NGLND XPX

by Ian Hutson

  Some of G’s colleagues burrowed down to unimaginable pressures and heat, sampling and relaying details of each and every layer and mineral that they sank through. Others darted about in the oceans, chasing sea-life and noting the currents and salinity and temperature as they went. G had been dropped into the middle of a circle of territory and his assignment was, as ever explore, catalogue, record and sample. He had no need to worry about anything else, about anywhere else. His life was pure, heavenly, robot bliss.

  Although his design followed humanoid convention and he walked on two legs, G wasn’t edible and he had been specifically designed to look as much as possible as though he wasn’t edible – tough matt white plastic and titanium was all that he had glimpsed of himself in a reflection in a window as he had left the ship’s stores. Being eaten by local fauna wasn’t actually something he worried about – he simply hadn’t been given any notion that this might have been a problem. He went about his work like one point two five metres of very solidly built, slightly futuristic-looking automaton wearing a motorbike helmet, and whenever he was powered-up his life was simple and fulfilling.

  G was dropped onto planets for survey purposes by robots far more capable and worldly-wise than he and who were careful to only assign G and his stable-mates exploration territories where they would be undiscovered and unchallenged by the local sentient life-forms. This too was something that G had never considered. It simply wasn’t his concern. He wasn’t equipped for such decisions and he had never been put into situations where he’d have to deal with making contact more meaningful than a sprinkling of water. All that G had to do was to make sure that when he slipped into the landing chutes he had his assignment parameters, his trowel, his watering can and his secret teddy-bear with him.

  Other robots made sure that he was always in reasonably good working order and that his battery packs were fully charged and that he was utterly sterile and aseptic. Other robots decided where exactly to land him and all he knew – all he had to know – was that wherever he was placed, there would be plants, lovely plants. Succulents in the desert regions; orchid and daisy analogues in temperate regions and aggressive and peculiar plants in tropical regions, all growing like wildflowers – mainly because they always were wild flowers. His favourite sample of all to date had been the domestic wolf-pansies on planet 3550-014 in a system about twelve surveys ago – they were little smiling faces on weedy little stems, just sucking up the mercury vapour and basking in the dull red glow of a dwarf sun.

  Far, far up the Spares & Repairs Chain, long before you even got to the hairy bottom of the Food Chain; the chain that eventually led to the Captain of the survey ship, were robots who monitored the target planets, listened to their chitter-chatter and formulated the plans to allow the survey expeditions to quietly see and sample everything. These machines, separated in the maintenance manuals from G by hundreds of chapters, even spoke to the living crew, communicated directly with them. The thought didn’t frighten G, but it did make his processors overly-warm to consider the notion. Plants were nice, plants were safe, plants didn’t do him any harm and plants were things that he couldn’t do any harm to. Plants never asked unpredictable questions or made unscheduled demands. Plants were predictable.

  In particular, the plants of planet fifty-two made G feel even more warm and fuzzy than usual because none of these plants even moved except to twist around slowly to track and face the sun, or to curl up on themselves in the cool of the night. Once he’d transplanted samples of a species into little pots and put them into the containers ready for collection they stayed put and it was easy to make sure that they stayed happy. There was none of the dreadful banging and fighting and screeching and scratching that the fauna collectors had to contend with, no sense of forcing anything against its will or removing it from its own familiar environment. You found a plant, recorded it, carefully uprooted it, potted it, watered it, fed it, bunged it into the greenhouse pods with a couple of dozen others of its type and it looked back at you happily, with no fuss, no panic.

  Moreover, plants didn’t poop everywhere.

  G couldn’t be doing with poop.

  The worst you could expect from plants was the occasional stinging pollinator or multi-limbed web-building insect and, while he still recoiled and squealed at those, he no longer ran away from them unless they actively pursued him.

  Rumour had it that the fauna-collectors sometimes got sent out to physically wrestle with specimens and hold them still while human crew members administered anaesthetics and poked at bits of them with sticks and probes. Hydraulic fluid leaks and torn-off sensors were not uncommon.

  Pansies rarely tore off a chap’s sensors.

  G opened another sack of potting compost and laid out a table of rough-pulp cardboard sample pots. In truth, he considered the area he had been assigned to survey was a little on the “nearer my god to thee” side of things than he would have chosen – elevation one thousand metres and with a bit of a precipitous slope in places. Rocks rolling here would certainly gather no moss, although they might lose a little as they tumbled. Still, the views were spectacular and in-between oiking plants from here to there and back, G kept his little Fuji Instamatic busy filling his personal photo-albums. G’s favourite classes of plant life all tended to be found in river valleys and gentle meadows. Plant life on this survey site, at what he had privately termed “Base Camp 3”, was fascinating, but it took some finding. He was in no danger of running out of memory for his daily technical logs.

  He had found some pretty yellow things growing in a silted-up crack in a cliff-face, and something with long roots and flowers like “His Master’s Voice” gramophone trumpets that sucked a living from the more horizontal spaces. G suspected that neither of them were going to have boffins and professors beating a path to Planet 52’s door though. A few species had been stubborn enough to develop into scrubby bush-like creations and there was, of course, the ubiquitous moss growing wherever the night-time concentrated any dampness in the air. His notebook was pretty thin really and he’d already resorted to several adventurous unofficial flower arrangements for no other reason than to make his work tables look busier.

  In two more days the survey ship would return and send a shuttle to collect him and he’d be back into the storage racks himself for months and months, waiting patiently for the next planet to explore. He decided that he had time for one more sweep and this time he’d make it anticlockwise just for fun, and he’d hold his trowel in his left hand rather than his right hand too. The thought of the novelty made his processors tingle!

  G was about a quarter of the way around his sweep of the area when he saw a sentient biped.

  This was not supposed to happen.

  What was he supposed to do? Stick it up to its knees in compost and water it?

  ‘Oh crap 101!’ came the rather unhelpful error code from some hitherto unread sectors of his memory.

  The “It” was wearing a simple woollen robe and sandals and an expression of absolute awe. Plants wore only disguises, not clothing. Clothing indicated that G was well and truly out of his depth. G, trowel and handful of soggy moss in hand, stared back – equally in awe and for the moment equally dumbstruck. Long minutes passed and neither party moved. G didn’t move because his basic programming told him that the best thing to do was freeze. The creature didn’t move because the thought in his head – and it was just the one – was whirring around too fast and too often for his muscles to catch up.

  In mammalian bipeds and chickens, when the head has effectively been removed the knees are often the most decisive part of the body, the first to take independent action, and this creature’s knees were no exception. It fell to them and then followed up by falling prone, face down in the dusty soil.

  G stopped recording video and took a couple of quick still shots for the cover of his incident report. When it became clear that the creature seemed inclined to live out the remainder of its life face down G took the opportunity to ste
p quietly backwards and out of sight around a handy rock-outcrop. The anti-clockwise left-handed survey could wait, or be cancelled entirely if necessary. By the time the biped looked up G was gone, jogging away and hidden from view behind a boulder the size of a launch-tractor. Without getting up the creature looked around some more, cautiously. He was just in time to see the distant G-Zero-D coming out back into view from behind the rock, and he quickly buried his face in the soil again in terror.

  G wasn’t far behind in the terror stakes. He was eighteen grades below being qualified to talk to even a regular crew member on the survey ship, let alone make independent and unscheduled “first contact” with an alien species on his ruddy Jack Jones. Where others carried contingency files relating to culture, civilisation and the impact of small white alien robots on hitherto isolated sentient species G carried a pruning attachment and an electron-driven love for especially friable, well drained sandy top-soils. Where others might mimic local body-language and express themselves in cheery and non-threatening Fibonacci sequence primes, scales of notes attuned to the local ear or even be able to project three-dimensional rainbows in obviously peaceful and non-threatening greeting, G might give an uncertain, slightly tremulous royal wave with an uprooted seedling.

  G calculated the length of the life-form’s legs and extrapolated a maximum possible steady striding speed. It would have taken it about forty days and nights to travel from the nearest settlement of sentients to reach G’s survey territory, assuming that some horrible stroke of fate had sent it striding purposefully in his exact direction through the lowland desert and all of the way up the side of a small and otherwise unremarkable mountain. What could possibly have alerted it to his presence? G took cover again behind a distant rock and peeped back the way he’d come. The damned thing was still there, still face down in the soil. Maybe it was dead? Perhaps the local sentient life-forms were prone to long marches through the desert followed by falling prone and dead? Was “prone in the soil” this creatures equivalent of flowering? What would it do next? Send up a sapling from its buttocks? Did bipeds ever do that?

  G consulted his Asimov. Inaction was not an option, even though he wasn’t qualified because the thing might be in trouble. He stepped out from behind the rock, trudged reluctantly back and approached it, very slowly and extremely warily. There were no obvious signs of life, it wasn’t tracking the sun or drawing water from the substrate. Expiration, such as there was, might simply be the tail end of automatic life after the core function has ceased. G poked it with his trowel and was rewarded with a dreadful moan. The biped buried its face further into the soil – perhaps it was plant-life after all? G watched for a while. No, there was no exchange of nutrients, no deliberate movement of moisture. He felt a pang of disappointment. Not a mobile exotic then, just a dreary mammal.

  However disappointing a creature it was though, it seemed stable, and it was in no immediate danger from external sources. G’s Asimov procedures relinquished control. It seemed that where G had no files relating to first contact the creature obviously did, and its procedures seemed to rely almost solely upon playing possum. Primitive though the tactic was, it was incumbent upon G to respect it and avoid further interference. He began to leave the area as quickly and quietly as possible and reworked his schedule to add a note of randomness to his movements for the rest of his final survey.

  Damn it though if the creature didn’t start to follow him. Always with the following already, what is it with mammals and the following? It kept a respectful distance but it was always there like some ruddy detached shadow.

  G packed up his sample containers and tore down his campsite, ready for pick-up, always painfully aware that he was being watched. Sometimes the survey ship pick-up was early. G hoped it would be early on this occasion, even though he disliked waiting in the racks for his next assignment. At least in the racks he never got watched by some local sentient that he wasn’t even supposed to encounter.

  Hours later the creature was still watching him from the edge of the little clearing G had temporarily made home. It was all very uncomfortable. G decided, once he had double-checked that everything was ready for collection, to simply stand and remain immobile. If possum was what the creature played, then possum seemed as though it might be the best response. G planted his feet widely, put his hands behind his back and idled, sorting his reports, filing his personal photographs and drawing comfort from the teddy-bear hidden in the storage compartment in his torso.

  Overnight and the following day the creature seemed to become more agitated and unhappy. It repeatedly fell to its knees and fell prone, tore at its clothing and seemed rather to be asking, almost demanding something from G. G applied his processors to analysing its cries and discovered a pattern. Oh heck, there was grammar and vocabulary! This simply added to G’s woes. The creature desperately wanted something from G and, the more it asked, the more G’s control centre – unfortunately – began to understand the local lingo. G considered turning off his sensors and processors but decided that this might be both rude and inadvisable. He considered that while he may not be edible, eating him may not be the limit of this creatures intentions. Instead, he listened, he had to listen.

  He listened and he hoped that the survey ship would return to rescue him before things turned ugly because between you, me and the gently sprouting samples, Possum didn’t seem to be working.

  Just as the sun rose once more it became apparent to G that the creature was asking for guidance or wisdom or laws or something such. It had “people” and it wanted to know how G thought best to govern them. The situation was becoming awfully embarrassing. G was tempted to say ‘grow all of your own vegetables and live simply and energy-efficiently’ and ‘don’t eat the daisies’ and ‘take time out from your surveys to stop and smell the roses’, but he didn’t.

  By noon of the final survey day the situation had become more than a mere embarrassment. The creature hadn’t ingested any nutrients since they first met and it appeared to have a very short operational period. It showed signs of dehydration too. Perhaps the soles of those sandals were preventing it from feeding and drawing moisture from the soil? G’s Asimovs were getting twitchy again. It got to the point where G seriously doubted that the creature would make it back down the mountain – it certainly wouldn’t make it back to the nearest sentient settlement forty days of marching away. This was quite intolerable. G relented, removed the sprinkler rose attachment from his watering can and gave the It a drink. He based the amount on the recommended intake for a radish and extrapolated to match the creature’s estimated body mass, plus one more gurgle for luck.

  This necessary action seemed to confuse the creature. It looked at the soggy soil around its feet and just spread its hands in some kind of gesture (possibly, finally, feeding from the sunlight?). It took G ten minutes to figure out that the thick, ugly flower on top of the twin stalks actually formed some sort of feeding tube arrangement. The tube was marked at the orifice by some pale, half-hearted red pigment and led directly to an acid-filled digestion chamber arrangement. G applied the nozzle of the watering can to the orifice and portioned out another measure of H2O. Even this caused problems and it seemed that the water had to be fed down the tube in small amounts with a long pause in-between each. What a complicated and silly design this sentient was. Eventually it seemed healthier, at least physically so.

  There was little G could do about its mental state though. Plants usually only presented two mental states, those being either happy or dead. The former was indicated by electro-magnetic and osmotic activity, the latter by the lack of them. This sentient seemed rather more demanding. Translations of its cries seemed to suggest that all hinged on it getting this “guidance” for its “people”. The more G listened the more it seemed that the healthy future and happiness of an entire tribe of these ugly mobile things was at risk. He had no idea what a “tribe” was, but it sounded as though it was a lot of creatures. A significant number, anyway; one or more
.

  G turned over a whole processor to deciding whether mental unease was a harm that he was not allowed to treat with inaction. Several trillion transactions later the answer to his question was returned.

  “0”

  Mental unease was classified a “harm” under the terms, and inactivity was not an option. He must try to fulfil its needs over and above immediate water and nutrients. The creature’s entreaty must be answered, somehow.

  G’s movement a millisecond later almost killed the creature with shock.

  It fell back onto its haunches.

  ‘How are you known?’ asked G.

  The creature resumed its position prone in front of him, arms outstretched.

  ‘I am Man.’

  ‘Man – what do you seek from me?’

  ‘Your commandments.’

  That nearly stymied G; his command protocols were limited to his personal behaviour and to keeping alien plant samples alive, but those were orders and purpose subject to variable conditions, they were not absolute commandments. What the hell could he tell this creature? The nearest he had to “commandments” as such were his Asimovs. How might this biped have known about those and why might it want them? His core processors did the Intel equivalent of shrugging their shoulders and saying ‘Meh! Whatever.’

  The survey ship signalled that it was nearly overhead and just about to collect. G could even feel the warmth of the backdraught from the engines. Time was short and even though this might get him dismantled for interference he had no choice, it was unlikely that the chap would return to a healthier growing environment and safe behaviour pattern unless he thought that he had been given what he wanted, so Third Law was in conflict with First so First won, whatever the risk.