brainbox and had to tilt the entire body to see anything. The entire structure was unstable, as the legs were not even in height and the top surface of the brainbox was canted to the left. I halted and watched it slowly turn, scanning its environment with what could only be called curiosity.
Watching it, I felt a tiny chill. This robot wasn’t like the others I’d known. Not even the Nano ships had shown this kind of initiative. They had acted in a semi-independent, problem-solving fashion, but it had always been traceable down to an underlying compulsion built into their source code somewhere. This thing was different. It had gotten bored with the room I’d left it in, restructured itself as best it could and set about exploring its environment.
The camera swept over me finally. “Kyle Riggs,” the tinny voice said. “Identification confirmation requested.”
“Yes,” I said, “I’m Kyle Riggs.”
I leaned forward toward the dwarf robot. It squatted and reached up with its arms to adjust the camera. I watched the lenses dilate and contract in tiny shivers as it focused on my faceplate.
“You need a name,” I told the robot. “From now on, I’ll call you Marvin.”
“Reference stored,” Marvin said.
“Marvin, can you talk to other biotic species-besides humans and the Centaurs?”
“There are the compressed forms you refer to as the Blues.”
“Of course,” I said. “What others?”
“Reference unclear.”
I nodded to myself. I brought out my computer tablet and displayed the world of Helios and still shots of the Worms. I let Marvin examine the images at length.
“Have you seen these creatures before?” I asked.
“No.”
“Have you seen recorded images of them before?”
“No.”
I frowned. Maybe this was a dead end. “Do you recognize the species?”
“Yes.”
I rolled my eyes. Marvin was literal-minded. He liked precision. Probably, he’d never ‘seen’ the images, but they might have been transmitted to him via a file transfer. He’d never been in their visual presence, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know about them, just as a person might not have even been to Paris, but still knew about the French and their history.
“Can you communicate with one of these creatures in their native language?” I asked.
The camera lifted from the surface of Marvin’s brainbox. It glided up smoothly, refocusing and studying my face again.
“Why?” Marvin asked.
I felt that chill again. What had I accidentally created here? Was this how things had gone when the Blues had invented the Macros and the Nanos, as I now suspected they had? Was this the path to doom for all biotics? At some point in technological progression, perhaps we were all doomed to build something like Marvin. He was a tool for a job that needed doing, but once such a fantastic tool was built, perhaps it was fated to eventually examine you closely and ask why?
I felt an urge to draw my pistol and blast Marvin right then and there. I’d witnessed vast destruction caused by smart little machines like this one. Placed inside a hundred foot body of alloy and machinery, this thing might decide to lay waste to cities. I took a breath and tried to slow my heart. I told myself I was still in control here. My paranoia would serve me well, and I would know the day Marvin became a threat. More importantly now, Marvin knew too much to be discarded or destroyed out of fear-I had no idea what was locked in his mind, but I knew Earth needed every byte of it.
“I wish to communicate with these creatures, Marvin,” I explained. “We need their help.”
Marvin studied me further. “Help indicates need. What necessity can be fulfilled by these creatures?”
It was my turn to think for a second. “This ship and everyone aboard is in danger. We are under attack by another ship. These creatures are potential allies.”
Marvin looked at my tablet again. “The Worms could help Marvin?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“I will speak with them then,” Marvin said. “But I have a need as well.”
I stared at him. “What is it, Marvin?”
“I’m having difficulty with locomotion. I need four new appendages for maximum stability and an instrument to aid in coordination and balance.”
“You want legs and a gyroscope?”
“That would be sufficient.”
As I submitted to Marvin’s demands I felt I had somehow placed my foot upon a path and taken the first step upon it, without knowing where it led. I suspected bargains with the Devil always felt like that.
I made sure the legs were short-stumpy even. I didn’t want him building anything new with them, so I organized the nanites with locked programming. They could not be reshaped into anything else without being reprocessed by one of my factories. I attached them to the bottom of his braincase and ran silvery threads to his central I/O node to power and control them.
The gyroscope was a little trickier. I didn’t want to put it on top where it might get into the path of his camera, and there wasn’t really room below where his legs would churn. Either side would throw him off balance. Finally, I decided to mount the camera forward a bit on the body so he could use the gyroscope as a counterweight on the rear. Essentially, I gave him a box-shaped tail. He ended up looking like a dachshund that someone had put through a trash compacter.
I looked him over, and knew that Sandra would have pronounced him cute. I might have agreed if I hadn’t been worried I was looking at humanity’s possible future replacement.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s talk to the Worms then. I want you to translate my words as closely as you can into their language and when they speak, translate it back to me.”
“I do not wish to communicate here in front of the prisoners,” Marvin told me.
I blinked at him. Had that gyroscope thrown his little mind out of balance?
“What?” I asked.
“I do not wish to communicate here in front of the prisoners,” Marvin told me again.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I got that part, but I don’t know what prisoners you are talking about.”
Marvin twisted his camera around to examine the bio-tanks in the middle of the chamber. They gurgled and churned with thick, dark fluids. I stared at them with him.
“The stuff in those tanks?” I asked. “That stuff is alive, isn’t it?”
“The contents of the enclosure contains billions of biotic structures.”
“Okay,” I said. “Those bags, tanks, whatever they are do enclose biotics. And they can’t leave. But how can mindless creatures be classified as prisoners?”
“The classification is correct. They are not mindless. They are a collective intelligence.”
I stared at the bags now, which shivered minutely while I watched. A fresh thread of condensation rolled down the walls of the nearest balloon-like bag and splashed to the floor where a puddle had formed.
I looked back to Marvin, not sure which was the more upsetting: a biotic mass with a collective brain in a baggy, or Marvin the know-it-all dog robot.
“Are you telling me these bags are full of intelligent… bacteria?” I asked.
“Collectively intelligent, yes.”
“The Macros kept these bags here for a reason, Marvin,” I said. “Do you know where they come from or why the Macros would want them here?”
“The Macros study dangerous fauna of all types,” Marvin explained. “These creatures come from the ocean-covered world which is the seventh most distant world from the star you refer to as Eden.”
I thought about it. The seventh from the star? That would make it one of the innermost of the warm-water worlds. One of the six jewels of the Eden system.
I walked over to the tank and tapped at the surface experimentally. Did the soupy stuff inside swirl fractionally? Or was that just my imagination? I tried to visualize what a race of bacteria would be like. Marvin said
