Rajnar Vajra - Doctor Alien’s Five Empty Boxes

I pored over the assembly sheet while Deal followed the instructions in reverse but so slowly that I could follow the procedure and sign off on each step. From the start, though, I had a nagging feeling we’d missed something obvious. If so, we both missed it all the way to the end, where nothing but machine parts and us littered the floor.

“You agree,” Deal asked, “that I made no mistakes?”

“Seems that way.”

“Then I shall construct it again under your few but watchful eyes.”

I sighed. “One downside to having a mere pair is that they get tired, but go ahead.”

“Since I have memorized this process and wish to avoid automatically repeating any errors, I suggest you provide all assembly information as we proceed, and I will obey your directions.”

“I like it.” And that way I’d set the pace. I lifted the assembly sheet and tried to look at it as if for first time. “Step one. Push the three long, gray rods into the holes in the smallest cylinder…”

With me calling the shots, the job took over two hours. I wouldn’t say we completely wasted our time because when we were finished, I had the fun of hearing my name repeated three times.

After that third repetition, I noticed that my shadow was darker than it should’ve been considering the room lighting. I wondered how long Gara had been with us, but if she wanted to go incognito, who was I to out her?

That night, Sunny and I took turns reading bedtime books to our son. He finally drifted off and we dared tiptoe to our bedroom. The weather had made a surprise U-turn to unseasonably muggy, but my weather widget claimed cooler air would return after midnight, so I left a window and its curtains open. We put our DM CPUs on their chargers and lay in bed with the lights off, chatting a little and watching a broad patch of moonlight on the ceiling that had snuck into our room by bouncing off the small pond in our backyard. Whenever even the mildest wind arose outside, the light above us would fill with moving ripples.

All this seemed incredibly peaceful, but I was too aware of the patrol car parked out front and too full of questions to relax. And when I closed my eyes, I kept seeing that damn assembly sheet. So I swallowed my pride and had my DM send a gentle 3-Hz pulse though my nervous system, knowing that within eight minutes my brainwaves would automatically sync to the pulse and I’d fall into a deep, delta-level sleep.

Why the pride-swallowing act? Because I usually advise against direct DM brain stimulus as a soporific. It’s too easy to become dependent on it and the process, continued over months, can scramble a person’s natural sleep cycle. Yes, acoustic entrainment is supposedly safe, but that night I wanted the biggest guns. I’d been awake most of the previous night and didn’t want to spend another day in a fog.

So I was gently settling into a dream when a nasty thought that must’ve been circling my mind for hours finally landed. If the government could shut off my DM’s recording function, what else could they legally make my DM do? Was I now bugged… from the inside? I paused the delta signal and called up a virtual screen, grateful that modern technology made it possible to do online research without getting out of bed and thus waking my wife.

Having spent most of my life in the dark ages before nanobiotechnology and computer science got married, before data management systems were partially implanted, I still feel most comfortable controlling my DM with a keyboard. Oh, I can use subvocals just fine to input simple instructions, but strange things happen when I try the non-simple kind, and Sunny tells me that such attempts remind her of watching a bad ventriloquist. So I only used sub-V to summon what I wanted: a virtual keyboard facing me, floating in midair below an impalpable screen.

I called up a meta-search engine, raised my hands to type, and then hesitated. If my DM system was bugged, did I want the, um, buggers plotting the exact vector of my suspicions? I needed to take a more tangential approach. Considering how Smith et al had prevented me from recording our session, wouldn’t it be reasonable for me to research the legalities involved with that, and if the information I really wanted happened to hang out nearby…?

Figuring my best bet would be the kind of omnibus document reserved for law libraries, I forked over the twenty-five bucks for a single LexNex session and lo, the veils parted as the blindfolded lady with the scales appeared. Thanks to DM nerve pulses, I felt the projected keys under my fingers as I typed in my search parameters.

Over a million hits, but LexNex sorted them so brilliantly that my answer waited in the very first document. What I’d feared was called a “mind-tap,” and it was out-and-out prohibited except when specifically authorized by an act of Congress.

So I was semireassured. I dispelled my toys, closed my eyes, and of course the damn assembly sheet that I’d been staring at all day floated up again. An impressively clear image considering that my visual memory isn’t normally terrific. I could practically see every detail, but it occurred to me that one detail could be missing.

Where was the power supply?

Sure, the robot had all sorts of mysterious parts, but nothing that seemed large enough to supply the energy to move something so massive… unless one mysterious part contained a fusion reactor. That seemed more than unlikely, but surely, the robot was intended to move.

Come to think of it, where was the thing’s CPU?

The sheet began fading in my mind, details growing fuzzy, so I regarded the dimming image as a whole. That’s when I caught on and mouthed the classic Oh My God. Could’ve sworn I didn’t twitch or wiggle, but Sunny turned toward me and said, “What’s so funny?”

Couldn’t help it, I cracked up. I tried to tell her why but couldn’t get the words out. After a minute, Sunny began laughing because I was laughing so hard.

“Shhh,” she warned me between giggles. “You’ll wake the boy.”

Tears still leaking from my eyes, I finally got some control. “I told you about trying to make that robot work.” The thought almost set me off again.

“Uh-huh. You and that Trader.”

I was merely grinning now. “Exactly. Your big-brained husband and an even bigger-brained Tsf spent pretty much the day on it. Kept putting it together and taking it apart. Followed the pictorial assembly instructions more than carefully. We were meticulous.”

“And?”

“We forgot something.” Another belly laugh got past me. “And we weren’t the first ones to make the mistake. A team of Tsf scientists overlooked the same thing.”

“So what did everyone miss?”

I told her and it was her turn to laugh. “That is funny,” she agreed.

My cheeks were tired from grinning so hard. “It just didn’t seem important at the time.”

In the morning, the same two cops chauffeured me to work, but this time they neglected to come in with me. My receptionist loomed behind his desk as usual, but no one else seemed to be around unless you count the docked cleaning robot.

“Good morning, L,” I said, walking up to his station.

He extruded a wad of tissue resembling a top hat circa 1800 on a thin stalk and waved it at me. “And a tip of the morning to you, Doctor.”

“That’s not—never mind. Is Deal-of-ten-lifetimes still here?”

The hat sank into nonexistence. “That is a near certainty. After you last departed, she resumed experimenting with robotics, then borrowed room six for a lengthy dose of gravity therapy. It seems she spent undue time yesterday operating under Earth conditions, and suffered some loss of bone density. The Tsf metabolism, if you aren’t aware, is considerably faster than yours or even mine.”