I grow my bots a fair amount once my pile of materials is big enough, reveling in the additional sensations and strength that the larger cloud brings. The waves slapping against the side of the cat give it a little side-to-side motion as we pull out of the broad river mouth and onto the open sea. The river cats aren’t optimized for the waves, and Marc is already looking a little sick. Valerie gives him something for the nausea. Hopefully he’ll be OK. It should only be an hour before we hit the smoother waters at the start of the Mekong delta.
I float a crate of control chips over from the guide’s boat to my deck. Like with the platforms we built in Hawaii and the catamarans, the filters and collectors need advanced processors and satellite uplinks. Complex silicon like that would take forever to print with the bots, so we pack them along. The construction routines for what we’re building now require one of these pre-built chips in addition to the raw materials and maintainer bots.
I grab another crate and move it to the girls’ boat, dropping it off on their empty deck. The decks of both of the Geologists’ boats all have sunbathers that I have to shoo away as the crates descend. A couple of them squawk in dismay as I slide their deck chairs to the side with them still on them.
To All: Time to start building. Control chips are on your decks, and we need them all turned into collectors today. Chad, please continue to keep the mosquitos off of us.
I crack open the wooden lid of my crate and pull out a chip for the first one. With materials handy and my cloud at its current size, it’s under a minute for me to get the first collector ready. A meter long and roughly cylindrical, the collectors will handle the casks of chemicals that the filters upstream will produce once we build them. It turns out that most pollutants have industrial applications if someone can cheaply concentrate and sometimes refine them. The filters will sort and store each kind of pollutant that it pulls out of the water until it has enough to produce a sealed, floating cask. Finding the right size for them was a challenge. They had to be big enough that none of the critters in the river can try to eat them, and small enough that they won’t cause any congestion. We ended up with tubes about as big around as a basketball and a little over a meter long.
The collectors will swim all over the delta, gather up the casks, and deposit them in warehouse areas for pickup. We’ll sell the contents cheap to whoever wants to pick them up, which should stimulate local economic growth and contribute to industry and agriculture.
The delta is huge and sprawling, so we’ll need a ton of these guys. During the next couple of days, we’ll be mass-producing them and dropping them in the water as we go. The smarts in the control chips will spread them out and coordinate them so that we don’t neglect any of the hundreds of waterways that make up the delta.
Another collector and then another take their place in a neat row on the deck. Marc hurls over the railing and begs out to go lie down. I’m not sure that will help with the motion of the ocean, but I’m already getting ahead of schedule, so I don’t object. Evan finally comes over from the girls’ boat and starts building. Soon we’ve got them covering most of the deck, stacked two high. We’re still not far enough into the delta that we can start dropping them off.
“You doing OK man?” I ask Evan. “That was heavy stuff with Valerie.”
“Yeah,” he answers. “Can’t say that was easy. We’ve been avoiding taking on that whole conversation head-on for a long time. She’s mentioned some of it, but never just dived in like that. I feel like I know her better now, and I don’t love her any less for it. She’s right, though. Pushing on this from the Chad side isn’t as good an option as trying to get his harem on board.”
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Harem, huh?” I laugh.
“You got a better name for them?”
“I’ve been using ‘girlfriends.’”
“Not sure if that’s the actual relationship there,” he notes, straightening out a stack of collectors that start to slide out of place.
“Well, ‘whores’ seemed rude, ‘staffers’ seemed inadequate, ‘employees with benefits’ was way too long,” I reply. “And Mom trained me to not even think of most of the other terms that would fit. I don’t know. ‘Harem’ seems archaic and misogynist.”
“Well, Chad is a misogynist. His views on women are directly copied from a dirty and very old man, so that tracks,” Evan counters.
I can’t really argue with that, but I’m never going to think of Keeya and Lucie as harem girls, so I just grunt and stack another half dozen collectors on top of the growing pile of them on the deck.
“Fine, we’ll go with girlfriends.” Evan concedes.
I nod appreciatively. “So what’s the backup if plan A fails with Chad? Are we still on for strangulation?”
“Seems appropriate,” he says with a chuckle. “How did you miss it, anyway? The contracts Chad had set up, I mean. You’ve got them all in your head, right?”
“I don’t really read all the documents I scan in. Especially early on when I was still getting my electronic brain set up. I spent a lot of time just screenscraping stuff with my bot eyes and dumping the text into the index.” I shake my head, wishing the artificial parts of my brain worked better than they do. “For a while, I had a dozen monitors set up and was just popping open documents all day and scanning while I did my other work. It was all I could do to get most of them hooked to the right index entries. So, just because it’s in my electronic storage, doesn’t mean I actually know what it is until I take the time to really look at it, and even then, I only have it until I forget it again. My brain is becoming more and more like a computer. The wet part is like the processor cache, the index works like the hard drive. I can only do anything with the information that’s in my recent memory, things I’ve been reminded about in the last few hours. If I get a prompt, memories seem to shake loose. Sometimes, anyway. But without some reminder, I just can’t put things together. Noticing things like Chad’s customizations to the contracts is something I would have had to look for specifically.”
“Makes sense.” He nods. “I’m not blaming you, really. Just making sure that I understand. You’re doing pretty well, all things considered.”
“Yeah, I’m broken but still functional,” I say, trying to keep the sadness out of my voice. “At least most days.”
“You ever think of just connecting directly to the network? Instead of screenscraping? Seems like it would save time.”
“No way. Any kind of direct connection opens too many doors for vulnerabilities. This thing is basically an open channel into my brain. I’m paranoid enough about the minimal comms we have for getting updates done, even though the devs tell me those are as safe as can be since they did their security updates.”
“Right,” he says, building another collector. There’s barely room on the deck now to stand.
“Besides,” I say, “doing that wouldn’t help me make connections between things. It would just make it faster to get more raw data in. That’s generally not the slow step these days.”
“Right,” Evan says again.
I look over the deck at the work we’ve done and check our location on the screens in the upper deck. Good, we’ve got more done than I expected we’d have by now. I reach over to feel out to the other boats.
“We’ve got about twenty minutes left before we can start dropping these guys, and it looks like both of the Geologist boats are behind schedule. You want to go help them catch up?”
“Let’s go,” he says as his massive body encases itself in a black flight suit.