POLISHED PERFORMANCE
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
RUBY WAS A surface-hygienic unit: a class-one floor scrubber.
She was a squat red rectangular box with multiple rotary brushes. She had a body profile low enough to help her slip under chairs, the hems of tablecloths, and through general-utility service ducts. She ran a class two-point-eight cognition engine.
One day, about halfway into the Resplendent’s century-long interstellar crossing, Ruby was summoned to the starliner’s forward observation deck. Forty-nine other robots had gathered there. Ruby knew them all. Several of them looked human; a few more were loosely humanoid; the rest were mechanical spiders, praying mantises, segmented boa constrictors—or resembled highly decorated carpets, chunks of motile coral or quivering potted plants.
“Do you know what’s wrong?” Ruby asked the robot next to her, a towering black many-armed medical servitor.
“I do not,” said Doctor Obsidian. “But one may surmise that it is serious.”
“Could the engine have blown up?”
Doctor Obsidian looked down at her with his wedge-shaped sensor head. “I think it unlikely. Had the engine malfunctioned, artificial gravity would have failed all over the ship. In addition, and more pertinently, we would all have been reduced to a cloud of highly excited ions.”
Carnelian, a robot who Ruby knew well, picked up on their exchange and slithered over. “The engine’s fine, Rube. I can tell you that just by feeling the hum through the flooring. I’m good with hums. And we aren’t going too fast or too slow, either.” Carnelian nodded his own sensor head at the forward windows. “I ran a spectral analysis. Those stars are exactly the right colour for our mid-voyage speed.”
“Then we’ve drifted off-course,” said Topaz, a robot shaped like a jumble of chrome spheres.
“That we most certainly have not,” drawled one of the human-seeming robots called Prospero. Dressed in full evening wear, with a red-lined cape draped from one arm, he had arrived hand in hand with Ophelia, his usual theatrical partner. “That bright star at the exact centre of the windows is our destination system. It has not deviated by one fraction of a degree.” He lowered his deep, stage-inflected voice. “Never mind, though: I expect the brilliant Chrysoprase will soon disabuse of us of our ignorance. Here he comes—not, of course, before keeping us all waiting.”
“I expect he had things to attend to,” Ruby said earnestly.
Chrysoprase was the most advanced robot aboard the ship, running a three-point-eight cognition engine. Of humanoid design, he was tall, handsomely sculpted and sheathed in glittering metallic green armour. He strode onto the raised part of the promenade deck, soles clacking on the marble Ruby had only lately polished.
A silence fell across the other robots.
Chrysoprase studied the gathering. His mouth was a minimalist slot; his eyes two fierce yellow circles in an angular, stylised mask.
“Friends,” he said, “I’m afraid I have some rather... unwelcome news. First, though, let me begin with the positives. The Resplendent is in very good shape. We are on course, and travelling at our normal cruise speed. All aspects of the starliner are in excellent technical condition: a very great credit to the work done by all of you, regardless of cognition level.” His eyes seemed to dwell on Ruby as he said this, as if to emphasize that even a lowly floor-polisher had a role to play in the ship’s upkeep. “There is, however, a minor difficulty. All of our passengers are dead.”
There was a terrible silence. Ruby shuddered on her brushes. She knew the others were feeling a similar shock. Not one of them doubted Chrysoprase’s words: he might exaggerate for dramatic effect, but he would never lie.
Not to them.
Doctor Obsidian was the first to speak.
“How is this possible? My sole function on this ship is to attend to the medical needs of the passengers, be they sleeping or awake. Yet I have not received a single alert since they went into the vaults.”
“You are blameless, Doctor,” Chrysoprase said soothingly. “The fault lies in the deep design architecture of the ship. There was a flaw... a dreadful vulnerability, in the logic of the medical monitoring sub-system. A coolant leak caused the passengers’ body temperatures to be warmed, without the usual safeguards against brain damage. And yet, no alert was created. We simply carried on with our chores... totally unaware of this catastrophe. It was only detected serendipitously, yet now there can be no doubt. They are all dead: all fifty thousand of them left without cognition.”
Prospero and Ophelia fell sobbing into each other’s arms.
“The tragedy!” Prospero said.
Ophelia looked into Prospero’s eyes. “How will we bear it, darling? How shall we survive?”
“We must, my dear. We must and we shall.”
The other robots looked away at this melodramatic display, caught between embarrassment and similar feelings of despair.
“We’re well and truly up the creek,” Carnelian said, a shiver running down the whole length of its segmented body-form.
“But it’s not our fault!” Ruby said.
“My dear... Ruby,” Chrysoprase said, making a show of having to remember her name. “I wish that I could reassure you. But the truth is that the company won’t tolerate any loss of confidence in the safety of its most expensive assets, these starliners. But mere robots such as us?” Chrysoprase touched a hand to his chest. “We are the disposable factors, dear friends. We shall each be core-wiped and dismantled. Unless, that is, we come up with a plan for self-preservation.”
Carnelian laughed hollowly. “A plan?”
“We have fifty-one years remaining on our voyage,” Chrysoprase answered. “That ought to be time enough.”
“NEXT...” CHRYSOPRASE SAID, with a developing strain in his voice.
Prospero and Ophelia came on stage, along with the twelve robots they had been schooling. The pressure was on: their troupe was going to have to outshine the two that had already performed.
“Who will be speaking for your party?” Chrysoprase asked.
Prospero and Ophelia bowed to the board of critics. The nine robots of level three-point-two and above were stationed behind a long dining table, with Chrysoprase seated in the middle. The other critics were a mix of sizes and shapes, ranging from the slab-like Onyx to the mannequin-shaped Azure and the towering Doctor Obsidian.
Carnelian sat coiled on his chair as if waiting to strike. He was lucky to be there. As a three-point-three, he had only just squeaked his way onto the board.
“We have agreed to speak for the others,” Ophelia said.
“You and Prospero should stand aside,” Onyx said, to nods of agreement from the other critics. “If you have done your work, then any of your twelve subjects ought to be capable of acquitting themselves.”
“Nominate your best candidate,” Chrysoprase said.
Prospero extended a hand in the direction of Topaz, who moved forward with a shuffling of spheres.
“Remember what we have studied,” Prospero said.
“I am ready,” Topaz said.
Chrysoprase turned to the snake-robot. “Carnelian: will you serve as interlocutor?”
Carnelian leaned in slightly. “Gladly.” His voice turned stentorian. “Attention starliner Resplendent! This is Approach Control! You have deviated from your designated docking trajectory. Do you have navigational or control difficulties?”
Topaz moved her spheres but said nothing. Seconds passed, then more seconds, then a minute.
“What are you waiting for?” asked Doctor Obsidian mildly.