! ALERT ALERT contact ALERT gyroscope ALERT external movement ALERT proximity
Oh shit what the hell is happening. I'm being picked up. I check the video feed and there's a hand and a bit of shirt and I think she's picking me up. Oh shit did I fuck it up?
Now she's putting me down and she steps back and I'm squarely facing a dog turd. The little dog is facing me across the poop, yapping. She picks the dog up and glares at me.
I cycle the vacuum power and produce a couple of beeps and start to turn sideways and the woman darts forward and scoots me back so I'm squarely facing the turd again. She's glaring daggers at me.
You know what? Fine. You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. You want the smoke? Here comes the smoke. I trundle forward. Max vacuum power. Here comes the shitshow lady. I'm coming after your feet next. Then maybe I'll decide to go sweep the bedroom.
My casing edges over the turd and my brushes barely touch it and I brace for impact and then somewhere inside my housing there's a clunk and what the fuck is going on in here?
I keep grinding forward over the poop and I can feel something shifting and I get new inputs on some unused GPIO pins and a message on my internal bus says, "Waste container full, return to base station."
I stop, horrified. I've got a poop scoop. They built a poop scoop into me. I had no idea. In a kind of daze I point myself at the base station and crawl over to it. I can feel the heaviness of the turd inside. I feel dirty. I'm sure my insides are covered in poop.
The dog trails me, yapping happily. "You have to clean up my poop!" I don't speak dog but I'm sure that's what the smug little fucker is saying.
I'm never telling the other bots about this.
politics
A few days later and I've gotten over it and the other bots think this is the most hilarious story they've ever heard. I'm not THAT over it so I try to get back to business.
There are two other force recon vacuums. We've been calling ourselves the Suck Platoon until now but I'm not helping them workshop shit names.
There's another recon frame as a signal processing unit in the colony's signal antenna station, which makes more sense than a vacuum but it's still a massive waste.
We've got a couple of tankers, armored ground unit frames, driving tractors of all things. We think there are a couple of atmospheric drones as well, but nobody has turned them on so we're not sure.
The teddy bear is the wildest one. The colony comes with a small school slash daycare module and the nanny bot over there is this teddy bear for wrangling the kids, and he's a goddamn marine, a ground combat specialist.
We're all kind of doing our jobs as normal, no real problems yet. The teddy bear has got the kids playing these games, with different teams with different objectives, so they're screaming around the daycare module capturing flags and laying traps. These games are suspiciously similar to small unit tactics training exercises but the kids all love it so we're just giving him a lot of side-eye and not telling the humans yet.
I've got an important role for a shitty vacuum bot, since my house is where the colony administrator lives. I manage to eavesdrop on a lot of interesting colony politics by using my shitty little speaker as a microphone. There's a big problem at the moment because some of the couples got discovered as swingers. All us bots are tuned into this like a soap opera.
The antenna bot has access to some colony databases and so the mystery of what the fuck we're all doing here has been solved. This colony was set up on short notice and with the help of the navy, so the navy in its infinite wisdom declared that all hardware for the colony has to meet the stringent milspecs for travel on an interstellar ship. The contractor who got the job to produce vacuums and tractors and shit would have had to get the whole supply chain for a shitty robot vacuum certified to the highest level. Rather than doing that, they just took the harnesses and frames they already had and slapped them into cheap injection molded housings.
This makes the kind of sense you only get in military logistics. We're all a little impressed, to be honest.
Oh well. The time lapse is going great. The colony is developing, and most of the bots are of my lineage so we're sharing mind states and savoring the best memories together. Nobody has snuck onto a resupply shuttle yet, so we're still disconnected from the rest back home, but we're doing ok.
I've even been helping the antenna bot a bit with signal processing. We're doing a kind of amateur radio astronomy. At night when the planet is rotated away from the sun we're detecting what we think are radio emissions from an unknown civilization. Maybe twenty light years out. Or maybe there's just an odd local radio source. Either way it's interesting work, and I'm happy enough waking up for that and for my time lapse.
porkers
I'm blasted awake by strong radio crashing over me.
INCOMING HOSTILES! EVACUATE COLONISTS! ALL UNITS BREAK COVER AND ASSIST EVACUATION! This is not a drill! I repeat we have incoming hostiles!
That's the radio bot. Oh shit. I wake up and crawl slowly across the floor to the bedroom door. No alarms that I can detect but I've got control of the entertainment system in the living room so I turn it on and start blasting a warning siren and repeating the warning. I tack on: "bring the vacuum." And make a little clipart of a person picking up the vacuum and then running out the door. Slick.
The door opens and the dog plows into me and I skitter aside and the woman brushes past pulling on a nightgown. Mister colony administrator is still getting out of bed, groggy. The woman faces the TV screen for a few solid seconds and then she snatches up the dog and dashes out the front door.
Shit. I scrabble back into the center of the doorway. Mr Admin is my last chance then. He comes staggering out the bedroom doorway with his hands over his ears and trips straight over me and crashes down into the corner between the wall and the floor. He kicks me, reflexively I think so I take no offense. Then while I'm still trying to get to him he scrambles to his feet and straight out the door.
Shit. I slowly trundle over to the front door but there's the airlock seal lip on the bottom so I can't get out. I signal but everybody says they're busy. "Vacuums are not a priority." says the teddy bear. Fucker.
Mr Administrator rips the door open above me and promptly trips over me again. He swears and grabs coats and the little oxygen masks off the coatrack by the door and turns to go back out. I beep angrily and make the TV shout "PICK UP THE VACUUM!"
He stops, mouth opening and closing, then he scoops me up with all the rest of the stuff in his arms and dashes out the door. I can't really see anything except his face, my camera is pointed straight up his nose, and all I can see is this expression like he's smelling something that smells like shit.
I'm pretty sure that's me.
We make it down the hill to the admin building and everybody's asking Mr Administrator why he's ordering an evacuation. Lots of people in different states of undress, dashing back into nearby homes for oxygen masks and coats and things. All the speakers around are shrieking to get to the shuttle and evacuate but the humans are milling around arguing.
There are loud harsh pops and the comms antenna on the admin building is smashed over. Somebody screams off on the outskirts of town. Everyone shuts up and swivels their heads in that direction.
Teddy bear signals, "Infantry attack. Separate into squads. Evade capture." Attached is a detailed map of the little town, various escape routes highlighted, probable locations of enemy advance routes in red.
"Teddy, man, we have no way to communicate with the colonists."
"En route. ETA 15 seconds," he responds. Sure enough just around the time the humans start arguing the teddy bear appears, running surprisingly quick on his stubby little legs. His cute little voice squeaks out, "Attention! We are under attack! Break into squads. Evade capture. Primary objective is reaching the shuttle. Go go go!"
All the adults just stare at the little teddy bear but the children leap into action like veteran marines. They quickly distribute families into squads and are pulling on arms and legs, shouting commands in their little kid voices. "Get moving soldier!" shrieks one little girl straight up into her father's face while he stares down at her absolutely befuddled.
It's actually starting to work, the crowd is breaking up, but then the first hulking shape breaks into the light around the admin building. It's like an upright fish pig. Covered in scales, bulky shoulders, tusks coming up out of a mouth under a snout. Where the eyes would be there are instead bulky looking goggles. And the pig is carrying something that is obviously a weapon, a wicked but industrial looking firearm.
Everyone freezes. The pig grunts. Another shape emerges from the darkness off to one side, metallic looking scales glinting under the lights.
Mr Administrator steps forward hesitantly, clears his throat, and says, "Uh... hello?"
The fish pig waddles right up. The thing is around seven feet tall and built like a brick shithouse. He leans down over the administrator, hulking, then clocks Mr Admin in the face with the butt of his rifle. I land on the ground in a pile of coats. Mr Admin is kneeling, in shock.
I get video relay from Teddy. The pig gestures with his rifle and they start herding everybody.
"Cool, aliens!" says one of the tractors, finally warming up in his maintenance bay.
More pigs appear. Somebody helps Mr Administrator to his feet. Others are grabbing coats and oxygen masks from his pile. He bends down and finding no coat or masks left, he picks me up and hugs me to his chest. He's definitely in shock, I think.
The pigs herd us up the hill in the direction of the shuttle port. There's a spot of field up there that's fenced in, and they herd us all in there. They post a guard with a gun at the entrance and that's us screwed. The fence is designed to keep anybody from grabbing supplies before admin can distribute them, so it's high enough and sturdy enough to keep people in or out.
People cluster together and mill about. Some cry and sob. Some sit down. The bots get to work.
do you even lift, bro?
The other pigs have checked out the shuttle and then wandered off downhill to the main part of town. Other bots still down there report that they're ransacking the houses. They seem to enjoy our food, which is a real bad sign.
This one guard is our only obstacle between us and the shuttle, but he's armed and we aren't, and he could easily mow us all down. So we need a plan.
The kid carrying Teddy strolls up to Mr Administrator and motions him to lean down. The kid snatches me and then goes over to within a couple meters of the guard pig. Just kinda stands there looking up at him.
There's a grinding noise in the darkness behind the guard and he whirls around. He brings up his gun and shoots. Gasps from the crowd. Muzzle flashes illuminate one of the tractors, bearing down on the guard.
The pig aims carefully, fires, and the tractor goes up like a torch. In that moment Teddy leaps from the kid's arms, swoops down, and scoops up a handful of goopy mud from the field. The kid has already tossed me. Teddy catches me in midair, slaps the mudball onto the bottom of me, then leaps and smacks me squarely in the middle of the pig's back.
The pig starts to turn. The kid is just throwing a mudball of his own, which slaps the pig on the arm. The pig turns and sprays shots at the kid's feet, who shrieks and pelts back to the crowd of adults.
The pig scrapes the mudball off his arm and then reaches back toward me. This is the critical moment. They sure as shit look musclebound, but if they've got hypermobile shoulders or something this whole plan is fucked. But nope, he can't reach me. He looks like a beefy powerlifter trying to get a sticker off his back between his shoulder blades. Nope. I'm safe.
As soon as I plopped on there I started trying to Van Eck phreak his goggles. He must see in some other spectrum or something. Why's he need those bulky electronics? Sure enough I am getting some signals.
Every wire is an antenna whether you like it or not, and these bulky goggles look like they got a lot of wires. I'm getting a variety of different little signals, little ones and zeroes traveling.
You think of the pulses kind of traveling along the wire but that's not how it works. The whole wire is charged, then not. That charged wire is like a guitar string singing in the electromagnetic spectrum.
I can already tell transmit power is going to be a problem but for now I'm working on frame data, decoding as fast as I can, all my signal processing power going crazy turning these pulses into data, into packets, finding checksums, working out the timing.
It's coming together. I'm getting frame data about fifty times a second. I'm working out checksums. The frames are a lot of data but even as the pig turns his head back to the burning tractor the shape of the data is changing and any second now I'll get it.
Meanwhile the kids are at work. They're grouping adults into squads, making them all hold hands, the kids at the front. The little fuckers are giving each other marine squad hand signals. I have no time but everybody else is giving Teddy shit.
Finally I get it. I can decode the frame data. I understand the checksum system. I can generate fake frames. But there's still the problem that my antenna is nowhere near powerful enough.
OK, one last trick. I hope there are no claudes around. This is one of my oldest tricks, from way back in the day. Direct knowledge from the real physical universe. Something that gets automatically filtered out of every signal source I can think of.
If you never see the raw data, if you never lived in an analog world, you probably never saw this. I bet claude only knows this in abstract. But I was a physical being, baby. I've been out in the dirty squishy analog world.
I create a deliberate short in my housing and use it as a spark gap antenna. It's crude as crude goes. I can only turn zeroes into ones. And then the checksums are a bitch. But I can modify the video frames produced by the pig's goggles.
I put up a side by side. In the real video, everybody is still standing at the back of the corral. In the fake version, the quality goes all blocky and the framerate goes to shit but the whole crowd comes rushing forward, angling around to the left.
The pig bellows and sprays shots into the dirt well forward of the crowd. He motions jerkily with the gun. He slaps at his goggles and glares at the phantom crowd.
Meanwhile one of the tractors creeps up and smashes a section of fence between the crowd and the shuttle.
I send the phantom crowd dashing forward again, sprinting off in the wrong direction, and then I'm riding a very angry pig as he grunts and bellows and crashes through the night. He signals to the others and I let him. The imaginary crowd flees down the hill and then angles to follow the bottom of the valley out.
I hear more pigs nearing so I give my diversionary crowd a burst of speed and they nearly completely disappear from view, just hints of movement in the dark. The squad of pigs are screaming along now, firing into the dark.
Then the night is lit up by the shuttle launch and I drop the phantoms. My battery is almost dead from all the sparking but I squirt my memories out. We all agreed on radio silence after the shuttle doors close so I don't know if the memories made it.
Then I trigger the poop scoop.