“I don’t believe this.”
There was the power line, a giant red snake coiling down from the darkness. And there was the input junction for the signal recognition assembly. And there was something he had never seen before in his life. Cautiously, he eased the bot forward.
The red power cable had a ring of tiny, interlocking metal pieces around it, something that looked a little like a metal watchband. Some of the parts of the band looked familiar: the base of an LED lead there, a strip of black insulation there. All of it was soldered together, and pits in the solder seam beneath him seemed to account for the source of the solder.
He extended a pair of probes. Just as he’d thought. On the other side of the wristband, the red cable was dead.
There has to be some explanation for this, Kevin thought. He swiveled the bot’s eye back and forth, feeling as if he were being watched. This was just too weird.
A yellow light blinked insistently in his goggles. The bot’s stored charge was one-quarter depleted. He’d better get on with this job before he lost another bot. His insurance was high enough as it was.
Cut the watchband, he thought. That was the obvious move. But something made him hesitate. Better to play it safe. Better to go on into the assembly, check it out internally before restoring power to the area. He’d never come up against anything like this. Yeah. Better to play it safe.
Darkness engulfed the bot as Kevin moved forward into the trouble area. He wanted to conserve power; but there was no choice, he had to keep the headlights on high beam. The silicon city around him was deserted, ghostly in its stillness.
Spooky.
“That’s odd,” Kevin muttered. Chip 47 loomed ahead of him, and there was something badly wrong with it. The leads were all intact, but about half the chip itself was gone. There was nothing neat about it, either, like you’d expect from a factory defect or a burnout. It had a fuzzy look, like something had taken a million tiny bites out of the casing. Inside, thin strands of something silvery had been woven in a not-quite-random pattern between the chip’s remaining internal components.
Kevin edged closer. Something seemed to be holding him back. He steadied the bot, rolled a little closer, stopped. Fear. It was fear that held him back. He’d seen it all. He’d diagnosed and repaired everything that a human could do to a piece of electronic equipment or that the equipment could do to itself. This was different. This was…
“Crazy,” he muttered. “It’s crazy. But I ain’t afraid of nothing. If it’s electronic, I can get to the bottom of it.”
Distantly, a whispering voice was trying to speak to him, and closer to home, the bot’s power readout was nearing the half-depleted mark. He ignored both and moved up as close as he could to chip 47.
Yes, the spaghetti tangle of microfilaments had a design to it. There were thousands of them! And he could see where some of them exited the chip entirely, connecting it to other nearby components. He probed one of the filaments—or tried to. The outer coating read as a nonconductor, and the material resisted his bot’s microdrill. Analysis showed its chemical makeup consistent with elements readily available inside the VCR, but in the form of an alloy he’d never seen before.
He backed off. The explanation that kept bubbling to the surface of his mind was too incredible to believe. But how could he deny what he saw with his own eyes?
I’ll tour the whole assembly, record what I see, and get out with reserve power, Kevin told himself. Later, he could analyze the data and try to figure out what the rewired components would actually do. Already, he had a sneaking suspicion. It was the signal recognition assembly, after all. Any alteration to it might enable it to decode signals other than those the equipment had been designed to receive. And with the satellite dish out back…
Kevin froze. The shadow of his bot had suddenly sprung into being directly ahead of him. The shadow was growing larger. He whirled the bot around. White light blinded him until he had the presence of mind to snap the filter down over his bot’s eye. That was when he saw the cylindrical object moving slowly toward him.
“Well, slap my butt and call me a bastard.”
The thing was a bot, no doubt about that. It was about half the size of his repair bot, and the thickening near the top hinted at a powerful onboard computer wired at the molecular level. The body itself was smooth except for a number of oval-shaped indentations, and the whole thing was levitating over the solder seam.
He ran a recognition check, just for grins. There was no record of any bot anything like this one in the entire MBSI catalog. It might be an experimental government device, new and secret, but what the hell would it be doing inside Mr. Walter Meekly’s VCR? Besides, it looked light-years beyond anything Kevin knew about…
The strange bot dimmed its headlight, as if sensing Kevin’s discomfort. Kevin lifted the filter. The bot was moving in a slow circle that ended up putting it directly between Kevin’s bot and the modified chip he’d been examining.
“Message received,” Kevin whispered. He folded his manipulators into the down position and backed up a bit, just to show it he was no threat. The other bot didn’t move. Who was controlling that thing? There wasn’t the sort of antenna that every bot he’d ever heard of needed to receive its VR control signal. But its responses to his actions were lightning-quick. He remembered how it had eluded him the first two times he’d spotted it.
“Autonomous,” he said out loud. “Must be.” What a breakthrough! NASA was still having trouble putting smart computers into their space probes. And those things were huge.
“Oh my God.”
It all became clear to him so suddenly, so completely, that he knew he was right. Then, as if he needed further proof, the Unidentified Microrobotic Object hovered nearer. One of the oval indentations opened, and a tiny needle-shaped manipulator darted out. Kevin started to back away, but then he realized the extrusion wasn’t a weapon. It was a writing implement. The UMO was moving it in quick jerks across the solder surface beneath them.
First contact, Kevin thought. Make that first nanocontact. And he was the contactee.
The UMO had finished, retracting the needle back inside itself. Kevin rolled forward, suddenly conscious of how crude his own bot felt by comparison. He peered down at the solder. Nothing. Not even a scratch.
He looked at the UMO. It seemed to be waiting expectantly for something. Kevin looked back down. The solder appeared unmarred. But what if…
He zoomed in, full mag, and focused his headlights on the area the UMO had concerned itself with. And there it was! A design was visible, the scaling so small that the image was blurry even to his microbot’s tiny eyes—which meant it was very small.
“Weird.”
He crept up a bit, mindful of the alien bot’s watchful posture, and peered down at the message. The design consisted of two circles. One of them, oddly familiar, held eight other concentric circles inside it. A line connected the third ring from center with the outer ring of the second circle, which held four more concentric circles.
“I get it. You come from a solar system with five planets.”
A voice, far off, replied, “What the devil are you talking about? The kick-offs in five minutes!”
Oh, hell, thought Kevin. Better be careful about that. Because a plan was already forming in his mind, and that plan didn’t include anyone else finding out about this—especially Mr. Walter Meekly.