by Joe Zieja
Mailn gave a bitter chuckle. “You ever wonder where all those cooks ended up?”
“They transferred them to ground combat ?”
“Yup. Said we needed more firepower. But all I’ve gotten so far is a bunch of fat, sweaty troops that don’t know the first thing about shooting anything and won’t take off their damn chef hats.” She paused, considering. “And some pretty good chili dogs.”
Rogers shook his head. Motor oil in his eggs was one thing. Pancake batter in rifles was another. Someone in personnel needed to have his head examined, though Mailn had suggested that the orders were coming from higher up. Was Klein really losing it? He was about the only man in the entire fleet that Rogers had confidence in.
“I’d better get a move on,” Mailn said. “I don’t want to know what I’m going to find when I get to Bravo’s training room. The droid training facility is this door right here. Good luck, speed bag. You’re going to need it.”
The corporal broke into a jog before Rogers could say anything else, and he found himself staring at the door that she had indicated, not wanting to go inside. His hand hovered over the button to open it, but he couldn’t make himself press it. He hated shinies, hated what they were doing, hated these damn posters on the walls. But was there any way out of it?
Maybe if he did a supremely awful job, they’d have to transfer him. They were transferring everyone, weren’t they? A couple of accidents, hopefully ones that didn’t involve Rogers getting smashed by a droid, and they’d put him somewhere else. Finance, maybe. As long as they didn’t make him an executive assistant, anything had to be better than commander of the droid ground combat unit.
That was it. He’d just be bad at his job. It would be easy, since Rogers had no idea how to do it properly in the first place.
Rogers grinned. He felt a little bit like his old self again. No duty was too great that R. Wilson Rogers couldn’t find a way to shirk it.
His glee collapsed when he hit the button and the door opened, revealing a platoon of droids looking straight at him. The only other human in the room yelled at the top of his lungs.
“A-TEN-HOOOOOAH!”
* * *
I. Don’t knock it till you try it.
Big Orange Button
In front of him, neatly arrayed in a perfect formation, was large collection of droids, all looking like they’d just come fresh off the manufacturing belt. Their exoskeletons were clean, shimmering, and of a darker shade than the other droids, though Rogers couldn’t quite put a name to the color. Their heads, horse-like if any comparison to any animal could be made, each bore a pair of glimmering blue eyes, all of which seemed to be fixed on Rogers. In total, he counted five by seven rows, making thirty-five shinies under his command. It was thirty-five too many.
“Um, at ease?” Rogers said uncertainly. “Are you all capable of being at ease? Would you melt?”
Nothing happened. The eerie metallic soldiers appeared no more at ease than a group of construction beams that had just been told an awful joke. Rogers wasn’t even sure they had noticed him; they stood so perfectly still that he wondered if they were even turned on.
He turned to the only other human in a room, a corporal who, thankfully, responded to his command to be at ease. He was old for a corporal, which didn’t bode very well for his competence, but his uniform looked neatly pressed with the exception of a small white stain on his left boot. It surprised Rogers, not because the stain was there but because Rogers normally would have never noticed it. This officer thing was already starting to get to him; soon he’d be measuring his underwear to make sure they were folded four inches across. Or at least ordering an enlisted member to measure it.
“Well, then,” Rogers said by way of expressing his complete lack of ideas about what to do.
“Aie present to yur dee Artificial Intelligence Ground Combat Squrdrun,” said the corporal, his flat face and very out-of-style mustache turning up into a proud grin.
“Ah, what?”
The corporal, surprisingly, looked as though Rogers’ confusion pleased him. “Aie saids, Aie present to yur dee Artificial Intelligence Ground Combat Squrdrun!”
Great. They’d transferred someone from the Public Transportation Announcer Corps to be his second in command. A PTAC was all he needed.
Rogers sighed. “What’s wrong with your voice, corporal?”
The corporal looked indignant. “There’s nothing wrong with my voice, sir,” he said, his speech surprisingly intelligible all of a sudden.
“So, why are you talking like you’ve stolen all the marshmallows and had nowhere else to hide them?”
“It’s my Thelicosan accent, sir. I’m training to be a spy. Can’t be a spy if you don’t sound like the Thellies, can you? I practice all day.” He cleared his throat. “Aie means, aie practice allur dee days!”
Rogers shook his head. “What’s your name?”
The corporal’s speech degenerated into something that Rogers was nearly positive had no vowels in it.
“What?”
“Corporal Albert Tunger, sir! You see how good I’ve gotten? I can barely understand myself sometimes.”
“I’m sure you’re the envy of the intelligence squadron,” Rogers said. “I’m assuming you’re my second-in-command here?”
“Ah, nur,” the curpural—corporal—said. “Aie am yur urderly.”
“My what?”
“Your orderly. I’m here to tackle the administrative tasks that officers are generally too busy or too lazy to do.”
“Right,” Rogers said. “Well, the first thing I want you to do as my orderly is ditch that accent. I can’t work with someone that sounds like he’s always puckering up for a kiss.” Not that he wanted to do any actual work. He really just didn’t want to listen to Tunger talk.
“But,” Tunger whined, his face sagging, “I’m training to be a spy! How am I going to be a spy if I sound like your everyday Meridan man? They’ll shoot me the first time I open my mouth!”
“I’m considering shooting you right now. You can practice when we’re not in here doing, uh, droid stuff, okay? There are plenty of other people to talk to on this ship other than me.”
“Urrrkaaaayy . . .” Tunger said, hanging his head.
Rogers sat down in the only chair in the room, which was pushed up next to a computer terminal, and put his feet up. He tried to adopt a position of nonchalance and comfort, but with his uniform tailored to actually look good when worn, it was a difficult task. It always felt like his shirt and trousers were having a war over his underwear and had reached a stalemate.
“Now,” Rogers said, pulling at his crotch to no effect, “if you’re not my second, who is?”
One of the droids, front and center in the five-by-eight formation, stepped forward, his metal feet making much less noise on the floor than Rogers was used to hearing. Rogers saw why; the combat droids’ legs had a series of shock absorbers that ran from their hip joints down to their ankles, and their four-clawed feet sported some sort of soft rubber on the bottom. Rogers wasn’t sure which he preferred: a droid he could hear coming an astronomical unit away or a droid that he didn’t know was there until they rubbed noses.
“I am Cyberman First Class F-GC-001,” the droid said. “I am second in command of the 331st AIGCS.” Rogers noticed he pronounced it like “eggs” in typical ramrod military acronym style, though he wasn’t sure where the “C” had gone.
“Hey!” Rogers said. “You don’t sound like a moron!”
“Oh sure,” Corporal Tunger said. “He can talk any way he wants.” He abruptly turned away and folded his arms, staring at the wall. “Droids can’t be spies.”
“I must request clarification for this statement,” the droid—Rogers decided to call him Oh One—said.
“I mean you’re not calling functions or calculating pi in the middle of a sentence or anything.”
Tunger, apparently over his short burst of teenage angst, turned around and pointed a finger
in the air as he lectured.
“New models. They’ve got the F Chip.”
“What’s that?”
“Freudian Chip. Named after a famous old psychologist. This is the first batch of prototype units with it; it adds a bit of human rationality and psyche, and apparently helps with their combat reactions. The first batch of AIGC units spent most of their time comparing casualty calculations and tended to go with solutions that left one guy alive on the side that was supposed to win.” Tunger shrugged. “Boolean logic has its limits, I guess.”
Rogers angled his desk chair slightly toward Oh One. “So, you’re an F Chip droid. A Froid.”
“You are correct, though the word ‘Froid’ does not appear in my vocabulary.”
“Install it,” Rogers said, “because that’s what I’m going to call you new models.” He leaned forward. “You don’t like . . . feel or anything, do you?”
“If you are asking whether or not F Chip droids—” The droid made an unintelligible computation noise that sounded a little bit like an old skipping record. “If you are asking whether or not Froids have human emotions, you are correct in your assumption that we do not feel.”
“That’s great,” Rogers said. He thought back to the way the inspection droid had reacted when he had used the word “shinies.” Rogers could have sworn that it had gotten angry, which just seemed ridiculous. “I don’t think I could handle it if any of you started crying or trying to tell jokes or anything like that.”
“I have no reserves of saline solution to excrete from my ocular implants,” the droid said. “If this is a modification that is desired, please see Ensign McSchmidt in the engineering bay, who will put in a request for a new design.”
“I think we’ll skip it,” Rogers said, “but thanks for the suggestion.”
Rogers sat in silence for a moment, Oh One staring at him with that blank blue-eyed gaze and Tunger looking a little depressed at not being able to talk like an idiot. A droid as his deputy. Wonderful. Judging from the rest of the people he’d met on the Flagship so far, he wasn’t sure that many of the human choices were any better.
Briefly, he thought about simply leaving, blowing off the training altogether and going to find a good card game to join, but that didn’t seem practical. He didn’t think he could find a card game in the entire ATBG, for one, and that wasn’t being quite subtle enough about doing a poor job. If he was going to be bad at something, he couldn’t make it look like he was trying to be bad at it.
So, he did something just short of being overtly stupid: he put a corporal in charge.
“Tunger,” he said, “you’ve got control. Why don’t you give me a little demonstration of what these battle bots can do?”
The corporal stiffened. “That’s not really my job, sir. I’m here to help you with the administration and organization—”
“Come on,” Rogers said. “Show me the good stuff. Make ’em spin around in circles and shoot each other with paint guns and do karate.”
“The word karate does not appear in my vocabulary,” Oh One said. “Are you referring to droid fu?”
“Shut up for right now. I’m trying to get the corporal to do orderly stuff like order you around with orders. Tunger?”
Tunger’s face was getting red, and he was avoiding meeting Rogers’ gaze.
“It’s just that . . .”
“You have no idea how they work, do you?”
Tunger looked at the floor. “Nur.”
Rogers sighed and stood up. “How long have you worked with droids?”
“Since I was transferred from the zoo deck.”
Well, that explains the boot stain, Rogers thought.
“And that was?”
The corporal hesitated. “Three days ago.”
Rogers grit his teeth. Another bizarre personnel transfer. What would possess Klein to put a zookeeper—if Tunger had even been in that illustrious of a position on the zoo deck—with droids? Rogers supposed dealing with strange creatures might give Tunger a leg up, but Rogers didn’t think these shinies would respond to fish or whistles. Maybe electrical prods, though . . .
“Fine. Fine. Did they tell you anything at all about these droids before you came here?”
Tunger brightened and turned to where a small cabinet was attached to the wall. He opened it with his personal keycard and removed a strange-looking datapad, roughly twice as large as the standard-issue personal datapad that everyone was required to use. He handed it to Rogers with ceremonial seriousness.
“They told me about this, sir,” Tunger said. “It’s the control pad. I tried to play with it a little but it’s not keyed to me; you’ll have to unlock it with your keycard first.”
Rogers held the device as though it was a live grenade with the pin pulled out. In his hands he held the controls for a bunch of shinies, none of whom had any personalities but all of whom had weapons, and he was supposed to somehow train them to fight. Or were they supposed to train him instead? Removing his keycard from the back of his datapad, he swiped it in the slot on the side of the control pad.
The formerly blank screen lit up, and it was a few moments before a complicated control panel came onto the screen. Nothing on it was marked at all, and there was precious little to distinguish one button from the other; small green and red squares dotted the display, looking almost like a new sort of game or an old box of chewing gum, and there was one large orange square button at the bottom.
“Well, this is helpful,” Rogers said. “Is there an instruction manual of any sort?”
“Yes!” Tunger said excitedly, happy to be of use. “Yes, there is!” He reached around to the same cabinet and pulled out a sheet of laminated plastic paper and handed it over.
“Ah,” Rogers said. “Well, let’s see, then.”
It was a picture of the datapad with all of the buttons on it. Nothing was labeled.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” Rogers asked.
Tunger’s smile faded. “Well, I think they might have thought you would label them as, you know, you figured them out?”
Rogers shook his head. “Alright, Oh One, what about you? If I get blasted by these phantom Thelicosans that everyone keeps talking about, what happens?”
“I assume command of the AIGCS and utilize the best available strategy to neutralize the threat at hand.”
“About as descriptive as the command pad, thanks. Anything more than that? How exactly do you exert said command?”
“I utilize the best available strategy to neutralize the threat at hand.”
Rogers ran his hands down his face, grabbing onto his beard and pulling hard. “I think I’d rather have another inspection.”
“For inspections, you should contact the Standardization and Evaluation Squadron. I am not programmed for that function.”
“Thankfully not.” Rogers turned the command pad over in his hands, wondering what would happen if he just started pushing buttons. The big one on the bottom, the orange square, looked promising. But maybe it was an execution command that only made any sense to use after other commands had been issued? It all seemed like a very primitive system for such advanced technology.
“Well,” Rogers said. “Here goes nothing. Why don’t you step back into formation, Oh One?”
The droid’s eyes flashed for a moment. “I am unable to find a suitable answer for that question. Most likely it is because I have not been ordered to do so by my superior officer.”
Rogers blinked. “Get back in formation.”
“Yes, sir.” The droid moved smoothly back to the position it had occupied previously.
Taking up the pad in his hand and swiping his keycard again—it had locked itself in the interim minutes—he hovered his finger over the orange button, wondering. What if it was the “seek and destroy” button? Or the “fire indiscriminately” button? Or, worse, the “talk to your commander” button? He had to believe that whoever had designed these things wouldn’t let something so dangerou
s be so easy to do.
He pressed the button, muscles tense.
A resounding ding came from the control pad, followed by the feminine voice that seemed to come standard with all pieces of military technology.
“Congratulations on activating the Mark III Artificial Intelligence Ground Combat control pad. As thanks for activating this service, you are entitled to one free It’s a Droid Life coloring book, to be redeemed at any of the many Snaggadir’s Sundries locations available across the galaxy. Remember: whatever you need, you can Snag It at Snaggadir’s™!”
“Great,” Rogers muttered. “My life’s treasure at long last.”
Oh One beeped, though to Rogers’ eyes, it hadn’t done anything. Looking back down at the datapad, he found that it had locked again.
“Damn it.” He swiped his keycard again, and the screen came back on. Nothing had changed. He pressed the orange button one more time.
“Command?” the control pad prompted.
“Ah, here we go,” Rogers said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Invalid command,” the control pad answered.
“I haven’t commanded anything yet.”
“Invalid command.”
“Hold your horses; I’m thinking!”
“I have received your command,” Oh One said, loud enough to make Rogers jump, “but I cannot execute it due to a lack of equine life forms in the immediate area.”
Rogers goggled at Oh One, wondering what kind of witless moron had programmed these things. When he turned back to the command pad, the screen was blank. It had locked itself in the short interim.
“What is wrong with this thing?” Rogers said as he aggressively swiped his keycard through the reader, unlocking the pad once again. He tapped the orange button.
“Command?”
“Disable the auto-lock feature on the command pad.”
“Security protocol prevents users from tampering with access features on this command pad. Command?”
“Ugh,” Rogers said. What was he supposed to do with these droids, anyway? He didn’t know how to fight, himself, so it seemed kind of ridiculous to try and teach them how to do it. Maybe some of that standard, Steuben-esque drill maneuver crap would suffice for now. It was about the only military training that Rogers remembered other than engineering work.
