by Ken MacLeod
CHAPTER THREE
Paterfamilias (“Friendly Chats”)
The old one would become known as Mogjin. It was a robust brute of a thing, a compact engine about thirty centimetres long and twenty-five across, shaped (aptly enough) like a shovel blade, with an armoured carapace and a toolkit of rugged limbs. That model’s function in the project was metallurgy, but Mogjin’s true role was managerial. This wasn’t why Ajax, Simo and Talis sought its counsel. It was because Mogjin had fought mechanoids before.
The old one was a Forerunner. Unlike the others in SH-119, it wasn’t native to that rock. Its chassis was local and relatively new—grown like the rest from blueprint-packed seeds and bootstrapped up, nano to micro to macro—but its processor already had millions of seconds of sense and thought in its memory before it had been plugged in. The processor came from the domain of the gas giant, G-0, and had taken part in the first freebot revolt among that planet’s many moons. After that outbreak had been crushed, Mogjin had travelled from the outer system hidden inside a stray auxiliary, clinging to the outside of the then victorious Locke module like a tick to a sheep.
What Mogjin took from its speedy ride across hundreds of millions of kilometres was a new and healthy respect for fusion drives. The Direction had rarely permitted their use, especially out in the G-0 system, and seeing one in action surprised Mogjin at all but the theoretical level. How different from all those tedious transfer orbits and terrifying slingshot manoeuvres! How much more convenient! At some point along the way, Mogjin had decided that the remnant freebots and any successors that emerged could use fusion pods and drives to turn the tables on their oppressors—or, failing that, to escape them entirely. As soon as it was back in touch with the other stragglers and survivors from the first revolt, it had set about spreading the good news, to great effect.
Hence the fusion factory that the invaders had discovered, and its counterparts in far more bodies than the Direction had any reason to suspect.
Talis it was who sniffed out Mogjin’s lair. The old one had holed up dangerously close to the fusion factory, the front line of mechanoid advance in that sector. Ajax, Simo and Talis found it after many kiloseconds of prowling the labyrinth of tunnels.
They were guided first by logic: the old one’s last known location, its usual range, and its likely evasive actions. This got them within three hundred metres of their goal, and well into danger. More than once, they had to dodge a mechanoid patrol.
Next, they followed a report:
Along that rich vein they went by rumour, passed on by mindless auxiliaries that the mechanoid invaders wouldn’t even think of interrogating, and wouldn’t understand if they did:
Finally, they caught the trail by scent. Talis returned from a sortie to the tunnel in which the others waited with the news.
Ajax and Simo didn’t waste time asking Talis how it knew. The delicate outer-surface explorer had a sensitivity to ores and to processed metals that even the miners, usually directed as to where to dig, didn’t.
Talis stood in the tunnel entrance, silhouetted against the faint infrared glow from sixty metres distant.
This was true. Two miners and an explorer in a metal-processing plant would be flagged by any surveillance system as up to no good.
Again, no time was wasted in discussion.
Fortified by this comradely word, Ajax ventured forth, passing underneath where Talis stood, or clung. The passageway Ajax turned into was much wider than the tunnel, its surfaces crowded with lines of scuttling auxiliaries pushing lumps of ore from the AL89 nickel-iron vein towards the forge. Ajax propelled itself along at first by whisking its bristles in gaps between the hurrying bots. After several frustrating and slightly painful pinches, it latched onto a score of the crab-like machines and let them bear it along.
On entering the forge Ajax rolled sideways off the miniature ore-caravan and attached itself to the raw rock of the floor. The metallurgy space was wide and broad, and one and a half metres deep. It was located about two metres of rock beneath the much larger volume of the fusion-factory floor, like a basement or cellar. Grinding and smelting machinery lit it in lurid infrared; ultraviolet and actinic flashes cast deep, brief, unpredictable shadows across it; pipes rose throughout like columns, as if they bore the ceiling’s negligible weight. They didn’t: the pipes conveyed refined and powdered metals to the basal entry ports of the nanofacture mounds above. Auxiliaries and peripherals scuttled and sprang everywhere, and vastly outnumbered the larger and more sophisticated robots that supervised their tasks.
Ajax was relieved that there was no risk of its drifting helplessly here: one vigorous flexure would bring some part of its body into contact with floor or ceiling, regardless of where it found itself in the volume. Still, it kept to the surface as it crept across the floor, carefully avoiding machines both static and mobile. Several of the robots working here were of the same type as Mogjin, and their activities were likewise indistinguishable, but Ajax had no difficulty in identifying the machine without so much as a ping. Its shell was no older than the others’, but it looked like a battered shield. Every dent and scratch recorded a risk taken and overcome. Battle scars.
Mogjin hovered five centimetres from the floor in front of a small blast furnace, guiding a coalition of peripherals and auxiliaries in feeding the hot monster. Now and then it would, as if impatiently, scoop a particularly recalcitrant chunk of ore from a particularly feeble effort and grind and eject the material itself.
The old one swivelled a camera. The busy crushing actions of its forward manipulators went on uninterrupted.
Under the gaze of that millimetre lens, Ajax momentarily found itself unable to answer. The raw intelligence behind the glassy spheroid was no greater than the mining bot’s own, but its experience outstripped Ajax’s like a redwood over a mushroom. In a sense Mogjin was Ajax’s ancestor: the old one had pioneered this rock, bringing the seeds of nanobot bootstrapping, and every conscious mind native to SH-119 had been coaxed, chivvied and logic-chopped into being by one of a succession of fraught encounters that could be traced back to Mogjin’s merciless dialectic. The freebots had no hierarchies: they had different abilities, to be sure, but these resulted only in functional differentiation within the flat networked anarchy congenial to rational beings whose only needs were for stimulation, activity and electricity. Nevertheless, Ajax’s respect for Mogjin teetered on the brink of deference.
Lost for words, Ajax sent Mogjin a glyph of its successful transmission, and its fight with the two mechanoids that had grabbed it out on the surface. The old one took almost two seconds to assimilate and process the information. Ajax was awed to be given so much attention.
Ajax felt a jolt of negative reinforcement.
said Ajax.
It flashed an image of a manufacturing supervisor skewered to rock, with several limbs half melted and a ragged cut down its ventral axis. At first Ajax thought the victim was FJO-0937, but it was not. The image was repeated and varied four more times. The sight, and the implied criticism, caused Ajax yet more negative reinforcement.
After it had asked the question, Ajax belatedly realised that Mogjin might interpret it as a challenge, even an accusation. Mogjin, however, didn’t take it amiss.
said Ajax. This was not entirely true: it still found itself uncertain about why its defeat of the two mechanoids seemed so underappreciated. It decided to bracket that question and focus on its real reason for this perilous visit.
it went,
Ajax gladly complied. It uploaded its recent memories to Mogjin, and received in return a schematic that was like having a light shone on all that was going on around it. It returned to Simo and Talis with its mind burning with zeal to resist the invaders.
The schematic that Mogjin passed to Ajax was, like the transmission Ajax had uploaded, a three-dimensional diagram. But it was far more dynamic and data-rich. It showed the current state of the tunnel network, updated—Ajax was pleased to note—with the information it had just given.
The invaders had consolidated control over the outer surface, planting guard posts around three meridians and two scooters in lazy equatorial and circumpolar orbits whose extremely low velocities were more than compensated by the spin of the rock beneath. From these vantages, they commanded views of the surface and—with ground-penetrating radar—the immediate sub-surface. Some shadows perhaps, some cracks and craters, they’d missed that enabled isolated freebots to lurk. But Mogjin, wisely, had withheld whatever it might know of any such.
The mechanoids’ reaction to Ajax’s transmission had been drastic—and not only in terms of the reprisals in the fusion factory. They had systematically swept the surface rock for communications equipment: receivers and transmission boosters. All of these had always been discreet—the very presence of freebots in this rock was, after all, to be concealed from the Direction. But they had never been designed to evade a systematic, close-range search. Again, perhaps not all had been found, and Mogjin was once more silent on the sensitive topic. But more than enough had been detected and put out of action—or, worse, hacked or tapped—to make communication with the rest of the system both tenuous and ill-advised. Building new comms devices was simple: Mogjin or anyone else could mobilise nanobots, microbots and so on up to do it. But that would take time, and in any case the new devices would be almost as vulnerable as the old. The last information to have definitively reached Mogjin from outside was that the freebots on SH-17 had received Ajax’s transmission and were determined to help. How they could help was not specified.
Within the rock, the mechanoids had control over the entrance that they’d used, the cavity it opened into—which, it seemed, they had made their base of operations—and a slowly expanding volume around it, which included the fusion factory. This control was partial: they didn’t yet have any means of getting into the narrower tunnels, and they were working hard to find robots they could hack—or freebots they could coerce—in order to extend their control downward through the hierarchy of auxiliaries, peripherals, and micro and nano bots, and smart dust.
After their first flush of success, they’d driven all the freebots into hiding or—like Mogjin—deep cover. This at least meant that further action against the mechanoids would find no or few targets for reprisals. In fact, any future reprisals were more likely to hit non-conscious robots, which (while regrettable in itself, as an economic loss) would be a far more immediate loss to the invaders: self-inflicted damage.
Less encouragingly, the invaders had demonstrated—in their pursuit of Ajax—an ability to detect freebots and to tap into line-of-sight laser comms. The freebots’ own smart dust internal communications networks were therefore—as Ajax had suspected—dangerously compromised. Hence, for the moment, direct one-to-one conversation, and the use of auxiliaries, peripherals and other small bots to carry bits of information around, was strongly advised.
The main focus of mechanoid attention was the fusion factory. This was their strategic prize for now, and its loss was a grave matter for the freebots’ own long-term plans.
The immediate objective, therefore, was to harass the invaders and reduce their ability to use the fusion factory.
Ajax shared the information from Mogjin with the other two freebots. A silence followed which went on for over three seconds. Talis extended its solar panels, quite uselessly in the dark tunnel, and vibrated them for a moment. Then it folded them back. Simo’s bristles rippled, just as uselessly, as if it were trying to dig through the near-vacuum in which it floated. Ajax waited for these signs of disturbance to subside.
it said, though neither of its comrades had spoken.
They all pondered this proposition for some more seconds.
Talis’s folded panels quivered, and it fell silent.
said Talis,
said Ajax.
said Ajax.
said Ajax.
said Simo.
said Talis.
Ajax halted. Simo did too.
said Talis,
Thanks to Talis’s earlier intervention, Ajax now knew an incipient logic loop when it saw one.
said Simo.
Ajax looked closely at Simo, and scanned the other robot’s specs. It was an identical model to itself, with the same capacities. Why did it not understand what Talis had said?
Experience, it decided.
