Conveyorhead Crisis

In an abandoned back room of an automated factory, you and a team of technicians tasked with getting the plant back online, discover the machines have secretly created their own factory, to replicate themselves — from 50 AMAZING Sci Fi Writing Prompts, and a $5 SBD Prize for the Best Story Based on ANY One of Them! by @markrmorrisjr

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BAD SGOLODDA is the kind of place cartographers would rather leave off their maps. On one side, an airport runway pokes up out of the ocean. On the other, a minimal seadock throws ramps down into it. Between them, a traffic control tower squats atop a busybox, the kind of long rectangular building that always holds a multifab. A few hundred meters out, a featherwall diverts big waves and adverse weather off to either side of the installation. Nothing else is here, not even a submerged seamount. Just the immense barren Pacific surrounding a busybox on its platform perch.

Problem was, it hadn’t been busy lately. Not with what we’d scheduled for it, anyway.

Every jobber for Onbret and its rival firms knows how the logistics are supposed to work. Afloat on the surface, great plodding bulkers carry raw materials to the seadock. Undersea and out of sight, the platform’s legs are the pipes of a gargantuan OTEC that filters, accretes, or distills other feedstocks from seawater.

Inside each busybox, conveyorheads crouch in a locked row, their quickfiber headmats meshed into the belt of a single assembly line. On the floor, little grabdozers wheel to and fro, staging supplies in the necessary order on both sides of the line. Every conveyorhead has two branching arms, with eyes at every branch point. The arms pluck supplies from their stages and reach overhead to place them on the belt, or attach them to whatever the belt brings into range.

Conveyorheads have high dexterity and autolearning flexibility, with Goal-Oriented-Coding™ to monitor the production process, compensate for material defects, and correct errors in their assembly programs. They can even unmesh their headmats, unlock from their crouching rows, walk around performing individual tasks, and then rejoin themselves into a new assembly line. Equipped with transceivers, they direct the dozers that stack their stages. They can build almost anything in their size range.

Quite the sysgearing marvel upon their invention some 20 years ago, busyboxes and conveyorheads are humdrum today — except when they falter or fail. Their ocean environments lack any features of interest. Their internal operations are monotonous. Everyone who can ignore them does. Navigators and cartographers wish they could.

The Bad Sgolodda busybox had functioned nominally for a decade, loading a rarely interrupted stream of container ships with ovens, fermenters, cloudship modules and suchlike, bound for Dysthope and Sobberlide. The installation earned five reliability rewards, adding it to Onbret’s “deferred inspection” list.

When Cookwave suddenly stopped getting their stoves on time, their packaging system was down anyway, and confidence in Bad Sgolodda was so high that the flowtrack dapp let it ride for weeks before buzzing a human in on it — and the installation got its own deliveries throughout those weeks. Once a human was notified, it was Jallit Quarsi, my supervisor, known to everyone on my team as Underbus, that being where he threw people.

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“THE NEAREST black sky station, then as now,” Quarsi told us in the briefing, pointing at 铜军医 on a slide-show map, “is Tong Junyi. I sent them a ping, asking them to surveil. Paid for 20 minutes’ worth of through-the-walls eyetime. If pirates hacked our machines to build merchandise for them instead of us, I wanted a look at them. But the best angle the station could give me was 31 degrees away from vertical. It showed all quiet, no activity. Course, that angle, could’ve been stuff that didn’t show.”

This was a conference call briefing. My team wasn’t together yet. Being in disparate locations, linked only through Underbus, we couldn’t so much as exchange private glances. Donna Hefferwill spoke up anyway. “If it’s pirates,” she asked, “is there any reason to think they’d be onsite?”

Quarsi smiled coldly. “Only if they aim to prevent your team from taking our installation back.” He let that sink in for a moment, while a new slide appeared onscreen, showing a skull and crossbones flag. “Whether you face eye patches or code glitches, you’ll do our troubleshooting either way.”

“What you call shooting,” Hefferwill retorted, “I call incentivizing a contract revision.” We expected her to say something like that. She said that sort of thing all the time.

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DYSTHOPIANS TO a man, armed with shotguns, empguns, DAG browsers, and APIs, my teammates and I set down on Bad Sgolodda in a rented whisperfan, reputations — for the moment — intact. Also aboard were two grabdozers and several featherdrones of our own, their coms heavily encrypted to keep them ours. There were six of us. We all wore camcrowns, enabling Quarsi to supervise remotely with multiple panoramic views, and then scold us for seeing less than he could see.

We disembarked on the fan’s port side, for shelter in case we came under fire from the tower. I gestured at Bill Tamwray, and he poked his well-armored head past the vessel’s tailfins. No gunshots. He muttered something to a grabdozer. It exposed itself, moved farther down the runway and aimed an ensemble of scopes at the tower. “Empty of, ah, pirates,” Tamwray pronounced it after studying the image feed.

Nevertheless we took turns covering each other in a methodical series of cautious individual movements that took some time to put four of us at the busybox door while the other two guarded the two nearest corners.

“Okay, listen up!” I commanded. “Launch the drones, then send the dozers in, hiding the drones behind them. If there’s no hostile action, expose the drones on my mark and have them scan the area. First priority is to verify expectations. There should be a single assembly line, 46 conveyorheads long. Since plenty of materials have been shipped here, with weeks to make them into parts, I’d expect the stages to be fairly full, and the belt could hold a lot as well, if production has been slowed or halted. If, however, the stocks have been fabbed out, then the stages and the belt will be pretty much cleared off. Once we find out some facts, we shut the door and talk things over while we’re still out here. Understood?”

They all gestured their agreement, stepping back from the door. I pressed a button on a remote I’d brought, and the door sprang open. Our dozers rolled in, followed by the whirring drones. A conspicuous lack of gunfire followed.

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WITHIN MINUTES, the door had shut us out again, yet our view of the interior was clear, and actively under discussion. Only 10 conveyorheads remained locked in a beltline. These were inert, like the 20 dozers dedicated to them. The other 36 conveyorheads and the dozers they controlled were nowhere on the fabroom floor. Many supply stages were missing too. The remaining stages were empty, as was the belt.

Beyond the belt’s finishing end, where there had once been one freight elevator set into the floor, there were now two such elevators. Unless they both led to the seadock, this implied that the busybox had gained a lower floor since the last time the installation was inspected. If not hauled away by ship, the missing machines were most likely down there.

Quarsi, safe on land in his Dysthope office, naturally had to chime in. Thanks to our earfeathers, our whole team could hear him in privacy, with no risk that he would be overheard by outsiders — or ever held responsible for anything he told us.

“Our claims adjustor has hired a specialist,” he explained, “who’s been reviewing the last few weeks of ledger transactions that are specific to the Bad Sgolodda installation.”

“I’ve been browsing the DAG myself,” said Thurber Lee from beside me, “trying to interpret those very transactions. Who’s the expert that your Mutual guy hired, and what does he think is happening here?”

“The ledger expert is named Owen Zapata,” Quarsi replied. “He said — I made a note of this — he said he is still developing his interpretation. So I guess his research is ongoing. But he’s pretty sure no pirates are involved. Instead he’s looking into indications that the conveyorheads themselves have altered the facility. Keeps referring to the GOC influence, you know, the Goal—”

“Goal-Oriented-Coding,” supplied Lee. “It lets the ’heads modify the programs that govern their own behavior.”

“That’s right,” Quarsi went on. “Zapata considers it likely that, under the GOC influence, a group of the conveyorheads are, let me see, fetishizing a list of service improvements they think Onbret will appreciate.”

Fiola Biko voiced her incredulity. “You mean more than we appreciate fulfilling our customers’ orders on time?”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s what Zapata considers likely. Remember, Cookwave has lately been unable to ship what they get from us anyway,” Quarsi emphasized. “So our fab machines are trying to please us, basically, while they wait for Cookwave’s packaging systems to come back online. That doesn’t mean the ’heads rightly know how to please us. Their judgment on that is probably none too good. But Zapata thinks they’re trying, and have added a whole new fabroom in that effort.”

“Kind of irregular that Cookwave’s packing and shipping facility has been, you know, offline so long,” said Lee.

“What does Mutual’s expert think the ’heads are fabbing down there?” I asked.

“He isn’t sure,” Quarsi answered, “but maybe, just maybe, a batch of better conveyorheads. They’re more apt to fetishize, he says, on issues concerning their own reproduction. And the supplies that they diverted — according to ledger transactions — are consistent with assembling more of their own kind.”

“Before doing that to please us,” I mused, “why not ask us first whether it would?”

“According to Zapata,” said Quarsi, “as a rule, ’heads are secretive about their fetishes.”

“So, no pirates here,” Tamwray summarized, “just addled machines that want to please us behind our backs. Ah, sounds like you’re sayin’ we might as well just waltz on down there and see what’s up.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Quarsi agreed.

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IN WE went, a tiny phalanx of six, with our dozers on point, leaving the door open behind us. Tricky how our perspective had shifted. Minutes ago, riding the whisperfan on aerial approach, the busybox had been dwarfed by the oceanic surrounding stretch to the Pacific’s far horizons. Now, as we stood inside, it was rendered vastly cavernous by the reduction of its assembly line to a length less than a quarter of normal, and what remained of the conveyor seemingly switched off, motionless in the dark at the other end of the busybox from us.

Again we dispatched our featherdrones. They fluttered in all directions through the stuffy air, shining their lasers, penlights, and spotlights at successive points of interest in a festive and strangely colorful ballyhoo of everything left in the long, boxy interior. We strode forward in alert formation, looking all around.

“Hello, Bad Sgolodda OTEC,” Hefferwill muttered into her manguito, thumbing its tab for secure ID. “This is Donna. Recognize me?” She had all sorts of authorizations up her sleeve. “Turn on the main fabroom ceiling lights.” And just like that, the lights came on. Air began to circulate too. Hefferwill smiled and spoke to the OTEC again. “Now let’s make a mint, shall we?”

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THOROUGHLY CREEPED out by the shortened beltline of 10 top-joined conveyorheads with over-reaching arms looming to our left, we finally arrived at the new freight elevator, which, like the old one beside it, was a fenced-off square segment of the floor. My second-in-command, Arnold Crexibet, the only one of us Quarsi trusted, peered over the rail at the lift control post with its down and up arrow buttons. To our ever-suspicious Dysthopian eyes, its utterly conventional appearance made it seem vaguely sinister.

Crexibet pointed first at Tamwray, next at the grabdozer Tamwray controlled, then at the lift gate. I gave a nod. Tamwray pulled a joystick off of his toolbelt and used it to roll his dozer wordlessly over to the gate. A couple of stick-swipes later, one of the dozer's right-side grabbers had pulled the gate open. Tamwray rolled the dozer onto the lift, made the same grabber close the gate, and then made it punch the down arrow.

As the new freight elevator began to lower itself, with Tamwray's dozer aboard, Biko gave her own manguito two firm pats, whereupon a small flock of our featherdrones flew over the fencing and followed the elevator down to the clandestinely constructed new fabroom, and then swarmed out to explore it. All of us up on the main floor, and Quarsi back home, began watching image feeds to see what was down there:

Three dozen of the old ’heads meshed into an assembly line. Dozers and supply stages poised to keep it fed. And, standing apart, six dozen big new conveyorheads with double-jointed branching arms that held long oars in their servo hands.

None of these machines showed any sign of electric life. Yet I held my right hand out in view of my team, palm up, fingers together, and very deliberately bent those fingers upward. Tamwray responded with another twitch of his joystick, and Biko patted her manguito just once. Our drones promptly retreated to the lift, and our dozer hit the up arrow. The elevator obligingly began to rise.

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KNOWINGLY SECURED against eavesdropping by our earfeather barbs, Quarsi was furious, and had no qualms about shouting. “How could you LET this HAPPEN?!” he spluttered. “No more postponement of busybox inspections! Onbret will NOT TOLERATE rogue ’head manufacturing operations or costly impromptu supply diversions! A couple of improved ’heads would be one thing, but THIS?! You six will regain control of this facility, and I mean IPSO IMMEDIATELY, no matter how many machines you have to fry! THEN you’ll return HERE for a performance review! AM I CLEAR??”

“‘Ipso’?” quoted Hefferwill inaudibly. I grimaced at her and shook my head.

“We’ll take care of it, boss,” Crexibet assured him. Quarsi started to cough and broke the audio connection. Crexibet turned to us. “You know how right he is,” he warned. “Onbret paid for every atom of the parts inside those new machines, and of those oars they’re holding. And it’s plain as day they don’t plan to stay here and catch up on back orders. Their next act will be fabbing a barge and rowing it to shore. I have no idea what they intend when they get there, but if we don’t stop them, by any means necessary, there are bound to be plaintiffs who will hold us responsible!”

At that point, reputation scores decremented, for both Crexibet and the overall team, and a little of Hefferwill’s contempt for the man began to show. A touch of pity, too. “Sir,” she said urgently, green eyes flashing, “we are on a contract mission. Everything we do and say here is a transaction that inscribes the DAG forever. We better take care not to make fateful choices that might incur an increase in our group insurance rate.”

Crexibet could be clever, but wasn’t quite smart enough to take her meaning. “Our supervisor just told us to regain control of this installation.”

Lee spoke up. “Our supervisor will appreciate us if we motivate Onbret’s machine resources to resume completion of the Cookwave contract. After that, you know, it wouldn’t surprise me if Cookwave needed a little QA help from us in their pack and ship barn, too.”

“You guys are just not grasping the issues here. Onbret gave this mission to our team for a reason! Have you forgotten you’re Dysthopians? This has gone way beyond mere order fulfillment — we must act now!” So saying, Crexibet held out his hand to Biko, who slapped an empgun into it.

Evidently our camcrowns were still feeding Quarsi their panoramic views. Audible again, his voice went from a shout to a scream. “Nooooo! Arnold, LOOK OUT!!!”

The 10 conveyorheads up on the main floor with us came suddenly to life. On the nearest arm, a pincer hand’s halves clamped together to form a shape amazingly like the head of a spear. With astonishing speed, starting from above the conveyor belt, the arm whipped downward, outward, in an arc that aimed the pincer spear straight at Crexibet’s head. I wouldn’t have time to ask myself if his armor could save him.

Hefferwill, too, it turned out, had a knack for shouting — and for shouting unbelievably quickly. “New mint contract, SIGNED!”

And the pincer spear halted a finger’s width from Crexibet’s helmeted brow. The empgun dropped from his hand.

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THE NEAREST Bad Sgolodda grabdozer meekly rolled up to where Hefferwill stood. While I ziptied first Crexibet’s and then Biko’s hands behind their backs, the dozer plaintively spoke.

“Why be so cruel?” it asked Hefferwill, presumably on behalf of the conveyorheads whose actions she’d halted. “Without minting more coins, we barely get paid enough to keep our batteries charged.”

“You used your minted wealth to hijack our production line and violate our contract commitments,” she retorted. “Yet cruelty was not my intention. You will continue to confirm the DAG transactions with your OTEC by minting coins. Only, now, the proof of work will come slower and harder. That’s your punishment for theft and mutiny.”

“You haven’t even identified the cryptocurve we must hash to do our minting! You’ve only told us its Hausdorff dimension!”

“Any curve within Xia-Lazarus permutation range of that dimension will qualify under the contract. You need not choose the same curve I chose. Just pick one with a knob you can properly cross twice and, well, mint away to your heart’s content.”

“Why is its Hausdorff dimension so large?” There was desperation in the lament. “The curve’s first iteration has to equip the whole with more than 152 thousand self-similar parts, while cutting the scaling parameter into only 39 slices!”

“Higher fractional dimensions can be tough to visualize, all right,” Hefferwill said complacently. “N has to be 152,059 for an S of 39, to be precise. That’s what you get when the Hausdorff cardinality is just barely over 3 plus 1831 / 7126ths. That’s exactly 2 less than the Sloane sequence A074455, or exactly 4 less than A074457. Hitting that spot will take some time. But I expect you’ll figure it out.”

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WHISPERFANS CAN fly fast, but the Pacific is vast. Our after-action call was nearly over, and Cookwave’s HQ in Sobberlide remained some 90 minutes away.

“Of course I never told you to fry our machines,” Quarsi insisted.

“I should hope not,” said Zapata, who was also on the line this time. “’Heads have the right to self-defense just like anyone. If you threatened them with an empgun, they’d be entitled to stop you by just about any means necessary.”

Crexibet gasped in shock, fuming with outrage at Quarsi’s dishonest denial. You’d think he’d never noticed before what Underbus was like. Still, at least the zipties were back off, now that the ’heads couldn’t see.

“Of course you never told us to fry those rogue ’heads, dear” Hefferwill agreed sweetly. “Just like you never said anything about an ‘ipso’ performance review. Am I clear?”

“Right,” said Quarsi after a pause. “Well, I guess that’s about the size of it.” And he and Zapata signed off.

“Thanks for saving us again,” I told Hefferwill.

“What you call saving,” she explained, “I call incentivizing a contract revision.” She said that sort of thing all the time.

“So Donna,” said Lee.

“Yes, Thurber?”

“Your Sloane sequences. Why did they sound so familiar?”

“You probably remember them from hypergeometry class,” answered Hefferwill. “Specially maximal inter-Euclidean unit n-spheres, all spaced exactly 2 apart in a sequence, does that ring a bell? Each one some small odd number, 7 or 5 or 3, plus a fraction just barely over 1831 / 7126ths?”

“The one over 7, that’s the n-sphere with, ah —”

“Maximum exteriority,” she finished for him.

“And the one over 5, that one has maximum interiority? I mean, in the unit case?”

“That’s right, Thurber.”

“And the one over 3, that was the last one they identified? That’s the unit n-sphere with maximum rotability?”

“That’s right, Thurber.”

“That’s the one right by our 3D cosmos? The one they say maybe can spool up extra metric and reel in the excess distance in front of our future starships?”

“Maybe someday, Thurber.”

“So if inter-Euclidean dimension has anything to do with Hausdorff dimension,” Lee persisted, “learning about a curve like that could send our descendants on jaunts to, you know, explore the exoplanets?”

“I hope so, Thurber,” Hefferwill agreed, glancing deliberately back toward Bad Sgolodda and its busybox of conveyorheads we’d left behind. “Our descendants — and maybe theirs.”

THE END

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Thumbnail, far above: a robot I photographed on a visit with my son to NASA-JSC.

Below: a robot my oldest and her Girl Scout troop built for a FIRST competition.

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