We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

For today’s entertainment, the doctor had directed me to diagnose and repair a complex piece of electronics, similar to items that I would have to deal with aboard ship. Dr. Landers watched me as usual from the window. He liked to engage me in conversation during these exercises. I suspected that he was testing my concentration and ability to multitask. I didn’t mind, since the conversations were always interesting and informative.

Then a massive jolt shook the building and knocked Dr. Landers off his feet. It was followed immediately by a solid pressure-wave of sound, more felt than heard.

As Dr. Landers got to his feet, the sounds of gunfire echoed down the hall. He turned to me, yelled, “Stay there!” and ran off.

Stay there? Despite the gravity of the situation, my sense of the ridiculous kicked in. The good doctor was obviously rattled. As he had pointed out to me, I wasn’t actually in this room, just attached to—

Hello…

In the middle of my internal comedy routine, I realized that the window had been popped partly out of its frame. It didn’t look as though it would take much persuasion to finish the job. And surely they couldn’t blame me for wanting to take a more active role in defense of the project.

I directed every roamer in the room to grab the window and pull. The roamers weren’t particularly strong, but 32 of the little buggers commanded a lot of leverage. Within moments, the window clattered down and took a divot out of the floor.

The window didn’t break. That’s some very strong stuff. They ARE scared of me.

I chose one of the roamers at random and took over control. Now I could see through its video camera. I directed the other roamers to follow, and we took off down the hall in the direction of the gunfire. Roamers ran along the floors, walls, and ceiling. I was impressed. These people might suck at acronyms, but their tech was pretty good.

The building complex was an interesting design. It consisted of a string of large, open atriums or lobbies, each surrounded by two floors of offices or labs. Skylights in the atriums provided plenty of illumination, and short hallways connected each central open area. My roamer room was one atrium over from the location of the attack. Maybe the invaders had miscalculated.

It took only seconds to get to the action. A group of attackers dressed in black were slowly moving through the offices, shooting as they went. Security guards returned fire, but significantly outgunned, they were being forced back.

This operation was being run either by a FAITH faction that didn’t approve of me or by one of the competing nations. Either way, they wanted me dead. It seemed to me that the Golden Rule applied. Time to reciprocate.

Appraising the situation had taken only milliseconds–I was really starting to love being a computer–so the roamers hadn’t broken stride. The horde stampeded into the area and swarmed the attackers, concentrating on faces and groins.

The roamers were surprisingly tough. No matter how many times an attacker ripped a roamer off his face and tossed it against a wall, the roamer would simply right itself and come back for more. The roamers were equipped with pliers, cutters, and screwdrivers, not technically weapons but still hard to ignore. And I had more than a month’s worth of frustration and angst driving me. Endocrine controls or no, I was thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to serve up some beatings.

The attackers finally started to develop a strategy. They managed to get one of their number roamer-free. As attackers tossed roamers against the wall, this guy blasted them with a burst of automatic fire. I did a quick millisecond calculation and determined that I’d run out of roamers before they ran out of ammo. And they now had two roamer-free shooters.

But the distraction allowed the security guards to regroup. They set up a crossfire and shot a few of the invaders, then invited the rest to surrender. Now, the attackers had to deal with gunfire as well as roamers attached to their faces. It was the last straw. The weapons were set down and the hands went up.

Once the security guards had restrained all the remaining invaders, we found ourselves in an awkward tableau. The lead security guard looked at the prisoners, looked at the roamers, opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. I waved a leg on “my” roamer to get his attention.

“You’re, uh… This is bad. Where’s Landers?” He glanced at his associates, eyes wide.

Dr. Landers picked that moment to come running into the atrium. He still had his tablet with him, and he looked as alarmed as the security guards. Since the raid was now effectively over, there had to be something more going on. I realized that they were more concerned about me than about the invaders. Ř𝖆ℕȫ𝐁Εs

“Bob, I wonder if I could persuade you to gather your flock and return to the training room…?”

He had the power to deactivate me, so it wasn’t ever really a question of whether I’d cooperate. In any case, I wasn’t the rampaging Frankenstein they seemed to be concerned about.

With a roamerish salute, me and my horde headed down the hall.

***

“Okay, doc, time to spill the beans. What’s with the security glass and the quaking in your boots when I got loose?”

Dr. Landers was courteous enough to not try to pretend he didn’t understand what I was talking about. He sighed and leaned back in his chair.

“We—by which I mean the people working on the project, including myself—are not scared of you, Bob. We’re scared of the tactical nuke buried in the basement.”

If I’d still had eyebrows, they would have shot right off my head. “Habba-whaaa?”

“It is just possible, Bob, that you face a greater danger from our own government than you do from our foreign competitors. At least from certain factions.” He shifted a little to face me and waved a hand. “I mentioned before that the upper echelons of FAITH are not unanimous in supporting this venture. I very probably understated the situation.”

I considered that statement for a millisecond or so. Nuke in the basement… yikes.

“So this is like the Andromeda Strain?”

Dr. Landers looked confused, so I waved a waldo in dismissal. “Never mind. Another old movie. The point is that the nuke is a last line of defense against me getting out and scaring all the civilians and farm animals?”

“That’s right Bob. And I’m definitely going to have to start watching some more old movies.”

“So who has the button?”

“I don’t know. We’ve deliberately not been told how we’re being monitored, who makes the decision, or how it’s carried out. We just know that if someone, somewhere, decides they don’t like something, we could all become a radioactive cloud. No warning, no discussion.”

“And you agreed to this? How much are they paying you?”

Dr. Landers laughed. “The rewards for successful completion of this project are considerable. Those who support the venture are throwing a lot of money at it. I, personally, will be able to retire with my bonus.” He grimaced and gave me a one-sided shrug. “And of course, under FAITH, agreement is not optional.”

I smiled—in my mind, anyway. “Gotcha. Okay, I’ll try to stay put in the future.”

He swept his hands to take in the room. “And, since we’re still here talking, I’d guess the immediate danger is over. Someone was either away from their monitoring station or decided you weren’t that big of a danger. Or something.”

Dr. Landers stood up and looked around the training room. The roamers—the remaining roamers, anyway—were properly arrayed on their racks. Maintenance people had levered the security window back into its frame and were bolting it back in place.

“I guess we’re back to operational. There were three fatalities, and several injured. Really, it could have been a lot worse.”

I bobbed my cameras by way of response.

In a video window, I watched the scene from across the hall.

***

The roamer moved carefully through the air ducts. The little robots were capable of a very light touch, but a hundred years of progress hadn’t come up with a replacement for galvanized tin as air-duct material. I didn’t want to announce the roamer’s presence to the whole complex.

The guerilla raiding party had shot up my roamers so thoroughly that any kind of inventory was impossible. As near as I could tell, no one realized that one unaccounted-for roamer was wandering the building.

So far I had identified numerous offices, the cafeteria, workshops, and storage. 3D mapping software had built up the layout of the office building. Interestingly, I hadn’t found any trace of a nuke in the basement, or any area that might have been walled off to contain one. Perhaps it was a bluff.

Meanwhile I’d narrowed down the building layout to two possible locations for the computer room.

As I moved the roamer through the ducts, I carefully checked for surveillance equipment, trip-switches, infra-red beams, or any other traps. The roamers were a very impressive bag of tricks and capabilities. I wondered if the FAITH techs really understood everything the roamers were capable of, when the various functions were combined.

Finally, the roamer arrived at one of the two areas that were still blanks in my map. And sure enough, it was on a separate air system. Definitely a good sign. It took me twenty minutes to exit the general duct-work and break into the isolated system. I moved carefully through the air conduit until I came to the room exhaust panel.

It was a standard computer room, mostly. Cables, blinking lights, air conditioning, rack-mounted computers. I guess rack-mounting was still the most efficient way to organize computers, even with a hundred years to improve things.

But in the center of the room sat something very new to me. Five cubes, each one just under a half-meter on a side, sat in a line on a low platform. Two of the cubes glowed an eerie blue, with multi-colored indicator lights blinking at their bases. The other three were dark.

I engaged magnification and pulled in a close-up of the panels at the base of the cubes.

Kenneth Martins

Jiro Tanaka

Neves Reijnder

Robert Johansson

Joana Almeida

This was it. This was us. The candidates. The glowing cubes were Kenneth’s and mine. The other three candidates were dark. I could see their power switches in the off position. Another thing that hadn’t really changed much in a hundred years, I guess. But really, how many different ways were there to design a rocker switch?

I stared at the tableau for what seemed like forever. I could turn Kenneth off, right now. But would it do any good? Could I sabotage him? Should I? Would they figure it out?

I felt shame as I realized what I was contemplating. I wasn’t going to be that guy. Not even in theory. I’d let myself be switched off before I’d save myself by climbing on someone else’s back.

With a heavy heart, I turned around and left.