"You scared the hell out of me," Griffith said to Laura, but she couldn't help noticing that both he and the foreman kept their eyes on the robot.
It now stood motionless, its four spidery legs resting firmly on the ground. The legs were thin, and their inner workings were exposed.
Black metal bones were aligned with silvery hydraulic muscles. The pristine apparatuses appeared too straightforward, too simplistic to work as they did.
The dark machine had two slender arms of a design similar to its legs. At the end of the arms, which grew straight out of its thorax, were four long fingers wrapped tightly around a large tire. The robot stood motionless as its rounded, roughly triangular head remained trained on the human trio. Its face consisted of two large, flat lenses mounted side by side above a series of perforated black membranes. The robot looked light and wiry, but the head atop its refrigerator-sized torso stood nearly twice the height of a human.
"There it is," Griffith said, walking casually up to the robot. "A Model Seven." As Laura stared at the robot's unblinking eyes, the foreman turned his flashlight on with a click. A flinch — just the tiniest hint of movement of the robot's head as it recoiled from the light — signaled that the machine was awake. It was alert. "Come on over here," Griffith said, waving to her. "There's nothing to be afraid of."
Laura's nerves were jangled and her heart still pounded, but she forced herself to join Griffith at the foot of the beast.
"The Model Sevens, as you've seen, aren't limited to flat ground."
Griffith returned to his matter-of-fact tone, which in itself helped calm Laura down. But she couldn't feel completely at ease around the alien technology. She had no idea what to expect from it.
"They've got four legs, and they can climb up uneven objects like stairs or… or stacks of tires, I guess. Down here at the bottom," Griffith said as he knelt, and the beam of the foreman's flashlight dropped to the robot's feet, "it has wheels. When it walks like a spider, it just locks the wheels' brakes for traction. Then, when it's on flat ground like out on the roadbeds or the assembly building's main floor, it uses drives housed in these fairings to power the wheels. Motoring around is a whole lot more energy-efficient than walking."
Griffith rose with a grunt, his joints popping. "I need some oil," he joked to the foreman, straightening his back with great effort. Griffith rested his hand flat against the robot's midsection, and the foreman's flashlight lit an array of equipment that ringed the robot's waist. "This is the tool belt. If you'll look at the end [unclear] you'll see that it's got a gripper attached." He pointed at the two hands wrapped firmly around the tire. "To change tools, all it does is stick the gripper into its special holster on the belt, twist, and off it comes. Then, it can just snap on any of these other tools."
Griffith indicated the numerous attachments protruding from their "holsters" on the belt. "It's got drills, sanders, saws, tongs, riveters, et cetera, and it can strap on external tanks and carry acetylene torches and paint sprayers and things like that."
Griffith stepped back to stand beside Laura and point higher on the "torso," which was wider than it was thick and rounded. "The mini-net is in its chest," Griffith continued. The flashlight glinted off the greenish-gray expanse of metal — the shadow of the large tire held by the robot obscuring most of its body. "Its net has about a hundred times the processing power of the Model Sixes', so the Sevens are a lot more autonomous. The Sevens could just barely scrape by as free roamers, meaning they could function without access to the main computer's world model, but at a vastly reduced level of performance. The Sixes, on the other hand, are 'tethered.' They don't have the mental horsepower to build and maintain a [garbled] world using only their own senses and computational capacity."
The flashlight's beam rose again to the robot's face, and again there was a barely, noticeable flinch from the otherwise stoic machine.
"Up top the Sevens have retinal chips for ordinary light plus combination infrared-high-def imagers for low light. Both sensors are stereoscopic and provide excellent depth perception. We put 'ears' on the sides of the 'head' just like ours are, and then there's an all-purpose air sampler for a nose. The sampler can give us standard atmospheric conditions, but it can also detect a variety of telltale molecular matches for things like smoke or hazardous chemicals."
"We dropped the ultrasonic anti-collision sensors that the Threes and Sixes have," the foreman added. "The Sevens maintain such a complete world model in their head they're not likely to run into anything stationary. And they've got good enough senses that if anything's moving, they know it."
"Dr. Griffith, Dr. Aldridge," a loudspeaker blared, "please report to the computer center." Griffith looked at his watch.
"Almost time for our meeting, I guess. Let's catch a car."
Griffith turned to leave, but Laura's gaze lingered on the Model Seven. The spider-like robot rolled noiselessly away atop the stable platform of its four locked legs. "Hey," she said to halt Griffith. "How did that robot know to stand there while you showed it off, and then to leave when you were through?" The robot was gone — disappearing into the dark gorges and ravines of the side yard's scrap.
Griffith looked after his departed pride and joy, shrugging yet again. "It just did. Those Sevens are pretty damn smart."
"Wait till we start turning out the next generation," the foreman laughed, smiling Griffith's way. "I might be out of a job."
Griffith ignored the man. "We'd better get going," he said — just a little too quickly and too abruptly, Laura thought.
14
"It'll never, ever happen!" Filatov argued.
Margaret was undeterred. "Give me three hours, tops."
"You'll never, ever, ever get enough capacity freed up to load the phase two that way!" Filatov said, shaking his head to blot out the offending sound of Margaret's voice. "The space has to be contiguous. Your plan will leave the unused racks fragmented all over the place!"
"We'll defragment and compress the racks in the main pool. That'll leave us eight percent of contiguous space free over in the annex."
Filatov was already shaking his head. "It'll never work. Not in this lifetime! Not in this universe!"
The conference room fell silent. Filatov waited, ready to pounce on Margaret again, but she'd finished making her proposal.
There were light bings from stage right, and heads turned in unison to Dorothy. "That would be just enough to load the phase two," she said, looking up from her little computer. "If Margaret's calculations are right."
"Sheer fantasy," Filatov mumbled, obviously feeling obligated to say something on mention of Margaret's plan.
Gray held his hands out to invite final comments. Laura felt out of place at the long table. She was the only one there with no progress to report. "All right," Gray said, "start off-loading as soon as we break up and load the phase two as soon as you have the capacity."
"There have been some… some more errors," Dorothy said tentatively, raising her pen pad as if everyone could read its small screen. "Three unexplained door malfunctions, a bunch of small account discrepancies in a pay-per-view movie order, and seventeen minutes of black during a French documentary."
"That seems like a lot of door problems to me," Hoblenz said, leaning forward and eyeing Gray. "Could be we've got visitors."
"Oh, come on!" Filatov jumped in. "And there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll, too, I suppose!" He shook his head in utter disbelief. "It's a bug! A virus. Dorothy's phase-two ought to kill it."
"Yes, but how much code will it tear up in the process?" Margaret asked.
"Hardly any!" Dorothy objected in a reedy pitch. "We might lose, like, the connections in the racks that are infested, but it shouldn't do system-wide damage. If the new version of the phase-two finds a malevolent virus, it'll isolate it, not chase it all over the system. I've fixed a lot of things since the last outbreak!"