Griffith reached out to restrain Laura as a Model Six backed out of a shed carrying a pallet. The robot stopped, and the electronic chirping of its reverse gear fell silent. Its searchlights turned in tandem to find the small group.
The three human sightseers proceeded on, and Laura wondered whether Griffith was always that careful or whether the computer's errors were the cause of new concern.
'Morphing,' Griffith answered, long after Laura had forgotten her question, 'is the way we fabricate plastic, and now some metal components. You used to have to design and build a prototype part, construct a mold around it, and pour molten plastic or metal into the mold. Now, we go straight from computer design to the morphing unit, which presses a superheated form straight into a big flat sheet. The key is in the rapid shaping of the form. If you watch the unit work, this flat surface pops up in the blink of an eye into the exact shape that the computer designed. The sheet on top gets melted around it and hardens instantly. The great benefit is that using morphing units, you can implement a manufacturing design change literally in milliseconds. Once the computer designs the component, it just' — Griffith snapped his fingers—'boom — punches it out. And it can switch from part A to part B to part C with absolutely no retooling — no delay whatsoever in production. We just keep feeding it the sheeting, or at least the robots do.'
They turned down a different row, following the foreman with his pen board and paying no attention to the ever-lengthening shadows thrown by the lights on the assembly building's walls.
'It should be around here somewhere,' the foreman said, and Laura saw that the two blinking dots on the map — one green, the other red were very close. They walked farther into the growing darkness in search of yet another of Gray's new species.
The width of the aisle through the mounds of supplies had grown irregular, and the passage itself began to twist and turn. Up ahead, an island of tenting covered ubiquitous dark shapes and split the aisle down which they searched in two. Stocks of black tires lined the walls. They wandered ever more slowly through the inky maze, and the foreman stopped to get his bearings by reference to the assembly building.
'It should be right here,' he said, holding the board up for Griffith and Laura to see. The green and red dots glowed steadily now and completely overlapped. 'I mean, like, right…'
A dark shape descended into the narrow canyon of tires, and Laura's heart leapt straight into her throat. It was a long, black leg not ten feet in front of them. She threw her arm out, striking the surprised foreman in the chest. Another leg soundlessly joined the first, and the large body of the giant metal spider crested the top of the wall and crept down into the hollows ahead, blocking their path.
Laura turned and fled, crashing hard into the wall of tires just behind her.
Her companions instinctively took flight, but stopped beside Laura after just a couple of steps. 'It's all right!' Griffith said testily.
'Jesus, Laura.' Griffith held his chest and seemed suddenly out of breath.
Laura turned with dread to watch the enormous mechanical creature lowering the last of its slender legs to the pavement.
'You scared the hell out of me,' Griffith said to Laura, but she couldn't help noticing that both he and the foreman kept their eyes on the robot.
It now stood motionless, its four spidery legs resting firmly on the ground. The legs were thin, and their inner workings were exposed.
Black metal bones were aligned with silvery hydraulic muscles. The pristine apparatuses appeared too straightforward, too simplistic to work as they did.
The dark machine had two slender arms of a design similar to its legs. At the end of the arms, which grew straight out of its thorax, were four long fingers wrapped tightly around a large tire. The robot stood motionless as its rounded, roughly triangular head remained trained on the human trio. Its face consisted of two large, flat lenses mounted side by side above a series of perforated black membranes. The robot looked light and wiry, but the head atop its refrigerator-sized torso stood nearly twice the height of a human.
'There it is,' Griffith said, walking casually up to the robot. 'A Model Seven.' As Laura stared at the robot's unblinking eyes, the foreman turned his flashlight on with a click. A flinch — just the tiniest hint of movement of the robot's head as it recoiled from the light — signaled that the machine was awake. It was alert. 'Come on over here,' Griffith said, waving to her. 'There's nothing to be afraid of.'
Laura's nerves were jangled and her heart still pounded, but she forced herself to join Griffith at the foot of the beast.
'The Model Sevens, as you've seen, aren't limited to flat ground.'
Griffith returned to his matter-of-fact tone, which in itself helped calm Laura down. But she couldn't feel completely at ease around the alien technology. She had no idea what to expect from it.
'They've got four legs, and they can climb up uneven objects like stairs or… or stacks of tires, I guess. Down here at the bottom,' Griffith said as he knelt, and the beam of the foreman's flashlight dropped to the robot's feet, 'it has wheels. When it walks like a spider, it just locks the wheels' brakes for traction. Then, when it's on flat ground like out on the roadbeds or the assembly building's main floor, it uses drives housed in these fairings to power the wheels. Motoring around is a whole lot more energy-efficient than walking.'
Griffith rose with a grunt, his joints popping. 'I need some oil,' he joked to the foreman, straightening his back with great effort. Griffith rested his hand flat against the robot's midsection, and the foreman's flashlight lit an array of equipment that ringed the robot's waist. 'This is the tool belt. If you'll look at the end [unclear] you'll see that it's got a gripper attached.' He pointed at the two hands wrapped firmly around the tire. 'To change tools, all it does is stick the gripper into its special holster on the belt, twist, and off it comes. Then, it can just snap on any of these other tools.'
Griffith indicated the numerous attachments protruding from their 'holsters' on the belt. 'It's got drills, sanders, saws, tongs, riveters, et cetera, and it can strap on external tanks and carry acetylene torches and paint sprayers and things like that.'
Griffith stepped back to stand beside Laura and point higher on the 'torso,' which was wider than it was thick and rounded. 'The mini-net is in its chest,' Griffith continued. The flashlight glinted off the greenish-gray expanse of metal — the shadow of the large tire held by the robot obscuring most of its body. 'Its net has about a hundred times the processing power of the Model Sixes', so the Sevens are a lot more autonomous. The Sevens could just barely scrape by as free roamers, meaning they could function without access to the main computer's world model, but at a vastly reduced level of performance. The Sixes, on the other hand, are 'tethered.' They don't have the mental horsepower to build and maintain a [garbled] world using only their own senses and computational capacity.'
The flashlight's beam rose again to the robot's face, and again there was a barely, noticeable flinch from the otherwise stoic machine.
'Up top the Sevens have retinal chips for ordinary light plus combination infrared-high-def imagers for low light. Both sensors are stereoscopic and provide excellent depth perception. We put 'ears' on the sides of the 'head' just like ours are, and then there's an all-purpose air sampler for a nose. The sampler can give us standard atmospheric conditions, but it can also detect a variety of telltale molecular matches for things like smoke or hazardous chemicals.'
'We dropped the ultrasonic anti-collision sensors that the Threes and Sixes have,' the foreman added. 'The Sevens maintain such a complete world model in their head they're not likely to run into anything stationary. And they've got good enough senses that if anything's moving, they know it.'
'Dr. Griffith, Dr. Aldridge,' a loudspeaker blared, 'please report to the computer center.' Griffith looked at his watch.
'Almost time for our meeting, I guess. Let's catch a car.'
Griffith turned to leave, but Laura's gaze lingered on the Model Seven. The spider-like robot rolled noiselessly away atop the stable platform of its four locked legs. 'Hey,' she said to halt Griffith. 'How did that robot know to stand there while you showed it off, and then to leave when you were through?' The robot was gone — disappearing into the dark gorges and ravines of the side yard's scrap.
Griffith looked after his departed pride and joy, shrugging yet again. 'It just did. Those Sevens are pretty damn smart.'
'Wait till we start turning out the next generation,' the foreman laughed, smiling Griffith's way. 'I might be out of a job.'
