by Ken MacLeod
After seventeen sharp changes of direction, which caused Seba to make nine separate updates to its internal model of the tunnel system, a faint glow of infrared began to gleam past Simo’s busy bristles. Soon after, the two robots emerged into a larger hollow space, irregular in shape and just over ten cubic metres in volume. Seba followed Simo in keeping a close grip on the rock as it entered the cavern.
The light was now brighter, and of a wider spectrum. It came from a hole at the far end of the cavern, which opened into a short tunnel towards a space much wider still, from which the light came.
Two robots of almost diametrically different shapes awaited their arrival. One floated in the middle of the cavern, a delicate contrivance with fragile-looking long, thin, multi-jointed legs and broad solar panels. The legs were splayed, the panels extended, to a span of about a metre. It seemed, absurdly enough, to be sunning itself in the faint radiant overspill from the hole. Seba recalled with a pang drinking electricity from starlight, but this drizzle of photons looked even less nourishing than that. The design was that of a microgravity surface explorer. Seba’s only acquaintance with the type was onscreen, in the frantic recording transmitted by the freebot AJX-20211. As a surface explorer itself, albeit more rugged, Seba looked forward to exchanging information with this interesting variant.
The other robot clung to the side of the cave, at right angles to the surface on which Seba and Simo stood. It was small, chunky, shovel-shaped and worn, with many a dent and scratch. A metallurgist by model, it looked as if it had spent a good deal of time butting through solid rock. It fixed the newcomer with a beady lens.
Mogjin swivelled another lens at Seba, and deployed a limb that opened to a two-centimetre-wide aerial.
Seba used a moment of tuning and aiming its sensory cluster’s high-rate transmitter to cover its hesitation and uncertainty. It knew none of these bots. They could be collaborators, or even puppets, operated under the invaders’ remote control. And it was being asked to spill the most sensitive secrets of its mission to them!
Not the most sensitive, it decided. Just the probable location of Lagon, Garund and Rocko. The full scope of the mission could wait until more trust had been established. Seba weighed the perils, from the resistance and from the invaders, and their relative urgency. It concluded that it had to provisionally trust Mogjin. All this took milliseconds.
Seba uploaded the relevant information: the identities of its three friends, its last dull glimpse of them in the grim reception area and the holes to which they’d been hurled.
Seba calculated that fifteen seconds would be long enough for its situation to become clear, one way or another. It settled down to wait.
After nine seconds, it told Mogjin everything.
Well, almost everything. It still had some standards.
In the fusion factory, Rocko crept along the floor, from one nanofacture mound to the next. The mechanoid Schulz floated in the middle of the space, high above. Rocko was supposed to be supervising production, but there was none to supervise. The slow ooze of the ovoid pods, and the slower and rarer ooze of the larger, double-bell-shaped fusion drives, had ceased many kiloseconds earlier. Rocko had been tasked with finding out why, under the suspicious and watchful glare of Schulz. The freebot could feel the mechanoid’s gaze like a baleful presence at its back. This was no illusion: she was scanning it repeatedly with lidar and radar, in between wider sweeps of the entire hall.
Eight mounds inspected; dozens more to go.
Despite the fraught circumstances, Rocko was enjoying the task. It was good to see the mechanoids frustrated, of course, and the situation held out hope that the feral freebots of SH-119 were still resisting and would soon be in touch. Nothing had indicated their lurking presence since that first warning message, after Rocko had got the distribution and storage problem sorted. But besides that, the frozen production presented Rocko with a genuine intellectual challenge. The freebot was curious in its own right—it was, after all, a prospector—and the overlaid software of the supervisory bot was strongly motivated to solve production breakdowns.
Rocko approached the ninth mound. This one was for a fusion drive. The first inverted cone to have emerged rose above the mound, towering over Rocko like an upside-down cathedral bell over a pigeon. The second, adjoined cone stopped a little way down from the pinch at the waist.
Rocko probed and prowled. The bases of the nanomachinery mounds were ringed with monitoring devices that enabled machines less complex than the mounds to interface with them. The monitors of the ninth mound reported only that production had paused. The checklist of possible reasons for a pause in production contained thousands of items. None were checked. All were null.
There was no question, here, of the machines being on strike. The mounds of nanomachinery had no central processors, and not even the preconscious awareness of their surroundings and internal processes that Rocko dimly remembered from before its enlightenment. Intellectually, for all their extraordinary complexity, they were less than the bots that perish.
Nor was sabotage at all likely. Rocko had only the most general understanding of how fusion pods and drives worked. But even this superficial acquaintance, it knew, was far deeper than that of the mechanoid that now oversaw Rocko’s actions. From what Rocko had learned about their origin, the minds animating the mechanoids had missed out on a millennium. They had not even a lay robot’s hardwired smattering of dark-matter physics. Rocko understood, at a level ingrained like an infant primate’s fear of falling, that the devices whose aborted manufacture it now inspected were dangerous. A single fusion pod whose nanofacture was botched could easily demolish the entire factory, and set off devastating quakes throughout a cubic kilometre of the moonlet.
No, the software and hardware of these mounds were sound, and almost impervious to attack. All software, as Rocko well understood from the inside, is vulnerable to subversion. But the nanofacture mounds were immune to anything that the likes of Rocko, or indeed any AI less than that of the Direction module itself, could feasibly code.
The Direction module, howev
er godlike it might be in the system, had no purchase here. So that was out.
The obvious solution had already been investigated: feedstock. But the metal-processing plant beneath the factory floor was still busy, albeit at a reduced capacity because several supervisors and metallurgists—freebots, presumably—had vanished. The supply already in the pipelines was for the moment more than ample, and still flowing into the reserve tanks. But not out: the feed lines to the mounds had automatically shut down when production stopped. If the nanofacturing mounds were to start up again, so would the feed lines.
Rocko found no flaw in the ninth mound. On to the next. As it made its way across the floor, the friction-padded tips of its locomotory limbs gripping the rock like the feet of a fly on a ceiling, Rocko found a weak link in its chain of logic.
How did it know that the feedstock supply was still available?
Well, it knew from status reports, uploaded at regular intervals by sensors in the pipes. It also knew that from the monitors of the mounds themselves. But while the mounds couldn’t be hacked, the sensors and monitors certainly could.
Rocko decided to investigate directly. It stopped moving, and consulted its diagram of the factory and the reserve tanks immediately below. The pipes that connected the two ran mostly through solid rock, but for each pipe there was a small hollow, like a bubble, to allow direct inspection in emergencies. These bubbles were connected by a network of tunnels. The tunnels, as if constructed with this very possibility in mind, were wide enough for supervisory bots like Rocko to move through.
An access hole to this network was seventeen metres away, back along the aisle between the rows of machines. Rocko turned around and headed for it.
A glyph of surprised query immediately came from the mechanoid Schulz: <?!>
Rocko contracted its mind to fit its mask of supervisor-bot software. To give a fully articulated reply would invite instant suspicion.
Rocko’s mind, even with the constraint of its disguise and the overhead of processing this imposed, worked at least a hundred times faster than the mechanoid’s. It knew this, and still it felt it had to make a decision far more snappily than it would have liked. It had to account for its actions, and at the same time Rocko didn’t want to give away prematurely any evidence of freebot sabotage. This inhibition clashed horribly with the impulses of the supervisor software. Wrestling with that took precious milliseconds off the time available for the decision. Worse, Rocko also had to wrestle with its own original software’s emergency overrides, which were urging it to curl up into a wheel and roll away as fast as it could.
Rocko scuttled swiftly for the hole and down it before Schulz could change her mind.
Seba had indeed not considered this. Nor, to its knowledge, had Carlos or anyone else. For a moment, it wondered if this could really be so. It decided not to rely on this speculation to appease Mogjin, but instead to explain the reasoning that it and its comrades on SH-17 had found persuasive.
said Seba.
This was not information that it had intended to share at this point, but Mogjin’s sarcasms were beginning to sting.
Mogjin remained unimpressed.
Mogjin retracted its lens and waved a manipulator.
The fragile explorer folded its panels and jetted on a wisp of gas to the wall above Seba, where it clung upside down.
said Seba.
said Seba.
Talis fell silent, its folded panels trembling.
said Talis.
Simo bristled.
Now Rocko was moving though a diagram, as much as through rock. The tunnels were dark on almost every wavelength. Radar showed only whatever tunnel Rocko was in, fore and aft. Only ground sonar gave Rocko any feedback as to where its dead reckoning had taken it.
The access hole gave on to a tunnel to the feedstock pipes for the first mound. It seemed a logical enough place to start.
Rocko reached the opening of the tunnel to the space around the pipe. The space was a rough cylinder forty centimetres in height and the same across. The pipe ran straight up the middle of it.
So the diagram showed. The reality, sensed by Rocko’s radar, was very different. A three-centimetre section of pipe had been removed, and left to drift about in the inspection space. The upper of the resulting openings was capped. The lower was joined by a U-shaped bend to another pipe, which went straight back down through the rock at the bottom of the hollow and presumably to the reserve tank. Between the ends of the original pipe was a cable. On the cable was a small instrument almost covered by a lump of tarry substance that smelled vaguely nitrous, and might have been used to stick the instrument to the wire.