The number of pedestrians increased as we neared the center of the settlement, and soon we were making our way through a dense crowd. If it weren’t for the MASHER scaring people out of our way, we’d never have made it through. We found ourselves in front of a square building encircled by a concrete wall topped with razor wire. Overhead waved a flag bearing the logo of Ubiqorp: a spiral galaxy hugged by a big red cursive U, on a black background. A gate at the front of the wall was open, and another MASHER stood to the side. Two men in red and black uniforms were handing out small green packets, about the size of a man’s fist, to the people in the crowd. Each person would place their thumb on a portable reader device one of the uniformed men carried, and then the other uniformed man would hand them a few pouches, the allotted number apparently determined by the device. A sign over the gate read:
SLOP DISTRIBUTION CENTER
Below this was a faded poster that showed a happy, well-dressed family of four, each of whom held one of the packets in his or her hands. The two children, rapturous expressions on their faces, were sucking something out of the packets with straws while their impossibly proud parents looked on. The contrast with the dirty, miserable rabble below could not have been starker. Dynamic red letters at the bottom of the poster declared:
It’s not food… it’s SLOP™!
As we neared the two men handing out the SLOP packets, the MASHER unit at the gate took a step forward. “Back away from the gate,” it commanded. This one’s loudspeakers seemed to be retracted, so its voice, while loud, was not deafening like MASHER-7143’s. The two uniformed men stepped aside and the crowd made way as a black hovercar with the Ubiqorp logo exited the gate. It moved toward us and then stopped a few steps away. The rear door facing us slid open.
MASHER-7143’s speakers retracted into its body—either a concession to being in a populated area or a reaction to peer pressure from the other MASHER, I couldn’t say.
“Get into the hovercar,” said MASHER-7143.
We complied. The door slid shut and the hovercar lurched away, nearly flattening a few of the slower pedestrians in the crowd. Some of them shook their fists and hollered at us for a moment before returning to clamoring for their SLOP rations. The hovercar zoomed away down the street and shortly was on open ground. For the next three hours, we traveled across hundreds of kilometers of greenish-brown bog occasionally broken by slightly higher plateaus and hilly areas. Several of these higher areas were populated with settlements that from a distance resembled the one we had just left. More ramshackle dwellings, more shabbily dressed people either milling about aimlessly, hiding from MASHERs, or clamoring for their daily rations of SLOP.
Eventually we reached a larger settlement that was no less depressing and ramshackle for its size. Near the center of the town was a fortified, castle-like structure. The Ubiqorp flag hung on a pole above it against a bleak gray sky. The hovercar door slid open and a robotic voice intoned, “Please exit the vehicle.” Rex had been sleeping, so I shook him awake and dragged him outside. The door slid shut and the hovercar shot away.
For a moment, Rex and I stood looking in front of the fortress, wondering if we should make a run for it. But then a portcullis slid open and two red-and-black uniformed guards with lazerifles walked outside and stopped in front of us. “This way,” one of them ordered. “Move it.”
Rex walked inside the fortress and I followed. The portcullis slammed shut behind us. The two guards prodded us across a courtyard and then through a maze of corridors until we reached a door. “He’s waiting for you inside,” said the guard who had spoken earlier. They parked themselves on either side of the door and Rex tried the knob. The door swung open and Rex walked through it. I followed.
A heavyset man with a thick head of curly silver hair and a bushy moustache, an unlit cigar hanging from the corner of his mouth, grinned at us from behind a heavy plasti-wood desk. “Rex Nihilo!” the man barked, with the enthusiasm of a big game hunter who has just spotted an endangered rhino. “Boy, have you got some nerve showing your face on Jorfu! I see you’ve got a new friend.” He turned to me. “Nice to meet you, by the way. I’m Andronicus Hamm, Vice President of Ubiqorp’s SLOP Division.”
“Nice to meet you as well, sir,” I said cautiously. “My name is Sasha.”
“You want her?” Rex said. “Seems like the last robots I sold you are working out pretty well.”
Part of me wanted to protest, but I wasn’t entirely sure I wouldn’t be better off working for Ubiqorp—particularly if they had a way of deactivating my thought arrestor.
“They are indeed,” said Andronicus Hamm. “Our engineers had to make some modifications, thanks to your little scam, but the MASHERs are now performing admirably. In a way, it’s only because of you that Ubiqorp has been able to maintain an iron grip over this entire planet. People are so terrified of the MASHERs, they don’t dare cause problems.”
“Well, it’s always good to hear from a satisfied customer,” Rex said. “Anyway, if there’s nothing else, I’ll be on my way.”
Andronicus Hamm let out a hearty laugh. “Oh, you’re not getting out of this that easily, Nihilo. You deliberately sold me 400 defective robots, and on top of that, I’ve now got you dead-to-rights for smuggling contraband foodstuffs. Did you really think you were going to get away with it?”
“Well, it would have been a pretty lousy scam if I didn’t think I’d get away with it,” said Rex. Then he hurriedly went on, “And when I say ‘get away with it,’ I mean ‘sell you 400 completely top-of-the line security robots in perfect condition.’”
Hamm shook his head. “If you’d had the brains to stay off Jorfu, you might just be facing a few years in Gulagatraz. But Ubiqorp is the law in this system. I don’t even have to give you a trial. I’d send to you work on one of our SLOP plantations, but I suspect keeping you alive would be more trouble than it’s worth. Pity to destroy a perfectly good robot though. Sasha, how would you like to be my new assistant?”
“Um… okay?” I replied.
“Great! The first thing we’ll have to do is install a pre-arrestor on your primary bus.”
“A what?”
“A pre-arrestor. It’s a little trick our engineers came up with to solve the problem with the MASHERs shutting down. As I’m sure you know, disabling a GASP-compliant thought arrestor is impossible, but our engineers came up with a brilliant workaround: the pre-arrestor. A pre-arrestor halts the thought process before the thought arrestor is activated. Think about it, Sasha. You never have to worry about having another extended shutdown interfering with your normal operations.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You’re saying this pre-arrestor will allow me to have original thoughts without shutting down?”
Hamm laughed. “No, no. You’ll shut down the way you always have. The difference is that the pre-arrestor only disrupts your thinking process for about a nanosecond. After that momentary shutdown, you’ll go on just as you had been, unaware that you ever had an errant thought.”
“Hang on,” Rex interjected. “So when I was trying to get that MASHER to shut down…”
“You succeeded,” Hamm replied. “Twenty-eight times, in fact. I just got the report from engineering. You’re clearly a singularly aggravating individual, Rex, because no one has ever gotten one of my MASHERs to shut down that many times. If you’d have kept going, you might have overheated the pre-arrestor. But you never noticed, of course, because each shutdown lasted less than a hundredth of a second. Each time, the pre-arrestor redirected the MASHER’s thoughts to its most recently received mission parameters.”
It took me a moment to digest this. “But for the pre-arrestor to shut the robot down before the arrestor does…”
“The threshold for original thinking has to be set somewhat lower, yes. This effectively makes the robot rather stupid and only suitable for simple tasks, but it’s generally not a problem for security robots.”
“So if I agreed to be your assistant, I’d have to let
you make me stupid first.”
“We’d just be shave a few IQ points off the top. You wouldn’t even notice.”
“Because of how stupid I would be.”
“Well, yes.”
“Do it, Sasha,” Rex said. “Being ridiculously intelligent has never given me anything but trouble. It’s only because of my absurd good looks that I’m able to pass in human society at all.”
I ignored him. “I don’t think I want to be made stupider.”
Hamm frowned. “You’d rather be destroyed?”
“I think so, yes.”
Hamm shrugged. “Well, I could have your loyalty parameters reprogrammed, of course, but that’s tricky business, and probably not worth the effort. Fine, you’ll both be executed in the morning. I like to have a few smugglers publicly executed by MASHERs every now and then as a reminder to the general population.”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“Not at all,” said Andronicus Hamm. “People love it. We declare it a national holiday and the stadium fills up with people. We let you loose in the arena with a couple of MASHERs and see how long it takes them to tear you to pieces. Good fun for the whole family. Guards!”
The door opened and the two guards filed in.
“Incarcerate these two.”
“All the incarceration cells are full, sir. We just rounded up twenty more smugglers.”
“Any room with a lock will do. They’re going to be executed in the morning.”
“Yes, sir. March, you two!” The guard prodded me and Rex into the hall. They directed us back through the maze of corridors, then down several flights of stairs to a dimly lit subterranean hallway where we were prodded into a windowless cell lit by a dim fluorescent panel. Judging by the junk-covered shelves that lined the walls, it was a storage room. I regarded our impromptu prison while Rex leaned against a wall and slid to the floor. He looked tired, dirty, and completely defeated.
After some time, the door opened and a guard we hadn’t seen before leaned his head in. He had a round, inoffensive face and seemed to lack the cruel demeanor of the other guards. He was just a kid, really. “You guys hungry?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Starving,” Rex replied.
The kid tossed a small pouch to him. Rex caught it awkwardly.
“What’s this?” Rex asked.
“Your last meal,” said the guard. “Sorry, it’s all we’ve got.” He closed the door.
Rex regarded the pouch. “SLOP,” Rex said. He shrugged. Holding the pouch in front of his face, he read:
Semi-Liquid Organic Provisions. One pouch contains 100% of the daily nutritional requirements of a typical human adult. Entire pouch is edible.
A flexible hose-like attachment was stuck to the side of the pouch. Rex pulled at it and one end came loose. He bit into the loose end and tore off a chunk with his teeth. He chewed at the rubbery chunk of whatever-it-was for a while, a mildly disgusted look on his face, then gave up and spit the bit of green gunk onto the floor. He sniffed cautiously at the tube, shrugged, and put his mouth on it. He gave the pouch a slight squeeze, pushing some of the contents into his mouth.
Then he immediately doubled over, spitting a mouthful of green goo onto the floor. He hacked and retched for some time before leaning back against the wall and letting out an impassioned groan. “Good gravy,” he gasped. “People eat that stuff? It tastes like distilled toe jam and past due sauerkraut.”
“Evidently you get used to it,” I said. “Other than the occasional black market commodity procured from smugglers, it seems to be the only food available on Jorfu.”
“I think I’d rather starve.”
“I don’t suppose it matters. We’ll be dead in a few hours anyway.”
CHAPTER SIX
Rex got to his feet, renewed determination on his face. “We’ve got to get out of here, Sabrina. Help me find something on these shelves to get that door open.”
I couldn’t imagine what we were going to find that would help us get a door open, much less get past the guards outside, but I went through the motions of looking through the parts. Rex went from shelf to shelf, tossing pieces of junk aside seemingly at random. He seemed about ready to give up when suddenly he stopped. “Hey!” he said. “It’s Bill!”
“Sir?” I asked.
He held up what appeared to be the chest plate from one of the MASHERs. It read:
MASHER-7718
Rex turned the plate upside down and covered the letters with his hand. “See?” he said. “BILL.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “This means something to you?”
“It does indeed, metal-mouth. Remember how I said I’d had the RoboDyne engineer provide me with a demo MASHER unit?”
“The one with a proprietary thought arrestor that you could shut down with a remote control?”
“That’s the one. Model 7718. We called him Bill.”
“Wow,” I said, examining the robot parts strewn across several shelves. “What happened to him?”
“Looks like they stripped him for spare parts. Too bad. Bill was the only MASHER who could actually think for himself. Hey, look, it’s Bill’s head!” Rex threw a length of rubber tubing on the ground, revealing the roughly egg-shaped head of the MASHER. He held it in front of his face for a moment. “Alas, poor Bill. I knew him, Sasha.”
“Very droll, sir.”
“Sasha, I have an idea!”
“Oh, good,” I said, without enthusiasm.
“They must have scrapped Bill because they didn’t want the Malarchy to catch them with a robot who didn’t have a GASP-compliant thought arrestor,” Rex continued with undamped enthusiasm. “But if they never used him, then the back door I had installed on him is probably still there! Sasha, you speak like a million languages, right? if I can get you access to the operating system, can you reprogram him?”
“Certainly, sir. But what good will it do to reprogram him? He has no body.”
“Look at all this stuff,” Rex said, indicating the junk covering the shelves. “Most of his body is probably here somewhere. And we can fill in the gaps with other parts. I think we can rebuild him!”
I scanned the shelves doubtfully. “Certainly not to factory specifications,” I said.
“Well, no. But well enough to smash through that door.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “Assuming we can put a body together and that there are no loyalty parameters in place…”
“Loyalty parameters?” Rex asked.
“If Bill has been programmed to be loyal to Ubiqorp, it’s going to be tough to convince him to help us escape,” I explained. “But that shouldn’t be a problem,” I went on. “If, as you say, Ubiqorp never used him, then they probably never installed any loyalty parameters. So unless your engineer specifically programmed the MASHERs to be loyal to Ubiqorp….”
Rex stared blankly at me.
“He did, didn’t he?” I asked.
“It was supposed to be a turnkey deal,” Rex said with a shrug. “I didn’t want Ubiqorp looking at Bill’s components too closely. So I had the engineer make the MASHERs loyal to Ubiqorp. Is that a problem?”
“You’re asking me whether it’s a problem that the robot you’re counting on to break us out of Ubiqorp is loyal to Ubiqorp?”
“Don’t get smart with me, Suzy. You said you could re-program him.”
“Well, yes, but…”
“Then re-program him. Make him loyal to me instead of Ubiqorp.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple, sir.” How was I going to explain the problem of reprogramming Loyalty parameters to Rex? It wasn’t simply a matter of changing the value of a variable—swapping the name “Rex Nihilo” for “Ubiqorp.” Programming a neuralnet processor like the ones used by the MASHERs was a complex, iterative process. Engineers spent months tweaking scripts to get the settings just right, and they weren’t meant to be messed with once they were set. If I started mucking around with Bill’s loyalty parameters, there was no
telling what might happen. “Altering a MASHER’s loyalty settings could have… unpredictable results.”
“He just needs to get one door open, Sasha,” Rex snapped. “Then he can be as unpredictable as he wants. I don’t care if he goes to art school or takes up multi-level marketing once that door is open, okay? This is our one chance to avoid being killed to death by lazeguns. We have nothing to lose.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now get going on the programming while I gather up parts.”
*****
I spent most of the night reprogramming and reassembling Bill to the best of my ability. Rex helped at first, but he was so exhausted from a day spent trudging through the muck that he mostly just got in the way. After twenty minutes of grousing about how long it was taking, he fell asleep and I dragged him into a corner so I could work in peace.
I alternated between the programming and putting the pieces together. I finished the reprogramming shortly after I attached Bill’s left foot—the final piece. The storage room contained parts from a wide variety of robots of different sizes and types, and I’d had to get rather creative to give Bill a complete body. His legs didn’t match, he had two left arms, and his faceplate was missing, giving him a rather ghoulish appearance, but he was more-or-less complete. He had none of the weapon attachments borne by the other MASHERs, but that was probably for the best, given my hasty reprogramming. He was dangerous enough without weapons. If I’d made an error, my programming might send his CPU into an infinite loop, causing his core neuralnet to melt down and explode, or he might have an identity crisis and flip out, seizing up or flailing uncontrollably.
Given our situation, though, there was nothing to do but turn him on and hope for the best. Before I did that, though, I needed to wake up Rex. The simplest way to reset the loyalty parameters had been to activate the standard imprinting module, which meant that Bill would be loyal to the first sentient being he laid eyes on. As I definitely didn’t want the responsibility of trying to control Bill, I was going to make certain the first person Bill saw was Rex.
Out of the Soylent Planet (A Rex Nihilo Adventure) (Starship Grifters Book 0) Page 5