over, the rotten little fuck. As I began righting myself, I heard a thud, and my viewpoint began tumbling around rapidly. Walt Christensen had tripped over me. He was drunk again. I was rolling toward the baby! I stuck out my left and right arms to stop my motion, but I was a shade too late, and my floppy middle arm smacked heavily against Scooter’s face. She began her savage screaming.
“Ow,” said I, looking away from the screen. “Need to control that tentacle.”
Pat and Walt were stomping the simmie-Adze now, the images of their feet warping into huge close-up perspective renderings as they thudded into the hapless virtual robot. I pulled off my gloves and stood up.
“Did you know that I helped write Our American Home?” I asked Ben. “The behavior patterns for the Christensens. I helped evolve them.”
“Sure,” said Ben. “You helped write it, and you’re here, so there’s nothing wrong with us using it, right?”
“That’s not what GoMotion would say.”
“ WentMotion,” drawled Ben.
“We’ve moved on to physical testing as well,” said Sun Tam. “Now that our hardware design is frozen.”
“Janelle calls it the Rubber Room,” said Ben. “I’ll show it to you later. But now it’s time for Russ Zwerg.” As Ben mentioned the dreaded name, there was again that touch of stress in his mellow tones.
Russ was in a cubicle near the center of the pit, and he was even more trollish than I’d expected. He was a lawn-dwarf, five-foot-two with full beard, bald pate, and long greasy locks, he was (I would soon learn) a vegetarian, a pagan, a libertarian, and a deep thinker with a dozen crackpot opinions, all furiously held. Russ Zwerg was the worst, the absolute worst, a ten-out-of-ten flamer.
At first Russ made a show of being too engrossed in his computer screen to look up. After entering a final system command and receiving an error message, he said, “Suck dead pigs in Hell,” to his screen. His pronunciation was clear and lilting. He turned his muddy little eyes toward us and addressed himself directly to Ben.
“Once again SuperC chooses to sodomize programmers everywhere. They’ve actually changed the inline pragmas. Again. And, they added new underscores to the library name-mangling! Whee! Put your old debugger in the shitcan! It’s going to take me at least two round-the-clock days to get the Kwirkey interpreter working again. What do you want?”
“Russ,” said Ben gamely, “I want you to meet Jerzy Rugby who’s joining us from GoMotion. He’s quite the wizard, I’m told. I’d like you to help him get up to speed on the Adze project.”
“How nice,” said Russ, cocking his head and peering at me. “I’m supposed to waste a week training a new hire? Bugger you, Ben. Bugger you very much.” As he said this, Zwerg kept his nasty little eyes on me. Now he smiled to show this was all in good fun. “Why did GoMotion fire you, Jerzy?”
“I’d rather not go into it.” Especially not with an asshole like you, Russ.
“Russ, why don’t you and Sun give Jerzy a physical demo?”
“A dog and pony show for the new hire,” snapped Russ. “Very well.” We all went into the Rubber Room, which was back behind the Sphex room I’d already seen.
A few years before she died my mother had a stroke. She was partly paralyzed, and she had to relearn how to do things like sit up on the edge of a bed. Every day in the hospital, I’d wheel her downstairs to the rehabilitation room. The rehab room had linoleum floors and things that looked like big toys sitting around, only the big toys were models of real-world obstacles that a person has to negotiate: there was a section of a cafeteria counter, there was a movable wood staircase with a fenced-in platform at the top, there was a big Plexiglas practice push door, and so on. In the rehab room with my mother there had been a woman with one leg gone and a man whose face had been split as if by an axe, all of them slowly moving around, trying to get it back together. I often remembered the feeling the rehab room had given me: a kind of awe at the tenacity of human life, awe at how these shattered people could somehow struggle to go on, and a feeling also of the preciousness and sweetness of life, however hard it might be. An aching feeling of tender awe.
Like the rehab room, the Rubber Room had a practice staircase and a big Plexiglas door, but in addition the Rubber Room had feely-blank dolls lying about, a man, a woman, a boy, and a baby-models of the Christensen family once again. There were also two chairs, a table, and a refrigerator. In one corner there was a big rug. The dreaded Baby Scooter was lying on the rug like a land mine.
Sitting idle on a patch of bare linoleum was an assembled Adze robot. Just like the model I’d seen on the Sphex, the machine was a big cylinder with a dome head, two wheels on jointed legs, and three arms. As on Studly, his left manipulator was a simple two-pronged rubberized crab pincer, and his right one was a well-articulated facsimile of a human hand. The Adze’s third manipulator was a flexible plastic tentacle with corrugations in its surface.
“We’ve been calling this one Squidboy,” said Ben. “Let’s fire him up, guys.”
“I’ve only just now been recompiling the code,” said Russ, obviously getting his excuses ready. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s a segment fix-up error.” Russ and Sun Tam made their way over to the still-inert Squidboy and began messing with him.
I shivered with the same fear I’d felt when Ken Thumb of GoMotion first loaded my code onto Studly. The Veep and Adze robots were quite different from the lame “robot butlers” people had been trying to sell for years. The Veep and Adze were fast and strong. They could kill you. At least there was a big, waist-high table between us and the main part of the room. There was some computer stuff on the table.
“Do you have a remote On/Off switch?” I asked Ben.
“Don’t worry,” he answered, picking up a radio control unit. “This is the switch. During runs we stand way back here so we can always turn the robot off before it can get to us and like start performing organ transplants.” He chuckled wheezily.
Sun adjusted some dip switches while Russ slipped a small CD into Squidboy’s chest. They skipped back to join us on the safe side of the table. Ben turned Squidboy on. A fan whirred and Squidboy’s scanning laser began to glow.
Just like Studly, Squidboy had two pencil-sized video camera eyes and an infrared laser-based moire contouring scanner in his forehead. The scanner’s laser would illuminate objects with rapid stripes of invisible infrared light, and the robot’s software would overlay successive scans to get moire patterns that outlined the contours of equally distant curves. This was invaluable for deducing the shapes of things.
“What do you want Squidboy to do?” Sun Tam asked Ben.
“Tell him to go to the fridge and get me a bottle of Calistoga water,” said Ben.
Sun Tam leaned over a keyboard and screen that, like Ben’s On/Off control, was radio-linked to the robot. Sun began assembling and entering commands while Russ kibitzed.
“Can’t you just talk to it?” I asked.
“Of course we can,” said Russ impatiently. “Only we haven’t put that part in yet because we’re still finalizing the high-level code. For now, we’re programming Squidboy in Y9707 assembly language. Sun knows all the opcodes.” Y9707 was the name of a chip.
Then Russ started arguing with Sun about something he’d keyed in, Russ being as rude and insulting as possible. Eventually Sun weakened before the torrent of abuse and changed it to Russ’s way.
Now Russ gave the okay and Ben pressed the On switch. Squidboy wobbled for a moment, turned toward the refrigerator, and started rolling. So far so good. The movable Plexiglas door was between the little machine and the refrigerator. Would Squidboy slow down and open the door? Had Russ’s program change been correct? To my delight, the answer was no. Instead of slowing down, the robot accelerated as it approached the model door, shattering the Plexiglas with a noise that was astonishingly loud in the small confines of the Rubber Room. The robot paused, his tentacle dangling like a limp dick.
“Dammit, Russ, that’s the second door you’ve broken this month,” said Ben as he pressed the Off switch. Russ marched across the room, yanked his CD out of Squidboy’s chest, and stalked out, vilely cursing about SuperC.
“I knew Russ was wrong,” said Sun Tam. “He keeps thinking in terms of Kwirkey, but I’m used to controlling the Adze direct. Ports and interrupts.”
“Let’s see.”
Sun Tam reset Squidboy and began to show and tell. I got into it. Sun knew a lot about robots. Ben Brie gave me the remote On/Off and left us alone to, keep talking.
While Sun was demonstrating Squidboy’s most rudimentary abilities, we discussed the three big problems of robots: connectors, power, and software.
