Tag: Sentient robots

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld #177, June 2021) is a sequel to the author’s amusing (and Hugo Award) winning The Secret Life of Bots (Clarkesworld #132, September 2017). The story opens with the hero of that latter piece, a miniature robot called Bot 9, being woken by the Ship AI sixty-eight years later to be told that they have a problem—and it isn’t ratbugs like the last time, but something else:

“What task do you have for me?” [Bot 9] asked. “I await this new opportunity to serve you with my utmost diligence and within my established parameters, as I always do.”
“Ha! You do no such thing, and if I had a better option, I would have left you in storage,” Ship said. “However, I require your assistance with some malfunctioning bots.”
“Oh?” Bot 9 asked. “Which ones?”
“All of them,” Ship said.

Bot 9 soon discovers that nearly all the ship’s bots have gone rogue and have started forming “gloms” (conglomerations of robots) who think they are the ship’s (currently hibernating) human crew members. This poses an immediate problem for Ship as they will shortly be arriving in Ysmi space, and the Ysmi are extremely hostile to nonorganic intelligences not under the control of biological species.
The rest of the story sees Bot 9 attempt to work his way to the Engineering section, where Ship hopes 9 can revive the Chief Engineer before they reach Ysmi space. As 9 makes its way there it is attacked by a ratbug (creatures who eat wiring, hull insulation . . . and bots)—but is surprised when he sees a former colleague, 4340, sitting astride the creature. They catch up, and 9 learns that all the remaining ratbugs are now under 4340’s control. Meanwhile, the Ysmi contact the ship, the gloms attempt to get control of communications (when they are not engaged in internecine battles to accumulate more bots), and Ship infects one of their number with a virus—which soon starts spreading.
Eventually (spoiler), Bot 9 gets to Engineering and revives the Chief Engineer (who was badly injured in an earlier incident and put in a med-pod there). When he wakes, Bot 9 brings Chief Engineer Frank up to date with amusing exchanges like this one:

“I must warn you, however, that PACKARDs are on the other side [of the door],” 9 added.
“Packard? My second engineer? That’s great!” Frank said. “I thought—”
“It is not the human Packard,” 9 said. “They are in stasis with the other crew. There are four bot glom PACKARDs, currently trying to reduce themselves to only one. Unlike the other gloms, rather than trying to claim sole ownership of an identity via the expediency of violent physical contest, these three appear to be attempting to argue each other into yielding.”
“That sounds a lot like the real Packard, actually,” Frank said.

And then there is this when the Ysmi ship approaches:

“Where are you?” Ship’s voice was faint, but there.
Bot 9 found the knowledge that it was back in Ship’s communication range a matter of some relief. “I have woken Engineer Frank, and we are now in his living quarters, looking for some human item called ‘goddamned underwear,’” it replied.
“There is a synthetic-fabric fab unit in the cryo facility,” Ship said. “Please tell Frank he can visit it after we have reclaimed the facility from the gloms, but that right now there is not time. I need him at the docking facility.”
9, who had reconnected to the voice unit after the human had set it down inside the door, relayed that information.
“I’m not meeting the Ysmi naked,” Frank said.
“You are wearing a flag,” 9 said. A few moments later it added, “Ship asks if you would prefer to meet the Ysmi naked or as a bunch of newly free-floating, disassociated particles in empty space.”
“How much time do we have?” Frank asked. Before he’d even finished speaking, there was a vibration throughout the hull.

After Frank satisfies the suspicious Ysmi (who instruct him to go directly to the jump portal that Ship wants to use) the virus continues to spread through the gloms, and there is a climactic scene where 4340 and his ratbug army come to 9’s rescue.
This is an amusing and well done sequel to the original, with many entertaining exchanges between the various characters. That said, the ending is something of deus ex machina (and one you can see coming), so it is probably not quite as strong as the earlier piece.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,050 words. Story link.

Red_Bati by Dilman Dila

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Red_Bati by Dilman Dila1 (Dominion, 2020) opens in a spaceship hold (although that is not immediately obvious, see below) with Red_Bati (originally a robot dog built as a kid’s toy) running out of power and realising that, if it does not get a recharge, it will die. As Red starts hacking the nearby bot and ship systems in an effort to get what it wants, we learn that it was upgraded to look after an old woman called Granny. After her death Red then hid its high level of sentience as it was converted into a mining robot. The loss of one of Red’s mining arms while he was working in that role is how it has come to be in the spaceship’s hold.
Eventually, and I am compressing a lot of the story here (spoiler), Red takes control of the ship and heads out to the asteroid belt to build more of its own kind.
This is a slickly enough told story, with the exception of the confusing (and irrelevant in terms of story setup) first page. The opening paragraph:

Red_Bati’s battery beeped. Granny flickered, and the forest around her vanished. She sighed in exaggerated disappointment. He never understood why she called it a forest, for it was just two rows of trees marking the boundary of her farm. When she was alive, she had walked in it every sunny day, listening to her feet crunching dead twigs, to her clothes rustling against the undergrowth, to the music of crickets, feeling the dampness and the bugs, sniffing at the rotten vegetation, which she thought smelled better than the flowers that Akili her grandson had planted around her house. Now, she liked to relive that experience. With his battery going down, he could not keep up a real life projection and, for the first time, she became transparent, like the blue ghost in the painting that had dominated a wall of her living room. Akili’s mother had drawn it to illustrate one of their favorite stories.

Who is “He” at the beginning of the second sentence? I thought this was referring to a third person, not Red_Bati, and the reason I thought this was because a “he” doesn’t normally have batteries. More generally, the point of view/subject matter bounces around like a ping-pong ball in the first few sentences: Red_Balti, Granny, She, He, She, She, He, Akili’s mother (!).
Furthermore, the whole first page is little more than backstory waffle like the above, and our intitial introduction (apart from the security cameras) to Red_Bati’s environment is a reference to ice floating about like a “predator shark”, something that further confused me.
The story would have benefited from a revised beginning that started with this paragraph:

The half-empty storage room looked like a silver blue honeycomb. They had dumped [Red-Bati] in it after the accident ripped off his forearm. The Captain had evaluated his efficiency and, seeing it down to 80%, tagged him DISABLED. They could not fix his arm on the ship, so they shut him down and dumped him in storage until he got back to Earth. Entombed alive. Left to die a cold death.

From this we would quickly have got Where, Who, What, Why, and realised that there was a sense of peril. You get none of that from the original. Then, after this opening, Red_Bati could have projected Granny for company, and you could then have fed in exchanges with her that outlined his predicament and gave snippets of his backstory.
Ultimately, this is a bit dull for the same reason that a lot of cyberpunk stories are, i.e. they are a series of hacking events that are rarely emotionally engaging or entertaining. It is also uncomplicated, and there is little sense of risk or peril.
** (Average). 4,450 words. Story link.

1. Dilman Dila has an interesting biography.