Aurona, page 17
“Stop! Stop right now!” He ran out into the midst of the throng, waving the potholder over his head. “It’s all right!”
Joelle tagged closely behind him, sobbing and shuddering uncontrollably. In turn, an entourage of women surrounded her, swatting the insects off her shoulders and doing their level best to comfort each other. They winced in revulsion as Adam threw his potholder away and held the wriggling form in his bare hand.
“They’re ours!” he shouted. “They have writing on the bottom!
The scrunching stopped. What did he say?
“These blasted things are man-made!!” he affirmed. “They’re robots!”
The crew kept a wary distance, watching him as he oh-so-carefully turned over what appeared to be a shiny black marble with legs, studying it in minute detail. He looked up. “I dunno. Not a thing was mentioned in my holo-recordings about these little guys. I can see that they’re definitely mechanical. I don’t know what they are yet, or what they do, but I assure you we’re gonna get to the bottom of this!”
Joelle pulled away from her clinging, weeping circle. She looked beat. There were hundreds of tiny, round, red suction marks all over her face. “I’m sorry, sir,” she sniffed. “I-I didn’t mean to….”
“Where’d you find these?” he interrupted. “Show me.”
They retraced her fateful route through the kitchen, stepping gingerly over piles of squashed, metallic rubble. Kron motioned hurriedly for a small group to follow. Along the back corridor, the creeping forms had invaded everywhere. Apparently, the geckolike suction cups on the tips of their feet enabled them to climb anything, so they skulked around seeking darkness, anchoring their feet with a wiggle as they settled into crevices.
The bucket lay on the floor just as she’d left it, with the thin booklet spread-eagled off to the side. As Adam pushed at it with his toe, a lone, black form skittered out. He caught the robotoid quickly, handed it to Kron, and then grabbed the book.
As he flipped through the manual with growing excitement, Joelle hugged her chest protectively, shuddering from the core of her being. Her eyes swept suspiciously around the darkened room. Her disheveled hair was still moving, now hopelessly knotted with dark, struggling shapes.
“Holy cow!” he burst. The men crowded around his elbow to see, but he pulled the book away, mischievously covering the title with his hand. “You’re not gonna believe this, guys! The black glass bubble over the center shields an advanced nano-holocamera, an improved, miniaturized version of the black sphere. It says here that these things are used mainly for surveillance!”
“Surveillance?” Kron interrupted. “What are they?”
He pulled his hand away and pointed at the title. The single, capitalized word in bold face type prompted a round of laughter all around. Even Joelle stifled a smirk.
“Spyders!” They tossed the name back and forth. “Get it? Spy?”
Adam eagerly turned his eyes back to the text. “Wait! Wait! There’s more!”
Kron shouted back, grinning. “Tell us, sir!”
“Listen to this, guys! The name’s an acronym, and states the robotoid’s purpose! Think hard now and spell out all the letters: S-P-Y-D-E-R! The room fell to a puzzled silence. “Any clues? Ready?” he teased. “It’s a whopper! All six letters, now!”
They made hurrying motions with their hands.
“Sophisticated Photo-Yielding Devices for Extraterrestrial Reconnaissance!”
An appreciative round of whistles, hoots, laughter, and applause swept the room. One of the crew sprinted down the corridor to the kitchen with the update, and immediately there was a distant cheer. Joelle snatched the book away from Adam in a huff to read the title, her mouth a tight, hard line. “Men!” she snipped, and flounced out of the room, recoiling at the icky arachnoids covering the doorway.
Adam looked up with a start. “G-get her!” he wheezed, stifling his laughter. “We need that book! We gotta find out more about these, ah….”
“Bugs!” Tola cut in and guffawed loudly. The men lost it again. Bumping into each other in haste, they crowded out of the narrow doorway.
It was now an amazingly different group in the mess hall. Everyone was totally over their fear and had scooped up handfuls of the robotoids. Even a few women were gingerly passing the bugs around, holding them by the tips of their legs. As Adam reclaimed the book, a noisy group huddled around him to get briefed.
Off to the side, Joelle’s entourage clustered tightly around her, whispering condolences. It was evident that the Spyders were hopelessly tangled in her long hair, so she gave permission to one of the women to cut it closer to her head in a short, pixy style. Her long, frazzled blonde locks fell in moving clumps to the floor.
Elena pulled up a chair, holding her hand. “You seem to have the regulation arachnophobia, Joelle,” she probed. “Bad experience, or something?”
Joelle shuddered as a deeply imbedded memory flooded back.
“C’mon, hon, you can tell us,” someone soothed. “What happened?”
She closed her eyes and sighed. “Well, it all started because of those cats.”
Their eyes blinked. “Cats?”
“Yeah, when I was a little girl my mom used to raise show cats, mostly chinchilla Persians and Himalayas. Well, anyway, one day one of her prize kittens got away and ran into the neighbor’s yard. The people next door were real slobs; you know the kind: hoarders? They collected old cars and piles of junk, never mowed their lawn….” Her big blue eyes opened impossibly wide as her story unfolded. “I’m talking forest here. I got lost in all that stuff when I ran after the kitten! Well, all of a sudden I tripped over a tangle of wires and fell into this huge mud puddle, and…,” she shuddered deeply, from her toes.
“And?” they prompted, all concerned.
“And there I was, flat on my back, absolutely covered with brownish, greenish goo, and this humongous spider’s web!” She cringed in revulsion. “His-his TV dinners were all over me!!
Someone snorted nearby. The men’s backs had been turned and they were poking each other, holding their sides in silent laughter.
Joelle shot them a disdainful look and continued, unperturbed. “Well, when I finally realized what could’ve made a web that size, I screamed, and….”
“And?” they all prompted nervously.
“‘He came out! I screamed, my mom came flying out the back door….”
“He?” they chorused.
“Mega ‘he’! Colossal ‘he’! You know, the kind that have those icky, hairy yellow legs and the big knapsacks?”
They all grimaced. Yes, they knew. Knapsacks: the ultimate gross-out.
Joelle seemed almost possessed, wringing her hands in revulsion and picking imaginary bits off her sleeves. Teary-eyed, the women hugged her.
Adam held up his hands. “Okay, okay! Show’s over, everyone! We’ve had intermission, and now it’s time for Act II! Everybody back up to the Observatory Room!” He checked his wrist programmer. “Those crates should be there!”
They trooped out of the cafeteria in excitement, their hands full of Spyders. The elevators were quickly filled to capacity so most took to the spiral stairs, looking like a swarm of slate blue ants as they corkscrewed upward. Adam beat them all. As they began to arrive he was already standing in front of the big screen with his face buried in the Spyder manual, boning up on the specs. Tola nudged him out of his concentration.
“Holy cow! How’d you get up here so quickly, sir? Did you fly?”
He looked up, distracted. “Oh, um, no. Private speed elevator.” The book pulled his nose back downward, almost like a magnet. “Ah, gimme a minute,” he mumbled. “This is great stuff, Tola!”
Chuckling, the round man slipped away to talk with Kron. They quickly formed a team and took charge, settling the crew down as they arrived, shushing them and waving them onto their cushions.
Adam stood riveted to the spot, deeply engrossed and oblivious to all the activity around him. Only when the noise level had finally subsided to a whisper did he look up. His eyes gave him away. Their look of wonder and unbridled excitement spread like a silent wildfire through the great round room.
“Wow.” He let out a long breath. “It says that these, ah, bugs, are miniature versions of our holocameras. They send out the same digitized, coded signals, but the main difference is that your Explorer’s Helmets can project the signals inside your face shields in real time! Think about it! These Spyders are miniature, mobile 3D TV holocameras! What they see, you see, as it happens!”
A whistle of appreciation escaped from their lips, echoing his enthusiasm. Joelle’s incident in quarantine was behind them now, left somewhere far away. They zeroed in on Adam as he turned a page in the manual.
“Wow! According to this inventory, we should have thousands of these Spyders in storage! They’ve been mass-produced on nano-robotoid assembly lines and they’re to be considered as expendable. That small bucket of Spyders Joelle, ah, ‘found’ in the quarantine room had been prepped and cleaned for introduction into an alien environment!”
He started reading. “The Spyder’s locomotion is threefold: it can walk, hop, or fly.” He looked up with a start. “Fly?” He pulled a featherweight Spyder out of his pocket and tossed it into the air. Incredibly, the black marble shape seemed to hang motionless for a moment, then begin to slowly descend. Pulling his eyes away, he read on excitedly. “‘The smooth airfoil shape is actually an ultralight lifting body, flat on the bottom and rounded on the top. When sensors on the tips of the legs signal it’s airborne, an internal mini gyroscope is activated. The guidance computer stiffens all the bimetallic strips, straightening the legs out to steer with their flattened and enlarged suction tips.’”
They were all watching the speck descend gracefully, like a piece of feather from a down pillow. Suddenly it flipped over, the big holo-eye pointing downward. The crew’s eyes darted back to Adam.
“I-I dunno,” he shrugged, “the book doesn’t tell me everything. Maybe its logic circuits are looking for a place to land?” Upside down, the Spyder steered purposefully toward him, tilting its flattened suction cups at minute angles and using them as both air brakes and rudders. It got to a few inches from his bare arm, flipped over, and landed gracefully. He tried to pry it loose, but the strong, strangely moist suction tips gripped tenaciously. Suddenly, there was a cool puff against his hand. He looked up at the crew, aghast.
That odor again!! Scrambling over each other in haste, the people in the front rows scooted away on their cushions. Adam leaped out of the purple cloud flapping his arms and holding his breath, reading the manual in desperation.
“Aha!” His finger jabbed at an illustration. “Here it is! The stink! There’s a cross-sectional diagram of the Spyder under ‘Defense Mechanisms’! The putrid, purple stink is the Spyder’s first line of defense!” He fanned the air with the book. “I’d say it’s more like offense! Enough said about that!”
They laughed only with their eyes; their hands were clamped tightly over their mouths.
“Jumping?” Someone offered weakly. “How about ‘jumping’?
“Yes, yes, let’s press on,” Adam agreed, stifling his persistent smile. “Jumping. They walk, hop, or fly. Let’s see: evidently these little fuzzy logic creatures can sense danger approaching. Remember I mentioned bimetallic strips? Their legs are constructed with…. Oh, just listen to the jargon, it’s way too technical to paraphrase.”
Concentrating, he bent to read. “‘Their legs are constructed with a closely integrated combination of micromotors and layered bimetallic strips, fired in a variety of programmed sequences in direct reaction to input from biofeedback sensors and logic circuits. Jumping, therefore, is the simplest of functions: all legs are fired at once, in effect flicking the Spyder into the air. In an Earth-gravity situation, Spyders can jump over seventy times their own diameter,’” he stopped, amazed. “Wow! That’s about twelve feet!”
The crew was duly impressed. While it was true that most of these concepts had existed for decades and if taken separately each idea was relatively simple, the total product formed a true synergism, serendipitously conceived by the minds and hands of brilliant artisans and engineers. Like their starship, these jumping Spyders seemed to have taken a quantum leap of their own into the future.
He bent back eagerly to the text, now paraphrasing in haste. “Their power is entirely solar, with a retentive storage capacity of well over fifty years.” He looked up with a start. “The light! That’s it! They sprang back to life when Joelle tipped over their bucket and the room lights hit them!”
“Ta-da-a-ah!” Joelle leapt to her feet triumphantly, gamely waving a Spyder in each hand.
As the laughter died down, a loud clunking greeted their ears. They spun around to see the bronze doors to the Observatory Room thumping and swinging open, signaling an end to the subject. Three sweating men backed in, pulling a line of floating barges. One of them turned around, red faced. “Ah, sorry, sir, we-we got lost! This is a huge ship!”
Adam shrugged. “That’s fine, we were all, ah, distracted! You can park the barges right where you are. If you want some food, take a trip back downstairs to the cafeteria and get a quick bite, or just grab some snacks over there.”
They glanced at each other. “Just snacks, sir,” the first man affirmed. “We’re, ah, dyin’ to know what’s in these crates, too!” They scanned the crowd nervously.
Out in the center of the room, Dexor’s smoldering eyes caught theirs. As he raised a single, questioning brow, one of the three discreetly shook his head and shrugged, then glanced pleadingly at his companions for support. Dexor’s jaw dropped in disbelief.
As Adam stood in front of the big screen waiting for silence, he used his wrist programmer to do a quick roll call, counting their PIL signals. After a moment, it flashed in a steady pulse and started to beep loudly. “NOT FOUND: TODD. NOT FOUND….” As the crew turned to him in surprise, he glanced up.
“Jon, have you seen your brother lately?”
“No, sir. I looked everywhere for him and then ran up here, thinking he might have followed the crowd. I was just about to sneak out and go look for him.”
Wow, Todd was missing! An anxious buzz went up.
“Oh, by the way, guys, thanks for swallowing your PILs. It made this demonstration easy.” The bleeping suddenly increased in tempo and volume, and his grin widened. “Well, whaddaya know, Todd’s coming … and on the run, I might add! His PIL signal just entered a twenty-yard radius I set on my ‘LOCATE’ function.”
An anxious Todd slipped into the room, wiping the last of his breakfast from his face. Most likely he’d wandered off somewhere along the way to look for stars on a big flatscreen monitor. Red-faced, Jon sat him down to explain everything, whispering in his ear. Todd looked downcast, squirming uneasily on his pillow.
“Thank you, Todd!” Adam smiled. “Yes, thanks for this opportunity to demonstrate a vital function to all your friends! And Jon, will you now please lock your wrist programmer onto your brother’s PIL frequency and set it to a ten-yard radius?” His gaze caught the boy’s anxious eyes. “Yes, Todd, Jon’s helping you to be an even better shadow now!” The boy smiled, visibly relieved.
Adam turned back to the crew. “You know, guys, I do want to see what’s in those crates as much as you do, but first I feel it’s more important for us to nail the operation of these wrist programmers. They’re quite unique: I purchased them back on Earth from a company my grandfather used to own. He left instructions for me to buy only these specific models and add about 10 terabytes of programmable memory. Why these specific models and why so much memory? I found out that as we slept in our pods, they connected themselves to the ship’s mainframe with some sort of Bluetooth and were completely reprogrammed from their original purpose.”
Almost involuntarily, nearly everyone held out their arms, checking out their wrist programmer in this new light. As they started to poke at them in earnest, they quickly discovered many menus they were unaware of.
Adam continued. “These things are a cinch to learn. In reality, they’re just simple transceivers with a series of menus, submenus, and codes for their functions. They’re all exactly the same, but mine’s way larger, with about 50 terabytes and one additional function….” He slipped his programmer off his wrist and held it up. “Direct control of this starship. So let’s make it fast! I’ll demonstrate the most important features in five minutes, tops.”
Dexor squirmed, nervously squishing his pocket to make sure his PIL was there. Yes, there it was, he could feel the lump. Wow, direct control of the starship! He flipped his collar up furtively, adjusting a switch to transmit Adam’s message more clearly into a tiny, hidden recorder.
After Adam’s short class in programming, the large chests were opened. A group of excited volunteers passed around stacks of strange-looking medical equipment, mini transporters, communicators, and radical, special-use clothing. Soon, except for the flat, featureless rectangle under each crate, they were totally empty.
He stood up. “Okay. At this point, I hereby turn over complete explanation of all these strange items to the only human in the universe, with the possible exception of my grandfather, who could possibly know more than me how they work!” He turned and nodded to his second in command.
Smiling, Kron stood there quietly, holding up a finger. “Wait a sec,” he announced, looking over the equipment. “Yes, these seem to be duplicates of my Bitron models.” He looked up. “Would you three guys please lift the last of the empty crates off the antigrav slabs? Just carry them out into the hallway for now.” As they jumped to his bidding, he explained. “Since you guys now know how your programmer’s ‘LOCATE’ function works, I’m going to give you a practical demo….”
