Windows Out

by Michael Galloway

  Table of Contents

  Windows Out

  Fermat’s Last Theorem of Robotics

  The Everbloom Factory

  Tangled Angles

  Numbers Game

  Surfacing

  The Bottles of Time

  The Pitcher at the Fountain

  Tomorrow Was Tuesday

  Starcatcher Eight

  A Tunnel in a Teacup

  Windows Out

  Painting in the Rain

  About the Author

  Windows Out

  By Michael Galloway

  © 2018 by Michael Galloway. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without written permission from the author.

  www.michaelgalloway.net

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, locations, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Fermat’s Last Theorem of Robotics

  They traveled on mechanized camels through the Martian desert until they reached the Plain of Torbica. The plain was littered with fist-sized black rocks as if a volcano exploded just days before their arrival. The change in scenery was welcome because they had become archaeological nomads in spacesuits, drifting from city to city not in search of water, but in search of an oasis of historical validation.

  Fermat stopped his camel and dismounted. Although the previous ground-penetrating radar surveys indicated numerous human artifacts in the area, something about the geology of the nearby mountain range bothered him.

  “Stevens, is it just me, or does that hill over there look like a giant cylinder lying on its side?” He asked as he turned to look back at his research companion.

  Stevens, a robotics engineer from the rival Sartellius Corporation, sat astride his camel and studied the hills before them. He was over six feet tall, with a two-inch curved scar on his cheek, and spoke with a heavy German accent. He shook his head. “This is the seventh field we’ve looked at. Our supplies are running low. Can’t you just admit defeat?”

  “I’m hardly defeated. Why did you come out here with me anyway? I thought we came here to find a lost battlefield.”

  Stevens scoffed and turned away.

  Fermat used his binoculars to scan the terrain. “Look. Dunes aren’t shaped like that.” He then walked back to the aluminum sled behind his camel. The sled carried a pick, a shovel, a camera, and a plastic box for collected artifacts. He brushed the dust off the camera and slung the shovel over his shoulder. As he lumbered up to the base of the mountains, the outline of the object unnerved and excited him at the same time. Along the way, he took countless photographs and only stopped when the rust-colored sand rose above the tops of his boots.

  “What do you make of this?” He said, calling back toward Stevens.

  Stevens marched to where Fermat stood and sank into the sand. He slogged a few paces forward but the sand only deepened. “Let’s approach it from the other side.”

  Together they plodded toward the other side and slowly the sand lost its grip on their boots. Then Fermat froze in his tracks. “I was right. This isn’t a hill.” He pointed up. “Look. It’s a cylinder.” He paced around the object. “Stevens, you can’t tell me I’m imagining things this time.”

  Stevens’ demeanor changed from indifference to magnetic curiosity. There, high above, was a dome on top of the cylinder that had dozens of small, black, circular openings covered with a smoky glasslike material. Along the sides of the cylinder the dusty outlines of wheels could be seen. To the untrained eye, it looked like a railroad tanker from an apocalyptic train wreck.

  Fermat reached up and rapped the side of the cylinder with his glove. The hull rang out like a dull church bell. His voice rose in excitement. “It’s got to be one our diggers.”

  He darted around the side of the structure and on the back side his hopes were confirmed. It was a giant DK-410, also known as a “digger”, built by the Rhyland Corporation as a defensive machine. When directly threatened, the machine would dig into the sand and turn into both an obstacle and a piece of artillery.

  Fermat furiously took more pictures. “We need an aerial shot of this thing. Let’s get back to our camels and swing around the back side here.”

  “Hold up. There’s more. Look.” Stevens pointed toward the edge of the mountain in front of them. He motioned with his hand from one side of the field to the other as if he was a battle commander. “If this is a digger, then the plains should be full of them. It’s as if they were backed up against the mountains. Such a pity that they died defending a piece of rock.”

  “Is that what your history books say? They weren’t defending the mountains. Your nightwinders kept attacking until a dust storm blinded everyone’s electronics.” Fermat pointed over at another area of unusually-shaped dunes. “By the looks of it, your machines didn’t fare so well either.”

  Stevens surveyed the area with binoculars and reasserted himself. “I think we’ve found our battlefield, Herr Fermat.”

  Soon they returned to their camels and rode along the base of the mountains. Fermat’s camel struggled through the soft sand, kicking up fountains of dust behind it. He stopped in front of another disabled digger.

  “I wish we had more rope. It might be nice to climb up on top of this thing,” Fermat said. He leapt down off of his camel and dug around the digger with his shovel. Several scoops later he shouted, “I found a hatchway.”

  He dug around the edge of the door, which appeared to be jammed open. He then shone a light inside and peered around. “Will you look at that.”

  Stevens stood by his side.

  Fermat knelt down and stared inside. “It’s full of smaller diggers. Like, hundreds of them. I remember reading about these, but I never thought I’d actually see it with my own eyes.”

  Fermat reached inside and pulled out one of the diggers and held it in his hand. The digger was a few inches bigger than his glove and it had black metallic wheels on the sides. The center portion, like the larger machine, was shaped like a silver cylinder with a dome on top.

  Suddenly, the digger whirred to life in his hand. He dropped it onto the sand where its wheels spun. A red light shone out from the middle of the dome. As it tried to roll forward it tumbled down the side of the hill and flipped over onto its top like a struggling turtle.

  He shone the light back inside of the larger machine and watched as hundreds of pinpoints of red light came to life like a tangle of Christmas tree lights. “I think we need to get out of here.”

  Stevens gave him a worried look. The scar on the side of his check curled like a startled snake. He pushed Fermat aside and tried to shut the jammed door with all his might.

  Fermat scampered back downhill, doing more sliding than running, as he raced back toward his camel. Behind him, he could hear the cutting sound of metal on metal, as if hundreds of tiny blades were now carving their way out of the fallen machine. When he reached his camel, he fired up the ignition. Stevens soon came running after but along the way he kicked sand at the digger lying on its back.

  Fermat watched as the first black-and-silver digger edged its way out of the larger metal hulk and tumbled down the slope. It fell to rest fifty feet in front of them and spun its wheels. The wheels then stopped as the tiny red light on top of its head rotated around, throwing a narrow ruby red beam along the ground as if to analyze the terrain.

  It was soon followed by a dozen more diggers and then another dozen after that. Some of the machines grouped themselves together and rolled toward the open plain while others rolled toward other
diggers trapped in the nearby dunes. One by one, the other giant machines were unearthed and cut open. Soon, more diggers tumbled out and many began to congregate with the others on the plain.

  “What are they doing now?” Fermat wondered aloud.

  The diggers organized themselves into a formation and swarmed toward another set of dunes. As the dirt was thrown aside, the outline of a fallen nightwinder became apparent. First the feet, then the legs, then the torso, then the chest, and finally the head was uncovered. Fermat thought it resembled a cartoon drawing of the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz without the ax. The nightwinder then came under the relentless hammering of tiny drills as if this newly resurrected army had come to finish the job left behind by their predecessors.

  Eventually, a hatch opened up in the chest of the giant. A new army of a dozen smaller nightwinders climbed out like irritated ants pouring out of an anthill. Some fought off the diggers while others crept over to another dune only to unearth another fallen nightwinder. Soon, a hatchway opened up in its chest and more nightwinders ambled out to join the fight.

  Through it all, Fermat snapped pictures.

  “Let’s set up camp over up on the ridge. Nightfall is coming soon,” Stevens said.

  “I don’t know if I want to hang around here,” Fermat said nervously.

  Stevens moved mechanically toward his camel. His face showed no trace of expression until he spoke up again. “Isn’t this what we came for? To study the battlefield in its glory?”

  “There’s nothing glorious about this.”

  “Oh, but there is, Herr Fermat. It’s as if the battle was paused just for us.”

  * * *

  Inside their portable pressurized camping shelter, Fermat did not sleep well. His mind raced with thoughts that the attacks on the Rhyland settlement could begin again at any moment. As he stared up at the domed ceiling of the shelter, he thought about putting his suit back on, walking onto the ridge with a flashlight, and checking on the battle with his long-range binoculars.

  He looked over to see Stevens lying in a sleeping bag with open eyes. He wondered if the man ever slept at all. “Stevens. You awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “In all my research, I never figured out one thing. Why did your company call their machines nightwinders?”

  “Because they would work tirelessly through the night to accomplish their mission.”

  “Without sunlight?”

  “They were powered by the consumption of local resources.”

  Fermat waited in silence for Stevens to elaborate, but of course, no explanation followed. “Wouldn’t there be waste? Wouldn’t the consumption take energy?”

  Stevens chuckled. “So many questions, Herr Fermat. Once the process begins, it is self-sustaining. So long as the mission objective remains unfulfilled.”

  “And what was the mission objective exactly?”

  Stevens let out a loud sigh. “To overwhelm. To outnumber. And when time permitted, reproduce.”

  Fermat bolted upright. “Wait. You successfully implemented self-replication?”

  Stevens remained silent for a moment and then spoke again. “That was the secondary objective.”

  “Okay. But did it ever succeed?”

  A wry smile broke across Stevens’ face and then abruptly disappeared. “We’re safe as long as I’m here, Herr Fermat. If that’s what you mean.”

  * * *

  In the morning, Fermat found Stevens outside with his hands behind his back and staring out upon the battlefield like a general surveying his troops. After he packed up their shelter he loaded it back onto the sled. On the ground, he spied a fresh pair of narrow tire tracks. He scanned around but did not see a digger.

  Then he saw tiny mechanical footprints that ran along a path parallel to the digger tracks. Further ahead he found a disabled nightwinder lying face down. He picked it up and to his surprise it broke apart in his gloved hands. He held the crippled machine out for Stevens to see.

  “What is that?” Stevens asked.

  Fermat looked down to see another, smaller, set of walking machines coming to life inside of the broken shell of the robot. Each of these new machines was less than an inch high. He dropped the machines onto the sand and stomped on them with his boot. “I guess we won’t be taking artifacts. Let’s go.”

  Fermat climbed onto his camel and started the ignition. Stevens knelt down in the sand and scooped up the smashed nightwinders like a child whose toys were just crushed by a neighborhood bully. As the machines tumbled through his gloves, his eyes burned with indignation.

  When they arrived back at the Rhyland settlement, they passed through the dome’s airlock and parked inside a sand crawler garage. Both men soon parted ways and Fermat collected his equipment off the sled and headed back to a company-owned apartment.

  Once inside the apartment, Fermat set his belongings onto the bed. Suddenly, he froze. There, on the side of his suitcase, a miniature nightwinder held on tight. He picked off the device and held it up to the ceiling light. It did not move.

  He brought it out to the kitchen and set it on the counter. With one crack, he smashed it to bits with the bottom of a ceramic coffee mug. He swept up all of the pieces with his hand and walked over to the garbage chute in the wall.

  He opened his palm and stared at the shattered remains of the device. Again, nothing moved, but he noted a strange, black powder was now coming off onto his hand. He opened the chute, dropped in the broken pieces, and washed his hands off.

  He then turned back toward his tablet computer on the kitchen table. On the screen was a draft of his paper for his upcoming presentation at the Interplanetary Robotics and Engineering Conference in nearby Magnopolis. He had hoped their battlefield expedition discoveries would add weight to his arguments. As he scanned the abstract he wrestled with the essence of the presentation itself: can humans work hand-in-hand with artificial-intelligence-enabled machines to build new civilizations?

  He paused to reflect and started a kettle of boiling water on the stove for a cup of late afternoon tea. Were there any machines left on the battlefield? Or did they all exhaust themselves overnight in one final glorious battle? The final pictures he took of the area only revealed charred or disabled hulks of diggers and nightwinders scattered about like toppled pieces on an alien chessboard.

  After the kettle whistled, he prepared a cup of Earl Grey tea. He then added new notes in the margins of his paper at a furious pace, unsure as to whether or not they were going to end up in the final presentation or not.

  Suddenly, an equation materialized in his mind. He typed it out with great speed:

  Hn + Rn = Cn

  The H in the equation represented humans, the R represented robots, and the C represented civilization. If n = 1, he wrote, this represented the most basic state of being: existence. If n = 2, he wrote, this represented existence plus intelligence. In the case of robotics, this would have to be artificial intelligence.

  As it was, on Mars and on Earth, sophisticated semi-autonomous machines already worked together side-by-side with humans. The fields of application were endless: mining, manufacturing, police work, farming, medicine, and automated delivery services, for example.

  Next, he typed out the equation n = 3. What would the third power represent? He took a sip of tea. Perhaps the next logical step beyond existence and intelligence was self-replication. According to Stevens, the Sartellius Corporation had already achieved such a feat. But what did that look like in practice? Were the replicated machines exact copies of one another? For a moment, he thought again about the black powder he dumped down the garbage chute and wondered if he should have analyzed it in the laboratory or put it in his artifact box.

  Ultimately, the question about the future of robotic self-replication seemed like a thread, that if pulled, would undo the entire fabric of his paper. Was it possible that no combination of humans and autonomous self-replicating robots could co-exist with one another? Animals and humans have co-existed
for thousands of years on Earth, he thought, so why not machines? Yet what would keep machine population growth in check?

  No matter. Although he left the equation alone in his paper, he thought about removing such talk altogether since it would undermine the funding of his own research. After all, the trajectory of his career as a soon-to-be-famous robotics engineer was going ever upward. Besides, who would want self-replication anyway? It seemed like such a useless idea.

  He turned off his tablet for the evening and dumped the remainder of his tea down the drain. In bed, he rehearsed the opening lines of his speech with his eyes closed. He imagined the applause at different points in his presentation and was sure it would culminate in a standing ovation. Then, just as he drifted off to sleep, somewhere in the darkness, perhaps inside the garbage chute, he heard the sound of stirring.

  The Everbloom Factory

  The poster in the break room read “Home of the triumphs of innovation in any season—Everbloom” with a picture of a crimson rose bush springing out of a pile of fresh fallen snow. David stared on at the poster as he poured himself a cup of steaming coffee.

  It was a poster he had not paid much attention to before even though it hung up there for weeks. Using the word “triumphs” on the poster was bizarre, he thought, because it was just strange to see a garden full of color in the icy grip of winter, growing healthy as if the plants thought it was deep in the middle of spring. That was the attraction, though—not only could the flowers grow year round in the roughest conditions, but you could order any color you wanted from a handful of varieties, and if you were really ambitious, customize basic elements of the flowers like that of a car. It was as if one could defy nature—by watching marigolds mushroom in November, or by witnessing a patch of asters blossom against the onslaught of a February ice storm.

  He was a data entry operator, though, not a florist. He did not work in the warehouse or take the orders over the phone. No, he worked at the beginning of the assembly line, with an Erector Set full of genetic parts that could be spliced together with a few lines of program code and a few taps of the keyboard. It was undeserved power, he reasoned. One prone to abuse, even. Of course, the quality assurance department would see to it that no mistakes were mailed, no pranks were packaged, and no slip-ups shipped.