Michael Kube-McDowell - Odyssey

When he was done, his own fatigue was pressing in on him. He placed Alpha in a wait-state, then unrolled the thin cushion in an open spot of floor and stretched out. The cushion did little to make the floorplates less hard. He supposed that Aranimas, slender as he was, would have found it entirely suitable. But Derec turned restlessly from back to side to stomach in a fruitless quest for a comfortable position.

How long had it been since he had slept? Thirty hours? Forty? He had started the day a reluctant prisoner of the robots, and now he was an even more reluctant prisoner of the raiders. I really should go snooping, he thought. He could not let the opportunity pass. Perhaps the absence of a guard was an oversight that would be corrected tomorrow.

I’ll just lie here for an hour or so, he told himself, make sure that Aranimas isn’t going to show up, give Wolruf a chance to settle in. Then it’ll be safe. I can rest a little while. This poor excuse for a bed is too hard to sleep on anyway-

He was wrong. One moment he was closing his eyes against the uncomfortably bright light which he had not been told how to douse. The next, he was rubbing sleep out of those eyes, gingerly stretching sore muscles, and bemoaning his own foul breath. The room was in semidarkness, but Wolruf was crouching in the doorway, silhouetted against the well-lit corridor.

“Iss it done yet?” Wolruf asked brightly.

“Eat space and die,” Derec growled, and threw the nearest rock-sized bit of robot scrap in Wolruf’s direction. The caninoid snatched it neatly out of the air and threw it back in one motion.

“No thanks,” she said with a curled-lip grin. “I already ‘ad breakfast.”

Though there was running water in the Personal, there was no provision for a shower or bath. Derec settled for sponging himself off, though there were no blowers and the only toweling available was harsh and scratchy. By the time he emerged, Wolruf was nowhere in sight. Derec wondered if she had perhaps stopped by only to waken him and would not be coming back.

Thinking that it wouldn’t take him long to get tired of the fare, he carried another meal of biscuits, cheese, and honey back to the lab. Settling at the workbench, he resumed work on the robot’s right arm. The electrical connections were sound, but the servo linkages were damaged beyond Derec’s ability to repair. His efforts to do so only made things worse. Whatever skill he had was cybernetic, not electromechanical.

“Alpha, I don’t think I can fix your arm. I’m wondering if you can, with your good arm. I could get a mirror so you could see inside-”“I am sorry. Without a Robotech cube in my library, my abilities in this area are limited to diagnosis only, sir.”

“I figured as much,” Derec said. “But it never hurts to ask.”

“Sir, I detect a deactivated robot in the room. Perhaps it would be possible to salvage the appropriate parts from its mechanism to repair me.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Derec said gruffly. “I can’t do it, not without micromanipulators. Besides, there’s some structural damage in the shoulder mount, which isn’t replaceable.”

Sighing, Derec pushed himself back from the bench and crossed to where his paltry inventory of robot parts lay spread out on the floor. As it had many times before, his gaze fell on Monitor 5’s arm. For the first time, he picked it up and examined it closely.

“I guess you’re just going to have to make do with one wing,” he said. “There’s a lot of it going around.”

The robot made no reply. Derec turned the Monitor’s arm over and tried to flex the elbow. It resisted-consistent with the fact that the hand had been locked in a literal death grip on the silver artifact.

Consistent, Derec realized with a sudden shock, except that the arm contained no joints. Not at the elbow, not at the wrist, not at the knuckle. Oh, the elbow was bent at an obtuse angle, the wrist twisted slightly, the fingers curled. But insofar as he could tell from looking at it, the arm was incapable of movement.

There were any number of syntheskin coverings which would flex and wrinkle realistically while masking joints. But this was no covering. It was rigid to the touch and absolutely seamless, like a plastic casting. Puzzled, Derec carried it back to where the robot sat.

“What magnification are your optical sensors capable of?”

“Only a limited amount, sir-one hundred power.”

“At what resolution?”

“That would vary with the distance of the object being observed, sir. The maximum resolution is approximately ten micrometers.”

“That’s better than I can do with that thing,” Derec said, nodding toward the inspection scanner. “See what you can tell me about the structure of this arm.”

“Sir, I am not knowledgeable in this area.”

“You can see and you can describe. I’ll settle for that at the moment.”

“Yes, sir. May I hold the limb?”

Derec surrendered the arm, and the robot held it at eye level in its rock-steady grip. “At ten power, the surface is undifferentiated. Increasing magnification now. Granularity becoming evident. There seems to be a regular pattern. Pattern resolving now into hexagonal planar surfaces. Maximum magnification.” The robot paused for a fraction of a second. “The surface appears to consist of twelve-sided solids in close association.”

“What?”

“The surface appears-”

“I heard you. Look at another spot.”

The robot turned his head slightly to the left. “I observe the same pattern.”

“The end,” Derec snapped. “Look at the end, where it broke off.”

“The surface is much more irregular, but it is made up of the same dodecahedral units.”

“All the way through?”

“Yes, Derec.”

Derec stood staring, dumbfounded. What the robot had described suggested a completely new approach to robotic design-not an evolution, but a revolution. It sounded as though the Supervisor robots had been built-no, it couldn’t be.

“Kill your right shoulder control bus,” Derec snapped.

“The circuits are now inert,” the robot said.

Derec separated the three-conductor control wire from the damaged right arm and threaded it out through the opening where he had been working. He touched the connector to the stump end of the Supervisor arm, and it clung there as though it belonged.

“Activate the control circuit. Send a command to bend the elbow.”

Almost instantly, the disembodied Supervisor arm slowly began to flex. “Look at the joint,” Derec demanded. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“The changes are taking place more quickly than my scan rate allows me to observe,” the robot said. “However, I infer that the dodecahedrons are undergoing some type of directed rearrangement.”

“Flowing into a new shape. The material of the arm is transforming itself.”

“Those descriptors are imprecise but consistent with my observations. The technical term for such reorganization is morphallaxis.”

Derec felt for his chair and sat down shakily. The Supervisors had been built out of billions of tiny crystalshaped modules-a cellular structure. Each had to contain kilometers of circuit connections, megabytes of programming. It was the cells that were the robots. The robots were more like organisms.

What a feat of engineering they represented-the essence of a robot in a package a few microns in diameter. Properly programmed, they could take on any shape. A Supervisor was an infinity of specialized forms held within one generalized package.

As he marveled, Derec was reminded of something he had not thought about for several days. The cellular design bore the same distinctive stamp that the asteroid colony’s lifts and environmental system had. Superficial simplicity-achieved on the strength of hidden complexity. Elegance of design, novelty of approach. It was another brush with the minimalist designer, and it gave Derec one more reason to seek to escape from the raiders.