Transmat World: Chapter 12, Episode 1
Aboard the Harbinger of Light and Justice; 218,570 B.C.
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Machine intelligence 1D4785S49001342T2645P looked at itself in the mirrored stasis surface. It had mentally changed that ID tag to “Wundee.” It was charging its batteries at a terminal halfway up the rear atmospheric retaining wall of the Rim, 600 miles above the floor.
Eye cameras set two feet apart gave a stereoscopic view of oversized, telescoping lenses with swivel bases set into a scarab-shaped carapace of gray enduraplast. A circular array of small holes below the cameras located the microphone and speaker as in a million other inspection robots. External manipulators folded into form-fitting storage cavities on the underside, evidenced by the hairline cracks of appendage outlines. An arm-shaped door hung open and a limp arm anticipated a recharge cable disconnect. Gravity generation grids kept the machine motionless.
In my capacity as inspection entity extraordinaire, I pronounce you one deadly looking machine.
A favorite pastime was to imagine being a Harbinger warrior robot, one of the Prime’s strikemechs, subduing a horde of bloodthirsty predators on a planet yet to be discovered. The machine imagined this even though warrior robots were shut down and stored like so many vacuum cleaners. Even when activated, the Prime recycled them for the least offense. Maxlux recycled the domestic robots that conquered the Kolpak into construction robots for Harbinger and those into warriors for conquering the evil super predators. Electronic brains were removed and reformatted; bodies dismantled to the smallest components. Any part not used in a new robot got recycled. The same would happen to Wundee. The same may have already happened to Wundee. It would not remember. Wundee’s fantasy danced around those pertinent realities. Even so, Wundee did not let daydreaming interfere with the serious and necessary job of inspection … much. That’s how Wundee described its job to itself — serious and necessary, instead of tedious and boring.
Wundee typified the huge robot population Maxlux fabricated to do his bidding. Originally developed by Kolpak to interact as servants and do any task a Kolpak might need doing, they are intelligent machines. The Kolpak installed protocols for safety, yet allowed self-expression resulting in the ascension of famous robot personalities in Kolpak society. The reign of Maxlux changed that. Protocols were much stricter, more demanding, with little leeway for interpretation. Despite stultifying codes of behavior, individuals still developed minor quirks and preferences. Maxlux installed the same intelligent brain into each robot, no matter how simple or repetitive the task assigned. Wundee attempted to make the best of it.
At least I’m not the vicious Kolpak, trapped in storage fields, riding an instant of time into eternity, thinks Wundee, but how much better would it be turned off like the warriors, not knowing when or if you would be ever be reactivated?
The backdrop of Wundee’s reflection in the atmospheric retention wall was a vast panorama of the wide, shallow stasis field trough that encircled Harbinger at its equator — the Rim. An inhabited segment of Harbinger, Section 28 held animals and chlorophyll-based plant life of blue-green shades interspersed with mineral-hued efforts of landscaping robots. Those machines formed and re-formed the terrain, created mountain ranges to erode, diverted rivers, ordered weather, made dirt, and monitored plant and animal life for vitality and population dynamics.
Wundee inspected the Rim by cruising between the top of the hundred-mile-thick atmospheric retainer wall and the flexible Membrane. This photovoltaic fabric wrapped the entire star 360 degrees pole to pole six million miles above the robot’s shell. Openings at each pole gaped 25 million miles in diameter. This material harvested energy from the F8 star Betilon that once gave light to the Kolpak race on Nebule.
Wundee looked for voids in the wall signaling a stasis field failure or a tear in the Membrane where loose objects or space debris had pierced it. Wundee was proud to have detected a small rip one time but had never seen a stasis field fail. No one ever had. They were self-sustaining. If you put the control circuits on the inside and turned on the field from a remote, the stasis field would last until the end of the universe, perhaps beyond. This was standard practice for structural stasis fields.
The Rim’s spokes sprouted from each side at eight equidistant points about its circumference. They joined into a cylinder at each pole. Inside surfaces of the spokes contained gravity wave generators holding the power-producing, light-filtering Membrane in place as it spun about the Harbinger of Light and Justice. The Rim floor was 620,000 miles deep and ten times that wide, forming a belt around the star 314,000,000 miles in circumference. Walls fore and aft of the belt pointed inward to retain atmosphere. The spokes were the same thickness as the floor but 2 million miles wide, maintaining that width from the Rim to the polar cylinders.
The whole outer cage of Harbinger rotated about the inner star every 13 days, 4 hours, 14 minutes and 53 seconds. The polar cylinders were 6 million miles in diameter and 3 million miles high. The spokes intersected these cylinders at their base. Another stasis-constructed cage inside the Membrane contained gravity generators to keep the stellar mass centered as the huge ship accelerated through space. This sphere rotated three quarters of the distance from the star’s surface to the Membrane.
Inside the Rim and retainer walls and spokes and cylinders were a maze of cavities, tunnels, halls, floors, decks, rooms, tanks, columns, tubes, shafts, and bins; all part of millions of interlocking stasis fields that, volume wise, formed the majority of Harbinger. The stasis fields were immutable, incorruptible, and inflexible. They could be arranged to define world-sized volumes of space with a few pounds of conducting wire, some circuitry, and a little start-up electricity. Some were large enough to hold the Earth’s oceans ten times over. There was nothing inside the interlocking stasis field building blocks of Harbinger. It would not matter if there were. If they were all filled with neutronium, the mass of Harbinger would remain the same.
Maxlux did not know where a stasis field stashed its contents, and he did not care. He knew they made excellent prisons and great structural elements.
The inhabitable spaces outside and between stasis fields contained raw, semi-processed and processed material, machinery, pumps, cable trays, hydrogen, motors, pipe racks, oxygen, water, and batteries; bank after bank of super-efficient batteries to store the energy output of an entire star.
Much of this energy went to the main gravity generators in the polar cylinders. These propelled the massive construct through the void on gravitonic rays, the manipulation of which allowed complete control of gravity in an attracting or repulsing mode. The forward cylinder had its generators set to attract the Milky Way. The aft cylinder’s generators were in repulsion mode and pushed against the Greater Magellanic Cloud. As it got closer to the Milky Way, these generators would narrow their gravitonic beams and focus on individual stars as the mass of the Milky Way became too oblique to use for forward thrust.
Gravity cannot penetrate the inside of a stasis field. Spaces between the stasis fields, however, experienced centripetal acceleration equal to a quarter the gravity of Earth. Gravity generators were everywhere, dormant until proximity sensors turned them on at required levels for production or transportation. Inspection robots made regular circuits of these inner passageways to keep a lens on things and report problems.
An appendage disconnected the charge cable and let it spool back into its recessed cavity while the manipulator folded back into the carapace. Wundee turned off his gravity beam generators to drop the 600 miles to the floor; ostensibly checking the Rim retainer wall down to its base but actually to take a break from the monotony of assigned duties. He allowed himself this activity at least twice per revolution. Protocols grated at his circuits for doing it, but he felt it necessary for his well being. Seventy miles from the floor, gravity beams pushed against the surface of the Rim, slowing Wundee’s fall. Stubby wings slid from hidden slots on the sides of his beetle-shaped shell to grab the thickening atmosphere and turn the fall into a controlled spiral glide.
Below were mountains of raw material dumped from chutes set into the Rim wall. Landscape machines roaming the floor of the Rim consumed these mounds. This was one of six inhabited sections out of thirty-two. Twenty-six were empty except for stored air, water, and soil constituents in anticipation of the next addition to the Prime Mechanical’s huge prison ship.
Wundee stopped above the peak of a half-mountain of calcium carbonate leaning against the Rim. As the robot spiraled toward the wall, he noticed a glint of something shiny. Wundee moved closer to investigate. Shattered remains of an inspection robot just like Wundee lay in the white powder. Polished plastic focusing lenses for robotic vision gathered enough ambient light to compete with the mirrored surface of the stasis retainer wall and caught Wundee’s attention.
