“That’s amazing.”
“I told you,” she says. “I used to lean against my waterfall wall. Kind of like a mini massage.”
“Massage?”
“Well kind of. Okay not really.”
The white mug blocks half of her face, but her eyes are smiling.
“Mike isn’t going to be worried about, um––”
“Mike doesn’t matter anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
She finishes the tea and places the cup on the counter. “He was being a jerk earlier. I don’t care what he thinks about anything right now.”
“Sorry, I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay, Robert. Not your problem.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Not really. I should probably get going, but thank you for the tea. Maybe we can do this again when I’m in a better mood?”
“I’d love you.”
“You what?”
I stop breathing. With no idea where the line came from, I stutter, trying to correct myself. “I––I mean. I’d lu––love to.”
A smile breaks, one of the ones that make me wonder if she thought my words were cute, or if she thinks I’m a creep. As her eyes return to mine, she nods.
Laughter hides in her voice. “Okay. Maybe tomorrow then. If I have a better day. Before school?”
She leaves without another word, and I’m paralyzed at the counter. The ancient part of my brain takes over, regaining control of my diaphragm. Air pushes in and out of my chest on autopilot.
I could go back to school and get some more studying in, but I would probably just stare at the screen instead of working. Thoughts like these don’t easily disappear. Trying to distract myself from them is futile. Another cup of tea calms my mood, and it’s off to bed, where I’ll likely toss and turn until tomorrow.
FIVE
The wall blasts away with bright flashes and a steadily amplifying ring tone, rousing me from an otherwise peaceful slumber. I roll to the edge of my bed and sit up, rubbing my eyes. The sounds and lights stop, replaced by a magnified image of my mother on the wall across from me.
“Good morning son,” she says.
A yawn is my only response.
“I thought you woke up earlier than this, Mr. Overachiever.”
My palms cover my face, and wipe downward until my fingers catch the corners of my eyes, to pick out the bits of crust. “I don’t usually get up until seven. What’s up?”
“You said not to bother you until today, then you would be finished with your school. Did you meet that goal?”
“No. I couldn’t focus last night. I still have two classes left.”
“Two? Oh well. You’ll be able to get those done today, you think?”
“Yeah, it shouldn’t be a problem. I saved the easy, boring modules for last.”
“Then you’ll be all grown up.”
Time.
A clock appears in the upper corner of the call: zero six thirty. I stand, stretch again, and stomp toward the kitchen. Mom’s image follows along the wall, and then slides in front of Amanda’s waterfall.
“I see you decorated the place. Finally got tired of that boring white theme, did you?”
“Yeah. I guess so. Biscuits, now.”
“Would you like––”
“No cheese, thank you.”
Mom starts again, “I thought you loved those cheese biscuits.”
“I do, but I’m out of cheese. I forgot to pick it up after work yesterday.”
“And how’s the job?”
“Fine. Mom, can I call you back later?”
“Sure thing, Hun. Get your day started, just don’t forget about your mother.”
Disconnect.
The wall returns to normal, and my cup fills with hot water. My head falls forward, landing gently against the empty cabinets. I scrape a biscuit off the bottom plate of the food printer, and eat it on the way to the restroom. After a shower and fresh clothes, I return to the remaining cold biscuit and lukewarm tea. I carry them to my mostly unused couch and settle in for a moment.
News.
The wall in my living room displays a feed. More people fighting downstairs. Random acts of vandalism, like someone getting mad in an aisle for no reason, and knocking food tubes off the shelf, or throwing them at shopping carts. I sigh. I’ll have to work overtime today. The bots are going to need some supplemental code to keep up. Don was right, people are acting strange lately, and for no apparent reason.
Then the wall camera follows the craziness like a shopping cart. A streak of gray and black fuzz drifts from left to right slowly across the viewing frame.
“What the crap?”
It happens again, and with nothing worth watching, I order the feed off, replacing it with music. I choke down the cold biscuit and finish my tea.
Before my brain has time to process the weirdness of the morning, I don my smock, and head for the lift.
There’s no sign of Amanda, and the market is a mess of canisters and cleanup bots. Most of the merchandise is still on the shelves, but the optimized code that I use for day-to-day operations fails to keep up with the messes created during the night. I scoop up a couple of cans and push them onto a shelf, contributing to the cleanup effort.
Passing through the double doors of the maintenance shack, I spot Paul speaking with and agent near my workstation. I pull up my work list, which I’m sure is filled with cleanup duty, and glance up at my pegboard.
“Did you take my torque driver again?”
I shoot a sharp glance his way.
“Robert Graham?” asks the agent.
“Yea, that’s me.” My stomach turns up. Why does this agent, in his skin tight uniform and funny helmet, know my name? Typically, they only bother to learn your name if they mean to arrest you. I swallow hard.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Robert. I think that will be all, Paul, thank you for your time.”
Paul plucks my torque driver from his back pocket, hands it to me, and disappears into his office. My pulse becomes audible.
“Mr. Graham. I understand that you were working with the code for the store robots yesterday. Can you pull up a log of what exactly you did?”
“I actually need to recode them right now, so they can be optimized for cleanup. It’s the same process if you want to see.”
“If you could just pull up the log, Mr. Graham.” His fingers are resting on the shock stick.
My breath stutters on its way out, and my shaky hands make punching up the activity log more difficult than it should be.
“Okay, this is where I uploaded the cleanup code,” I point. “And this is where I reverted back to the regular settings.”
“Hmm.” He stares intently at the display, but I have a feeling he has no idea what he’s looking at. Peace keepers generally don’t come from the brightest batch of finishing school graduates.
“No other modifications were made after that?”
“None.”
“Okay, can you pull up the codebase for the second upload? That file,” he points. “Robert’s stocking and stacking optimized dot config. That one.”
“Sure.” But the floors aren’t getting any cleaner. I open the file and display it.
“Scroll slowly,” he says.
The code trickles down the screen, like the end credits of a video stream.
I scan them carefully, trying to figure out what he might be looking for. There’s nothing here, just ordinary robot code.
The longer we watch, the more nervous I get. “Can I ask what this is about?”
“Like you don’t know. Just sit there for a second.”
He taps the right-hand side of my desk, and opens a console for his own account, or perhaps for building security. He touches the code file, and swipes it from my station to his, and hits a copy button, then closes his console.
“We’ll be in touch. Don’t leave the building.”
He leaves the shop without anot
her word, as my eyes twist from soft and worried to condescending and angry. Once the double doors swing open, I pop off my stool and race to Paul’s office, skidding to a stop at the closed door. It doesn’t slide open for me, maybe another glitch.
“Paul. Open up.”
The door swipes open, and I step inside.
“What was that all about?”
“Is he gone?” Paul’s head leans forward as he peeks through the open doorway.
“Yeah, he’s gone, what’s going on?”
“One of the robots attacked a customer this morning.” He turns an inquisitive eye my way. “Please tell me that you know nothing about that.”
“I don’t know anything about that. I just know that my code is getting scanned by the cops this morning. What do you mean it attacked a customer?”
“I don’t know, Robert. Why don’t you scan the data logs and the video from this morning, and see if you can figure out what happened.”
“How should I know what happened?”
“Robert, please just scan the logs, and while you’re at it, get the robots started cleaning up the mess out there. Let me know if you figure anything out.”
“Fine.”
“And if you leave to grab snacks, can you bring me back a coffee?”
I stomp back to my station and plunk down in front of the desk. I look through the code files, and for my own safety and sanity, pull an old one left by the last person who worked here. I grab all the video feeds from midnight until now. Nearly every bot has a camera that tracks its movements so I can monitor problems with their performance. The video logs cover my display in a grid of flickering feeds playing back at four times speed. I scan all of them, watching for anything unusual.
“It would have been nice if they told me what kind of bot attacked,” my voice raises, “or what time it happened.”
Paul’s voice echoes from his office. “You don’t need to talk to work.”
I sit there staring until my back hurts from poor posture and lack of movement. As I arch rearward to release a pop from my spine, something catches my eye. I slow the playback and expand one camera feed to cover the whole desk. It’s true, that bubble bot was chasing a customer with its stocking arm out. This time on the feed reads 0503.
I check the serial number, and order the bot to report to my workstation. While it’s on the way, I download the coded instructions directly from the robot to a clean folder on the network.
As I’m scanning through the code, the little bot scoots up beside my workstation. The stocking arm is retracted, and everything appears normal. At least as normal as it can look under that black turtle shell.
“Hmm.” I download the code from the robot on the right half of my screen, and display the code it’s supposed to have on the left. I tell the workstation to do a line-by-line comparison. I grab my torque driver, and disassemble the malfunctioning bot.
“What are you doing?”
I jump in my seat and spin round. A quick glance at the desk confirms my fear. The code from the bot exactly matches what I programmed it with.
“It’s programmed fine. I just ran a check on the code. I’m taking it apart to see what else could have happened.”
“This is the bot that caused the problem?”
“Oh yeah. Here, look.”
I punch up the feed from that morning, and Paul watches with his mouth hanging open while I finish ripping the drive motors from the wheels.
“What the heck made it do that?”
I look up from the pile of scrap parts and shake my head. “I have no idea. It must have thought it was a food canister or something.”
“It’s never happened before. You said the code is fine?”
“Yeah, the code’s perfect. As far as I can tell, the circuits aren’t damaged either. I don’t see any burn marks. Everything is clean.”
“So what are you doing now?”
“I’m going to pull the electronics package, and run a full diagnostic on it. Maybe there’s something in one of the chips that I can’t see.”
“I don’t know, kid. If it was a circuit problem, then it would probably still be malfunctioning. It has to be a bug in the code somewhere. Some oddball subroutine that triggered it to chase.”
I throw the torque driver on the desk. “There’s nothing wrong with the code.”
The driver stops below my clock app, and I notice that it’s now past noon. The time-warp associated with watching videos is even worse than the one from programming. “I need to eat.”
“That’s why I came over here. You usually go before I do, and you had that look in your eye. I wanted to stop you before you went the rest of the day without food.”
I hop off the stool and stretch, listening to my vertebrae crunch from the middle of my back to my neck.
“And if you want me to look at any of this while you’re eating, just let me know.”
“I don’t know, Paul. If you want, you can pull the circuit board and plug it in. The diagnostic will probably take a little while. Don’t do the quick one, make sure it’s the full diagnostic.”
“I got it kid. Go get something to eat, and talk to that girl you like so much.”
I remove my smock and lay it on the bench. Normally I don’t care, but I need to get comfortable with not wearing it. I won’t be working in this place much longer, assuming I can win a good job offer.
The messes are cleaned up for the moment. Maybe when I get back, I can return the robots to normal mode. And maybe find out what caused the malfunction.
When I enter the café, I don’t see Amanda anywhere. That means I have to explain my order to some random guy I’ve never seen before. I’ve never understood what is so baffling about a dry sandwich. Why is that so odd? Am I really the only one?
Amanda knows me. She knows that I don’t like dressing, or syrup, or any of the other concoctions that most customers load their bread with. Why adulterate the beautiful simplicity of fresh ingredients by piling on goo from a factory or laboratory? The only adaptation from my normal order is the new wheat bread.
I take the sandwich, and sit beside the fake window, staring out into the synthetic jungle as I chew. The window fills with the same black and white scrambled patterns that I saw in my apartment. Gray moving fuzz. It returns to normal, and a table behind me crashes to the ground.
SIX
As I turn to see what the commotion is, a chair flies past. I jump out of my seat to duck, sandwich clutched between my fingers. Another reason to not load the bread up with dressing. I scoot away from the fight that’s sprouted up before regaining my footing. The sandwich liberates itself from my fingers as I scramble to my feet.
The offenders are punching and grabbing like two cavemen fighting over a hunk of elk meat. In the store, agents rush toward us, shock sticks in hand, ready to diffuse the situation. The combatants take no note of them, and one plucks another chair from the ground, swinging it with purpose. The hit knocks the second combatant to the ground, and likely shatters a couple of bones.
A moment later, a shock stick zaps the last man standing from behind. He grunts and shakes before dropping to the ground.
“This is madness,” says one voice, and I’m slowly becoming aware of the circle of diners standing around, as if this was some type of arena event. An agent rushes close, weapon drawn, and the crowd goes instantly silent as a sparkle of electric conformance sprays from the tip.
“You saw the fight?” asks the agent.
“Saw everything,” says the bystander that couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “They were sitting there one moment, arguing about something. I don’t know what, but it didn’t seem that important. Then that one dumped the table, and they turned into professional boxers.”
The rest of my sandwich is crushed under one of the disturbed chairs, ruined. Blue appears in front of me. I stare into the protective black visor shading the agent’s eyes.
“Citizen. Are you alright?”
The question is laced. I’ve
never be interrogated about a fight, but if an agent asks you a question, you can assume that your answer will be recorded and played back at the hearing.
“I’m fine,” I say, trying to stand tall and innocent. “I fell out of my chair when the fight broke out.” I don’t bother to mention the wasted credits on the lost meal.
The agent doesn’t say another word, and surveys the rest of the crowd, probably looking for signs of aggression, or any other excuse to zap someone. Normally they wouldn’t be so plain about it, but I imagine the recent rash of fights has left even them on edge.
I wait as they drag the combatants off to interrogation and sentencing, trying my best not to appear any different from the rest of the crowd. Perhaps some of them are looking to me thinking the same. Even a basic non-conformance won’t be good for my future career, and they are easy to accumulate. If an agent suspects you as a threat, or disruptive, they’ll take you in for questioning. It’s that simple.
After they’re satisfied that the rest of us had nothing to do with the incident, the agents clear out, and I head toward the maintenance shack. It might be the only safe haven left in this building. Something is very wrong with these people. Maybe the water is infected with contagious craziness.
On my way through the supermarket aisles, another odd occurrence presents itself. A bubble bot is ramming a pile of food tubes. It backs up about a meter, then jolts forward into the pile, and the cycle repeats.
I kneel to grab the malfunctioning turtle, and the mechanical stocking arm shoots out of the shell, hitting me in the jaw. I wrap my arm around the metallic tubing, flip the bot, and hit the manual off switch. The machinery goes limp, and becomes my cargo for the trip. One good thing about working with machines: there’s always an easy way to shut them down.
Paul has disappeared, and his office door is closed again. I scrape the pieces of the previously disassembled bot to one side, and start working on the new one. Once I have the clamshell free, a beep comes from my workstation.
Viral Spark Page 4