Chapter 9.0:
A Dark Day For Ship
If Speed knew little about what had happened to the GoodBots in the meantime, Ship, his faithful ally may have known a bit more.
Of course, what constitutes knowledge for a robot may always remain a mystery to human beings, except a small club of experts in artificial intelligence.
Ship had sensors, and memory banks, and even a mission: to protect Speed, whom ship assumed to be the the last human, regardless of what other devices communicated via the interlink. The Interlink could no longer be trusted as a secure source of data. It had been compromised by this other, darker Interlink, this group of Machines which were not totally mechanical.
Something besides GoodBots was in the cloud.
Upon receiving his first instructions from this new, dark source of information, Ship had immediately seen that the data was corrupted by another force. There was random and backwards data mixed with the pure scientific data collected by the GoodBots. If the data itself had been corrupted, then who knows what could have happened to the GoodBot programming.
Still, Ship concluded that GoodBots, by their very wiring, do not act unless there is a human involved at some level. So, to determine who this human was--or perhaps there was more than one?--Ship set a course for the source of the transmission: a nebula.
Ship flew cautiously, since the nebula was full of machines he did not recognize. They were flitting about, in perfect rhythm, and shining bright red lights out into space. Ship’s processing units speculated that these must be sensors of some type. There seemed to be no way of getting to his fellow GoodBots without crossing the paths of these strange machines.
So, Ship refreshed his random access memory and set a course directly for the center of the nebula.
What Ship did not know what that he was being followed by his former GoodBot friends...
Battle Moon 2075: Ramming Speed Page 9