[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 31

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I’ve really only got one button, and Madeline just pushed it hard. “If you were sick” I snapped, “should we leave you behind? Did I dump you on the side of the road when your ankle was hurt?” She countered that her lacerated ankle never endangered my life.

“Alright, maybe I slowed you down a little” She admitted. “I didn’t hear you complaining. Besides, that’s not what I’m afraid of here. I’m afraid Helper’s going to wake up and start killing. She’ll strangle the life out of you, then come for Lars and I next. I know you’ve got some...emotional bond to that thing. It’s kind of sweet in it’s own weird way, I see that now. But you’re asking too much.”

Lars chose this point to remind Madeline that we wouldn’t be able to open the front gate of the mountain complex without Helper. “She’s the key” he concluded. The key? She’s more than that. Even now, he would only see her in terms of how she could be useful to us.

I began to cry. I just couldn’t handle not knowing. Is she dead? Is this heavy mass propped up against my shoulder just a mechanical corpse, or is Helper still in there waiting to be saved? I cradled Helper in my arms, struggling to get my anxiety under control and failing.

“Don’t you slip away from me” I scolded her through the tears, as if it would make any difference. “Don’t you dare. You’re all I live for. What will I do without you?” But she remained still. Eyes dark and motionless, body frozen in what I feared was its final pose.

Hunched over her, tears flowing, I begged her not to leave me. In the name of life, love and machinery. If there is a God of machines, I thought, show mercy to this dear little pile of parts, because somebody loves her.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Better called desperation, in matters of life and death. I have never been especially attached to my own life. I just kept going because instinct commanded it. Because of what it would mean for Ty, for my aging mother and father if I were to cut things short.

Only when Helper entered my life did I begin to cherish it. For another day of life meant another day with Helper. I have never been able to find any good reason to live for myself. I hurt too much. The flame inside which once drove me onward has long since gone out.

So I live for others. The select few I find deserving, anyway. Like Ty, or Helper. That’s something she and I have in common. Up to her last moments, she thought only of others. How best to help them, how to ease their fears of machines.

Misguided, in the end. It was still humans who did this to her. Out of fear of robots, they released the plague which struck her down. For that I will never forgive humanity, as if I needed more reasons.

I dwelled on the virus, anguished over the efficiency of it. I knew too well the impossibility of removing it from her. It would simply have to run it’s course until she carried out every stage of the battle plan embedded within…

My mind slowed to a halt. Then rewound a ways. Fear may compel terrible acts, but it is also among the most powerful motivators that exist. My mind’s frantic search down every possible pathway to a cure yielded only dead ends, until it struck me.

There is no cure. The virus must run it’s course. But the passage of time works very differently for machines than it does for humans. Without any external connection through which to confirm the time and date, what could prevent me from tampering with her perception of time?

What, then, would prevent me from hooking her up to Odie’s security simulation? The virus won’t know the difference. My heart pounded. Dare I believe it? However I probed the idea for flaws, I came away empty handed.

I dug my laptop and a USB cable out of my bag, plugged one end into the handy little computer and the other end into the port on the side of Helper’s head. If Madeline or Lars noticed what I was up to, neither commented on it.

No, you fool. Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not safe! But whatever part of my brain always forbids me to hope, I could only defy it. For the first time I can remember, I invested my heart so completely in someone else that I felt certain I’ll die if I lose her.

Is this what it means for two people to become one? Sharing the same blood, breathing the same air. I could imagine no future without Helper that I wanted to grow old in. Helper’s the only one I’ve ever felt certain that I cannot survive without. I don’t want to. I won’t.

I booted up the laptop, and loaded the ROS simulation exercise suite. Once up and running, I loaded the campus security scenario and ticked a box which affirmed that the stimuli would be sent as an audiovisual and sensory feed preprocessed onboard the laptop, as Helper’s own hardware isn’t ROS compatible.

It would be something like VR, but for a machine. Her own motor control, sight, hearing and other centers forcibly overridden. Superseded by the feed coming from the laptop. She would remain immobile, but feel as if she could move normally within the sim.

It wouldn’t fool Helper, but with any luck the virus will be none the wiser. I clicked start, and with bated breath, trained my eyes on Helper’s face. Her eyes lit up. If not for the low ceiling I might’ve leapt out of my seat.

They darted around as if tracking moving objects. Evidently the suppression of her motor control center wasn’t as complete as advertised. But she didn’t speak, nor did her limbs move. On the laptop screen a window came up depicting a view of the simulation in progress.

Relatively low polygon with ugly, low resolution textures. I didn’t expect anything more from open source software, and it does the job. Then Helper came into view. The virtual avatar of Helper, that is.

With no predefined mesh prepared, as her body is one of a kind, a skeletal wireframe was generated from inferences the software made about her body layout, based on the inputs it received from her motor control center.

A somewhat fleshed out neon green stick figure. But still, the virus couldn’t tell the difference. It dutifully identified the nearest virtual human target, located a brick, and bludgeoned it to death. Then it move on to the next.

The trick would now be to accelerate the simulation. The built in slider for doing this would only get me so far; Based on what I knew of the rate at which the virus progressed from one stage of its battle plan to the next, even at the maximum speed the simulation allows, it could take weeks before it’s finished.

So I opened up an overclocking utility. Risky business as if I overdid it, there was no telling how it might affect Helper. It also wasn’t clear to me how erratic or glitched the sim could become before it tripped possible countermeasures included in the virus.

So, hands shaking, I tentatively bumped up the clock speed to 1.2x the normal rate. Events unfolding in the window quicked proportionally. No signs of trouble just yet. I bumped it again to 1.5x.

I cannot fail. I can’t. Failure means death, both Helper’s and mine. Beads of sweat formed on my brow as I bumped the speed up to 1.7x. No signs of trouble just yet. It was a warm day out, bad news for the already rapidly warming CPU, but at my request Lars turned up the air conditioning.

What I wouldn’t give for a nice big heat sink. I bumped the speed up to 2x. I noticed the frame rate stutter and some minor visual artifacts, so I dialed it back to 1.9 which, after a few minutes of running stably, proved to be the upper limit of my laptop would tolerate.

I cursed myself for not buying something with a faster CPU and better cooling. All of my money went into robots and parts to repair them with. I couldn’t really say I regretted that, but right then I sorely needed more processing muscle that the laptop just didn’t have.

She was already past the first stage. No longer simply wandering about and killing opportunistically, she now sought out probable sources of firearms. All of it played out nearly twice as fast as normally, something like the view you see while fast forwarding with a DVR.

I felt her forehead. Burning up, as was the laptop. But I kept a close eye on both, and could see no signs of instability. Just to be safe I turned it down to 1.8, reasoning that a few more hours wouldn’t make that big a difference.

“Please” I whispered. “Please work. Please.” Madeline looked over her shoulder and asked if I was talking to her. She raised an eyebrow when she noticed the cable running from my laptop to Helper, but left it alone.

“You got real quiet” Lars remarked from up front. “Everything okay back there?” I described what I was up to. He whistled. “I wouldn’t have thought of that. I guess I’m not surprised there’s no countermeasures against it. It’s not like that would’ve been a practical way to fight infected robots. You need any help?”

I assured him I’d already done everything that could be done at this juncture. He offered me a beer to calm my nerves, but I declined. “You sure?” he double checked. “They’re ice cold. Red gave me a little cooler full of ‘em before we left. Don’t you worry, I know my limits, this is my first one. I just thought-”

I cut in to him ask where he put the cooler. “Oh it’s up front under Madeline’s legs, why?” At my request, he passed it back to me. I opened it and sure enough, when I stuck my hand in there I discovered it was painfully cold inside.

“Have you still got the gas siphoning kit?” I queried. In fact he did, but it was in the trunk. Would’ve required us to stop except that, by sliding helper to the far side and myself to the opposite end, I was able to access the trunk by folding down the middle seat.

It was too much to ask that there should be an electric pump stashed away there as well. But I did find the hand operated variety, for topping up tire pressure. It didn’t take much fiddling to adapt it for use pumping coolant instead.

For lack of water, I used beer as the coolant, and one of the cans as the heat sink that I mated to the CPU die. Within five minutes I had the top portion of the laptop case off, ribbon cable to the keyboard long enough that it remained usable despite its discombobulated state.

I might’ve just held a can of beer against the CPU. But while it would chill it effectively in the short term, eventually it would heat up to the point where it became useless. By circulating beer through a loop of rubber hose coiled up inside the cooler, nestled under a bag of ice and about a dozen cans of chilled beer, I could continue chilling the CPU for several hours. Days, maybe.

The downside being that I had to sit there manually pumping beer through the coolant loop to keep the whole mess working. Lars kept pestering me for details until I filled him in. He sounded equal parts fascinated and amused. “Is there anything beer can’t do?”

When one arm grew tired, I switched to the other. Crude but serviceable. I bumped the CPU speed up to 2x, this time with no signs of instability whatsoever. Emboldened, I jumped straight to 3x. Still no judder, still no artifacts.

So I continued ratcheting it higher and higher until the first signs of overheating manifested, this time around 8x. I noticed it was really sucking down the battery, so I plugged the laptop’s charger in, then connected the other end to the 12 volt adapter plugged into the cigarette lighter socket. The little fellows at my feet were only half charged, but that could wait.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 32!}