Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

Within a relatively short time, the sphere enclosing the Gros Horloge primary began to coalesce under the manipulators of a horde of mindless automatons ranging from the subatomic to the celestial in size. At that point, Trurl and Klapaucius moved their quarters to the sphere’s airless outer surface, erecting an even grander manse than before.

Trurl spoke now with evident self-satisfaction and pride. “Soon we’ll be ready to begin fuelling, while we construct the actual time-travel engine inside the sphere. I estimate that both assignments should be done about the same time. Which task would you prefer to handle, my friend?”

“Gathering up crumbs of dark energy and dark matter strikes me as a mindless chore, unfit for either of us. I propose that we construct a captain for this vessel, so to speak, of limited intelligence, who shall deal with that little matter for us.”

“Splendid! To the birthing factory!”

At the controls of the birthing factory, the master constructors began to consider what kind of assistant they wanted.

Trurl said, “I propose that we make our new comrade-in-arms a female. This gathering job strikes me as essentially feminine, rather like housekeeping. Sweeping up galactic debris, don’t you know. And the females of our sort are always more meticulous and persevering and common-sensical than we males, who tend to let bold dreams of glory divert us from more mundane yet necessary pursuits.”

“Well spoken, comrade! What shall we call this new woman?”

“Much of the dark matter that will be under her purview consists of neutrinos. Might we call her Neu Trina?”

“I myself could not have devised a better cognomen for this cog in our plans. Neu Trina she shall be!”

The two master constructors now fiddled with various inputs, adjusting them for maximum utility, maximum beauty, and minimal intelligence. “No sense giving her too many brains, or she’d soon grow bored and chafe at her duties.”

Out of the factory delivery chute soon rolled Neu Trina.

She was a stunning example of the female of her cyber-species. Approximately one-third the size of her creators, Neu Trina possessed gleaming Harlie-One Stacks, trim little Forbins, long, graceful diamond struts, shiny HAL eyes, and sturdy Mistress Mike redundancy buffers. Her polished nailguns, plump ATV tires and burnished chrome skin made her the perfect Mad-MEMS-oiselle.

Trurl and Klapaucius stood rather dumbstruck at the unforeseen beauty of their creation. The small inanimate models of Neu Trina that had emerged from the 3-D printer during the design stage had failed to convey the sexy rumble and lissome, coy, flirtatious manoeuvres of her chassis.

“Hello, boys!” Neu Trina batted the heavy meteor shields that served her as eyelids. The airless artificial sphere they resided on would necessarily sustain dangerous impacts from many cosmic objects during its journeying.

Trurl replied, “Heh-heh-hello!”

Klapaucius tried to assert some male dignity and an air of command. “Neu Trina, you are to assume your duties immediately. We have downloaded into your registers the peta-parsec route we have planned for the Gros Horloge Construct. It will take our sphere through the richest charted concentrations of universal dark matter and dark energy. Your job will be to maximize the harvest and protect the ‘ship.’”

“Sure thing, Klappy. Just let me get dressed first. I certainly don’t mind you boys seeing me naked, but who knows what creeps we’ll meet on this mission? I’m not giving out free shows to every blackhole boffin and asteroid-dweller out there.”

Immediately a spontaneous swarm of repair bots concealed Neu Trina’s shapely form. (She had been given control over them all in order to perform her job.) They spun out vast swaths of lurid lurex and promiscuous polymer fabric, enough to cover a good-sized island. Soon Neu Trina was pirouetting to display her new garments.

“What do you think, boys? Does it show off my sine curves nice enough?”

“Oh, yes, Neu Trina,” Trurl gushed. “You look marvellous!”

Klapaucius’s voice was sharp. “Trurl! Come with me!”

The two master constructors trundled off, leaving Neu Trina humming a tune from Mannequin of La Machina gaily to herself and decorating her captain’s command post with steel daisies and hologram roses.

Some distance away, Klapaucius confronted his partner. “What’s come over you, Trurl? You’re acting like a simpering schoolbot! Neu Trina is our slave mechanism. She was created solely to perform a boring task we abjured.”

Trurl’s voice was peevish. “I don’t see anything wrong with being polite, even to a servo. And besides, she seems to like me.”

“ Like you! You ! She treated both of us equally, so far as I could detect.”

“Perhaps. But she certainly won’t continue to do so, if you maintain a bossy and insensitive attitude toward her.”

“Trurl, this is all beside the point. You and I have a big job ahead of us. We need to construct our time-travel engine inside the sphere, then retrieve the palefaces from the past, in order to save our millennium from total apathy. That’s our focus, not dalliance with some hyper-hussy, no matter how seductive, how sweet, how streamlined— I mean, no matter how irritatingly winsome she is. Are we agreed?”

Trurl reluctantly squeezed out an “Agreed.”

“Very well. Let’s descend now.”

The constructors entered an open hatch that took them inside the vast sphere. The big heavy door closed automatically, and, as it did, it severed two remote sensing devices slyly trained on Neu Trina, one long slinky probe emanating from each of the two constructors.

Down in the solar-lit interior of the sphere, Trurl and Klapaucius laboured long and hard to build the trans-chronal engine that would breach the walls of the ages.

The myriad tasks involved in Trurl’s elaborate plan seemed endless.

They had to burnish by hand millions of spiky crystals composed of frozen Planck-seconds, labouriously mined from the only known source: the wreckage of the interstellar freighter Llvvoovv , which had been carrying a cargo of overclocker chips when it had strayed too near to a flock of solitons. Hundreds of thousands of simultaneity nodes had to be filled with the purest molten paradoxium. A thousand gnomon-calibrators had to be synched. Hundreds of lightcones had to be focused on various event horizons. Dozens of calendrical packets had to be inserted between the yesterday, today and tomorrow shock absorbers. And at the centre of the whole mechanism a giant orrery replicating an entire quadrant of the universe had to be precisely set in place. This was the mechanism by which the time-travelling Gros Horloge Construct, or GHC, could orient itself spatially when jumping to prior segments of the spacetime continuum.

All these tasks were the smallest part of their agenda. And needless to say, all this work could not be delegated to lesser intelligences, but had to be handled personally by the master constructors themselves.

Trurl and Klapaucius went to these tasks with a will. Really, there was nothing they enjoyed more than reifying their brain-children, getting their hands dirty, so to speak, at the interface where dreams met matter.

So busy and preoccupied were they, in fact, that three entire centuries passed before they had occasion to visit the surface of the GHC once more.

They monitored the dark energy and dark matter capacitors on a regular basis, and saw that these reservoirs were filling up according to schedule. They received frequent progress reports from Neu Trina via subetheric transmission, and found all to be satisfactory with her piloting. (True, the sensuous subsonics of her voice, each time a transmission arrived, awakened in the master constructors certain tender and tremulous emotions. But such feelings were transient, and were quickly submerged in the cerebral and palpable delights of building. While the master constructors were as healthily lustful as the next bot, their artistry trumped all other pursuits.)