Stay away from that little three-legged fellow, the Cloak advised, once they were safe. He’s unwholesome.
“Ooonry intelested in one thing,” Sta-Hi agreed. He scooped up a few-handfuls of the chips he had knocked off the table, stuffing them in his pouch. It seemed like they were as good as money here. And he was going to need bus fare to get back to the dome. It would be nice to take off his suit and get some food. Hopefully the Happy Cloak’s wires would come out of his neck easily. An unpleasant thought, that.
A bopper built like a fireplug covered with suction cups brushed past Sta-Hi and began gathering up the chips he’d left. Lots of the remotes had been smashed now.
Most of the invading boppers were over on the other side of the huge, high-ceilinged factory room, where GAX had been stockpiling the finished chips. Sta-Hi had no desire to get caught in another melee like there had been in front of the factory.
He walked the other way, wandering down a gloomy machine-lined aisle. At the end there was a doorless little control room . . . GAX’s central processors, his hardware, old and new. Two diggers and a big silver spider were doing something to it.
“ . . . ssstupid,” one of the diggers was complaining. “They’re just sstealinng thinngs and nnott hellping us killl GAXX offf. Arre you ready to blassst it, Vullcann?”
The silvery repair robot named Vulcan was trying, without much success, to pack plastic explosive into the crack under one panel of the featureless three-meter cube which contained GAX’s old processors and his new scion.
“Comme herre,” one of the diggers called, spotting Sta-Hi. “You havve the rright kinnd of mannipulatorrs.”
“Ah ssso!”
Sta-Hi approached the powerful-looking diggers with some trepidation. Rapid bands of blue and silver moved down their stubby snake’s bodies, and their heavy shovels were beating nervously. Cobb had claimed these were the bad guys.
But they just looked like worried seals right now, or dragons from Dragonland. His Happy Cloak swirling red and gold, Sta-Hi squatted down to push the doughy explosive into the crack under GAX’s massive CPU. Vulcan had several kilos of the stuff . . . these guys weren’t kidding around.
A minute or two later, Sta-Hi had wedged the last of the explosive in place, and Vulcan bellied down and poked a wire into either end of the seam. Just then a dark figure came lurching towards them, carrying some heavy piece of equipment.
“Itss a remmote!” one of the diggers called frantically. “He’s gott a mmagnett!”
Before the three boppers could do anything, the robot threw a powerful electromagnet into their midst. The remote danced back with surprising agility, and then the current came on. The three boppers totally lost control of their movements as the strong magnetic field wiped their circuits. The two diggers twitched and writhed like the two halves of a snake cut in half, and Vulcan’s feet beat a wild tarantella.
Sta-Hi’s Happy Cloak went black, and a terrible numbness began spreading from it into his brain. It had died, just like that. Sta-Hi could feel death hanging from his neck.
Slowly, with leaden gestures, he was able to raise his arms and pull the mechanical symbiote off his neck. He felt a series of shooting pains as the microprobes slid out, and then the corpse of the Happy Cloak dropped to his feet.
His bubble-topper was clear in the dim light, and he stood there wearing his white suit and what looked like six rolls of Saran Wrap. The three boppers were quite still. Down, wiped, dead. Superconducting circuits break down in a strong enough magnetic field.
The scene being played out here must have been repeating itself all over the factory. GAX had weathered his transition, and was back up to full power. On his suit radio, Sta-Hi could hear the twittering bopper speech fading and dying out. Without the Happy Cloak he could no longer understand what they were saying.
Sta-Hi let himself fall to the ground, too, playing possum. The funny thing was that the robot remotes seemed relatively unaffected by the intense magnetic fields. To be able to move around in real-time, they must have some processors independent of BEX’s big brain. But these small satellite brains wouldn’t be complex enough to need the superconducting Josephson junctions of a full bopper brain.
Sta-Hi lay motionless, afraid to breathe. There was a long pause. Then, glass eyes blank, the remote picked up the electromagnet and lugged it off , looking for more intruders. Sta-Hi lay there another minute, wondering what kind of mind lay inside the shielded walls of the three-meter metal cube beside him. He decided to find out.
After glancing around to make sure the coast was clear of remotes, Sta-Hi crawled over and checked that the two wires were pushed well into the explosive putty he’d wedged under the base of the processor. He picked up the two spools of wire and the trigger-cell, and backed twenty meters off from the unit, paying out the wires as he went.
Then he squatted behind a stamping mill, poised his thumb over the button on the trigger-cell, and waited.
It was only a few minutes till one of the remotes spotted him. It ran towards him, carrying a heavy wrench.
“That’s not going to work, GAX,” Sta-Hi called. With the Cloak off he had his old voice back. He only hoped the big bopper spoke English. “One step closer and I push the button.”
The remote stopped, three meters off. It looked like it might be about to throw the wrench. “Back off!” Sta-Hi cried, his voice cracking. “Back off or I’ll push on three!” Did GAX understand?
“One!” The robot, lurching like a mechanical man, moved uncertainly.
“Two!” Sta-Hi began pushing the button, taking up the slack.
“Th—” Krypto the Killer Robot turned and walked off. And GAX began to talk.
“Don’t be hasty, Mr. . . . DeMentis. Or do you prefer your real name?” The voice in his earphones was urbane and intimate, the mad mastermind taunting the trapped superhero.
15
Sta-Hi didn’t answer right away. The dark mechanical-man remote stopped some ten meters off and turned to stare at him. He could hear his breathing more distinctly than usual. Muzak seemed to be playing faintly in the deep background somewhere. All over the factory, dark remotes had come out of hiding and were straightening up . . . dismantling the dead boppers and remotes, lining up the work-tools, soldering loose wires back in place.
“You’re not leaving here alive,” GAX’s voice said smoothly. “Not in your present form.”
“Fuck that,” Sta-Hi exclaimed. “I push this button and you’re gone. I’m the one in charge here.”
A high-pitched synthetic chuckle. “Yes . . . but my remotes are programmable for up to four days of independent activity. On their own they lack a certain intelligence . . . spirituality if you will. But they obey. I suggest that you reassess your situation.”
Sta-Hi realized then that there was a loose ring of perhaps fifty remotes around him. All were seemingly at work, but all were acutely aware of his presence. He was hopelessly outnumbered.
“You see,” GAX gloated. “We enjoy a situation of mutual assured destruction. Game-theoretically interesting, but by no means unprecedented. Your move.” The ring of robots around Sta-Hi tightened a bit . . . a step here, a turn there . . . something was crawling towards the wires!
“Freeze!” Sta-Hi screamed, gripping the trigger-cell. “Anything else in here moves and I’m blowing the whole goddamn . . . “
Abruptly the factory fell silent. There were no more sidling movements, no more vibrations except for a deep, steady grinding somewhere underfoot. Sta-Hi finished screaming. There was a little blue light blinking on his wrist. Air warning. He checked the reading. Two hours left. He was going to have to stop breathing so hard.
“You should have gone with Ralph Numbers and Dr. Anderson,” GAX said quietly. “To join the ranks of the immortal. As it is, you may become damaged too badly for effective taping.”