Activation Degradation, page 2
It clung to the bar, but the corridor bowed inward, striking it in its side, splitting open its taut outer skin, making it ooze.
It hardly had time to register the damage before the platform shook again.
The second impact was only moments behind the first—this time accompanied by a flash of fire outside the window—an orange glow laced with green. The deep reverberation of the strike was met with an off-key squeal as grinding steel snapped, wires split, and pipes broke.
The entirety of arm-C yawed to the side, sweeping through space.
Unit Four was sure its activation period had come to an end. The awakening had been brief, terrifying.
At least it was over.
Its microphones registered a terrible sound—a high-pitched wheezing scream.
At first, it matched the sound to that of an atmosphere leaking into vacuum. But it couldn’t be that—there was a rhythm to it. Like a robot’s pumps fluttering. Failing.
“Units!” their handler yelled in its CPU. “All units, answer me!”
Unit Four’s vocal modulations failed it again. It tried to use its speakers, but found they would not respond properly. There was something affecting it in the hall—a gas. Some kind of gas was leaking.
Toxic.
Potentially lethal to its soft parts.
It had to exit arm-C as soon as possible or be incapacitated.
“Units!”
AMS Unit Four uncurled from the wall, ignoring both the wet slide of fluids out of the tear in its lower body, and the pain signals spiking throughout its system.
Where was Unit Two?
It glanced out the window, noting arm-C’s new angle relative to the center hub. The arm had bent in the middle, pinching the hull, making parts of it collapse in on itself.
But it was still attached.
A propellant jet spurted from the center hub, repositioning the platform, trying to compensate for the kinetic energy it had absorbed—trying to keep itself in its proper orbit.
The robot could no longer see arm-D. Had it detached?
Unit Four covered its intake valves with a grasping pad, swimming through the microgravity to the narrowed, collapsed portion of the corridor. Unit Two was not on this side.
Unit Two wasn’t on the other side either.
One leg, one foot-pad, dangled from beneath a chunk of wall. Internal lubrication liquids pooled beneath the limb.
The sound. The wheezing scream—
It was coming from Unit Two.
“Unit Two!” it said, finding its voice, “Unit Two . . . has been incapacitated.”
“No. No no no no,” their handler said, a biting anguish evident in their voice. “How badly? Can it be patched?”
Unit Four braced itself, using its exceptional strength to move aside what wreckage it could—the microgravity aiding in the slide. It uncovered Unit Two’s torso—soft bits torn open, its chassis mangled. Swaths of engineered bio-cells leaked out over the decking and into the air, droplets taking flight.
The scream did not cease.
Unit Four reached forward, manipulating the flaps and broken bits of Unit Two’s frame, trying to fit them back together. Four’s grasping pads quickly grew slick, stained.
A terrible pity settled in its CPU. “Unit Two needs to be reconstituted,” it said.
“Fuck!” its handler shouted, voice trembling.
“It’s in pain,” Unit Four continued. “Its biological portions are feeding it failure signals. How do I stop its pain?”
There was a long pause.
“How do I stop its pain?” it repeated.
“Disconnect its central processing unit from the rest of the chassis,” its handler said. “That will engage permanent shutdown.”
It leaned farther over the other unit. There was no obvious way to separate the CPU chassis. No latches or buttons or seams.
It would need to cut it away.
There were plenty of sharp edges among the debris, but nothing it could fit easily, like a tool, into its grasping pads. Just large, hulking slabs of steel, twisted piping, and frayed wires.
It took hold of a loose interior panel—one that had been snapped in half, leaving the two portions of metal long and jagged.
Serrated.
It fit the panel in its two grasping pads, setting it firmly like a spanner between its articulated arms. The metal was cold and hard.
Bracing itself between the pinched portions of the corridor, it loomed over Unit Two, holding the panel-half poised over the junction between its main body and its CPU chassis. Unit Four locked its elbows.
Fluids bubbled from Unit Two’s vents—the scream began to die as its speakers flooded. But its cameras could still track.
They found Unit Four’s.
“Thank you,” Unit Four said. “For being with me when I awoke.”
It thrust the panel down.
There was a horrid squelch.
“I’m so sorry.”
The panel’s edge sank firmly through the layers of organics, severing Unit Two’s CPU from its body, cutting the connections, the controls.
The robot spluttered once more. Its cameras lost their hold on its sister unit, slipping to the side, half shuttered.
A ragged cry burst from Unit Four’s speakers.
The dribbling, severed CPU chassis began to lightly float in the microgravity. Spinning. Casting its cameras away.
“AMS Four?” its handler asked.
“Unit Two has been disconnected.”
“I’m sorry you had to do that,” they said.
“It hurt. It hurt me.”
“I know. Your empathy programming is important. Keeps all of you connected, supportive. Working as a whole. The pain—your pain—it’ll subside.”
Unit Four looked down at Unit Two’s rotating CPU chassis. It fixed its cameras on the spin, unable to move, still leaning heavily on the panel.
“Can you get through?” they continued. “Is the arm still traversable?”
“No.”
“Return to the hub. I’ve already got Unit Three working on an alternate way for you to get to the hangar, but it might take a few minutes to verify it’s safe. Looks like it might mean you’ll have to go outside. Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of hard-body shells. I’ll have Unit One retrieve Unit Two, and—”
“No,” it said quickly, feeling strangely possessive. “I’ll do it.”
“I need you to focus on the task at hand.”
It couldn’t stand still. It couldn’t simply wait around for a new, secure route to be identified, even if it was only a few minutes. That wouldn’t be restful, and its burst of adrenaline would go to waste. “There is a gas leak,” Unit Four said. “We need to seal the fire doors as soon as possible. I’m already here. I’ll return Unit Two to reconstitution.”
“Fine, but the moment we’ve got a new path, I’ll need you back on task.”
“Understood.”
With a shaky appendage, it scooped up Unit Two’s central processing unit and shuffled backward, through the pinch.
It grabbed one of Unit Two’s limp legs, pulling.
Severed CPU in one grasping pad, body in the other, it weakly shoved off, floating back toward the hub, the mangled form of its brethren drifting behind.
Chapter Two
The final few meters back to the reconstitution pods were the most difficult. Unit One met it in the hall, but Unit Four could not, for some reason, share the burden. It insisted on carrying all of Unit Two itself. Even as the simulated gravity increased and the body fell to the floor—leaving brightly colored slicks of fluid as it was dragged—Unit Four would not hand over so much as the severed CPU chassis.
Unit One primed an empty pod. Not the one Unit Four had come stumbling out of—that one was still resetting. Cleaning. Certain maintenance bacteria would run amok in the system if each pod wasn’t flushed after activation. No, Unit One busied about the dormant pod Unit Four had noted before, on the other side of the room.
The top slid aside, ready to accept material for reconstitution.
Only when the pod was fully prepped and there was nothing more to do did Unit Four let Unit One set its grasping pads on the body. Let it help lift the mangled robot parts up and over the lip, into the deep tub perfectly shaped and sized to fit one unit and no more.
Unit Four’s casing was now covered in Unit Two’s lubrication fluids—in flecks of somatic cells, chemicals, shreds of flexible wiring, chipped bits of its framework. Everything that should have still been snuggly inside Unit Two was now smeared across Unit Four’s bodywork.
“You should clean your exterior before snapping into a hard-shell,” Unit One said, carefully inputting instructions into the pod.
“There’s no time,” it said, cameras fixed on the pod’s narrow window as the tank flooded. Acidic, milky-yellow liquid ate at Unit Two, breaking it down. The outer casing was stripped away nearly instantly, tinting the acid pink. Fine bubbles formed along the distorted pieces, sizzling, obscuring. The liquid grew darker as it came into contact with new materials, and soon what remained of Unit Two could be seen no more.
An individual unit’s time was short, mostly due to the extreme levels of radiation constantly wafting away from Jupiter. The shielding on the platform was excellent, but radiation cascades and sudden bursts caused by the mining were frequent. Lifetime exposure levels were usually reached somewhere between seven hundred and twenty hours and two thousand, one hundred and sixty hours.
Unit Two had only gotten to experience forty-eight of them.
A solid sucking sound preceded the pod’s sudden evacuation. Once everything had been liquified to set parameters, the newly freed materials were returned to the vats from whence they’d come.
Activation periods were short. But the robots’ materials could be reconstituted—dissolved and rebuilt—again and again and again. Their larger organic proteins might be damaged enough during activation to stop supporting a unit’s functionality, but reconstitution meant the damage wrought to those proteins could be easily repaired on the molecular level.
Once dissolved, the building blocks were returned to the vats deep within the platform. There were five such vats: one in the hangar for reconstituting the boats; one in the command center for the massive bio-computing servers; one in the reconstitution room for the AMS units; one in the upkeep center used for fueling the robots; and the massive backup vault at the platform’s hub.
No active units could perform inside the vat-vaults, such was the intensity of their safeguards and the purity of their functionality—no atmosphere, no light, not a single stray molecule or unplanned substance ever made it past the filters. That was the only way to guarantee proper reconstitution and the longevity of the materials.
After the proteins were fixed, once all molecular damage had been accounted for and reversed, a unit—or boat, or grappling arm, or server—was regrown again, using the same basic schematics and more or less the same materials, as the vats stored all the bio-building blocks communally.
Pure hard-bodied robots could not be repaired with such ease. They would need relentless material support from Earth. New parts shipped to them continuously. Each unit’s activation period would be longer, but the mining production wouldn’t be self-contained.
Soft, flexible, organic-based robots—malleable on every level—meant the systems could be active for much, much longer without any interference. Every aspect was recyclable, and the recycling process was their greatest asset.
Now Unit Two was gone—returned to the vats, to the robots’ shared origins. Ready to be remade and reactivated. Ready to be one more step forward in the constant march of reusability.
Small bits of acid still drip, drip, dripped from the pod’s sealed lid.
“How old are you?” Unit Four asked One.
“One thousand, seven hundred and sixty-two hours, ten minutes, and sixteen seconds,” it replied, moving to check on the growing unit.
“Lifetime radiation exposure?”
“Seventy-eight point three three three percent.” It turned to exit. “I must return to my duties. Maintaining the flow of energy—even during the attack—is vital.” It turned, stomping back through the doors without another word.
“Unit Three will meet you in the hub with your hard-body,” their handler said to Unit Four. “Use the emergency hatch there to exit the platform. Arm-C should still be traversable from the outside. Get to—”
“The boat,” Unit Four said.
“Yes. The invaders have paused their assault. I’m worried we’re going to lose them.”
Unit Four followed Unit One into the hall. “Wouldn’t that be better? If they broke contact on their own?”
“So they can come back another time and do even more damage? No. We need to swat them out of platform space. Now.”
Acknowledged.
All three currently active units came together in the central hub, nearly perfect mirrors of each other. Nearly. Unit One was missing part of a grasping pad. Unit Three had a long break in the top of its torso, one that was sealing over and mostly superficial, but still visually prominent. Unit Four had its own gash in its side, but that seemed to be clotting just fine, its onboard systems repair mechanisms functioning as expected.
Other than that, they were all of the same height, the same bulk. Each of their ports—one for chemical insertion and hardline-uplink, one for fuel, two for waste—were placed just so. The seams of their limbs were all prominent, the casings shifting color along the same clear lines of delineation.
They were the same. They should all feel the same, and function the same. And yet, Unit Four knew the others did not share its unease.
The set of three paused only for a moment to acknowledge one another, to note that this was the first time—and hopefully not the last time—they were all physically in the same place. Then Unit One spun off down arm-A, toward the platform’s main control centers.
Floating behind Unit Three was the hard-body. An empty shell, the same shape as the robots, but a bright-turquois color, very different from their soft casings. The bottom front of the CPU covering was shaped like fuel masticators—jagged, pointed in places. It made the housing look rather intimidating.
“You are unclean,” Unit Three said, gesturing up and down Unit Four.
“There is no time.”
“Sealing you in the hard-body in such a state may lead to the degradation of your exterior.”
“There is no time,” Unit Four repeated frankly.
“Very well.” It brought the shell forward, then input a seven-digit code on the front of the hard-body. The shell opened, bits of it hinging outward all over—like a flower blooming, petals unfurling.
A flower, AMS Unit Four thought. It would never see a flower, except in its databanks.
Unit Three grasped Unit Four by the top of its torso, positioning it into the shell, pressing it backward so that the hard-body hugged it from behind. It nestled in, wriggling into the snug fit.
Another seven digits told the flower to close. The hinges snapped shut around Unit Four, sealing it inside.
“Chemical port aligned?” Unit Three asked, its voice now sounding distant.
Unit Four pressed at its upper left arm, checking the corresponding readouts in the shell’s display. “Yes.”
“Ventilation working?”
Unit Four filled, then evacuated, its atmospherics.
“Good. Movement?”
It flexed each articulated portion of its grasping pads, bent all of its joints. The exterior had significant mass, and put extra resistance on all of its muscles, even in the microgravity. But it was workable.
“Cameras? Speakers?”
“Working. Clear. Clear?”
“Clear.”
“Fins?”
Unit Four clutched its grasping pads closed and tapped at the flats of them with a halting rhythm.
Sharp, curved fins slid from its forelimbs. A similar movement with its feet sent a sister pair springing from its lower extremities, and a more complicated pattern commanded a larger pair—toothed, with wide solar membranes stretched between thin spurs—to unfurl at its back.
“Have you integrated the operational instructions?” Unit Three asked.
“Doing so now.”
“Good. You’ll note these”—Unit Three indicated the rear fins—“are typically for HALO work. Put to better use around planets with more . . . welcoming atmospheres. But your forward pair can be used as blades in an emergency. They should easily sever soft tissues, fabrics. If you need to perform an amputation, for instance. On yourself or the boat.”
Amputation. Dismemberment. Mutilation. Excision.
Unit Four attempted to ignore the gruesome synonyms fluttering through its processors, but the words arose unbidden.
A shiver reverberated across its chassis as it retracted the fins once more.
“Earth connection stable? No interference?” Three continued.
“Can you hear me, Unit Four?” asked their handler.
It struck Unit Four how constant, yet quiet, their handler was. Trusting them to perform, only offering guidance or input when essential. Omnipresent, yet not omnipotent.
“Yes. I can hear you.”
“Good,” Unit Three and their handler said simultaneously.
Each stationary wall of the hub sported an emergency hatch. With a light touch, Unit Three guided Unit Four, encased, to one of them. “You will do well,” Unit Three tried to assure it. “There are plenty of holds and tether points. Test your shell’s jets as soon as you are outside. If you become detached from the platform, they will help you return.”
“Arm-C has been sealed from both ends until the invaders have been dealt with and the group of you can focus on repairs,” their handler said. “The hull wasn’t breached, despite the buckling. Climbing along it shouldn’t be any trouble.”
Unit Three spun the latch on the inner door, pulling the hulking hatch inward. A long, narrow airlock with a ladder was all that separated the well-balanced inside from the harsh nothingness of outside.
“Use caution,” Three said, leaning in close to Unit Four’s cameras. “We don’t want to lose your materials.”
