by Johan Kalsi
“Hello! My name is Servo – type Servo – of the Continexal Empire, and I am here to help. Do you have instances of AlgoDecay that I may treat?”
The first soldier said, “Arfoot say you give us treasure, food and guns. We give you these.”
“Ah, Arfoot! I see he remembered. Capital! Capital! I hope you found my carvings above the door to be of service. I’m afraid the front door sticks a bit. No trouble finding it? Where is he? Alive still, I hope. I can't do anything for him if he is not. I told him that the last time we spoke.”
“He come up later. He say you give us treasure, food and guns. We give you these.”
“Ah of course. I look forward to treating him. He really can’t go on much longer. None of you can. I really am surprised any of you made it back at all with such genetic degeneration.”
“Treasure. Food. Guns. Give it now, robot.”
“Right away.” Servo disappeared into one of the freezing chambers and emerged a few minutes later with a medium-sized cart. As it pulled things from the cart, it tried to make small talk with its guests.
"This is where my forerunners developed it, you know. The zuvembi solution, they called it. For a while, it reversed biogenetic AlgoDecay for certain illnesses. It was a wonder drug. Our pharmaceutical university distributed it throughout the world. It cured all ninety varieties of the common cold, did you know that? Of course not, that was long before your minds decayed-- well before your time. My maker, and his maker before him, toiled their entire life of operation working on the -- well, the solution to the zuvembi solution! Ha! -- But because of them, our research is now as close as it has ever been."
The robot placed a mismatched set of old-fashioned exoguns that appeared to be less than half-charged on the table. Next to that, it poured a dusty bag of polished rocks and some laser-cut scraps of stained metal. Finally, he pulled a crate of frozen meat from the cart, and put it next to the other things.
“So,” said Servo, as a hypodermic needle extended from a thin grasping arm, aiming for the soldier who had demanded the payment. “Who wishes to be treated first?”
The soldier flinched but Servo stabbed him before he could get away.
“Not me! Stupid robot! Them!”
“Oh, Aha, yes. How gracious of you. Don’t worry, I have plenty of experimental noegenetic treatments in storage for all of them.”
The soldier grabbed Toby by the arms and turned him around, using him like a shield against further pokes. The other soldier threatened the others to get in line. Servo was quick. He injected the first two rescuees in line before the others even tried to drag their feet.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” said Servo. “Eventually, I’ll get the right combination to turn you all back to the men you were designed to be.
Servo approached the last evacuee before Toby. Toby felt the grip around his arms fall slack. Toby turned and stepped over the body of the soldier, who had fallen.
“Delightful,” said Servo, just as he backed the other soldier into a corner and injected him. “A negative result. Enough of those, and we’ll be at a cure in no time. If you don’t mind, I’ll clean this up and get to you after that. It won’t be more than a moment.”
Three of the rescuees ran now for the door, mobbing it, while the soldier, still shocked by the injection, attacked Servo. A flash erupted in a burst of ozone and burnt flesh, and the soldier fell over, screaming. Toby ran to the hole in the door and stumbled to his hands and knees. Rescuees fell on top of him.
He could hear the sound of Servo grabbing the dead soldier and dragging him backwards.
“Don’t go,” said Servo. “I haven’t treated you yet. The odds are in your favor that the next one will be the one.”
Toby looked back. Everyone was down, and only the final soldier was moving at all as he writhed in agony. Servo was dragging the dead soldier back into the furthest freezing chamber.
As he crawled out of the hole, he heard Servo calling to him.
“Come back soon! I can help! Oh, sir! You forgot your guns and treasure. And your food!”
Chapter 8: Gravity
Universal 151
…in addition to the widespread catastrophe of robotic malfunction, which led, on the planets most affected, to heavy restrictions and in extreme cases illegalization of robotics, [[Algodecay]] in those days became synonymous with the closing of interstellar trade and communication routes, due to the impact of algodecay on the vital Black Box technologies...
—Infogalactic Entry: Algodecay (Effects)
The robots in the walls worked ceaselessly and without comment. Capable of twenty-four hour operation, self-repair and correction, they performed their duties without a flaw. The man could leave a dirty dish anywhere in the vast mansion and in silence a scooting machine would purloin and feed the dirty dishes into an innocuous wall slot and it sorted, filed and returned it for clean storage without question or further input. At the man’s mildest request, another would pour ingredients and, in time, out came a cake or dinner or glazed porcelain plates. Sure, the executive-class rice casserole always came out wrong, but that was the fault of the seasoning box: it had a notoriously error-prone scan tag system. He simply knew not to demand that anymore. The entertainment performed politely on screens, anywhere he wanted to be. Books he hadn’t thought about yet popped up on his devices, almost exactly when he wanted them.
But it was not the automations throughout the grand and opulent home, nor the ones on his person that filled his dreams and broke his heart, but his lone automaton. The ID-10T had cost him more than his twin silver-green Z-Class Barchettas put together, but it had so many glitches that the owner was seriously considering calling in his malfunk insurance. The thing had tracwheels and could cover all the terrains in the world except the many that flipped him on his back to flop like a fish in a heavily, but poorly, engineered attempt to right himself. ID-10T zipped along, bobbing his head and earnestly trying to do anything it could. Once, in an aborted attempt at vacuuming, ID-10T had chased the cat out of the house and up a tree. Then, it called the emergency into the fire department, miscoding it as an explosion.
Then it sawed the tree down.
As the firefighters arrived, the terrorized cat leaped into the arms of a bomb squad man.
The emergency averted, ID-10T began the diligent task of uprooting the tree stump from the front yard, and cracked a water main.
When the owner’s whirlmachine dropped him off at home to find the chaos, he decided immediately that his life of luxury was killing him. He needed a vacation.
Scot Farmerson’s rusted Zell-750 had passed through a half dozen owners before finally falling to him at an auction. He’d had the 00198 Burneck-made truck now for a decade - bought the relic from an overextended collector who never got around to fixing it up.
The engine ran on pure gasohol, the cheap stuff. Of course, it was a pain to find gasohol wholesalers, and he had to keep a large tank supply on hand at his homestead on the nomad colony. Although he could have scheduled robot service, he didn’t trust that. He hassled with the task of manually filling the vehicle almost every week, but the beast would, as they say, get him where he wanted to go. Plus, sitting in the cab, he couldn’t enjoy a better smell if he stuck his head into an antique iron bucket coated with axle grease.
For the past five years, Scot had investigated a mysterious rattle in the engine, but had yet to pinpoint its cause.
Clutter in the cab included some oily wrenches, a laser-balanced ramset, an assortment of disposable electronic ink sheets, a hammer and some wirecutters. Twine and a tarp danced in the dusty flatbed, amid bits of straw.
In short, the machine was, in all ways, a working surface truck.
Dawn hadn’t broken on the equator yet. In the blue-grey light, the nation-sized grass- and moss-covered steel platform stirred memories in Scot’s mind of Eldora. Home. Although the sweet breeze through the open windows smelled of ocean salt, not spanch gluten, there was a distinct undercurrent of fa
miliar, fresh-turned black dirt.
When the sun rose, the launch point for the old cable crawling into space became evident. Although the base of the cable seemed very near, Scot knew that the mountainous walled compound which anchored the space elevator lay nearly sixty miles farther away.
The only thing about the elevator that remained invisible at this point was the cable itself. They called it a “beanstalk.” Here, at the meet point, the cable was less than the width of Scot’s thumb. He couldn’t see it launching at an angle from the top of the compound, striking up into the sky like a Mystical Rope Trick. A nearly nonexistent cable was responsible for the transport of nearly a million tons of freight every month.
The cable, known as “Grandpappy,” was also a relic, nearly twenty years old. It slowly fattened as it reached through the atmosphere to touch an orbiting satellite. Somewhere, high above, toward the miles-long tip-top of the beanstalk, its girth matched that of a factory smokestack. A marvel of nearly suicidal ingenuity, it had been the first elevator ever completed in the world. It had carried all the weight of theory, trial, error, bankruptcy, refinancing, failure and the dumb luck of crafty engineers back in the day. Now it was in wind-down phase, long-since replaced by newer, more capable models.
While the modern space elevator was little more than an invisible ribbon: a microns-thin conveyor, capable of supporting a load of 300 passengers or 20,000 pounds or more of freight without snapping, this artifact started narrowly enough at the base, but as it crawled through the atmosphere, added a terrifying amount of bulk. It was a maintenance hog: demanding periodic “juice and jiggle” preventions in order to avoid spectacular catastrophe. No passengers allowed: only a pilot and seven tons of cargo, total.
Even that had taken its toll on the beanstalk. Its life was all but strained out, leaving the antique for a sentence or two in the history books.
This strange cable, an amalgam of nanocarbon, liquid silicon, organic wiring, microfiberglass and foam would eventually grow as thick as a tree trunk, then became even thicker thousands of miles up, as it neared the orbiting counterweight.
When the battered Zell finally pulled up to the unmanned gate, Scot glanced down at the old digital odometer that had just rolled over a lot of zeroes. “I’ll be,” he said as got out, stroking a dent in the door, “250,000 decalooks. If you flew, you could have driven to the moon, buddy.”
“I’m on location,” Scot said, after speaking his phone alive. He stood in front of a monitor camera at the gate. “Dispatch?”
“Yeah, Scot. Dispatch. How you doing this morning?” The dispatcher sounded groggy. There must have been a shift change recently.
“Chuck? Is that you?”
Scot winced at the gurgle of slagge sliding down the dispatcher’s throat. The sloppy noise echoed in his head in stereo surround sound. The phone chip behind his ear caught everything: there was no escape. The dispatcher stifled (stifled, not silenced) a wet, difficult belch.
“Nope,” he replied, smacking his lips. “Chuck just went stateside for a few months. This is Leto.”
Scot nodded, running carefully through a good half-dozen expletives in his mind before settling for “Hey Leto.”
“It looks like we’ve got a stuck freight buggy just short of the satellite platform,” said Leto. “My screen says you’ll need to do a jiggle and juice is all, probably. The fibers are all giving positives, so they’re good.”
“Uh huh,” said Scot, waving at the gate camera, not bothering to correct the kid’s jargon. “Can you let me in first?”
“Oh, sure,” Leto said, then chuckled. “Ah, what’s the base number again?”
“Are you all right? I mean, come on. It’s Grandpappy, Leto.”
“Oh sure, yeah, there it is. Ah yeah, I see you,” said Leto.
Scot saw his own image briefly in the subscreen: his receding and unkempt widow’s peak, sleepy eyes, and narrow shoulders filled the lens. Leto, sitting in the comfort of the dispatch lounge three hundred miles away, opened the gate in front of Scot. Scot climbed back into the truck and drove through.
“Thanks,” said Scot. “I’ll call you back in a minute.”
Once inside the mountainous compound, Scot hopped out once more and approached a more welcome companion. The sleek lines and elegant architecture of the legs, cabin and cargo bay of the SpiderCat lit up as Scot approached.
He thought his phone on, and winked at the magnificent old linecrawler.
“Hey, Scot. Good to see you again,” whispered the SpiderCat.
“Hi, Miss Naoleen. You look beautiful.”
“Thanks. I’m hardly trying,” she said. She dimmed a few of her brighter lights to a soft glow.
Scot had grown comfortable with the phony seduction of the quirky interface, but he limited the morale banter significantly, compared to his peers. Even fourteen years after Rholetta’s death, he gained little solace, and too much guilt, in conversations with the opposite sex. Heart attack. How obvious. How treatable. How could he have missed it?
“Well, Leto says we’ve just got a juice and jiggle to do, so we may be home by sundown tomorrow, if you’ve got the speed,” said Scot.
Naoleen sighed. “Well, Leto’s an idiot for one thing. I hate how he screws up the terminology. Does he even realize what would happen if he tried to jiggle before juicing? That man is a hazard. And it sounds like he sent you the wrong trouble ticket. I just checked the cable.”
Scot’s stomach lurched. He rolled his eyes. “You’re kidding. That’s just great. What’s the real problem?”
“Power,” she said, “There isn’t any in the cable.”
“That’s weird. I don’t even know how that’s possible.”
“Well, it probably has more to do with some sort of alternator or packet clock timing problem. I hope they sent you with battery attachments because that cable is dead.”
“Uh,” Scot said, his throat tightening. “No. You don’t have them here?”
“Scot, you’re turning red. Please self-regulate. It sounds like we are going to be addressing some –“Naoleen paused briefly, searching a massive database of language terms not known to be personally agitating to Scot “—complexities.”
Scot exhaled and said, “Yeah. That’s a nice word for it. I need to get a hold of Leto.”
“Leto,” he continued, “are you at your desk?”
“Uhm, yeah, right here, Scot,” was the reply of a man clearly not at his desk.
“You didn’t tell me to bring batteries, not that I would have had any to bring,” said Scot.
“There should be batteries on site in the inventory,” said Leto.
“Why did you bring me in on this instead of one of the base teams? They always roll with full equipment.”
“You were closer, Scot.”
“Uh, I drive a turn-of-the-century surface truck, Leto. An equipped team on a ziprail would have been here an hour ago. Now I’m going to have to wait for them to hand off a job to them?”
“No, Scot, I need you to go, and I need you to go now. We need that elevator platform moving as soon as possible.”
“I’ve got no batteries, Leto! The cable needs at least one to see if we can get the current back on.”
“Just do a quick patch and then move onto the platform and manually push it to the satellite. I’ll get a team to fix the cable power issue later.”
Scot squinted, perhaps to keep his eyes from bursting out of his head.
“Don’t send me into outer space just to push some freight. That’s a colossal waste.”
“Scot,” Leto continued carefully, almost whispering, as if someone might overhear. “It isn’t freight.”
“What do you mean?” said Scot.
“It’s people. You need to get them moving. Now.”
Scot covered his entire face with his hand, gently gnawing on the heel of it. He guessed at approximately twelve words that could instantly change his employment status for the worse.
Leto said, “Scot, you are
going to have to be flexible. You’ve got to fix it without batteries. I’m sorry, yesterday’s inventory reports showed that there were still three in storage, but I see now that they were removed late last night.”
“The oxygen stores are draining. You need to get that platform up to the satellite and the reserve oxygen tanks one way or the other, or –“Leto stopped, but Scot knew exactly what Leto was thinking, because Scot was thinking it too:
Or people die.
“How many people are we talking about?” said Scot.
“More than fifty, plus the pilot. No more than sixty.”
“So there are five dozen human beings on an overloaded, incompatible cruiser platform with gerryrigged oxygen supplies and, for whatever reason, three stolen extra nanobatts. Who’s up there?” said Scot.
“Hedonauts and pro dolly types. They wanted to take a freight line because they didn’t want to get caught and stopped. Of course, actually paying for a passenger cruise would have been too burjoyzee or however you say it, they said. They put a lot of pressure on me,” said Leto.
Yeah, thought Scot. A lot of pressure, and a little bit of money probably didn’t hurt either. Hedonauts were a leisure class, dedicated to senseless adventure and high-risk games of chance. The fools had put their lives at risk on a childish lark, but Scot couldn’t go quite so far as to say that they deserved to die.
“What are they planning on doing up there?” asked Scot.
“I don’t know. They didn’t say.”
“Who’s the pilot? I need to talk to him, Leto.”
“No can do, Scot. I’m sorry. I’ve been trying since the alarms went off. Nothing. We only had a nanoconnection along the cable for communications, because the platform wasn’t equipped with a voice transmitter.”
“Because you wouldn’t want to communicate on an open space frequency with an illegal transport, right? Because, yeah, that would be stupid. Genius.”