[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 32

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With the power issue sorted, all that remained was to watch events unfold in almost incomprehensibly accelerated motion on the laptop screen. Virtual Helper had somehow hijacked a tank and was speeding around in search of more substantial targets. Like police stations...or hospitals.

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.

I watched the window open on the laptop, forlorn, as the sim played out far too rapidly to understand any of it. Yet nowhere near fast enough! I clocked down to 2x briefly to see what virtual Helper was up to now.

Slaughtering security guards in a mall. Should’ve guessed. It sort of resembled an old video game I once played about stealing cars and evading police. Except that had filtered textures at least! The textures in sim were a chunky mess of big, raw pixels.

Something stirred in the back of my brain. Like I was close to an important realization. How maddening that some vital piece of information often occurs to us when we don’t need it, but is then totally irretrievable when we do!

On a whim I opened up the program settings and clicked on the video tab. The “software mode” box was checked under “renderer”. I clicked “use 3D acceleration” so the real time view at least wouldn’t look so nasty. A little footnote under that option caught my eye in the process.

“GPU assist settings can be found under hardware options.” I blinked a few times. GPU...assist? Oh. Ohhhhh. Fuck me, I’m stupid. I struggled to contain my excitement as I tabbed over to “hardware options”. Sure enough, an unchecked box read “GPU assist: Use your integrated or external GPU to assist the CPU, increases sim acceleration cap.”

Hiding there, tucked away in the options this entire time. I tried to slap my forehead but hit the mask, painfully flattening my nose for a moment. I cursed loudly, attracting Lars’ attention. I explained the situation as best I could.

“Well shit, I coulda told you that” he boasted, to my supreme annoyance. “Well then why didn’t you!?” He claimed that this entire time he figured I already had the sim configured to fully utilize the laptop hardware.

With that troublesome little box checked, I could now increase the program’s own acceleration to 100x. I whooped and hollered, Madeline looking confused as to what merited all that excitement but too indifferent to find out.

“Can you get the gate open or not?” Madeline inquired. “It’s getting cold.” I called back that I could open the gate in a little over a day. She balked. “That’s the best you could do!?” Lars also seemed unimpressed.

“Is there really enough gas to keep the engine idling for that long? I’m down to a third of a tank.” I hadn’t thought of that. “We could always go back to the lodge for some gas.” He rebuked me. “Are you nuts? You think they won’t figure out there’s something wrong with your robot if we show up and it’s vegetating in the back seat, wires and tubes everywhere? They’ll turn us away for sure.”

I proposed leaving me with Helper and making the run either alone or with Madeline, pointing out that I still had Richard’s truck to seek refuge inside of should any unwelcome visitors appear. Lars stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Yeah, alright. Not tonight though, I don’t wanna make that trip in the dark. Looks like we’re sleeping in the car until we can get this shit sorted out.”

So I carefully stacked the cooling kit and laptop on Helper’s lap, then with Lars’ help, heaved her into the back seat. He and Madeline once again occupied the front. The sun was now finally setting, sky ablaze with oranges, yellows and reds.

Difficult to appreciate when packed into the same car you spent hours in earlier, temperature quickly bottoming out. Lars agreed to run the heater but just long enough to get the interior comfortable so we could fall asleep.

“We could sure use a blanket up here. You didn’t happen to bring one, did you?” I looked down at the three little machines snugly wrapped up in the blanket that I did, in fact, remember to take along. “Nope. Sorry, wish I could help.” I smiled warmly at the trio of little fellows and stroked Eric’s head.

The back seat was finally the place to be. I alone could lay down, though only with my knees bent. My head rested on Helper’s lap. I wrestled with her uncooperative arms until her left hand lay on my shoulder and the right one on my head.

Still stiff as a board. The bacteria just kept chugging along regardless, so her glow remained undiminished, but the heaters which normally keep her gel sacs at average human body temperature are electric. Which is to say that her thighs made for a very cold pillow.

I didn’t care. I just wanted to be close to her for as long as possible. That’s all I’ve wanted since we met. If the end of the world couldn’t stop me, what chance does the virus have? I drifted off, and soon enough dreamt that Helper recovered completely.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 33!}