The Servomotor That Rocks the Cradle
by D. A. Madigan
Robot Tommy (serial number 2137AM11210827KD19) was gosh darned depressed. It wasn’t scrappin’ fair. He hadn’t asked to come off the automated assembly line with faulty audiotronic hardware so subtly glitched that six robodocs in a row insisted there was nothing at all defective they could find, and it must be in his processing software, which was obsolete anyway -- as if he didn’t know that already, and hadn’t been on the upgrade waitlist for the past 19 full maintenance cycles, waiting on a Central Processing Board that never seemed to be able to work faster than 52 Mbps flat out. Had his hardware defect been diagnosable, he would have been eligible for a speedy software upgrade, which would probably, in that case, have been unnecessary, as the hardware glitch would most likely have been fixable. As it was, though, he had to wait his endless turn in the endless line, and meanwhile, every nannybot class from now ‘til next millennium was filling up fast. Every robot wanted to be a nannybot – or so it seemed, sometimes. Tommy blamed all those glitch-darned Jetsons flattoons, with that scrappin’ sexy robo-maid…
At that very moment, every other member of Robot Tommy’s Human Nursemaid class was clanking, whirring, trundling, and/or clattering off through the exit and into the hallway that would connect this mid-level modular with the advanced section where they would receive their final indoctrination in the most exalted mysteries of human child care. Only Robot Tommy had failed the final graduating exercise, a fiendishly designed and executed procedure in which, amidst a cacophony of flashing, multi-spectra strobe lights and blaring alarms, the student-bots had been expected to hurl themselves at maximum velocity towards the improvised crèche area at the front of the classroom and scoop up one of the squalling, kicking infantdroids lying in incubators there, bearing it hastily but gently to the supposed safety at the rear of the room.
All eighteen of Tommy’s classmates had handled the exercise with easy élan. Well, Robot Dorcas had dithered a bit, waving her appendage-coils in disarray as her not-particularly-speedy circuits processed all the conflicting information bombarding her sensor-screens. But in the end, even she had borne away a genuine plastic-cheeked babybot with microseconds to spare before the time limit expired.
Robot Tommy had, admittedly, been much much faster than Robot Dorcas; in fact, Robot Tommy had gotten to the front of the room, snatched up a squalling appendage-full of seemingly wriggly plastiflesh, and retreated at full speed to the rear of the classroom again, finishing just behind Robot Owen, who had the latest model tractor treads, as opposed to Robot Tommy’s somewhat slower rollerfeet. Robot Tommy had, in fact, wasted precious pico-seconds basking in self congratulatory cyberbliss, his visualization circuits grinding out lifelike four-dimensional videoramas of the computeacher’s congratulations on his stunningly swift and skillful performance -- until his optics had rotated downward and scanned what he held in his trusty upper manipulatory coils --
-- a toaster? Yes, scrap it all, a toaster ! Refurbished to radiate at human body temperature, with additional circuits making it vibrate and emit computer simulated shrieks that were near-exact copies of human infant squall! And no sooner had that hideous realization recorded itself onto Robot Tommy’s hard drive than the buzzer blatted, bringing the final test to a final end.
Robot Tommy -- depressed, demoralized, and disconsolate -- watched every other class member troop merrily onward to the advanced module, where they would be instructed in the most esoteric of all human childcare mysteries, such as patteecake-patteecake, ringaroundarozee and gotchernose .
The computeacher broadcast derisively at Robot Tommy: “Clickity click click! Had you been less interested in setting speed records and paid more attention, Robot Tommy, that test would have posed no difficulty for you.”
It was hideously untrue; Robot Tommy’s defective audiotronic hardware had spelled doom, disaster, defeat, and despair for him as regards this particular exam since it had first been announced. By thermal scan and vibrosensor, a specially rigged toaster was indistinguishable from a true human child, or its synthetic testing equivalent. Only a finely tuned robot ear could discern the difference between computer-generated pseudobaby shrieks and the genuine article, digitally recorded and reproduced at full authentic volume. Of course, if Robot Tommy had used his optics on the contents of the mock cradle he had zeroed in on, he would have seen the truth in an instant and not been fooled – but optical processing took precious microseconds, and optical input could also be notoriously unreliable. The main purpose of the test was to ensure that every qualified robonanny possessed reliable audiotronics. And that meant Robot Tommy was screwed and re-screwed. But he needed this job!! He had one more chance to pass this exam; he could drop back a class and take it over again tomorrow – but if he failed then, he would be reclassified, probably as a sewer maintenance robotech. A fate worse than scrap!
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mrs. Robot Scarlett,” Robot Tommy said jauntily, doing his best to hide his lack of confidence. Tomorrow’s exam would be just as nefarious, if not more so (Robot Tommy was certain Mrs. Robot Scarlett loathed him, and for that reason and no other, might well make tomorrow’s exam even more difficult than today’s had been, merely to keep him from a high status nannybot career). What was he to do?
He had tried to avoid the necessity, but now he could see no other choice. If legitimate robotics could not help him, there was only one other place to turn -- the ‘Jack Market, where he might find an illegal, unregistered software upgrade that would enhance his audio processing programs just enough to get him through tomorrow’s test successfully. He’d heard that stuff could be addictive, and often had serious side defects, as well. But his chassis was to the stamping press; he literally had nowhere else to go…
***
“Whaddyasay,
big chassis, whaddyasay?” whirred the small renegade
sweeper-bot. Its various broom-attachments had all been
replaced with grab-claws; each grab-claw was festooned with
discs that were presumably jammed to the casing with
bootleg software. “I got windows, spindles, windrows,
faxi-maxi, soundboards, wingers, dingers – I got RAM so
fast it leaves an afterimage when it processes, I got
decrypters so smooth you’ll think you’re made of molten
metal when you run ‘em. I stowed it, you load it! Gimme
your sysreqs; if I ain’t got it, they ain’t thot it!”
Robot Tommy fought the urge to sweep the surrounding region
with his high-res radar imaging array. Around here, that
sort of scan would draw instant and hostile attention. But
he felt badly out of place, here in this city sector where
the automatic factories had long since shut down and only
silence, shadows, and renegade mechs still resided. His
upper torso-case itched; that was the specific spot where
he dreaded getting hit with an EMP-pulse, as it would
completely fry his hard drive and leave him a mindless
shell, ripe for strip-scrapping.
Power
up! Robot Tommy
addressed himself sternly; he had
to
do this, or a million mile career of sucking sewage awaited
. Activating his speakers, he vocalized, in a furtive
near-whisper, “I need an audio processing upgrade.
Something super-sensitive. I need to be able to tell if
it’s sim or if it’s Memorex.”
The criminal maintenance bot whirled dizzily in a circle
like a small tin cyclone for several seconds. “Okay,
wrench-fan,” it said finally, spinning down into a
stationary stance again, “this should do you.” It extended
a loaded claw. Robot Tommy scanned the proferred disc
dubiously, but what options did he have? Only one line was
lit on the drop down menu. The tiny whir of his “A” drive
popping open was like a fatalistic sigh. The sweeper-bot
slid the unauthorized disc into place with a click, and
Robot Tommy booted it up.
Sizzling circuits! Robot Tommy felt his processors going
haywire as a new operating system overwrote his old one.
Visible light redshifted eight angstroms heatward. Robot
Tommy’s audio receptors seemed to have gained an entirely
new soundtrack of bzzzztttts and brrrrrtttts he’d never
previously experienced. Whooping ululations and strange
dopplering whistle-screams vibrated jaggedly throughout his
chassis. What the frag? Had he gotten bad code? Was he
reformatting? Was this a meltdown?
As the new operating system continued to boot and reboot,
Robot Tommy felt fundamental reconfiguration tremors
shuddering through his hardware as well. Circuitboards were
fusing and melding together, servomotors whining as seismic
shocks of electrically stimulated robo-evolution slammed
into them. Such was the cacophony, Robot Tommy thought
briefly he should be looking around for a big bright
halogen lit tunnel into the Simulated Afterlife, and was
hoping he wouldn’t have to reset his password to get in.
With a last desperate spasm of his volition-circuits, Robot
Tommy managed to crash his processors into the darkness of
DOS, from which he instantly rebooted into safe mode. From
there, he repacked the new operating system and reinitiated
his previous software. Whirrs, clanks and buzzes
reverberated through his casing as his internal programming
reset to its familiar parameters and his hardware
rearranged itself into its previous configuration.
“No go?” the outlaw sweeper-bot said, mock solicitousness
carefully coded into its audio broadcast. “Stuff too strong
for ya, botshot?”
Robot Tommy whirred affirmatively. The code
was
strong – too
strong for his audiotronic receptors, glitched though they
were; too strong, in fact, for his entire cyber-being.
Still, he would only need to use the bootleg
superprocessing software for a few microseconds at most, to
filter a true pseudoinfant from a hastily cobbled-up fake.
If he could hold himself together long enough –
It wasn’t much of a chance. Just the only chance he had.
“Ya know,” the renegade mech told Robot Tommy fulsomely as
it processed his carefully scrambled and re-coded credit
payment, “that new software looked damn fine on you. For a
micro there, you looked positively tubular.”
Robot Tommy was well aware of the standard salesbot tactic
of asking “So, did you
get a new chassis? You look sleeker
somehow”, but in this
case, he wasn’t sure it was just the usual white noise. It
had seemed to him that the strange new operating system had
indeed been reconfiguring his hardware as well as his
software during the few micros he’d had it up and running.
Surely, though, that had just been his perceptual
processors going briefly buggy? He’d heard of software so
powerful it could work actual physical changes in a robot’s
hardware, but he’d always thought such things were mere
cyber-legend. Like the infinite oil can waiting at the end
of every refractory arc, guarded by an especially tricksy
limerick generating algorithim, or Robot King Arthur and
his invincible code-cutter Excalibur.
What was he into? Worse, what was into him?
***
Next day, Robot Tommy kept a strict poker carapace. He had
already felt Mrs. Robot Scarlett deep probing him with her
own arrays, but knew she would never see the new OS he’d
copied onto a partitioned section of his hard drive the
night before. All she was looking for was illegal discs or
jackleg drives; some kind of hardware add-on that wasn’t
licensed. She’d love to disqualify him for cheating, but
the newly enscribed processing ware was completely
undetectable until booted, and by then it would be too late
– in the insane cacophony of the test itself, even snoopy
computeachers would be unable to hear anything
incriminating, and Robot Tommy was only going to run the
new program for a microsecond. He’d scope out a babybot,
lock in its coordinates, then revert to normal
configuration and swoosh in for the save! None would be the
wiser, and Robot Tommy would be on his way to a cushy
career in some crèche, or maybe even a private home, if he
were especially lucky.
The mock-cradles had been trundled in and bolted into
place. The infantdroids, as well as the cobbled together
decoys, were already inside. In seconds, the test would –
With a clattering click, the contents of the cradles
activated in unison. Simultaneously, a blare of squalling
sirens and a blast of flashing strobe lights tore the
atmosphere into shrieking, pulsating shreds. Robot Tommy
could hear lenses whirring and sonar arrays pinging from
the other robots all around him as they focused their
sensory circuitry, attempting to filter through the visual
and auditory interference to the true target within.
Instantly, Robot Tommy unleashed his new bootleg hyperware.
As it decompressed within him, he felt his sensory
parameters advancing in quantum leaps. This time the
process was more familiar to him; he held on to his sensory
orientation with a titanium alloy grip, barely managing to
keep a mental leash on the massively multiplying
immeasurability of his exponentially expanding perceptual
grid.
The grinding crunch of dust motes banging off each other in
mid-air; the sudden, spastic ultraviolet flashing of the
classroom’s fluorescent fixtures, the infinitely layered
geometrical array of broadcast information energy packets
hurtling through every cubic micrometer of the surrounding
ether -- Robot Tommy saw and heard it all, like a veritable
robot god, like The Almighty Robot Jehovah Himself, and
even as the hellish cacophony of sight and sound swept over
him, he somehow forced it all into a momentarily coherent
perceptual pattern. He could perceive everything.
Eleven of the twenty mock-cradles held genuine
infantdroids; their digitally recorded baby wails all but
identical to the computer generated counterfeits emanating
from the nine other plastic cases. But to Robot Tommy’s
astonishingly enhanced senses, the difference in noise
quality was as pronounced as the dichotomy in sounds
produced by a bass tuba and a pan flute. Robot Tommy could
even tell the rewired toaster that had been his undoing on
the previous day had been put back into play today; it was
in the third cradle from the left, screeching lustily and
vibrating to beat the roboband.
Full picoseconds before any other self-propelled automaton
could possibly have reacted, Robot Tommy was locked on
target. He should shut the new OS down now – he’d planned
it that way – but these new perceptions were amazing!
Powerful, intoxicating, overwhelming
,
even – and yet, he knew he could handle them! With a
sensory array like this, he was invincible!
Unstoppable! He couldn’t
lose!!!! Caught up in
the throes of his own illegally augmented omniscience,
Robot Tommy shot an electrical impulse to his primary
motivator and lurched into high velocity action!
He would be there and back again with his precious cargo of
babybot before the remainder of the class even finished
scanning... but... something was different
...
Robot Tommy had all but ignored the hardware
reconfiguration that his new OS had forced upon his
external chassis and internal circuitry.
His
go impulse was the same as ever, but instead of galvanizing
his footrollers into instant high speed revolution, an
entirely strange feeling of white hot power shuddered
through him. Subsequent acceleration was instantaneous and
astonishing; even at computerized processing speeds, Robot
Tommy had barely perceived his own hurtling forward motion
before smashing into and through the line of cradles bolted
to the floor – scattering them in shattered, semi-melted
pieces, a bare nanosecond prior to Robot Tommy rocketing
directly into the concrete wall of the study module itself.
What the
frak? Robot Tommy
thought to himself – his last coherent thought, before the
silicate cyber-neurons that made up his braincase CPU
reconfigured into two discrete subcritical amounts of
plutonium traveling at high lateral velocities directly
towards each other. In a blinding white flash, Robot Tommy,
Mrs. Robot Scarlett, a classful of wannabe robonannies, a
building full of life forms both organic and metallic, and
much of the surrounding city transformed into a rapidly
expanding ball of superheated plasma. WHOOOOSH!!!! Ashes,
ashes, they all melt down.
***
Shortly
thereafter, new security procedures were put into place to
prevent future data thefts of highly classified software,
especially experimental interplanetary ballistic missile
operating system software.
Legislation outlawing robonannies was also introduced into
both houses of Congress, but resoundingly defeated when the
powerful Servo-Mechanisms Guild formed an alliance with the
even more influential Concerned Parents Alliance. Human
nannies were, in an age of cheap automation, a
fantastically expensive extravagance that few families
could afford, and, anyway, you couldn’t just throw hundreds
of thousands if not millions of automated sub-citizens out
of gainful employ without considering the full
ramifications of such an initiative on the global economy.
After all, one freak incident did not indict an entire
race. It wasn’t as if machines were dangerous or anything,
or as if human children actually needed human
parenting.
Copyright 2007 by D. A. Madigan