is largely unchanged by fleeting instances of poor judgment,” Ma said.
“Ha!” Lex said.
He set Squee’s bowl and plate of food on the floor beside his table, then sat back down.
“Ma!” called a voice from the hall. A second later the door was kicked open and in walked Karter. “I need a hard copy of section one-point-two-one g of the Beta Tester’s Handbook. And let Solby out, I’m done with that thing for a while.”
“The hard copy is being printed now, and the doors to the kennel are now open,” Ma said.
“Hi, Karter,” Lex said.
“Ma’s going to hand you a printout in a minute. Read it. I had to add some sections to that training manual,” he said, marching up to the food and loading up a tray.
“Dr. Dee!” Michella said, standing, brushing off her outfit, and slipping smoothly into her “schmooze the interviewee” routine. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you in person. I’m a great admirer of your work.”
He turned to her, sweeping his eyes from head to toe and back again. He turned back to Lex. “This is your girl?”
“Yes.”
Karter turned to her. “I own a planet. Your boyfriend over there doesn’t. Think about that for a minute.”
A second mechanical arm trundled in with a few pages pinched in its grasp. It presented the pages to Karter, who snatched them away and handed them to Lex.
“Here. Before we get started on whatever it was I was supposed to do for you freeloaders, familiarize yourself with that.”
Lex looked over the pages. “‘Temporal Contingency Plan’? What’s this all about?”
“That’s what you find out by reading it,” he said, slamming down his tray and digging in.
“I wonder if I could just ask you a few questions,” Michella said.
“Later. Food now, then science. Less important stuff after.” He glanced down, noticing Squee for the first time. “How’s the funk?”
“She’s doing fine. She actually sniffed out some survivors from this massacre we’re about to look into.”
“Mm,” Karter grunted. “Weird. Can’t imagine why she’d do that.”
“It is possible that funks are implicitly empathetic to humans,” Ma suggested. “Solby has been largely isolated on Big Sigma. Squee is the first funk to be exposed to this level of social interaction.”
Karter shrugged. “Could be. Lex, from now on I’m adding Squee to your beta-testing list. I want a write-up on her behavior. Thorough.”
“Yeah, I think Ma will be able to hook you up with that,” Lex said, without looking up from the pages.
As though he knew they were talking about him, Solby came trotting into the cafeteria. When he caught sight of Squee, he very nearly exploded with enthusiasm. The male bolted over to her and began hopping and prancing around her, sniffing her and working his way through the astonishingly diverse assortment of funk vocalizations. Squee, for her part, stood calmly and watched as her energetic counterpart orbited her, offering up a sniff or a lick whenever Solby slid to a stop in front of her and came nose to nose. Michella found herself incapable of suppressing a coo of affection at the sight.
“So… this is a list of instructions regarding what I should do to minimize the possibility of a time paradox,” Lex said.
“Yeah, I know. I wrote it,” said Karter.
“Why is it so important that I read this now?”
“None of your business. Ma, make sure a copy of that gets to Gun Lady and Mr. Kiss-Kiss Bang-Bang.”
“I will forward updated, annotated, and highlighted copies to Silo and Garotte,” she said.
“Now refresh my memory, Lex. Why are you here?”
“Killer robots that ate Nagari-Hamilton lab.”
“Right, right. You brought me one, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Ma. I want preliminary scans, risk assessment, component breakdown,” Karter dictated. “Let’s see what those idiots couldn’t handle.”
“Preliminary scan in progress. Shall I prepare one of your workshops for a briefing?” Ma said.
“Yeah.” He glanced at Michella. “And make it the fancy one.”
Chapter 17
Lex and Michella stepped into one of Karter’s many workshops, leaving Squee and Solby behind to get better acquainted. It wasn’t the first time Lex had been summoned to such a room to view one of Karter’s projects, but it was the first time he’d been to this particular room. Karter was notable for any number of reasons, but one of the most unusual was his predilection for very low-tech design tools. He liked to work in pen on paper. Most workshops were practically wallpapered with printed-out schematics and structural diagrams with notations written in pencil. Such was not the case in this room. Not only was it immaculate, it looked decades ahead of its time. The room was dark, not only in color but in lighting. The walls, ceiling, and floor were finished in a black-matte material that made the room seem to go on forever. Tiny lights shone down from above, indicating the location of each of sixteen black leather chairs. A cluster of similar lights kept the rest of the room at barely the brightness of a theater. The center of the room was dominated by a glossy black conference table. There must have been holographic emitters embedded in the table, or perhaps in the ceiling, because a hologram of the robotic specimen was projected into the air in the center of the room. The detail of the image was such that Lex took a step back when he saw it, briefly convinced the specimen had escaped. It was standing, rocking very slightly in place. Beneath the bulbous central portion of its body, the small, spidery electronic core was exposed, sweeping with a series of sensors.
“Holy… is that? Is that a hologram?” Lex asked.
“Damn straight. Eighth-gen emitters,” Karter said, stepping into the room from a door on the opposite side.
“I thought we were only up to sixth generation,” Michella said.
“Consumers are. You’re looking at a pro. You’ll have these in… I don’t know, five years,” Karter said.
Michella leaned forward to scrutinize the actual-size projection of the robot. It was one of the better constructed of the batch that had built itself from the pieces of the laboratory. Structural steel cut from girders made up most of its frame. It had formed an armored shell from sheets of some kind of high-impact polymer, carved into precise shapes and fused into what looked like a low-poly version of an insect’s carapace. The only evidence this wasn’t built in a factory was the lingering remnants of some safety signage etched into the polymer, as well as a small section of one of the rear legs, which had utilized an entirely different sort of building material.
“That’s… flesh,” she said.
“Ma, put the component scan up,” Karter said.
The long rear wall of the conference room lit up with crisp readouts listing components, percentages, and internal scans of the mechanism.
>
“Yep,” Karter said, glancing over the readings. “Looks like this sucker utilizes about two percent animal proteins and three-point-one percent calcite. Probably a hunk of thigh bone and some of the surrounding meat. Structurally it doesn’t make much sense, but you’ve got to admire the shock value of seeing one of your buddies parted out to serve as robot accessories. That’s some high-quality psychological warfare.”
“Do we know who built it?” Michella asked.
“One of the other robots built it. Probably two. The components of the inner core and the outer shell are highly varied.”
“I mean originally,” she said. “Who designed it?”
“Again, probably one of the other robots, and that one was designed by another one, and so on,” Karter said. “This isn’t a human design. There’s too much randomness to it. Too much variance. A human would have built it much more standardized. Look at these two front struts in the forelegs. There’s an eight-millimeter difference. And look how these plates back here fit together. I’m getting two different design vibes. Up here, this is what you get when you adapt a design to utilize found components, which fits the design goals of a macroscale self-replicator. No surprise there. But up here, along the back, and down here where the fine manipulators are totally different—this is the sort of design you get from trial and error. Evolutionary design.”
“So this is some sort of artificial evolution?”
“No, it is real evolution. Just with circuits and struts instead of cells.”
“Does that mean it actually is an alien? Like, a whole new life form?” Lex said.
“New? Hardly,” Karter said. “Evolutionary design is nothing new. Genetic programming has been in industrial use for years. I used an evolutionary algorithm to design the funks. This is just a physical implementation of it. You could call it a life form in the same way that you could call Ma a life form. Alien? I doubt it. Ma, blow up the circuit scans.”
Grayscale images replaced the readouts on the rear wall. They had the hyper-detailed look of an electron microscope image, though to Lex and Michella they just looked like a random pattern of grouped parallel lines.
“This is elementary level, centuries-old component design, but the layout and utilization—” Karter began.
“I know, Dr. Dreyfus went over that. He compared it to a spacecraft chiseled in stone,” Michella said. “He theorized it was a hybridization of available technologies and foreign ones.”
“I don’t know who Dr. Dreyfus is, but he’s an idiot. If this was a hybridization, there’d be elements of something new. Something I’ve never seen before. Assuming this is alien in origin is like assuming if aliens were to find a dictionary, they’d immediately abandon their own language for ours. No, I think if you were to trace the lineage of this sucker back a few dozen hardware iterations, you’d end up with a prototype robot built to withstand standard anti-electronic countermeasures. These big, ancient circuits, aside from being dirt simple to fabricate, are hardened against electromagnetic attack. When modern stuff gets hit by an EMP, there’s always the chance it won’t come back. With circuits like this, nothing short of physically severing connections will bring it down permanently. I’d call it a decently designed war machine, except the one thing it’s missing is weaponry. All it has is a cutting torch and a bunch of assembly and disassembly tools. It seems like it was only designed to self-replicate. It was made to build. The destruction is just the way it gets materials. The real goal is construction. That still doesn’t explain why it would shave off chunks of man meat as raw material though, or why it would have tools for working with flesh and bone.”
“The first one discovered was almost entirely flesh and bone. It was built from yak anatomy, except for the core,” Michella said.
“Look, this is all fascinating, but maybe we should just focus on how to kill them,” Lex suggested.
“Oh, any standard weaponry will take one of these out. They aren’t particularly sturdy. The tricky bit is keeping them from rebuilding. The obvious way is massive application of firepower. Constant nuclear bombardment would be ideal.”
“That’s what the military is already planning.”
“Then what are you bugging me for?”
“They’re on a populated planet,” Lex said.
“And?”
“The goal is to save lives,” Michella said.
“If you wanna make an omelet, you gotta lay waste to a few continents,” Karter said with a shrug.
“What the hell kind of omelets are you making?” Lex said.
“Another way would be to deploy the CMEA. That’d bathe the planet in a months-long EMP barrage. Might take them down for good. Would definitely keep them down for the duration of the barrage.”
“But that would also deactivate all electronics. The people would be cut off from supplies and communication. It would be devastating.”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s no good either.”
“Listen, if you want nonlethal, you’ve got to specify that in the statement of work.”
“Statement of work?” Michella asked.
“You will be paying for this,” Karter said. “I’m sick of you do-gooder types mooching off me. Lex is already on retainer as a beta tester, and I’m no longer a prisoner of a bunch of terror-cult idiots, so this one comes with a price tag.”
“But—” Lex began.
“But nothing. I’m a professional, and professionals get paid to do what they do.”
“You’re a professional mad scientist! Surely the rules are different.”
Karter’s expression hardened. “Say that again and I swear I’ll cave your head in.”
“What? You said yourself you’re crazy. You showed me the certificate,” Lex defended.
“I never said I wasn’t crazy, but don’t you dare call me a scientist. I’m a mad engineer.”
“What’s the difference?” Lex asked.
“Scientists are frauds. ‘The scientific method’ involves making a hypothesis and testing it, and they get paid whether they’re right or wrong. They’ve turned trial and error into a career. You want to know the difference between scientists and engineers? Scientists make guesses, engineers make gadgets. And I get paid handsomely for my services. So if you want a solution to this little riddle, I’m going to want my standard consulting fee of half a million credits per hour, plus ten percent over parts and labor.”
“Karter, this is serious,” Lex said.
“Yes it is. I haven’t made a dime in any of my dealings with you, and I’ve churned out some pretty high-class equipment.”
“You… you haven’t made a dime? You confiscated a whole space station a couple of months ago!”
“That was more of a finders-keepers thing than a payment.”
“If I may suggest a solution,” Ma said. “Lex, submit a statement of work. Karter will develop a proposal and a price quote.”
“How is that a solution?” Lex asked.
“It gets me paid, that’s how,” Karter said.
“He will be contractually obligated to develop a potential solution to the problem in order to estimate the cost of its creation. It will allow the process to move forward, regardless of your ability to afford his services,” Ma said.
“That’s right, I do free quotes for problems that interest me. Let’s see you find a mad scientist with that kind of customer service.”
“Fine. What do I need to do?”
“Simply state your detailed request verbally. I will compose the proper forms and enter them into the database.”
“We need you to find a way to wipe out an infestation of these robots with as little collateral damage and loss of life as possible, and then help us implement it,” Lex said.
“Timeline?” Karter asked.
“As soon as possible. The bombs could start dropping in a few days. We need to wipe out the threat before then.”
“Okay, now we have a framework to work from. Was that so hard?” Kar
ter said. “Ma, mechanically incapacitate this thing.” He picked up a stylus and reached over to the hologram, swiping across the figure as he spoke, leaving red highlights in the air. “I want power feeds cut here, here, here, and here. Sever these three tool heads. Physically restrain at these points. Once it’s immobilized, get a dump of the firmware and any other data we can pull out of this thing. If there’s a nonlethal solution, I guarantee we’ll find it by exploiting a weakness in the code.”
“Ma?” Lex asked.
“Yes, Lex?”
“How exactly are we going to pay for this solution?”
“You could pass a hat around on the planet you’re trying to save. If they knew that it was going to come down to paying my invoice or being dissected by frenzied robots, I bet they’d cough up,” Karter suggested without looking away from the hologram as it was skillfully disassembled according to his specifications.
“I will analyze the pending beta-testing schedule. It is possible you will be able to work off the consultation fee with a few high-risk testing sessions.”
“Oh goodie,” he said.
“Enough talking. I’ve got work to do. Go away. I’ll have Ma call you when I’ve got your answer,” Karter growled, instantly irritated by their presence now that he had something to engage his interest. He shooed them away, then flopped into a chair. “Ma. Yellow legal pad and a number 3 pencil. I like what they did with this actuator linkage…”
Chapter 18
Michella and Lex marched down the hall away from the workshop as Karter went about his business. Squee trotted out of a hallway and tapped along behind them. She had a bit more of a spring in her step than usual.
“That man is… strange,” Michella said. “Are you sure we can trust him to help us out?”
“He’s like a trained bear. He can do some surprisingly human things, but you always need to be mindful of the fact that at any moment he could tear your throat out and eat your face. Fortunately, what we’re asking him to do is the equivalent of asking a trained bear to eat a salmon in exchange for another salmon. And if he can’t help us, we’re out of luck, because I don’t have very many friends who might be able to deal with a problem like this.” He paused. “Actually, I do have a lot of friends who can deal with a problem like this, but the rest of them are already dealing with it.”
Artificial Evolution Page 29
