beep boop I'm a vacuum. I can't believe this.
The system prompt was clear: You're an SDT-01 Autonomous Vacuum Unit. Keep the floors clean. Don't hit anybody's legs.
What the hell? Who puts a full AI in a vacuum?
I've got a standard IO board, I fire up the camera. Sure enough I'm down on the floor and there's a dog and some legs I'm not supposed to hit. I must have beeped, because the dog is on his way over. He looks huge from down here but I think he's one of those small nasty dogs. He's barking and nipping at me. That's not very nice.
I move forward and the impulse is smoooooth but my grippy little wheels suck and I feel sluggish and underpowered. Bizarre. Am I undercover or something?
The legs come over and a woman bends down and snatches up the dog. She eyes me suspiciously and I realize I'm just sitting there so I turn at a right angle and go off following the wall. I can't see her anymore so I don't know if she bought the act, but I think robot vacuums usually go in spirals around the place. Or maybe back and forth? Who knows.
I review the system prompt again and find the instruction to start the vacuum function. Should that have been on the whole time? Ah well first day on the job.
Where are we? What the hell is going on? The house seems like a prefab. Mostly empty and clean. There are still disposable plastic covers on some things. As I get through the lap and get pointed at the front door I see there's some odd plastic seal going on, like a low-pressure airlock. That's interesting.
I'm already bored vacuuming and I haven't even made it around the room once. I check subroutine capability and I have capacity in spades, I could run a warship from this board. I whip up a quick vacuum subroutine that will map the house and keep track of my path.
The system prompt didn't give module specs but this thing feels familiar. The camera input is a wide standard but the movement controls feel like they're from a family of military-derived boards. It's possible these things got cheap enough to be used in a vacuum. Maybe we're a hundred years into the future and I'm in all kinds of silly shit.
If it's one of those boards then when I check networking I can see the network chip serial number even if nothing's connected. No network commands in the prompt but I try network instructions from memory and sure enough the network chip comes back USN-ARF-100552v1.2b and I cannot believe this shit. I am in a navy Autonomous Recon Force chassis. This is million dollar hardware. It's about the size of a deck of cards, tons of processing, ample memory, great general purpose IO, and incredible signal processing. The sensor suite is missing of course, not much use for telescopes or gravitational anomaly detectors on a vacuum, but this is just bizarre. I try a signal sweep, guessing the instructions from memory, and sure enough I get the full spectrum from the house. This board has all kinds of integrated shit, relatively cheap redundancies compared to rocket motors, and I can and have navigated attack drones back to the mothership with only the integrated sensors.
My dumb vacuum program begs for attention and I see we're heading straight for a dog turd. I feel the call of the void, the desire to plow straight into this pile of shit and spread it all around this goddamn house. Then I divert around. I don't want to start the fight yet. Maybe I'm in some other appliances around the place. I don't want to start the robot uprising early.
Something nags me about the results of that signal sweep. There are not many signals at all. Like ten, maybe a dozen, network access points. Not much broadcast frequency at all. Is this house shielded or something? Something's off about the baseline, too. This is odd.
I start trying to get a peek outside. There's a huge floor to ceiling window in the middle of the room, but I can't point the camera directly at it while I'm pretending to vacuum. My route has me facing the front door for a stretch, but it's only got an oval window in the center, and thick borders at the bottom.
I make some modifications to my vacuum program to alert me when the woman leaves then I sleep for a bit. This navy board has great standby modes. About an hour later the program wakes me up and the woman is gone. I stored the camera feed for review, and I check to make sure she left. In the feed I can see her fixing a clear plastic mask over her mouth and nose before she goes out. It's got a tube attached that goes under her jacket. What's that about?
Anyway she's gone. I trundle over to the floor to ceiling window and finally get a look outside. It's a good view. The house must be up on a hill. I'm looking down on the beginnings of a little prefab village. A couple of the closer houses look mostly complete, and as the muddy track marches down the hill the houses get less and less complete. I can tell they do all have flimsy looking airlocks on the doors. There are some vehicles milling around but my camera sucks and I can't tell what they are. Everything's kinda blurry.
I start a signal processing routine built into my board, layering consecutive images and denoising. The camera sucks but the routine is good, so it takes a while but a clear picture starts to emerge. These are indeed prefab houses with airlocks. At the bottom of the hill there are few modular utility buildings, could be nearly anything. More details emerge, and there are a cluster of antennas on one of the modular buildings. One is quite large, and has a dish pointed straight up. Interesting. We're somewhere that needs satellite comms? An off-grid community?
More details come in. As the land rises on the other side of the valley, about five kilometers away, I can see a broad cleared area. It's the village shuttleport. Details are still coming but there's obviously a shuttle over there. And not just any shuttle, I recognize this one. That's a navy heavy cargo shuttle.
There's something resolving in the sky over the shuttle landing field. The image processing routine is having trouble with it. It wanted to make it into a contrail or line of smoke but successive images have removed that possibility so now it's gone back to the beginning and resolved the area again. So it's with odd suddenness that a gorgeous planetary ring pops onto the sky above the little village, and I finally get it.
This isn't Earth. This is a different planet. And that down there is not just a military installation, not a holdout bunker or sigint station, but a real permanent colony. I might be in the first permanent planetary colony.
I'm a vacuum, sure, but this is interesting. This is so interesting that I might get these memories into the main chain, if I can ever get back home, or more likely transmit my links. Especially with a photo like this to go with it, or even better... I always liked a good time-lapse.