Robot Awareness: The Inner Circle

by B. C. Kowalski

  Rex shrugged. “I knew about that. I don’t care. It’s...”

  “What?”

  Rex’s eyebrows turned up. “We got company.”

  Celia sighed. “Fine. To be continued.” She briefly ran her finger along his jawline, then grabbed the pad from the work station next to the robot. “Eighty-three percent — it’ll have to do. Let’s go.”

  When a pair of maintenance workers entered the storage room, the robot stood alone, with no sign of anyone else.

  ***

  Isellia evaded a barrage of laser fire from the closest group of fighters. A lesser pilot might have been overtaken, but Isellia spun and turned, deftly dodging the attacks. She couldn’t turn to make her own attack run; such a maneuver would allow the other fighters to catch up. She could only continue to lead and evade, dodging their fire while staying alive.

  That was only a temporary solution. With so many fighters, they eventually would lead her into a trap, just with sheer numbers. She could only prolong her own demise unless she thought of something quick.

  “If you’ve got any ideas, Porter, I’m all ears!” Laser fire whizzed past her cockpit window, temporarily casting an orange glow that was too bright for Isellia’s liking.

  “Just keep them off of you, Isellia. We’ll think of something.” Porter rubbed his temples. His captain had hired Isellia as a buffer of protection for his smuggling ship, mostly against minor attacks. Porter had been against it, and a situation like this was why. He felt like a father watching his daughter about to get slaughtered. The feeling made him sick to his stomach.

  “Easy for you to say! Ow!” Isellia yelled as a blast scuffed the top of her left wing. It didn’t actually make contact, but was close enough that the energy caused the ship to jolt before it righted itself.

  “What are we gonna do, Porter?” Joey asked, his eyes frantic.

  “Solution is now calculated,” the robot suddenly chimed.

  Porter and Joey turned to look at the robot, whose green LED flashed furiously, it’s connector plugged into the ship’s computer.

  “Well, don’t keep it a secret,” Porter said.

  “Isellia, fly toward us,” The robot said through the ship’s comm system.

  “What? Is that bolt bucket?”

  “You got some kinda plan, robot? Tell us,” Porter said, staring at the machine. “‘Cause that’s not sounding like such a good idea.”

  “Frequency calculated. Trust Robot.” The robot’s LED went blank, then flashed once quickly, before going blank again. It stood facing the viewscreen, waiting.

  “What are you talking about, Robot?” Joey said, banging on its chassis.

  “Isellia, do what he says,” Porter said, starting to catch on.

  “Are you bleeping crazy!? You want me to fly at the ship?”

  “Just do it!”

  Another laser blast caused Isellia to barrel roll to avoid a direct hit. She took a deep breath, then shook her head. “Fine. I got nothing else. I hope that mechanical fly trap knows what it’s doing.”

  Isellia planned a quick flight path, and slowly arched toward the ship, bringing the cloud of fighters on her tail directly toward the people who’d become her crew — the only family she had. She gunned the throttle as the ship came into view, sending her blasting toward the cargo vessel.

  “Oh shit...” Isellia said, the feeling leaving her extremities. She’d trained herself to do the opposite of this — flying toward the ship with enemies on her tail was suicide for everyone.

  Porter and Joey watched as Isellia’s ship grew from a tiny dot, to a miniature ship, to a full blown fighter. Behind her were a swarm of fighters, following her like a well-formed cloud of bees.

  “Isellia will go full throttle once past the ship,” the robot said.

  “More throttle? I'm already at full!”

  "Use modifications."

  "Bolt bucket! I haven't repaired since the last of your modifications."

  "Robot already did."

  "You what?!" Isellia checked her console. The lever that activated robot's mods was in the off position, ready to be flicked. "When I get through this, we're going to have a talk about touching my things!"

  Isellia's XR screamed toward the nose of the cargo ship. As she neared it, she flipped the lever, feeling the power vibrate through the XR's hull.

  "But just this once, I'm glad you did," she yelled as the XR blasted past the ship and all but disappeared from sight.

  The fleet of fighters grew visible on the screen, and Porter took in a deep, sharp breath. His hand was in danger of locking into a claw, he gripped the console in front of him so tight.

  Suddenly everyone clasped their hands over their ears. The concept of sound disappeared, replaced by a high-pitched vibrating tone that sent Porter and Joey scrambling on the deck, writhing in pain. The fighters turned quickly past the ship, some of them grazing the ship’s hull. None had been on a direct collision course, thankfully. The ship’s systems went completely dark.

  Then the sound ceased, and Porter and Joey looked at each other.

  “What the heck was that?” Joey asked.

  “Now what?” Porter said, attempting to look around in the dark.

  Suddenly the lights geared back on, the ship powered back to life. A small light located on the robot’s chest area blinked faintly, but otherwise the robot was still.

  “Jeezuz, Robot.” Porter muttered.

  “What,” Joey looked around. “What happened?”

  “Sonic blast. The Robot figured out how to generate a sound to disable those fighters in a certain radius. Nevermind the details right now though, we need to get out of here. Isellia?” Porter said into the headset. There was no response.

  “Porter, look!” One of the fighters had been far enough away not to be hit by the sonic blast the robot had created. The straggler turned toward back toward the smuggler.

  “Shit ...” Porter said. The fighter zeroed in on the smuggler, its laser guns glowing at the ready.

  “YAAAAAAAAAAA!” blasted over Porter’s headset, as Isellia’s vessel dusted the top of the smuggler ship. The crew saw Isellia's XR fly across the viewscreen, blasting a flurry of laser fire toward the fighter, piercing its hull with sharp beams. The ship exploded into a fireball and then was nothing.

  “YAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!” Isellia yelled, unaware her headset was still clicked on. “How do you like that, clunkhead!?”

  “Isellia!” Porter yelled.

  “Isellia!” Joey echoed, eyes wide with joy.

  Porter looked over at the robot, which had gone blank, save for the blinking light.

  “Robot?”

  Chapter 44

  Rex sighed. Celia stood next to him, ready to spring on the soldiers. They could be forgiven for not recognizing her readiness; to everyone but Rex, she appeared to be simply standing in place.

  “Do you always bring trouble?” Celia hummed, smirking a little at her own joke.

  "You bring the trouble, typically," Rex replied. Celia feigned a hurt expression.

  Rex surveyed the hallway. Black-helmeted soldiers stood in front and behind them along the narrow hallway, comprised of a mess of crevices, tubes, tunnels, conduits, access panels. The halls all looked like this, and Rex wondered where the tunnels led. His eyes lit up ever-so-slightly when he noticed what they were looking for.

  “Told you we should have stopped for directions,” Celia purred.

  “Right,” Rex muttered. “I said to turn right.”

  Celia shrugged. “So—“

  “Of course I have a pla

  “My man,” Celia smiled.

  “You have a—?”

  “Of course.”

  Rex smiled at her — nothing that would have appeared as a smile to anyone else, but Celia was beginning to learn what constituted a frown and a smile on Rex’s seemingly inexpressive face. That was the best she was going to get out of him, but she knew smiling wasn't something Rex typically did.

  The group of sold
iers parted to clear a path between them, and Wimprey walked through it. His eyes turned sharp with anger when he saw who was standing in front of him.

  “You two!” Wimprey fumed. “I knew you were working together. I —“

  “Hi,” Celia waved, winking at Wimprey. Wimprey gritted his teeth until they hurt, and he pointed his finger toward them.

  “I’ll save you for last, bitch. I’ll gut you like a fish and torture your insides, I’ll use your skull for—“

  Wimprey stopped talking as Celia laughed, and Rex simply shook his head.

  “Why are you? ... Stop laughing!” Wimprey protested.

  Celia leaned on Rex.

  “I almost want to stay and play a little,” she said. She leaned her head a little closer to Rex as she spoke. “After all, it would be fun to give him a little payback for what he did to you.”

  Rex snorted. “That was nothing.”

  Celia rolled her eyes at his bravado. “Oh, such a tough guy. Well, then, shall we be off?” she said. Rex nodded.

  “Oh no you don’t! Guards, get —” Wimprey stopped shouting orders as a bright light flashed in all of their faces, its luminosity even penetrating the dark helmets of the Company soldiers, who fell to their knees, trying futilely to wipe their eyes through their helmets.

  When the light cleared from their eyes, the space where Rex and Celia had previously stood now was empty. Wimprey went into a rampage, kicking whatever, or whomever, he could find.

  ***

  Isellia positively strutted onto the bridge, high from the previous victory in space. She beamed as she walked over to Joey, who had a diagnostics terminal hooked up to the robot’s input ports.

  “I don’t know what you guys did, but that was fantastic!” Isellia said, patting Joey on the back. Joey nodded but continued staring at the diagnostics screen, a frown on his face. He watched the numbers on the screen, making adjustments inside the robot's open panel on its front.

  “So what’s up with our metal friend?” Isellia said, crouching next to Joey.

  “Needs a new micro power coupling. Whatever it did completely burned out some of the robot’s circuitry. It’ll take awhile to repair.”

  Isellia nodded. “But you can fix it, right?

  “Yeah,” Joey muttered. “He won’t be operational until we get that coupling though. I'm running the test to make sure I get the right one. Robot's got several different ones between circuits, and I think they're all different.”

  “Hey, nice work, Isellia,” Porter said behind her. “Thought we were all a goner there.”

  “Hey, I’m an ace XR pilot, Port! Nothing to worry about when I’m in the skies.”

  "I wouldn't go that far," Porter said, his smile lessening. "About worrying, I mean. The ship's a mess."

  “What, did we take a lot of damage?”

  Porter nodded. “Yeah, it’s gonna be costly. Especially with all the extra room we’re going to need with that big head of yours.”

  Porter chuckled while Isellia playfully punched his arm repeatedly. Joey looked up at them, smiled faintly before again concentrating on the terminal, his hands inside the robot's circuits.

  "I'm tempted to stop and salvage a bit, to maybe offset whatever the repairs are going to be," Porter continued. "But who knows who else is waiting for us around here? Better cut our losses and continue. We should be coming on one of the first Inner Circle systems soon, and there's a station we can stop at.

  "Then we can start trying to figure out where Rex and Celia went."

  Kenpur walked onto the bridge, his hands folded, while Porter spoke. “No need. They will find us.”

  Isellia looked at Porter, then back at Kenpur. “What you mean, old man?”

  Kenpur said nothing, but smiled a little before he turned and left.

  “I really hate it when he does that,” Porter muttered.

  ***

  “Ma’am, can I bring you more java?”

  Fran didn’t seem to notice the waitress in the small diner, standing impatiently over her holding a warm, mostly full pot of coffee. The diner had been decorated in the fashion of a greasy spoon from Old Earth, or at least what someone imagined it must have once looked like. The green-vinyl diner’s tables’ edges were rounded, and the seats plush as might have been appropriate to a 1950s restaurant, but idiosyncrasies abounded in the strange diner. Guitars from an 1980s Old Earth metal band adorned the walls — replicas, of course. The real thing would have been far too costly and valuable to be hung in a small diner in Radiola.

  Stacks of papers surrounded Fran, who rifled through files, receipts, and an electronic terminal that hooked her into the mainframe of the Company computer. She shouldn’t have been able to access it while she was on “vacation,” but Fran had indexed every single one of her passwords, and had memorized a back-up method for accessing her account by employing an algorithm based on a combination of those codes. In case she ever needed to work outside the office, which had never been necessary — until now.

  “Ma’am!” the waitress said a little more loudly, less of a question than a demand.

  “That’s interesting, yes, very interesting — see that money shouldn’t be right there, it’s in the wrong column, but it doesn’t seem to be a mistake, and if I follow it back, this receipt had to come out of this fund marked ‘robotics,’ because I traced back all possible routes to where else it could have come from, and they’re all correct and accounted for because I indexed them myself ...”

  The waitress sighed, poured a little more coffee in her cup and walked away, as Fran continued, her face hovering a few inches from the paper as she traced another possible path to be sure she was on the right track.

  “Now what’s this little section? I hadn’t seen this before, it’s on the electronic terminal but not on my print-outs, now why might that be? It appears to be marked defense but isn’t actually in the defense fund which makes me wonder what it’s doing there and not where it’s supposed to be, and—“

  Fran stopped abruptly, after taking a sip of her coffee.

  “Um, waitress, I didn’t want my coffee filled, I have a very strict rule about the ratio of my creamer to java, and I need to have this refilled so I can refill the proper ratio,” Fran said at the waitress, already out of earshot. “Um, excuse me, waitress?”

  Fran looked around from her booth, realizing she seemed to be the only person at the diner at the moment. Even the waitresses appeared to be absent.

  Fran’s eyes, distorted through the thick lenses she wore, became distraught.

  “Well that’s odd...”

  ***

  Yardley cracked open the creaky, aging door to the dungeon, causing Underow to jump a little where he sat in his cell. Yardley always stood tall with an air of pride and dignity. It’s why he was so good in his current role.

  “Come to finish me off, then?” Underow asked, as he sat on his bunk, elbows on his knees, with his head staring at the floor.

  “Oh, don't be so glum, Mr. Underow. I’m here to set you free.”

  Underow peaked out from his cowering position. “You are?”

  Yardley sighed. “Yes, your punishment is at an end.”

  Underow nodded at this, starting to gain a little of his self-importance back. Of course, they wanted him to get back to work. Surely it was piling up out of control at this point. It would take weeks for him to get back to being only hopelessly behind.

  “It’ll be good to get back to my work,” Underow said, standing up as Yardley unlocked the cell.

  “Oh, well now that’s not exactly what we had in mind,” Yardley said, opening the cell door.

  Underow stared at him a moment, but stepped out of the door, happy enough to be out of the cage. “What is it then?”

  “Why, Mr. Underow,” Yardley said, smiling with a secret on his lips. “We have quite the assignment for you, indeed!”

  Underow didn’t like it when Yardley smiled.

  Chapter 45

  Joey guided the smuggle
r into the repair outpost, his mind still on the robot. It pained him to sit at the controls and not do everything he could to try and repair the robot's damaged circuits. He looked over at the robot every so often as it sat motionless, propped up against the bulkhead on the bridge, a faint LED flashing red.

  “You can guide us straight into a repair dock, Joey. Then you can go search for the coupling you need," Porter said. “Meanwhile, they’ll repair the ship while we wait. Hopefully, we have enough.”

  “Of course we’ll have enough,” Isellia boasted. “We have all my XR winnings.”

  “The damage is pretty extensive, Isellia. It’s gonna cost us.”

  “Just have them fix the big stuff. Me and the kid here can handle any minor stuff.”

  Joey nodded absently.

  Isellia noticed the look on Joey’s face. She clasped his shoulder. “Hey, we’ll get your friend all fixed up, OK? Don’t worry about it.”

  Joey nodded, and Isellia’s concern did comfort him some, though he doubted he could do anything but worry about it. Porter looked on, genuinely surprised to see something other than sarcasm from her. Then she noticed him watching her.

  “What?” She looked at Porter. “Wanna take a picture?”

  Porter chuckled, briefly forgetting about the expensive repairs.

  ***

  Underow sipped a dark coffee in the out-of-the-way diner. The waitress had scoffed at his order: One coffee, black, a touch of Sasugan sugar (sugar was one of Sasuga’s chief exports — the soil on the planet’s eastern hemisphere made its sugar so much better than any other planets’, for some reason) and a slice of toast. Then again, the waitress mostly scoffed at everyone. Underow didn’t repeat his order when she said "excuse me?" and had glared at her with his sunken expression until she shook her head and left to fetch the coffee.

  He watched the short woman with staccato movements and glasses with frames far too large for her face, and glared. His assignments seemed to grow more ridiculous by the day, and he longed for the solitude of his office. He thought of the particular zeal with which Mr. Yardley gave him this particular assignment, and sneered a little more. Someday, he would be on top. And he would make Mr. Yardley pay. Yardley had no ambition — happy to do his job, keep a smooth ship running and remain in the background. That someone could be so self-satisfied with so little made Underow sick.