Sam sat at the workbench, a magnifying visor strapped to his head. His eyes pored over the details of the most-recently assembled spider-bot. All the welds looked solid, all the circuits appeared to be in place. He moved the legs around to test their range; they pulled back uncertainly, seemingly miffed by the imposition. He gazed uneasily at the brain; the oblong lump of neural tissue sat in a fluid-filled glassine tank, a trunk of fiber-optic cables trailing to the external interface. He closed all the access hatches and looked into its optical sensors; they returned his gaze impassively.
Sam smiled sadly and placed the newly-born spider-bot on the ground, facing it towards more of its kind. It seemed to recognize them instantly, and moved to join them. It lumbered unsteadily over the floor, reacting with surprise to its own footsteps. Before long, it had reached the outskirts of the bot’s play area, and stood there to watch the others.
Sam turned to pick up the next bot from the assembly line, but a flashing red light distracted him. He sighed, removed his visor, and stood up. “I gotta take this call,” he told Gary, seated closer to the end of the automated factory. “Just let the bots through; I don’t even remember the last time I found a flaw in one.”
“Yeah, me either,” Gary concurred. “It’s a little unsettling, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re advancing awfully quickly. Are we ready for this much progress?”
“I sure am!” Sam laughed. “I’ve been rotting on the vine for way too long. It’s nice to see some real advances! Besides, this is better than languishing in that poor excuse for a university lab, isn’t it?”
“Can’t refute that, I suppose,” Gary sighed.
Sam noticed Gary’s troubled look. “What is it? Are you worried about the impending robot rebellion? Or are you just not used to accomplishing this much?”
Gary shrugged. “I don’t know. A little of both.”
Sam smiled. “Well, you can head off the first one easily!” He motioned towards the play area, their whimsical term for where the bots worked out the basic physical laws and their effects on themselves. “Why don’t you join them? They could use a mentor.”
Gary smiled. “Sounds like a great idea.” He looked at the three new bots, fresh off the assembly line. They looked up at him uncertainly. Gary waved them closer. “Well, what are you waiting for? Come with me!” He turned to walk to the play area; the bots followed clumsily.
Sam exited the workshop and found himself in the office area; two rows of cubicles ran the length of the room. He heard Stacy call out to him. “Your nephew’s on line one.”
“You mean our boss,” Sam corrected.
Stacy peeked over the cubicle wall. “Sorry, didn’t mean anything by that.”
“You’re fine,” Sam assured. “Just don’t let him hear you say that.”
“Well, duh!” Stacy guffawed.
Sam smiled as he grabbed the receiver from the retro-style office phone and punched line one. “This is Sam.”
“Hey, uncle!” piped up the voice. “How are things?”
“Just fine, nephew.” Sam looked towards Stacy and winked; she returned a beaming smile before sitting down again. “You should come by the lab some time! I think you’ll be impressed with our progress.”
“If only I had time for a tenth of what I’d like to do,” Eric lamented. “I’m sure a visit would blow my mind. What you’ve produced so far has already done that!”
Sam sat down on the nearby couch. “We didn’t produce that so much as find it. Nearly all of it was existing technology.”
“Really?” Eric sounded surprised. “I know you told me about suppressed science and technology, but…I don’t know…part of me wasn’t willing to believe it.”
“Nearly everything you’ve seen so far is stuff we pulled off the shelf, so to speak,” Sam explained. “We may have tweaked it a little to make it fit for service, but most of it was ready to go.”
“Quite impressive, for your set of personal contacts,” Eric complimented.
“Hardly just my contacts,” Sam corrected. “My team’s contacts, and their contacts, and so on. Plus, a lot of it was found just by reading tech-oriented news sites such as TildeNerd. We scanned through several months’ worth of back articles, looking for new advances, and contacted the inventors directly. Nearly all their work was languishing, and most of them signed on to join us.”
“Signed on?” Eric asked. “Are we paying them? I couldn’t help but notice that you’re staying well within your budget.”
“We don’t sign them on directly, not in the way you’re thinking,” Sam explained. “We pay them for working demonstrations of their inventions, then for their help integrating them into devices. That weeds out a lot of pretenders. I’ve hired several of them, and have spun up many satellite research groups. But they operate autonomously, and mostly earn their own way.”
“Sounds like a lot of investment opportunities for me,” Eric trilled.
Sam laughed. “Yeah, you would look at it that way. You see them as potential streams of recurring income. I see them as something I can help get started, get back my original investment with a small bonus, and then let them go their own way. Heck, I’ve even funded a few that compete with each other. I don’t have the time or inclination to micromanage them; I have my own work. And as long as they can fund themselves, they don’t need investors. Sorry to break this to you, Eric, but…they don’t need you.”
Eric laughed. “You’re right…I just instinctively look for revenue streams. I need to stay focused on the big picture.”
“Don’t fret, I get it,” Sam assured. “There’s a lot of money, and a lot of neat tech, happening out there. We can’t possibly be involved with all of it.”
“Fair enough,” Eric agreed. “And you found a lot of them on public web sites? What’d you call it? TildeNerd?”
“That’s one of the oldest tech-oriented news sites around,” Sam explained. “Most places only cover something once it becomes commercially viable. TildeNerd reports stuff as soon as it’s barely working in the lab. A lot of the articles link to research institutions, university laboratories, or in some cases, just someone’s personal blog. It’s a treasure trove for people in a position to make use of it…much of it way too raw for professional investors, or the rest of the mainstream. But once I had a budget…I felt like a kid in a candy store.”
“Well, you’ve certainly proven your point!” Eric laughed. “Is that where you found the eviction droids?”
“No, that was even easier,” Sam related. “They’re from a bankrupt warehouse-robot company. The problem was their technology worked too well; there was a groundswell of opposition from the workers they were intended to replace. The public outcry ruined their business; it also made them easy to find. The story behind the construction, demolition, and security droids is similar; most of that tech was mature, proven, and ready to ship, but got shut down by bad publicity.”
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“Which is code for people unwilling to work and unable to change,” Eric commiserated.
“Exactly,” Sam agreed. “People that just want to sit on the couch all day and watch TV.” Sam let out a hollow laugh. “I genuinely don’t understand such people. To me, the world is a mad science laboratory, just waiting for me to unveil its secrets! But I don’t have the time or energy to do a tenth of what I’d like to do. And somehow I’m the oddball.”
“You and me both,” Eric concurred. “I don’t understand people like that, people that lack vision and motivation. It’s like they’re a different species.”
“Homo minitherium?” Sam quipped.
“Wow, that takes me back,” Eric reminisced. “I barely remember that would mean little sloth-people.” They shared a laugh.
“Your air-mobile security drones were ready to go, too,” Sam explained. “Their bad press came from the people that got tased, as if they were innocent and the bots had run amok or something. We bought that company out of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar, too.”
“Certainly good fortune for us!” Eric guffawed. “Did you hear they’ve created an open-air prison in a derelict college dorm? No fences, no bars, just droids securing the perimeter.”
“I think I heard something about that,” Sam sighed. “But I didn’t read up on it. There’s too much happening; I can’t keep up with the firehose.”
“Well, they’re doing an incredible job,” Eric related. “The droids are impressive enough, but the surveillance A.I. that ties it together is really out of this world. I can’t believe they went bankrupt; seems like they should have made a fortune.”
“Actually, no…that’s one area where we made improvements. You’ve seen the cats with the neural implants; they’re fighting the rat and pigeon infestations in the older parts of the city. But we’ve also perfected neural implants in humans.”
“Really?” Eric exclaimed. “Where do you find your volunteers?”
Sam smiled as he leaned back in his chair. “The coma wards of nearby hospitals. We get consent from the families; most are only too happy to try. We’ve confirmed a lot of them are unrecoverable; that news makes the family unhappy, but they still thank us for the clarity. The rest, we find, are highly mentally active, though bored out of their gourds. Their neural implants allow them to communicate with the outside world, and even to drive their own motorized wheelchairs, even if they remain comatose outwardly. To make a long story short, the surveillance A.I. is being supplemented by so-called invalids, who are happy for the chance to work, and far from being a drain on resources, now earn their own paychecks.”
“That makes more sense,” Eric conceded. “I had a hard time believing artificial intelligence could be that good. And these people don’t mind being put to work like this?”
“Quite the contrary,” Sam assured. “They describe the neural implant to be like giving them a much larger body, one consisting of buildings and machines. They find it incredibly liberating. And…that isn’t even the full story.”
“I can’t imagine how much bigger this can get,” Eric quipped.
“The neural implants help us recover minds, but in some cases, we can recover the rest of them,” Sam related. “Nearly a third of recipients, with some directed therapy, have woken up, and are regaining the ability to control their bodies. We’re confident many of them will fully recover!”
“Wow,” Eric exclaimed. “Talk about making full use of available resources!”
“You gave us that direction,” Sam reminded. “We’re following it as well as we can.”
“And you’re doing a great job!” Eric gushed. “It already looks like the future on the city streets. Legions of gleaming droids, wresting the city back from chaos.”
Sam slowly sat up, and leaned over slightly in his chair. “If I haven’t done this recently…I want to thank you again for providing this opportunity. I’m sure I speak for all the other mad scientists working for us, too.”
“I’m glad to have you all on the team!” Eric cheered. “And speaking of mad science…how are your experiments going? I look forward to seeing some biologically-sourced machine intelligence on the streets!”
“Much better than we had hoped,” Sam explained. “We’re still using depatterned cat brains, but we’re having a lot less of the trouble Angie and I encountered in our early experiments. Maybe that’s the difference between using suburban strays versus urban strays; the latter seem more prone to appreciating their improved condition.”
“Any idea when we can field them?” Eric asked.
“They’re still learning,” Sam conceded. “We build spider bodies for them, and let them explore their new abilities and surroundings. The older ones show promise, and some might be capable of becoming service droids, but I’m not sure how many. It seems that once a cat, always a cat.”
“That’s too bad,” Eric sighed. “We can’t have droids that get distracted by a dust mote.”
“Having said that, though, I have some good news,” Sam continued. “Our lab-grown neural material is showing great promise; right now, they’re developing in a software-simulated virtual world. But we plan to transplant some of them to spider-bots, possibly as soon as tomorrow.”
“Nice!” Eric gushed. “Keep me posted!”
“I’ll let you know as soon as we can field a bio-brained bot,” Sam promised.
“I’m sure you will,” Eric agreed. “Hope to hear from you soon.”
They said their goodbyes and hung up.
Sam heard metallic clinking, getting closer. “Stacy?” Sam called out. “Do you hear that?”
“Yeah, it’s just a stray,” Stacy answered. Sam saw her stand up behind the cubicle wall, then disappear; he walked over to where she sat. Stacy looked down at a spider bot, who was staring back up at her. “Are you lost, little one?” she cooed. “Let’s get you back home.”
The spider-bot lifted its two front legs and pointed them upwards; Stacy smiled and picked him up. She stroked its head as she walked towards the play area; the bot clung to her gently. Sam followed both of them back. “I wonder how it got loose? Gary is supposed to be keeping an eye on them.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Stacy offered.
They found Gary seated on the floor in the play area, surrounded by spider bots, smiling beatifically. Stacy put the bot down; it scurried back to its mates. “We found this one in the cubicle area,” Sam announced.
Gary turned slowly to face Sam, his smile unchanged. “Do you see what they’re doing?”
Sam looked; his jaw dropped. “How long has that been there?”
“A while,” Stacy answered. “But it was a lot less elaborate the last time I saw it! They’ve been busy!”
A sprawling jungle gym filled the northern portion of the cavernous room. The lower rungs were wrapped in carpet; the upper reaches showed bare wood. A line of bots continued to carry in new building materials, left over from the lab’s renovation. Other bots attached new wood to existing structures, maneuvering their handless legs to grip screwdrivers, laboriously but nimbly driving in new screws.
“It looks like a…a giant…” Sam began.
“Cat tree,” Stacy finished.
“That’s it!” Sam exclaimed, snapping his fingers.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Gary purred, a dreamy look in his eyes.
“I wonder why they stopped carpeting it?” Sam asked.
“I’ve been watching them for a while, and I think I’ve figured that out,” Gary related. “The younger bots need the extra traction when they start climbing. The older bots don’t need that crutch. Also, the lack of carpet lets them do other things.” Gary pointed toward a darkened area. “For instance, that fellow up there.”
Their gazes followed Gary’s gesture. As their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they spotted a spider bot engaged in freeform gymnastics. It skillfully hooked its legs around a wooden beam, swinging around it, using its weight to propel itself to another beam, which it caught deftly, continuing its routine.
“There’s something you don’t see every day!” Stacy laughed.
“More importantly,” Gary pointed out, “it’s something you wouldn’t see a cat doing. Cat bodies aren’t made for swinging.”
“So they’re finally getting over not being cats anymore,” Sam noticed.
“I’m glad to see them growing into their new bodies!” Stacy trilled.
“I know I obsess a lot over the possibility of an uprising,” Gary conceded. “But sitting here, watching them play…I’m a lot less worried now. I mean, there still might be one…but it won’t be our bots.” He raised his hands to gesture toward the jungle gym as a whole. “They’re much more interested in building than destroying.”
“I wish I had known this earlier,” Sam pined. “I could have given some more good news to Mr. Thompson.”
“Don’t you mean your nephew?” Stacy quipped.
“Let’s not get into that again!” Sam guffawed. “I just wanted to give him the best update I could. For instance,” he said as he gestured to the bots adding to the structure, “some of them are probably ready to become construction droids.”
“Or lab assistants,” Gary suggested. “We need all the help we can get building the assembly lines. We have no end of other machine-building projects, either.” Gary looked up and smiled. “I’ll get them started with some mounting hardware for the ends of their legs, something to let them wield tools better.”
“I’m sure they’ll appreciate that,” Stacy chimed. “Can’t wait to see what they come up with!”