Whisk! A flat steel controller base plate spun like a buzzsaw away from one of his Positioners. It bit into the exposed hydraulic tubing in the wrist of one of the monster’s Positioners, cutting two of the tubes clean through. Fluid coursed into the air in a pink fountain until the automatic pressure monitor valves snapped closed and cut the feed.
Another stab of pain. Simon grunted, and dropped a second controller base plate into its Positioner. He calculated the path between that base plate Positioner and one that threw optics drive motors, and sent it spinning.
Clang!
Across the width of Building 800, sheet-metal shields rotated down over tools and Positioner hands. ARFF had been designed to cope with the occasional bad throw. If a part went off course toward expensive tooling, a shield could be dropped into place, almost always before the wayward part could connect.
Almost. Simon remembered Line Start Three, and winced.
Chung! The spinning base plate struck the shield guarding the Positioner it was intended to hit. The base plate gouged the steel skin of the shield but did not pierce it, and clattered to the floor.
The monster was still learning.
Again, stalemate. His enemy could not throw parts from behind metal shields. Simon’s Positioners all gripped parts. As soon as one of the enemy’s shields pulled back, a missile would be sent its way. Simon knew the latency in the shields, and knew how quickly any given part could reach any given target. Only the closest paths were viable. Simon calculated all possible paths and cached them. He waited.
Clink! A shield withdrew. It belonged to the #2 laser welder unit. Simon had no direct path to the welder, nor did it have a path to any of the tooling he controlled. So what was the damned thing up to? The welder hissed to life. Up near the ceiling, the blue-white beam struck metal. Sparks arced away, fading from yellow to orange to red before winking out halfway to the floor. Simon took several seconds to understand: The monster was cutting down the ceiling catwalk.
That was where Dave Mirecki was hiding.
Simon’s enemy had all four of the laser welders. Ironically, the four largest Positioners were all Simon’s, and all had an easy ballistic line to the laser bay—but none had anything to throw.
Yet.
51: Dave Mirecki
So Blood Dust had glued the doors shut to its only two vulnerable areas: the core farm and the breaker room. Neither room needed guarding anymore. The Outfielders that could still see were fleeing toward the front of the building. Dave picked up a copier drum shaft lying on the concrete, and bashed in the heads of the Outfielders he had blinded with paint.
The impact shields were down over most of the tools, and nothing was moving. He scanned the floor. Stypek was there somewhere, a fish so far out of water he might as well be swimming in Mare Imbrium. At least Mr. Romero had a shotgun.
There were cams all around the huge space, and yet he couldn’t access any of them. Nor could he call Simple Simon. Tapper wireless was jammed. Only the robots could communicate.
Hmmm. Dave reached up into a parts bin in the first rank of machinery, and pulled down a blue cylindrical part the size of a bottle of cocktail sauce. He tossed it onto the concrete a few yards away, and heard it clunk, bounce, and roll to a stop.
Any second now…
“Dibs! Dibs! Dibs!” A Trilobyte left its floor charger and rolled dutifully to the capacitor. One toss of its pincers and the capacitor flipped into its net bag. Dave trotted up to it and put one boot down hard atop its double-humped carapace. He heard its motors buzz internally, unable to move their wheels.
“Stick around, bud,” he said quietly, then bent over and thrust the end of the drum shaft down on the Trilobyte’s two plastic pincers, shattering them. He flipped the robot over and dragged it under the shelter of the wire harness table where he had left Stypek.
Stypek was nowhere to be seen. Dave would soon fix that. He pulled out his Swiss Army knife and extended its Torx blade. A few seconds later he had the steel carapace off the buzzing, indignant Trilobyte, and was poking at its innards, nudging its wires aside, looking for a network diagnostics connector he remembered from a hardware seminar.
There!
Dave dug into his belt pouch and pulled out his universal Plasmanet adapter. He plugged the appropriate lead into the Trilobyte’s connector. He then pulled his tapper out of his vest and plugged another adapter lead into its edge port.
“Pup, connect to the ARFF tooling network. Find Simple Simon.”
Puppis’ blank silouette nodded. “Complying.”
While waiting for Puppis to break into the robotics network—which would have been hard except that Dave had already done it, and stored the rainbow tables in his tapper—he idly dumped the capacitor out of the Trilobyte’s internal catch bag, along with a small heatsink and a few Allen bolts. He picked up the capacitor and hefted it in his hand, squinting at the label.
Graphene super-ultra. 270 Farads at 64 volts.
Yikes!
Puppis spoke from inside his vest. “Connected. Bandwidth limited. Video disabled.”
“Simon! Can you see me?”
The AI’s voice was agitated. “Dave, I’m a little busy at the moment!”
“Hey, I’ve got an idea. If you can tell where I am, give me a sign from the nearest Positioner you control!”
Dave heard the wheeze of hydraulics very nearby. He craned his neck back, and saw the Positioner looming just three feet over his head give him the thumbs-up sign.
Dave picked up the capacitor in one hand and his Swiss Army knife in the other. “Ok. Listen carefully…”
52: Simple Simon
The laser welders were a problem. They consumed a huge amount of power, and their massive power supplies stood man-high on three sides. Simon had no Positioners in a location that could reach them in a straight line, and the monster knew it. Lobbing drive motors along a high parabolic arc was slow. The beast would drop the shields on the laser heads long before any missile thrown ballistically could reach them.
Worse, the welder heads had their own eyes, so the monster knew very precisely which way the beams were pointed. At the moment it was casting back and forth with all four heads, obviously trying to find a clear line between the welders and the place where Mr. Romero and Carolyn were crouched.
The beam was an eighth of an inch wide. It wouldn’t need much of a gap to be deadly.
Simon heard the power supplies whine. He gulped. One of the beams flashed obliquely across the main aisle, and metal flared white-hot.
Mr. Romero yelled, in alarm but not in pain.
Simon squirmed. Machinery was slow compared to thought. Hurry!
The corrugated overhead door between the factory floor and the warehouse rose. As soon as it would clear, the cart-puller robot pressed forward, the last load of completed, boxed copiers on its cart. The cart took the corner and rolled as quickly as its motors were able to the packing station.
Aching from a hundred-odd stabbing pains, Simon reached out with one of the four largest Positioners, and dropped one of the boxed copiers onto the packing table. The Positioner thrust a giant thumb through the cardboard and ripped the top of the box away.
The big laser spoke. Mr. Romero yelled again. Carolyn screamed.
The closest of the four hands lowered itself into the box, and a Voicematic 880 copier emerged into the light. Simon rotated the hand and its burden so that the copier was oriented correctly by his calculations. He felt virtual, Class Nine sweat appear on his forehead.
The laser welder flashed again. Simon watched Mr. Romero kneel and fire his shotgun toward the welder bay. The shot struck pipes and panels but came nowhere near the welder heads.
The big Positioner and its payload bent toward the floor. Simon licked his lips. “I built this. It’s mine. But I will let you have it.”
Simon’s hands tightened in the control channel. With a ponderous thump the big Positioner threw the copier high. It arced upward nearly to the roof girders, spinning
precisely about its own axis as it peaked, and fell.
The protective shields clanged shut over the laser heads. Moments later, the copier struck Head #3’s shield square-on. Sheet metal groaned as though crushed in a fist. The head beneath the shield shattered, its wires snapping and sparking. The copier bounced to one side and fell against the shield of Head #4, bending it badly enough that Simon doubted it would ever open again.
Two down. Two remained. As though to emphasize the point, the monster snapped open the shields over the #1 and #2 welder heads. Both beams fired at once.
Simon tore open a second box. He pulled the copier from the box, spun the hand to orient the load, and tossed it as he had tossed the first.
On the far side of the floor, Simon watched two Positioner shields pull back. Two hands hurled two small but high-mass parts, a gearbox and a drive clutch, on high and nearly linear paths. The gearbox and the clutch struck the copier just before it hit the peak of its arc, with enough force to alter its carefully calculated trajectory.
The copier fell on a pair of mill/drills just to one side of the welder bay.
Simple Simon cursed. Learning. Still learning.
53: Dave Mirecki
Dave crouched in front of a power feed panel serving a row of wire harness weavers. He had removed the cover without trouble. He had taken off one of his socks, and, using the sock as insulation between his hand and his Swiss Army knife, carefully shaved the bright red plastic insulation from a fat run of AWG #4 stranded wire that he judged by diagrams on the back of the cover to be carrying 48 volts DC at some insane current.
He hoped it was not too insane for what he was about to do.
The shaved length of #4 stranded ran quite close to an exposed quarter-inch ground bus. If he touched one to the other, the panel’s breaker would doubtless pop. It might pop anyway. Dave had only a hobbyist’s training in electronics, and did not know the factory equipment well enough to get any sense for the power supply’s internal resistance. Would it hold? Would it pop? It was a toss-up.
Heh. A toss-up.
“Simon, are you ready?”
The voice from inside his vest sounded harried. “This is nuts!”
“Well, yeah. Right now nuts is the only thing that might work.”
With his sock on his right hand like a sweaty puppet, Dave picked up one of a pile of graphene supercaps that he had taken from the chute of the machine above him. He oriented its twin terminal posts as he hovered the capacitor in front of the ground bus and the #4 wire.
Dave squinted and pressed the capacitor forward. Snap! Sparks flew from both terminals. The #4 wire twitched. Dave held the cap against the two contacts for several seconds. When he pulled it back, no sparks flew. Full.
Full, yes. For very large values of “full.”
“Cowabunga!” Dave tossed the capacitor upwards. Simon’s Positioner caught it, and without pausing whirled around and hurled the capacitor across the floor. Seconds later, a sharp explosion echoed back to them.
Simon’s voice sounded incredulous. “It’s dead. I hit a Positioner controller cabinet with it, and the controller is dead.”
“Well, how many joules were in that thing?”
“311,040.”
Dave nodded. Release all that energy in one dead short, and it would generate an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to kill nearby digital logic and wipe its memory. How near “nearby” was he didn’t know. Evidently near enough.
“This is really nuts!” Simon exclaimed. “Give me another one, fast!”
Dave grabbed a second capacitor and thrust it into the panel. Sparks flew. Then the capacitor flew. Then sparks flew again, somewhere else out on the floor, and another Positioner died.
“Keep them coming!”
Dave grinned. He knew Blood Dust couldn’t hear him, but he looked out across the floor and said it anyway: “Once I put three hundred thousand joules in him, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend!”
54: Simple Simon
It was all in the wrist. Simon caught another capacitor grenade from Dave and launched it hard against the control cabinet of a Positioner fifty feet away. The capacitor was shaped like a big saltshaker, and he was good at saltshakers. The challenge was severe: He had to give it just the right amount of spin to keep it oriented such that the two terminal posts would strike the bare steel of a control cabinet cover at the same time.
If he missed, the cap bounced and rolled under something. If he hit, the cap spilled its joules with a very healthy bang, and another of the enemy’s machines would die.
So far, fifteen grenades in, he was four out of five.
Simon was not lobbing the joule grenades randomly. He was taking out Positioners with a clear line on Dave’s hiding place—and, of course, the Positioner Simon was using to do the lobbing.
The monster was initially nonplussed by the grenades, and while it remained confused Simon knocked out Positioner after Positioner. It took only a few minutes, but soon his enemy had begun throwing things at Simon’s grenades. Its aim was poor—the capacitors were smallish things traveling fast—but getting better. Grenade #26 was struck by a paper feed clutch and knocked off course. Ditto grenades #31 and #34.
Learning, learning, always learning. Simon had never heard of any piece of software learning that quickly.
Grenade #37 was struck by a reduction lens and fell onto one of the aisles. Simon saw a Trilobyte race out and grab the capacitor in its plastic pincers, and toss it into the plastic-net catch bag under its carapace. The grenade did not go off.
Hmmm.
The Trilobytes were automatons, with just enough internal AI to watch for dropped parts and pick them up quickly. Simon did not need to control them—but he could. He reached down into an otherwise idle control channel and touched the Trilobyte’s motors. It spun in a tight circle and headed off in another, carefully chosen direction. Trilobites were active all over the factory now, picking up thrown parts that had fallen to the floor. They were everywhere, grabbing odd bits and piping “Dibs! Dibs!” as they raced around in circles, looking for new targets.
Simon’s Trilobyte did the same, tracing a drunkard’s walk down the aisle while unobtrusively allowing other Trilobytes to go after the debris in its path.
Close to the center of the factory floor, the two remaining laser welders were cutting through panels and posts that shielded Mr. Romero and Carolyn from their beams.
Another capacitor grenade was struck off course and rolled to a stop in the aisle. Simon gunned the Trilobyte’s motors and made a beeline that would send its drivers into thermal shutdown if maintained for more than a few seconds. “Dibs! Dibs!”
He got to the grenade just before two other Trilobytes did, and hoisted it aloft in black plastic pincers. Tossing it in the mesh bag was a fraught strategy: If the terminals of the two capacitors bridged, the plot was laid bare to the monster and the Trilobyte itself was toast.
Simon tensed. The pincer flipped the cap into the bag. His luck held; no explosion. Abandoning the Trilobytes’ characteristic curving path, Simon floored its motors and steamed the little robot arrow-straight down the center of the aisle.
Grasping and pulling something out of their mesh bags was not on the Trilobytes’ feature list. It took some fumbling and several false tries before Simon figured it out. But eight feet from the welder bay, his Trilobyte had a charged grenade in each pincer.
Fifteen or twenty feet further down the aisle, an Outfielder noticed the little robot, and began to roll in its direction.
Too late: The Trilobyte took the turn into the welder bay at full speed, holding both capacitors terminals-first in front of it. The much taller Outfielder took the turn moments later—and walked right into both beams. Sssszzzzit! Molten metal flew from the Outfielder’s head stalk, and the robot’s controller froze.
The Trilobyte reached the control cabinets for laser welders #1 and #2.
Simon stared at the welders, and smiled a grim smile. “Dibs.”
His hand twitched in the Trilobyte’s control channel, and twitched again. Two sharp concussions echoed out of the welder bay, and the laser welder beams went out for good.
55: Carolyn
She had never had a broken rib. Was this how it felt? Carolyn squeezed herself farther back into the forest of pipes and benches and steel cabinets, feeling the agony in her side and wondering how fast she could run, if somehow they got free.
The stink of burning grease and hot metal hovered over them. Brandon kept looking for a straight shot at the welders and failed to find it. He had fired two shells at a cabinet near the laser bay that was oblique to their position, hoping that ricochets might damage the laser heads. No go.
For a time the two welder beams had seemed intent on pruning the steel jungle like a bamboo stand, burning the pipes and conduits and supports for anything it could reach. Whether by luck or intent, it had caused the collapse of a parts chute that first pelted them with tubular parts that Brandon called dashpots, and then blocked their only good path of retreat. A little later one beam cut through a thick electrical conduit, causing the lights to dim for a moment amidst distant clatter.
The beams stopped indexing back and forth, and stopped cutting into pipes and cabinets. They did not, however, extinguish. Between the parts chute on one side and the welders’ beams on the other, she and Brandon were pinned.
Brandon spent some time wedging himself against a large pipe and shoving against the parts chute with his feet. It would not move. Carolyn heard things crashing against cabinets and the concrete floor. Now and then some motor or plate would strike something above them and fall down among the pipes nearby. Eventually Brandon gave up trying to forge a path of retreat and sat on the concrete with his back to her, holding the shotgun at ready.
If the welders had the time and the inclination, they could burn through the machines in whose shadow she and Brandon lay. Carolyn felt that she knew, now, what Stypek’s two magical Opportunities had done to them. Brandon was unlikely to figure it out on his own and might not believe it even if he did. If they only had minutes, she wanted to try.
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 28