To bide the time, Arachna examined the tiny robot that she'd recovered from inside the air ducts. After prying it apart, she'd been unable to figure out how it worked exactly. It didn't have any inner organs, at least not in the way that Krath or even Yumens did.
If it didn't have lungs or a heart, how did it survive? Horde, it didn't even have gills or photochondria or anything else to make it go.
Battery.
The world flashed in her mind. There was a small rectangular device that her Carlsen mind seemed to understand was a source of power for the tiny thing.
Interesting. These Yumen contraptions used alternative sources of energy. She grimaced. The idea of drawing energy from something made of metal made her stomachs churn.
There was also something else inside it that she recognized to be a circuit board. Her Carlsen mind intuited that this was like the brain of the tiny robot, if it could be called a brain. The circuit board had small chips on it that provided instructions for the rest of the device.
Chips like the quantum chip she'd recovered from the rifter? She held up the circular quantum chip in her other hand. It glowed with neon-violet light that emanated from gyrating circuits on the top half of the flat metal disc. It was a beautiful thing. What it did exactly she wasn't sure.
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But the quantum chip wouldn't fit onto the tiny robot's circuit board. The chip was far too big, and the circuit board too small. Hmmmm. If it wouldn't fit here then where would it fit?
She studied the little robot. What if there was a way for her to talk to it? Get it to understand that she was a nice queenling who wanted to be its friend.
Arachna tried powering it on. The little robot began to hum. A light near its top glowed yellow then red then, finally blue, as it powered up.
It didn't move.
Arachna sent psionic signals into the tiny robot, but nothing happened. Next she tried pressing down on the different circuits. Still nothing. How in the horde did Yumens get these things to work?
Need interface, her subconscious mind told her. Another Humboldt Carlsen intuition. Her host was familiar with these robot things.
She scanned the room. What was an interface? Maybe something in the trash?
Her eyes honed in on the damaged datapad she'd used before. That should work. Arachna scampered over to the device and picked it up. Then she returned to the tiny robot.
"Establishing connection," the device said in a melodramatic female tone. "Connection established. Running diagnostic."
Click, click, click.
The voice startled her. An image of the robot popped up on the screen. There were red highlighted areas on the image indicating where it had been damaged.
"Would you like to establish a command console for M-91 sentry bot?" the voice said. "Yes or No."
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Battery