[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 56

alexbeyman (74)in #writing • 6 years ago

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Once or twice we hit a bump and the whole rickety, jerry rigged cooling system jostled about, droplets of beer landing perilously close to the laptop’s exposed motherboard. I used sealant from a tire patch kit to waterproof the spots where the rubber hose passes into the beer can, but it wasn’t holding up well to the vibration.

“Keep it on the road, will you?” Lars studied me in the rearview mirror. Then craned his neck to get a better look at the contraption spread out between Helper and myself. “What the hell is all that MacGyver shit? Don’t start a fire.” I replied that there wouldn’t be a fire unless there was a short, and there wouldn’t be a short if he kept the damn car on the road.

“Whatever. Just don’t spill anything, that upholstery is Egyptian leather.” As if that mattered when weighed against Helper’s life. When I next looked up, the mountain had finally risen into view over the horizon. Deceptively close by that point, as it took only another hour or so before Lars brought the car to a stop before the front gate.

“Dangit” he muttered. “I was hoping the security system would just detect that she’s here and open up for us. Well whatever you’re doing back there, I hope it works, otherwise we came all this way for nothing.” Madeline reminded him we could still go back to the lodge.

He sighed. “Yeah I guess. But you haven’t been inside the complex yet. Furnished dorms, a communal kitchen, washers, dryers...it makes Red’s bunker look like...well, a bunch of buried buses. I’m not ready to give up on getting that door open just yet.”

Richard’s truck still sat outside where Madeline and I left it on the first night. I searched it for anything that might come in handy, but turned up nothing. Meanwhile, Lars snooped about the area immediately surrounding the entrance in search of alternate ways inside.

“Any luck?” I shook my head and told him I found nothing of use in the truck. “What about you?” He held up a bundle of black hose, with a shiny metal bit on either end. “Will this help?” I took a closer look.

No fucking way. Unbelievable. “Where’d you get this!?” He pointed to the wreckage of the security UGV that used to scan my retinas on the way in. “That model uses a liquid cooling system to avoid overheating on hot days. There’s one for the CPU and another for the motors. I brought the CPU cooling system since I figured it’d be easier to adapt to-”

I threw myself at him. A long, awkward hug followed. “Hey. C’mon. You’re gonna get my germs on you or whatever.” On any other day I might’ve simply thanked him and kept my usual distance, but Lars had just delivered into my hands the probable means of Helper’s salvation.

“This is exactly what I need. You don’t know what this means to me.” He scratched his head. “I think I have an idea. You and I never really got along before this, but I understood you at least. We’re both gearheads.”

I tried to hug him again but he pushed me away. “Just fix your robot. Miss Helper, whatever. We don’t have a lot of daylight left.” So after dialing the clock speed down to 1x and waiting for it to cool, I removed the shoddy cooling system I improvised in the car and got to work attaching the new one.

Still a bit of a kluge. The UGV used a different processor than my laptop, so the heat sink which normally sits atop it wouldn’t snap on cleanly. Some duct tape took care of that. The biggest improvement, besides using proper coolant fluid in place of fucking beer of all things, was the electric coolant pump.

My arms burned from the constant pumping in the car. At last I could perform that part of it electrically! The only problem was how to supply that electricity to it. At my request Lars fetched the robot’s power supply.

It wouldn’t output the necessary voltage for the pump. It was instead designed to charge the UGV’s battery pack, which then supplied appropriate amounts of current to the various onboard systems, pump included.

So it became a battery hunt. Compatibility wasn’t a concern. All lithium cells of the same chemistry have the same nominal voltage. Lithium ion in this case, so 3.7 volts. It was just a question of collecting enough of them to string together into a pack of the correct voltage for the power systems Lars salvaged from the UGV.

As he’d arrived here before us on the first night, there was no shortage of robotic wreckage scattered about. Stragglers who happened to stumble upon him, dispatched with a bat or other cudgel by the looks of it.

No single battery pack was intact. Most were burnt, melted and otherwise ruined. But in some of them, while the punctured cell did become swollen, it never caught fire. The rest of the cells remained perfectly usable as a result.

It wasn’t long before I’d managed to assemble a 72 volt pack from the salvaged cells using the soldering iron from my bag. The resulting pack was meager in terms of capacity, but I didn’t need it to power the cooling system by itself for any length of time, just to act as a buffer.

I hollered at Lars to start the engine. Rhonda roared to life, and upon plugging the UGV’s power cord into an inverter, and the inverter into the cigarette lighter socket, the coolant pump sputtered to life.

One of those scant few times when Murphy’s law fails. The whole mess hummed along beautifully, CPU monitor program reporting a rapidly plummeting temperature. I plugged the laptop into the inverter’s other outlet, then cautiously increased the clock speed.

6x. 7x. 8x. No problems. 9x. 10x. 11x. Remarkably, still no signs of overheating. 12x. 13x. 14x. 15x. Unbelievable! But then, I just got done mounting a military grade cooling system to this thing. I’d have been more surprised by far if it maxed out already at just twice what I managed with the system I built on the way.

I reached a multiplier of thirty two before it began to falter. I dialed it back to thirty as it yielded an easily calculable rate of about one month of simulation time for every day which passes outside of it.

But, that’s before factoring in the software’s own simulation speed settings, which I already maxed out at 10x. That would yield a rate of ten simulated months per real world day. Still not fast enough.

I warily bumped it back up to 32. I saw very subtle artifacting but no judder. Most likely the absolute upper limit I could push this old machine to. Even then it only gave me 10.6 months, or 320 days per real world day. Still not nearly fast enough. We could hardly afford to hang around in the open like this for the eleven days it would take to fully exhaust the viral instruction set.

^{Stay Tuned for Part 57!}

#books #horror #scifi #stories

6 years ago in #writing by alexbeyman (74)

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kwadjobonsu (66) 6 years ago

I reached a multiplier of thirty two before it began to falter. I dialed it back to thirty as...

The bot is simply amazing. To be able to handle an x30 multiplier is something really rare. Even with nitrogen cooling, most recent PCs struggle under higher multipliers.

rothberg (58) 6 years ago

He held up a bundle of black hose, with a shiny metal bit on either end. “Will this help?”

That moment I started to believe Helper is saved. But still anything could go wrong. I also felt relieved when they were able to get power supply from the other robot’s batteries. 😞 again? With all they already have, it would take that long? He has to figure out something...

junelinarez (43) 6 years ago

I think it's not a good idea to go back as Madeline put it, because it's one more hour on the way back and when passing through the same place where they already warned the crawler robots, the first thing is to save helper and madeline has to collaborate more, just as Lars is helping out, you have to help yourself because survival depends on everyone.

edgarcastillo87 (46) 6 years ago

I thought that the last option you would have was to use the batteries of your smaller robots Hero1, ellie, because the robots that were out there were not useful for you since they were useless to take out their batteries, but now things have changed Lars he is more attentive to help you, he is not the same anti-parabolic that he did not care about anything else but him. The only salvation is helper that starts as, but you have to have a better CPU so that waiting time is less.

empress-eremmy (65) 6 years ago

Hope they don't end up endangering themselves too.

mudasirfarooq (44) 6 years ago

I like this sentence, ' I replied that there wouldn’t be a fire unless there was a short, and there wouldn’t be a short if he kept the damn car on the road', isn't is Newtons Third law of motion.

nattybongo (73) 6 years ago

Interesting turn of events, the bot is great with his abilities

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sheikhiqra (45) 6 years ago

it is a very big novel

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zaheerdahri (32) 6 years ago

Yeah it is very lengthy and big noval takes days to read it by the way nice work dear.

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tigerflora (39) 6 years ago

Little Robot, Part 56 was great to read, and many things were noticeable, waiting for the next part 57.
thank u for amazing novel.
stay blessed @alexbeyman

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