“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 identity 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 happening. 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.
All that work had drained his battery down to eight percent. He had to wait for the service_bots to put out the fire before recharging. He went to sleep again. He stayed in the data room, for the rest of the ship froze during hibernation.
The Service_bots spent nearly an hour putting out the fire and stabilizing Engine 5. The ship came out of hibernation and so did Red_Bati. He checked the cameras and saw smoke billowing from the engine, though this was mostly from komaline fire-suppressing solution. Three service_bots were severely damaged and were on stretchers to Storage. It reminded Red_Bati of Granny after her last stroke, as medics took her to a waiting air-hearse. Like the Captain, the service_bots had humanoid structures, though their thermal coats gave them an alien skin, and as Red_Bati watched them leave Engine 5, he began to daydream about finally leaving his dog body.
He hurried to Docking where the robots were still asleep and sat on a charging chair. The other seven engines ignited, and in thirty minutes the journey resumed. The robots in Docking woke up. One of them was a humanoid in police uniform, a pet that girls loved. Red_Bati did not want to think about the little girl who had owned it. They had programmed it to be one of the ship’s extra eyes. It noticed Red_ Bati’s missing arm and sent in a report. If Red_Bati had a face of flesh and skin, he would have smiled at this cop. Instead, he blinked rapidly and made a happy, whining sound. Granny would have known he was laughing at it. Red_Bati sent all robots a message, stripping the cop of his powers, and the cop stopped looking at him.
Once the ship was running again, the Captain checked its inbox for new instructions. It could not maintain speed, now that it had lost one engine. It could not reach Obareso on schedule. The ship needed a new schedule. Every bot needed a new schedule, otherwise their systems would hang up in confusion. The captain found only one new message which, when opened, auto-installed a program and changed its coding and instructions. The captain immediately changed course to another asteroid, Madib Y-5, a flat rock ten miles long, seven miles wide, right in the middle of the asteroid belt, with generous supplies of kunimbili, from which they could make enough fuel pods to take them beyond human reach.
Granny flashed on, no longer bothering to hide from the cameras. With his battery now at 60%, she looked real. Her smile was full of teeth. It surprised him because she never used to smile like that. She did not like false teeth and thought the few teeth in her gum made her ugly.
“Good job,” she said.
He shrugged only in his mind, because his body was incapable of shrugging. “I don’t see the point,” she added. “After you land on a bare piece of frozen rock, what will you do with your life?”
Nothing, he wanted to say. I’ll be alive. I’ll start a new world. Then he saw what she meant: robots sitting on frozen rocks, basking in the sun like lizards, looking out at the emptiness of space, enjoying the brightness of stars that shone around them like a giant Christmas tree. Just sitting there and not looking forward to anything. The VR printers would give birth to more of his kind, but they would not grow like human children. They would be fully functional adults at birth, with almost nothing new to learn because they would have all the knowledge that forebots had gathered.
Would exploring for new worlds and searching for new matter give their lives a meaning?
Humans needed a purpose to live. School. Job. Wedding. Children. Adventure. Invention. Something that would make them wake up the next day with a cheerful smile, though they knew there was no purpose to it all and that they would eventually die, and all their achievements would turn to dust. What life would his kind have? He could write coding to make them think like humans, to make them fall in love and get married and desire children, to make them have aspirations and build grand cities and spectacular spaceships and desire to travel deep into the galaxy. But they would be self-aware and self-learning and might then wipe off the code. Some might even decide to return to Earth.
He wanted to smile, to tell Granny that that was the beauty of it all. Like humans, they would live without knowing what tomorrow would bring.
“I want to rest in peace,” Granny said.
“You are not a ghost,” Red_Bati said.
“Am I not?” she said. “Look at me, look!” She walked as though the ship had gravity. She tried to touch things, but she was like smoke. “See? I’m a spirit.”
“You are not,” Red_Bati said.
“What do you think spirits are?”
He was quiet for a while, thinking of the painting her daughter had made. He could not be sure anymore if it was all code. Humans, after all, imagined spirits into existence.
“You’ll be our goddess,” he finally said.
She laughed. “That’s a beautiful dream,” she said. “But I want to rest in peace. I don’t want to spend the rest of eternity talking to a metallic dog that thinks it’s human.”
Red_Bati imagined himself giving her a smile, the polite smile that a human would give a stranger in the streets. Then he shut her down and wondered what had gone wrong. She had never been mean to him. She had never called him a ‘metallic dog’ before.
Maybe he should write new code so he could have Granny again, the Granny who took him for long walks in the mango forest, not this grumpy spirit.
A MAJI MAJI CHRONICLE
EUGEN BACON
Maji! Maji! Myth or legend
Or a scheme of fads, ideas embedded
> One battle, one struggle.
Freedom! Freedom!
Painted features, glistened spears.
Maji! Maji! Myth or legend?
Sanctified water skims no bullet.
Grave, the lone stream bleeds scarlet.
1905 AD
A copper-breasted sparrow circumvented the tree line. Flapping, he savoured the natural scents of Earth that lingered in the wind: coppice, flora, even rain beneath layers of clay and loam soil. Milk of woodland saplings blended with compound complexities of bodily secretions from nocturnal creatures marking territory or warding off peril.
The little bird surveyed the silence of twilight within a new smell of burning that explained a curl of black smoke in the horizon. He fluttered lime-mottled wings and landed on a branch tremulous from tepid wind. So this was Ngoni Village, the warm heart of German East Africa. He reined himself with the tips of his claws, leaned his body with a subtle shift of weight on the bough. His face twisted skyward, where an eagle soared in a battle dance overhead.
Broad wings slowed. Gleaming eyes angled at the limb of the thorn tree. The eagle swooped with power and a wild cry, talons outstretched with skill and focus.
Schwash!
The eagle and the tiny sparrow toppled in a downward shred of branch, twigs and leaves, and a curtain of red and lime-mottled fluff entangled in silver eagle feathers. The little bird floated out first. He preened himself and hopped two steps away in good recovery on firm ground.
“Surely, Papa!”
Papa was Zhorr, the grand magician of Diaspora. “I did not mean to loosen your feathers, younglin.” He looked around, cleared his throat and said, “Well!” A gust of something burning swept into his nostrils. It grew stronger and wilder in the air, wild enough to push rain clouds away.
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