Mimicking the key shape was easy enough – Trixie’s scanners were more sophisticated than anything available when the lock was created. She could map the inside of the keyhole and create the shape almost instantly. Generating the right code to tickle the lock’s nanos into doing their thing was a different matter. Human beings were notoriously bad at thinking up passwords or numbers, relying on easily-remembered dates, pet or family names, or other mnemonic devices that thieves could easily work out themselves or obtain with a bit of simple social engineering. In days of old, even numbers or codes ‘randomly’ generated by computer turned out to be a lot less random than anticipated, though again this was the fault of human fallibility in determining the definition of ‘random.’
A machine like a Navigator could generate a key code that was impossible to guess. The strings they came up with were of variable length and drew from various sets of symbols, numbers, and letters. Only a Navigator could estimate how many billions of combinations were possible. And a Navigator never wrote the key on a bit of paper and stuck it on the bottom of a drawer in case they forgot it.
If the Navigator had been active, I could probably have nudged it and got it to try and relock the mechanism, during which action we could have picked up the key code like the signal from a cheap vehicle’s keyless lock. But the artificial sentience was still asleep, evidently oblivious to what we were doing. Unless it was lying in wait, ready to spring to its own defence when I least expected it.
I took Trixie from her loop on the shoulder of my jacket and placed the slim metal tube into the hand of the robot. The Trixie closed the fingers around herself.
“I bet this reminds you of something you do regularly,” she said.
“What?”
“Holding yourself in your hand? Never mind.”
“You just compared yourself to a penis.”
“Yeah. Usually it’s you I’m comparing to one.”
I picked up the robot arm and used the pliers to place it into the case where the two mummified arms had lain.
“Keep your hand out unless you really need it down there,” Trixie said.
“Are we still talking about...?”
“I’m talking about the lock. I’m scanning the inside of the hole and getting ready to insert myself. Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop sniggering and grow up!”
“Sorry.”
“Okay, I’m in. I’m examining the lock mechanism.”
There was a loud ‘snap’ and I threw myself backwards away from the casing.
“Sorry,” Trixie said in my ear, “I accidentally triggered the secondary locks.”
So far the metal strips and sections of girder I’d put in place were holding.
“How do the nanos feel?” I asked.
“Primitive,” Trixie said. “I think they were man-made.”
Man-made nanos were a joke machine intelligences like to make – as if a human could ever make anything as small as a modern nanobot. They seem to forget that we made the machines that made the nanos.
“Can you control them?” I asked.
“It’s going to be like herding cats,” she said.
“But they’re binary cats,” I said, “they sit in one of two locations, you just need to get them off the mat and point them in the direction of the patch of sunlight.”
“You know how to bludgeon a metaphor to death, don’t you? I’m checking to see if the material structure of the lock was fully reset.”
If you make a model out of clay and then screw it up into a ball, it may be possible to ‘unwrap’ the ball of clay and see what the model you made looked like. Unless you completely kneaded the clay over and over until there was nothing left. If you imagine the lock as a piece of clay, Trixie was trying to see how much of the model was still discernible. If she could see the residue of the shape, she could try and urge the nanos back into it. The shape, in this case, being a lock that can be opened as opposed to something that looks like a solid block of metal with a key-shaped hole in. If she could reshape the nanos, we wouldn’t need the navigator’s secret code.
“They’re moving,” Trixie said.
I imagined video of a melted object being played backwards from a pool of goo back to its original shape. Trixie would have scoffed at the simplicity of this analogy. On the video image transmitted by the drone, I could see the surface of the lock mechanism start to shift. A hair-width gap appeared, extending around until it formed a complete circle around Trixie’s skeleton key.
“Do you want to reach in and work your magic on it?” Trixie asked.
“No, let’s open the lock first. You’ve earned the honour.”
There was a metallic click and a hiss of compressed air. The lid of the Navigator’s casing rose upwards on its metal rods, like a table whose legs were getting longer.
I leaned closer, peering into the casing. I didn’t want to stick my head inside in case the lid descended again suddenly.
“Something isn’t right,” I said.
I used the pliers to lift the robot arm out of the case. The drone floated out after it. Then I used the pliers to grip the mesh that the arm had sat upon. It came away easily – the four screws that normally held it in place were missing. The drone hovered over my shoulder as I peered into the bottom of the case.
“I’ve never seen one up close,” Trixie said, “but that doesn’t look like a Navigator.”
No, it didn’t. It looked very much like a Bertie the Bear soft toy. In all probability because it was a Bertie the Bear soft toy.
“Someone got here before us,” Trixie said.
I reached into the case with the pliers, intending to pluck
