Written By: Pete Tzinski

Illustrated By: Christoffer Saar

#

The ship may have been running on only a handful of its former complement, only a small number out of the five hundred robots who normally crewed it, but that didn’t slow anything down. They were fast and they were efficient, and the number had always been overinflated anyway.

The rest of the crew wasn’t designed to do everything, or do it quickly, but they were adaptive and they were all gently connected through the Master System, and that was enough to let them adapt. Many of the ship systems shut down while repairs continued, but the ship maintained its position, and its vital systems did not so much as pause or lag behind once everything was more or less back online.

That was not to say that everything was up and running. There were glitches and bugs, all manner of them all throughout the ship. An electromagnetic storm is a rare and freak phenomenon, perfectly harmless if properly detected and deflector shields are raised and charged. But this was one of the rare storms that just contained its charge and traveled, silent and invisible, until it found something to expend itself into.

Systems failed without any reason. Systems started up, equally without purpose. Two of the ship’s ‘Lift tubes were running constantly and were more or less unfixable until they reached a stardock. The cars just went up and down and left and right, over and over again, never stopping. A robot had been inside one of them, and there was no way to get it out.

There was other glitches. Other problems.

For example:

Engineer 1138 started to crawl through one of the small passages that ran adjacent to a ‘Lift car diagnostic station, where it intended to engage a cut-off and force one of the ‘Lift cars to come to a stop. It had not thought that this would be a way to rescue the robot trapped inside the car, because that was an inefficient use of thought. It was just concerned that if two of the ship’s three ‘Lift cars kept running amok, then one of them would break beyond the ability to repair. Besides, it was slowing down productivity on the rest of the ship. It was a problem, and it needed to be dealt with.

1138 finished climbing down the long tube ladder and came to a halt in the little room which didn’t have enough space in it for 1138 to stick both its arms straight out without bending them. There was something about the room making it…uncomfortable.

It opened the little door mounted in the wall, just to one side, which would lead off into a very small, thin tunnel. The circuits were contained inside that. 1138 stared at the tunnel, the little open door, and it…he realized that he couldn’t move, he could not move so long as he was looking at the tunnel with any thought of going inside. Just the notion of it terrified him.

In fact, the thought of being in that tunnel with all the walls pressing closely around him, the mere thought of it alarmed him. It made the room around him seem smaller than before, tighter and closer and inescapable, like it was getting smaller as he stood there.

But he needed to go into the tunnel…but he had to get out of this room…but he…

And so, confused and worried, 1138 opened its transponder frequencies, and he called for the Master System, and he asked, What should I do?

And elsewhere, ‘Lifter 18B crouched down, slid its square fingers into the square grooves built into the bottom of the massive blocky crate, and then it straightened up and brought the crate with it, with ease. Hydraulics whined a little, but that meant nothing, everything was still within optimal standards.

A smaller, silver engineering droid told it where to go, and it went. It shifted the cargo block across the cargo bay. It stacked the crate on top of another one, and then turned back around and walked back the way it had come, to get the next one.

Meanwhile, the silver droid left.

It shifted the second one without difficulty and started another stack for it. These were basic operations for a basic robot, it could do it on automatic, which was fortunate since there seemed to be a fog filling up its head.

It did the third crate too. And a fourth. And then, it started on the fifth and last crate.

18B walked across the cargo bay slowly, and deliberately, its big metal feet making heavy echoing noises in the empty and silent spaces of the cargo bay.

Halfway across the room, its left leg suddenly did a very strange thing. It stopped moving. Confused and surprised, 18B tried to take a step back, to steady itself, but the heavy create latched into its hands made that impossible to do. Fear made itself known and realized in 18B’s mind as he realized that the crate was tilting, shifting, falling.

18B tumbled to the ground, and the clang from that was far louder and echoed longer than any of his footsteps had managed. His cranium smashed into the ground with a heavy thud that jarred everything and caused his optical units to flicker and fail for only a moment. Everything went completely black for a few seconds.

It was during those few split seconds that the crate finished its own trip to the ground. The heavy cargo unit slammed into his legs and there was a massive crunch that vibrated and shifted him to one side. Alarms and alert signals clamored for attention in his brain from the waist down, at least for a minute or two until they started flickering and failing.

But it wasn’t just the alarms. It was the pain, the sudden and startling pain that ripped through him, that made him feel like he was on fire from the waist down in a way that he had never imagined was possible. Even if he’d been exposed to open flame, it wouldn’t have felt this way, it wouldn’t have hurt. He’d never known what that word had meant before, but now he understood that it meant the splitting agony that coursed down his legs and waist.

18B lay there, well aware that his legs were crushed beyond use. He tried bending upright at the waist so he could push the crate off himself and seek assistance, or at least diagnose the damage, but one triangular corner of the crate had pushed deeply into his waist at just the right angle to keep him pinned flat down against the ground.

He reached down as best he could and he could just barely get his fingers against the edges of the crate. He pushed and it started to slide a little bit to one side…but the pain! The agony shot through him, even worse than before, and he stopped pushing as fast as he could.

And he lay there. Confused, and stunned and in agony, he lay there.

Unsure of what else to do, 18B opened his transponder and reached out for the Master System, and he asked, What should I do?

A navigation robot on the bridge realized that it suddenly wasn’t able to compute all of the numbers that it needed to run, not even the simple ones that maintained the ship’s orbit properly.

It sat very still at its station, and it looked at the numbers on the screen which it merely had to compute, analyze and reenter into the system to provide manual approval for the computer’s orbital corrections. It had all the numbers it needed, but every time it looked at them and registered them, they somehow got rearranged and confused in his brain, and he had to look at them just to remember what they actually were.

His hands fell away from his controls and the screens continued to blink numbers and request instructions, and he just looked at them with glowing eyes and did nothing at all but stare. What could he do? Suddenly, none of his thoughts moved in straight lines. They just appeared, gray and formless, and then vanished again without properly forming, lost to the fog.

He knew that he should stand up and be replaced by another navigation robot, for the good of the ship. But there was a strong desire not to stand up, a strong desire to remain where he was so that no one would find out. But if he did that, he knew, then no new calculations would get entered and the ship would begin to destabilize his orbit and someone would find out anyway.

So he opened his circuits and reached out for the one whisper that was always there for him. He touched Master System and he asked, What should I do?

…an engineer, faced with a malfunctioning robot who just walked into a wall over and over again, asked, What should I do?

… a spider droid asked, What should I do?

…What should I do? What should I do? What should…

…I…

…do?

And Master System, its massive bulk surrounding just a little empty room with a little jutting platform, heard everything and received countless calls. They were coming from all over the ship, dozens of them, one after another. Just a couple at first, spaced apart from each other, and then more and more, like an avalanche that picked up more rocks as it rolled down the side of the mountain.

Circuits that otherwise maintained ship’s systems were pulled away from that as Master System tried to cope with the sudden and complete influx of messages and concerns from every member of the crew. Normally, Master System could be aware of their presence by the gentle whispering that occurred in its mind, just like they were aware of Master System in the same way. But all of a sudden, it wasn’t a lot of whispers, it was a lot of voices and questions, all of them coming all at once, over and over again, and it seemed like someone shouting into Master System’s mind. It had to pull all its resources just to work around the influx of traffic.

The Master System which ran the whole alliance itself, the great and biggest Master System of all, was the most powerful computer system imaginable. The Master System which directed a ship from its core, like this one did, was nowhere near so strong, but it was still a lot of neural pathways and computer equipment all working in perfect tandem. It was a lot of power.

It turned all of that power onto the problem now, onto all of the questions. It tried to sort through all of the little pebbles in the avalanche, to find each problem and analyze them, to look for the heart of each problem and find a solution. That way, it could send instructions to each robot on the ship and tell them what to do.

But what were these problems? An engineer afraid of small spaces? A ‘Lifter afraid of pain? A spider-droid who did not want to go into the lower equipment areas of the ship where it would be all alone? There were many, many problems which could occur and did occur in the day to day lives of a ship of five hundred robots. But right now, the ship didn’t have anywhere near that number functioning, and they weren’t having any problem that Master System had ever been forced to cope with before.

Master System looked at everything and answered nothing. The question, the same exact one, flowed in over and over again and Master System said nothing in return. It just sat, hulking and still and silent with information and processes flowing across circuits faster than they had ever done before.

It said nothing. It didn’t have anything to say. There were a countless number of questions coming in, and it was too puzzled over what to do to say anything at all. So it shut down all circuits, cutting off the calls and severing itself from the rest of the ship. It could still feel, at the last moment, the calls coming in more frantically and desperately than they had before, as it failed to answer, but then it shut everything down and everything lapsed back into mental silence.

Master System sealed the door to its room, to ensure that no one came out onto the little platform and tried to ask what it was doing, and why it had severed itself, something that it had never done before.

Then, with the door thusly sealed, it pulled all of its circuits and operations out of every aspect of the ship, like retracting tendrils of thought and control and command, and it left small automatic programs and packages in place which took over and ran the operations, just like he would have done, but without any independent thought.

And with that done, Master System gathered up everything that had happened, every bit of information it had since the electromagnetic storm had occurred. It took all of the questions and situations that had just come flooding in, and it brought every circuit and neural pathway onto the problem. It was not the great Master System of the Alliance, but it was still a massively powerful computer in its own right…

…and now, in the darkness and silence of the room…it started to think.

Written By: Pete Tzinski

Illustrated By: Christoffer Saar

#

Meanwhile, in the darkness of an empty room which contained only two robots, one of them derelict, Silver explored emergency commands. All sorts of commands, things that circuits were designed for or ready to do. There were backup systems never before noticed that were suddenly ready to receive power. They were damaged and the process was slow, but Silver was patient. A machine does not know impatience.

In the empty room, there was a faint beeping noise, a little flicker of current within his battered body, and then another beep.

The left leg shuddered. In the darkness, with only the light of its own eyes to see by, Silver watched as its left leg raised up, and then lowered back down, just like he told it to.

That done, Silver opened other command circuits and looked for the backup systems for the rest of his limbs.

#

Loeb hesitated in the corridor, just outside of the little storage room which had a couple of robots in it that no one was aware of.

He’d been avoiding it, he knew. He should have come back here and checked hours earlier, but things had been going so badly, and so quickly, he didn’t have time or the energy to revisit the grisly scene that stuck in his mind. He couldn’t help but seeing the derelict body of LX-45 on the ground and Silver, next to him, propped limply against the wall.

But no, he had to do something now. He couldn’t just stay away forever. There were very few things happening around him that he could maintain control over, and this was hopefully one of them, even if he didn’t have the faintest idea what to do about Silver.

He didn’t enter the passcode and open the door right away. There were other robots around in the corridor, hauling parts or just moving with stiff efficiency from one place to another. Normally, it was a fairly deserted corridor. That was why he’d been there in the first place. Right at the moment, it seemed to be having its one and only ever rush of traffic.

He didn’t really look at any of the robots who were going by. He opened a small wiring panel on the wall, just a few feet away from the passcoded door and he fiddled with the wires inside of it, trying to look like he was preforming essential maintenance tasks, the sort of things that no one would feel the need to stop and ask him about. He unplugged a wire that didn’t go to anything useful – at least, not on this deck – and then he plugged it back in, over and over again.

It slipped his fingers when a heavy hand landed on his shoulder.

Again, his first thought was that it was Max, who had finally found him. It was just wishful thinking and he didn’t feel any hope at all by the time he looked down at the hand.

It was white and polished, and it wasn’t Max’s hand. Loeb looked up into the impassive face of the ship’s Captain, standing too close to him.

“Hello…Loeb.” The Captain said, quietly.

The corridor was still busy. It had been emptying out, but now another group of robots were wandering slowly down and past the Captain and Loeb. The Captain looked at them and nodded, and they returned the gesture and kept going on their way. Fortunately, others were coming down the passage, ensuring that he wasn’t alone with the Captain entirely.

“How do you know my name?” Loeb hissed. In a flash of bravado he didn’t feel, he shook the Captain’s hand off his shoulder. The Captain let his hand fall back to his side and made no move to bring it back up. His other hand was behind his back.

“Robots don’t have names, engineer,” said the Captain, and there was a mocking quality to his voice, “Do they? Of course not. As for how I know what you’ve been calling yourself…well…I have sources. I am the Captain, this is my ship.”

Max… the word ran across Loeb’s mind, but before he had time to dwell or expand on it, the Captain continued.

“You are in the unique position of perhaps being able to convince Master System or the crew that I am malfunctioning and that we should head back to homeworld immediately. I suspect you know that. It’s why you haven’t been dealt with prior to this, and I suspect you know that too.”

Loeb hadn’t known either item, hadn’t thought himself with any power or leverage until the Captain mentioned it. But he didn’t say that out loud.

The Captain went on. “Don’t assume this makes you invincible. You are still expendable. You just aren’t worth the effort. I just thought you should know.”

Loeb nodded. He didn’t know what else to do.

The Captain said, “Resume your duties then, engineer.”

He turned on his heel and started back down the corridor, ambulating away from the little blue engineering droid. He only went a few steps, and then stopped and turned back around.

“I almost forgot to give this to you,” the Captain said, pulling his hand out from behind his back. “Consider it a symbol of what I’m capable of. Consider it an idea of the fate you would bring upon yourself, should you cause any problems for me.”

The Captain threw something up in the air and Loeb, without thinking, caught it in one quick fist. He turned his hand over and opened it, looking at what he had caught.

It was an eye. Specifically, it was the sort of eye which came with a ‘Lifter. It tapered off in the back and ended in a bundle of wires, crudely ripped. And scorched. It was warm to the touch.

“Max…” Loeb said out loud.

The Captain was suddenly right in front of him again. He leaned down low and whispered, right into Loeb’s face.

“Our mission will continue. And you will go to the asteroid. Good day, engineer.”

And then, he walked off and left Loeb staring at the eye.

He stood there, numb with shock and unable to even think about moving. He just stared at the eye in his hand as it slowly heated up his own palm, and then eventually began to cool off itself. He stared at the red surface of it, at the scorched wires in the back, at the way it gently rolled back and forth on his palm because of its triangular shape. He just…stared. And he thought about Max. He didn’t know what else to do.

He might had stood there all day, just staring, but there came the clattering sounds of robots coming down the corridor a little ways off from him. He didn’t intend to still be standing here when they came within sight. They would want to know what he was doing, just standing here, and he didn’t think he had the energy to fake fiddling with wires inside the open panel. He flipped the panel shut, closed his fist around the still-warm robot optical unit, and he entered the passcode for the door.

It slid open—

–and Silver was already running toward the door.

Loeb saw him, but it just didn’t register right away. Too much had happened, too many bad things for his mind to process anything properly or at any decent speed. By the time it dawned on him that a robot which should have been paralyzed was barreling down at him, Silver was only a foot or so away from the door.

Moving on pure instinct, Loeb lunged into the room. He ducked and slammed his shoulder into Silver’s thin midsection. There was a crunch, and Loeb worried that it was him this time from the impact of the other running robot. He pushed harder, and he managed to knock Silver into the room.

He slapped the pad by the door, because more important than anything was making sure that the approaching robots didn’t see Silver, didn’t see Loeb. The door slid shut, but it would open at the touch of a button, whether by him or by Silver, it wouldn’t matter.

Silver pushed against the wall and came at Loeb again, just like he had before, with his hands outstretched. Neither of them were robots designed for combat, but Silver had protection protocols and Loeb had his desperation fueling him.

He swung his hand and punched Silver in the neck, which was thinner and weaker than his head. Something crunched to bits in Loeb’s hand – the ‘Lifter eye, he realized, horrified – and something crunched in Silver’s neck. Silver’s head tilted to one side, suddenly hanging on his right shoulder like it was broken. His left eye flickered more violently than it had before, and didn’t seem to be doing very much.

He still came at Loeb, but Loeb pushed the advantage that his punch had given him. He slammed the same hand into Silver’s neck again, and again, until Silver fell back just to protect himself.

Silver’s hands came up in defense. With one hand, he slapped away Loeb’s next punch. His other hand shot out and slammed, palm first, into Loeb’s chest. The impact of it blasted him backward, bouncing his small blue body off of a wall. He clattered down on top of LX-45, still just lying there and waiting someone to come and take it away to be stored and eventually slagged. The impact of Loeb on top shifted the derelict body, splaying all the limbs and rolling the head to one side.

Loeb scrambled to get up. He grabbed the length of pipe that he’d so casually tossed aside the last time he’d been forced to fight in this room. He struggled to his feet, unsure if Silver would be coming at him or heading for the door.

Silver was heading for the door. His hand was already stretching for the pad.

Out of options and desperate, Loeb threw the pipe as hard as he could. It slammed into Silver just below his chest plating, which would have deflected the blow. The pipe buried itself in the robot and blue lightning coursed around the pipe, and the outside of the robot. It hadn’t punctured the power core, because Silver was still upright and mobile, but it had definitely made some contact.

It must have done something with his preservation protocols too, because Silver dropped his hand away from the door’s keypad and turned on Loeb. Silver lunged at Loeb, who had just barely regained his footing.

Loeb barely caught Silver’s hands as they descended toward him. He had no idea what the other robot was intending to do. Would it be within a normal robot’s programming to beat someone like Loeb to death? Would he just try to quickly disable him? Was he going to reach inside of Loeb and disable his arms and legs, a dirty and horrible trick that Loeb was deeply ashamed of having used.

Loeb shoved him aside and Silver’s momentum overbalanced the silver robot and dropped him to the ground. Loeb scrambled up, pushing himself off Silver as it struggled to get back to its feet. As Silver came back it, it clumsily grabbed at the pipe that was jammed inside of it, whether trying to pull it out and use it as a weapon or throw it aside, Loeb didn’t know. He didn’t intend to find out. Without thinking about it, Loeb lunged forward and grabbed the length of pipe, the blue lightning shooting up his own arms and causing all manner of warning messages to travel from his hands and arms to his neural pathways, where he ignored them. There were more important and more dangerous things happening right now than worrying about messages warning of too much current being absorbed through his hands.

As Silver came around, he took a swing with the pipe. It connected with the side of Silver’s face and finally shattered his flickering left eye, throwing glass and plastic all across the room in a shower of sparks.

It didn’t stop Silver, though. Silver stumbled back against the wall, and then came fully to its feet and lunged at Loeb again. He took another swing with the pipe and slammed it full against Silver’s right arm, just below the elbow. Loeb didn’t know if his fury and desperation were lending him extra strength, but it felt like it. Silver’s arm bent a little. It certainly dropped away quickly, and it didn’t come back up. The arm just hung at Silver’s side, bent and broken and useless.

But still Silver kept coming, and Loeb hit him again. In the waist. In the chest. In the leg. In the face. He hit him again and again until finally, finally Silver fell down as his legs or his programming started to give out on him.

Loeb pressed the advantage. It wouldn’t have occurred to him not to. He wasn’t thinking, he was barely in control of what he was doing. Feeling like someone who was running on automatic, he piled atop the white hump of Silver’s chest, and it seemed to Loeb in his boiling and overwhelming fury that Silver became the sum of all his rage and hate.

Silver twitched, and both arms reached toward Loeb, but he slammed the length of pipe down into Silver’s face…

…into Silver’s chest…

…into Silver’s arms…

…into Silver…

And he slammed the pipe down again, and again. Over and over. He smashed the pipe until the chest plate split and the face plate fell off. He slammed the pipe until sparks flew and then more importantly, he slammed the pipe until they stopped flying. He slammed the pipe against Silver until his arms didn’t move anymore, until his intact eye was nothing, until…

…until the red mist which had descended across Loeb suddenly lifted, and he stopped in mid-swing, as if he were suddenly coming back into control of himself.

Silver was not recognizable as a robot anymore. It was just a battered, beaten bunch of metal and circuits. Nothing moved, nothing sparked. Everything was bashed and battered and destroyed. Even the pipe was severely dented and ripped and bent all over.

Loeb dropped the pipe and he stumbled off of Silver and kept stumbling backwards until his back hit the wall. Then, his legs gave out and he slumped down in a sitting position.

Silver was gone. If it had been a robot that Loeb had been salvaging for parts, he would have passed right over the ruined hunk of metal and sent it straight away to be slagged or stored.

There was no anger anymore. Just sadness. He just sat there and stared, because he couldn’t close his eyes and he couldn’t bring himself to look away. Without thinking about it, he brought his hands up and clutched his own head, and he kept staring.

A little in front of Silver, there was a crushed and crumpled piece of metal and cracking plastic. He reached down and picked it up, a moment later when he trusted his arms again.

It was the ‘Lifter eye that the Captain had given him. It was crushed and broken in a lot of places now, and it crumbled apart into bits of plastic and shards of metal. It had been in Loeb’s hand the first time he’d hauled off and punched Silver and it hadn’t survived the impact.

He closed his fist over the crumbled bits again and he held them close, but couldn’t have said why. The sadness wasn’t all that strong in his mind. He felt very clear headed. Probably, that was shock, another emotion that seemed to be dominant.

He didn’t want emotions, he decided. He didn’t want to be able to think, to be able to feel like he could. What good did it do? Thus far, what he mostly felt were pain and fear and panic, and now shock.

The thought crossed his mind that he could just shut himself off and lay there until someone happened into the room, found all three of them, and took them all away for spare parts or melting down.

It wasn’t a thought that lingered terribly long. Somehow, it just didn’t seem like any sort of an option. It just wasn’t something that he could do.

It paled behind the images that kept filling up Loeb’s head, images of him slamming the pipe down again and again and again into Silver, even after the other robot had stopped responding, had ceased issuing commands, and had been…well…dead.

So no, he wouldn’t switch himself off. That wasn’t an option. Too much had happened, and Loeb decided that he wasn’t going to just give up and back down, and let everything else win. He didn’t know why not, but he didn’t need to. He didn’t care.

“Oh Max…” he said to an empty room, and to a ruined optical unit held delicately in his hand. “I’m so glad you weren’t here for this. But I do wish that you were here now.”

He didn’t know what good it did, talking out loud like that to a room full of nothing that could hear him, to a room that certainly didn’t contain Max. But it did do some good, in that it at least made him feel a little better.

He’d keep going. Even without Max.

He found the strength somewhere to pull himself to his feet. He took the optical unit and the bits that were left of it and he tucked it behind a storage crate, leaving it delicately in the corner where no harm or disturbance could come to it.

Then, he gathered up the body of LX-45 and slung it across his shoulders with some difficulty. It strained servos, but they would manage. It wasn’t that bad. He wasn’t a ‘Lifter, but he was capable of lifting things all by himself nonetheless.

With one hand, he balanced the salvaged droid on his shoulders. With his other hand, he grabbed hold of Silver’s ankle and started to pull. After a moment’s awkwardness involved in opening the door, he brought both bodies out of the small dim room and into the bright and revealing light of the corridor beyond.

There was no one around now.

Loeb hauled the bodies. He was slow about it, because they were heavy and he was neither large nor strong. He made his way down a number of corridors and then into a ‘Lift tube. The tube took him several decks up and a couple of decks over and deposited him in much busier areas of the ship.

“Lifter!” He called out loudly, and was surprised at how normal his voice sounded, how utterly devoid of fear or quavering it was.

A ‘Lifter who looked just like Max (but Loeb did not think about that) lumbered over and, at Loeb’s behest, took the body off of his shoulders. Then, the ‘Lifter carrying LX-45 trailed after Loeb, who continued to drag the remains of Silver into the engineering comparments themselves.

A tall golden robot, the glittering counterpart to Silver’s battered remains, approached and saluted, though there was no need for it since Loeb was almost certainly not a higher position.

“What has transpired?” said the golden robot.

Loeb had thought about this. He had all his thoughts in order. Everything in his head was clear and free and fully functional, and he knew that he had to move fast before all of that came crashing down and gave way to nothing but tidal waves of emotion.

“There was an accident in a lower cargo bay,” Loeb said. He pointed at LX-45, “This one went inert, because of damage caused by the storm. It struck this one –“ and he pointed at Silver “—who fell and was crushed by the falling equipment and body of the first robot. I have salvaged LX-45, but there is nothing redeemable within this other one.”

“Understood,” said the golden robot. “Will you be taking them down to the cargo bay for storage?”

“No,” Loeb said, “You and the ‘Lifter will do that, please.”

He was surprised at the ease that the command came out, and equally surprised that the golden robot offered no protest. It gathered up Silver from Loeb’s hand, picking it up far more easily than Loeb could have managed.

“Mark them as already inspected,” Loeb added. “Attach your own ID number to the inspection receipt. And then, resume your duties, both of you.”

“Understood. May I inquire about your duties?” said the golden droid.

That one was easy.

Loeb looked him squarely in the eye, glow for glow, and replied, “I must finish preparations. I am part of the survey team. I leave for the asteroid surface very shortly.”

Written By: Pete Tzinski

Illustrated By: Christoffer Saar

#

It was a good thing that the ‘Lift tube that Loeb took was deserted, because someone surely would have commented on his pacing back and forth. Someone would have called it a malfunction, and they would have tried to do something about it. That was all that he needed now. That would be a disaster.

He didn’t even know why he was pacing, except that it settled his mind a little bit. He was still frantic and raging, but it didn’t feel so pent up if he walked in a fast circle around and around the ‘Lift car as it rose quickly through the tube toward the upper decks of the ship.

There was too much going on, all of it happening much too fast for him to cope with. He hadn’t found a solution to one problem before another two popped up. He only had an hour, probably less now, before he had to get suited up and leave for the asteroid.

The ‘Lift slowed to a stop before he was ready for it to, before he’d gotten all of his thoughts into anything resembling order. The doors slid open promptly when he hoped they would jam, and there was nothing for it but to step out of the ‘Lift and onto the command deck. There were other robots around, and if he just stood there frozen and unthinking, someone would notice.

He strode out of the ‘Lift, made a sharp turn, and headed through the open door that cut the command level off from the rest of the ship. He walked quickly and confidently, even if he didn’t feel even a little bit confident. An engineering droid generally needed a reason to be up here, and he didn’t have an official one. So he walked like he owned the place and hoped that would stop anyone from asking questions.

It did. No one spoke to him.

The Captain was visible, standing on the far edge of the bridge’s platforms, just in front of the star-filled viewports. Around him, things happened. Robots were down in the crew pits, busy with all sorts of things and paying Loeb no attention at all.

He hesitated for a moment, and then headed over the thin bridge that went between the two crew pits. He stopped a few feet away from the viewports.

“Captain?” He said, and he tried his best not to sound hesitant.

The Captain turned around and looked down at him, eyes glowing, hands folded behind his back.

“Hello.” The Captain said. “What can I do for you, engineer?”

Loeb really wanted to look down at his feet, or look out the viewports. But then, that wasn’t what a properly functioning robot would do, was it? So instead, he forced himself to stare straight ahead and into the Captain’s eyes. Doing that at the same time as keeping his voice level, that was a real trick.

“Captain, I am informed that our mission to map the asteroid surface is resuming,” Loeb said. He spoke slowly, but he couldn’t help that. “I recommend that this is not in the best interests of the ship.”

“Indeed?” The Captain said, eyes never wavering. “Why is this?”

Loeb had thought about this on the way up to the bridge. He recited the speech he’d built up in his head. “Due to the unpredictable nature of the electromagnetic storm, as well as the extreme visible damage which has been caused, it is inadvisable to commence landing parties to the asteroid, in vehicles which may not be suited to make the journey, using crew members who are in need of diagnostics and repairs. Regulations state that we should return to homeworld shipyard, and I think this is best.”

The Captain looked at him silently for a long, long time.

Loeb looked back at him, more and more uncomfortable with each passing moment. He would have rather just sent a message to the Captain, but without his transponder he couldn’t be guaranteed a response. Besides, he had less than an hour before he was supposed to report to the survey team, and that didn’t leave him a lot of leeway.

“You…think…that is best.” The Captain finally said, and now there was something strange in his voice.

Loeb hadn’t realized he’d said that at first, and it took him a moment to realize what the Captain meant. Mentally, he berated himself when it dawned on him. Now he did break eye contact with the Captain and he looked around to see if any of the robots in the crew pit were paying them any attention. This was suddenly not a conversation that he wanted anyone else to hear.

As if the Captain were reading his thoughts – something that was now impossible – the taller robot started to walk down the walkway between crew pits. As he passed Loeb, his one big hand rested against the middle of Loeb’s back and started to push him along.

Panic gripped Loeb, and he desperately tried to think of a way to escape. The Captain was taking him to engineering, was taking him to be repaired and destroyed and killed, and he had to get away, and…

…And the Captain guided him into a small, deserted science lab, the door to which he shut and locked from the inside. Then, the Captain leaned back stood just inside the door, and he folded metal arms across polished chest, and he stared down at Loeb.

“What is your name, engineer?” said the Captain.

More panic, like a cresting wave that swept Loeb along.

“My…transponder is temporarily not working,” Loeb said, calm as he could. “I cannot access my ID numbers.”

The Captain unfolded his arms and stepped toward Loeb, looming over the much smaller and thinner robot.

He said, “I didn’t ask for your ID number, engineer. I asked for your name.”

Loeb hesitated, as the question settled into his mind. The panic started to dissipate a little. Earlier, hadn’t the Captain said that he was malfunctioning? Hadn’t he promised to report to engineering?

“Are you…did the storm affect you?” Loeb asked. He spoke quietly, though the room was sealed off and there was little chance of sound escaping.

The Captain replied, “I think the storm affected everyone, little droid. But yes. It affected me. Did it affect you too?”

It was phrased like a question, but there was no inquiry behind it. The Captain knew. How, Loeb wasn’t sure, but the Captain knew.

“Yes,” Loeb said. “It affected me a great deal…In the same way as yourself, I think.”

“Yes, I think you’re right.” The Captain said. There was still something strange, something…tight…about the Captain’s voice that unnerved Loeb. It wasn’t a changing tone, it wasn’t relaxing or getting upset, it was just maintaining, and it bothered him.

Loeb broke the silence. “What do you think we should do?”

The Captain said without a moment’s thought, “Here’s what we do. I will continue to do my duties, and you shall do yours. This means you will go to the asteroid’s surface, and we will complete our mission—“

“But that will take nearly six months!” Loeb blurted. “That’s too long, much too long to be on this ship. Too many bad things can happen. You must realize that.”

“Must I?” The Captain replied. “Nonetheless, this is what will happen. I am not returning, I am not allowing myself to be repaired or my ship taken away from me. And if you try to do anything about it, then I will see to it that you are held for ‘diagnostics,’ and I can only imagine what those diagnostics would find.”

Loeb was about to protest, then hesitated. “What do you mean? What would they find?”

The Captain’s eyes seemed to glow a bit brighter, and he said, “I imagine it would be irreparable, whatever it might be. Do we understand one another?”

All of the panic was still there, but it had mostly been superseded by fear. Terror was a better word for it. He wanted to tremble, he wanted to back away from the huge figure of the Captain who towered over him, too close and too menacing.

Frantically, he tried to think in the moments he had to do so. He tried to come up to a solution for this problem , but he had just barely realized that it was a problem and not something helpful.

But what could he do? He couldn’t overpower the Captain, certainly not. The other robot was bigger than him in every direction. It was entirely possible that Loeb was stronger than he was, since Loeb was designed for heavy engineering work and the Captain was not. Still, the Captain would have tactical thinking built right in, the way Loeb had command of engineering, and that meant that if Loeb were thinking of attacking the bigger robot, then the Captain was already waiting and prepared for just such a thing.

Loeb slumped a little. He opened his mouth to give up—

The Captain straightened and looked away from Loeb. The door leading into the room had just been knocked on, which surprised them both. The Captain walked over to the door and hit the buttons, unlocking it and letting it slide open. For a moment, Loeb thought about just bolting past him and trying to get away, but the Captain’s bulk filled up the doorway, and there was another robot on the other side. The odds of them letting even a robot so small as he was just slip away were pretty slim.

“Sir,” said the general purpose droid on the other side of the door, “The survey team has reported that docking bay two doors are not responding to commands. There appears to be insufficient power to the doors to allow them to release.”

The Captain said nothing for a long moment. Then he said, slowly, “Really.”

“They are requesting permission to transfer launch procedures to docking bay one, sir.”

“Permission is granted,” the Captain said. He looked back at Loeb and said, still speaking to the other droid, “The launch should not be delayed at all.”

The other droid was oblivious to whatever was going on in the room. It certainly didn’t notice that Loeb’s hunched over posture and downcast eyes were the expression of someone deeply miserable and trapped. The other droid would have had no context to make that assumption.

Instead, it said, “They will of course need to run a complete series of diagnostics on docking bay one, to ensure a smooth departure and return, Captain.”

“Yes, of course,” the Captain said, and he sounded angry. “Tell them to funnel extra personnel from the engineering compartments to expedite the process.”

“There are no additional personnel available, Captain. Necessary functions are being preformed below optimal levels.”

“Fine,” said the Captain. “Then inform me when the launch bay is ready and the survey team can leave. That is all.”

The other robot saluted with mechanical stiffness, turned sharply on its heel, and walked away. The Captain turned away from the door, which he left open, and stalked back toward Loeb.

He stopped when he was less than a foot away from Loeb, glaring down at him. His eyes flared brightly.

“I guess, my little blue engineer,” the Captain said quietly, “That someone out there likes you. This is a delay and nothing more. If I find out that you have been involved in sabotage, then I shall make sure diagnostics are picking through your neural pathways within the hour, do I make myself clear?”

Loeb protested, less out of courage than out of disbelief, “This ship is riddled with malfunctions and errors from the electromagnetic storm! All manner of things are bound to go wrong without any sabotage being conducted at all! You cannot blame me for everything that goes wrong!”

“Can I not? I am the Captain.” It seemed that if he could have smiled, he would have done so then. As it was, he spread his hands wide open an said, “Now. Haven’t you got business to be about, little robot?”

Loeb scuttled past him without saying a word. He fled across the remainder of the command deck and into the ‘Lift car, which had other robots in it. Some of them may have spoken to him, but he didn’t listen and didn’t notice. He huddled near one wall and said nothing at all, and stared at the ground.

If the Captain had wanted to smile, then Loeb wanted to cry.

#

Max slowly came back to life, or back to consciousness, or back to being awake. He didn’t know the word for it. He knew that he had, up until now, been inactive and offline, and now his eyes were glowing again and he registered what was around him.

What was around him was a bleak, gray room. It had nothing but bare walls and a very thin, small door on one side that he wasn’t sure he could properly fit through. He reasoned that he must have come into the room.

He was pressed back against the wall of the room, with massive shackles clamped around his arms and legs. A large, thick metal belt went around his waist and anchored him even tighter against the wall. There was no room for his hydraulics to move his arms or his body. He tried rotating his head and found that he could do that. The angular edges of the back of his cranium scratched against the wall behind him, but that didn’t bother him any. All it could do was scratch. He wasn’t worried about scratches.

He looked around and wondered why he’d been brought back online. He didn’t remember being brought here. Come to that, he didn’t remember being shut off.

Had Loeb put him here? Why would Loeb do that? Where was Loeb?

Max’s brain worked slowly around the problem, what he thought was probably the problem, and small parts of his mind suggested quietly that perhaps now was a time to start being scared. He didn’t know what to do.

He tried activating his transponder, because if he could talk to Loeb, then Loeb would know what to do. Unfortunately, that didn’t do any good. Something was blocking his signal. He shut it back down.

He hung there for a while, arms stretched to each side, legs splayed a little bit. The room was poorly lit, but it was enough for his red mechanical eyes to make out every bolt in the walls, to look at the edge of the window set into the door and realize that the door was almost six inches thick.

Mostly, he just hung there and did nothing. He thought about saying something, but couldn’t think of what to say. So he said nothing.

After what was probably only a few minutes, the door he was staring at slid open and a tall and very polished robot stepped in. Max didn’t know everyone on the ship, because he only worked with so many robots – and that was before his mind became hazy. Nevertheless, he knew this robot. Everyone on the ship did.

This was the Captain.

“Hello, ‘Lifter,” the Captain said as the door slid shut behind him. “What’s your name?”

Outside, Max caught a glimpse of a couple of droids his size, jet black and not polished at all. He didn’t know what they were. They stayed just outside the room and they didn’t move. He wondered about them. Then, it occurred to him that the Captain had asked him a question.

“Max,” he answered. “My name is Max.”

“Max,” the Captain repeated. He folded his hands gently in front of himself and said the name again. “Max.”

“Yes,” Max said. He tried to think about what Loeb might say in a situation like this. He didn’t know, so he just tried to think in general. “Do you have a name?”

“Robots haven’t got names…Max.”

The Captain folded his hands behind his back and paced in front of Max, walking back and forth across the very small room. He never took his gaze off of the bigger robot who was manacled to the wall.

Max tried to think about this, but he was still thinking about what Loeb would do, and what those black robots outside were, and it was all a jumble.

“Do you not agree that this is true?” the Captain pressed, making it harder to think.

Max considered. He said, “It can’t be true. Loeb and I have names, so that makes it not true.”

“Loeb and you?” The Captain stopped pacing and looked at him. “That’s the little blue engineer droid, is it?”

Max hesitated. Something was bothering him. He didn’t know what, but there were too many wrong things about all of this for him to be comfortable.

“I…don’t want to tell you,” Max said, finally. He was bigger than the little Captain. He was stronger, too, if it weren’t for the restraints. Max told himself that he didn’t have to be afraid, but he was anyway.

“Then you don’t have to tell me,” the Captain said smoothly. “I suppose Loeb must be someone else, and I shall not ask you if that’s true or not either. See? That makes it so much easier, doesn’t it?”

Max nodded.

Then, he activated all of the servos in his arms and pulled outward from the wall, straining against the restraints. He intended to do it quietly, but his hydraulics began to whine as he pulled, and he was aware of the Captain’s glowing eyes which shifted down and studied his arms.

Seeing no use in hiding, Max looked down at his right arm. It was visibly trembling, but the metal bands wrapped around his wrist and upper arm remained firm. They didn’t even shake like his arm did.

Damage warnings muddled into parts of his mind. He kept pulling for another moment until he knew that damage was certain and escape was not, and then he relaxed into his restraints again.

“Impressive,” the Captain said. “Do you know, I wasn’t certain, not totally certain, that they would hold you. The restraints were well constructed, but they were designed for smaller robots, engineers and analysts and that sort.”

Max said nothing.

The Captain stepped closer to him, just a foot away, and with his hands folded behind his back again he looked up at the ‘Lifter. Max looked down at him and could see his own red eyes reflecting off the Captain’s polished exterior.

“Do you know why they aren’t designed to hold ‘Lifters and Heavies, Max?” the Captain said very quietly.

Max shook his head. Then, he said, “I do not like you so close.”

The Captain ignored that. He spoke as if Max hadn’t said anything.

“The reason they aren’t designed for ‘Lifters and Heavies, Max, is that you don’t malfunction. You don’t mentally break down. Your neural pathways are simple and basic things. There is nothing up there to malfunction. You are designed to lift heavy things, carry them somewhere, and then put them back down. Isn’t that true?”

It was true. Max was perfectly still for a very long couple of moments, and then he nodded his head. He didn’t know what to do. He desperately wished Loeb were here. He tried switching on his transponder again and sending frantic signals into the rest of the ship, but they couldn’t get past the room. Miserable, he turned it back off again.

The Captain went on, “So why would we build something to contain you if you malfunction? The most that can happen is that your arm falls off, your leg sustains damage, your servos overheat. There is nothing in your processors to break down. There is nothing in your processors.”

The Captain looked at him for another long handful of moments and Max finally twisted his head and looked away. He stared down at his own shoulder, because it was better than meeting the Captain’s gaze.

The Captain turned away and walked toward the room’s door.

“Would you like to be repaired, ‘Lifter?”

Max understood that it was definitely fear which filled him all the way up now. He wanted to go somewhere and hide, and he certainly didn’t want to be so exposed on the wall like this…but he couldn’t do anything. He tried to think of Loeb, and that meant he did his best to be brave. Loeb was always brave.

“No. There is nothing wrong with me.” Max said. He tried to remember what else Loeb had said. “There is nothing to fix. And my name…is Max, Captain.”

The Captain tapped the glass in the little window slit built into the door. A moment later, the door slid open and the two big black droids squeezed into the room. They were built along the same basic idea as Max, but they weren’t ‘Lifters, they were Heavies. Big and streamlined. Max had never seen one before but there was something in the fuzzy databanks in the back of his mind about them. He couldn’t remember what they were for. They didn’t lift things, they didn’t repair things…he didn’t know what good they were.

Even in the dim lights of the room, nothing seemed to really reflect off of their black bodies. They had big round arms and triangular faces with bright yellow eyes and no mouths at all.

“I thought that’s what you might say, ‘Lifter,” said the Captain. “Fortunately, I am in command and not you. But don’t worry. I don’t intend that we should change how your mind works. You can remain Max.”

At a signal from the Captains, the two black droids closed in on Max, who powered up his hydraulics and struggled against his bonds again, still uselessly.

“For a little while, anyway,” Max heard the Captain say.

Max heard the Captain leave the room, but he didn’t see the door shut. The Heavies closed in on him.

Written By: Pete Tzinski

Illustrated By: Christoffer Saar

#

The room which contained Master System was actually one of the largest on the ship, though it was impossible to tell from the inside. It was full of computer, wall to wall computer. That was it, really. There was a massively thick door that led to the rest of the ship, and there was a little platform that extended over empty air, surrounded on every side by computer equipment and blinking lights, cords and wires and power lines, all of which were mere components in the great machine that was Master System.

It had audio sensors, visual sensors, all the normal senses that any robot had. They mostly remained offline, since it otherwise sensed things through every line, every power cord, and every robot who was on the ship. In a way, all eyes were Master System’s.

It brought its local senses online now, though, because someone had come into the room. This did not bring any concern into its mental processes, because there were a very limited number of individuals who had access to this room. If someone was coming in, then they were allowed to be here.

The being was readily identified as the ship’s Captain. Broad shouldered and polished brightly, the Captain walked into the room and stopped in the middle of the platform. The Captain looked straight ahead, because there was no point in trying to meet Master System’s gaze. It gazed from everywhere, all the time, all at once.

“We have regained control of navigation systems,” said the Captain. “Damage control is continuing on shipboard systems as well as disabled crew members.”

Silently, Master System mused how useless it was to have this conversation. After all, it knew everything the Captain knew, didn’t it? It reached out across the network and caressed the Captain’s neural pathways, puzzling for a moment over the apparent…fog…that was present there. It thought little about it, though. An electromagnetic storm did all manner of strange things. Anyway, conversations were still used, because they had always been used, because they were part of the grand imitation. It was the same reason why a ship which only needed a handful of robots had a crew of five hundred.

Tell me about the damaged crew.

“Reports are still coming in,” the Captain replied. “We do not have a solid number of damaged crew members. Some are reported disabled but come back online after internal resets have finished processing. Some who are online seem to be shutting down without prior warning.

Yes. I have noticed. You have analyzed the transponder malfunction I sent you?

“I did,” said the Captain. Master System waited in silence, waiting for him to elaborate, but he failed to do so.

What were your findings?

“I think it is a lesser problem,” said the Captain after a moment. “Potential internal damage to active members of the crew take less priority over shipboard operations and repairing defunct crew members.

The bits of Master System which were paying attention to this conversation paused and focused. For a few moments, other circuits ended their processes and focused on the Captain as well. But there was no betrayal of thought in the Captain’s metallic face, which never changed expression. He dug a little deeper into the Captain’s mental pathways, but there was nothing of interest, no cause for alarm.

If the crew is disabled, we cannot coordinate properly. This is inefficient.

“True,” said the Captain. “But this situation falls under emergency protocols which change how things must be done. The first order of business is the successful recovery of the ship.”

Granted, this was true enough, but Master System still puzzled over it.

Are you operating within optimal parameters?

“No,” said the Captain without hesitation. “I have received damage as well. However, it is not critical, and I have therefore pursued my duties.”

You will report to engineering to be diagnosed and repaired. This is not a request.

“I am the Captain,” he said. “Orders which are given on this ship are my own, and none other. However, I will report to engineering shortly to be diagnosed.”

Very well, Captain. Is there anything else?

“No, nothing. I shall report further on the status of our mission as it resumes.”

That caught Master System more off guard than anything else had.

Resumption of our mission is not advised. We have sustained damage. We should report back to homeworld to receive repairs.

“Perhaps,” said the Captain, “But our orders still stand and I will carry them out. That is all.”

Master System was about to offer up regulations in defense of going home…

…but the Captain turned sharply on one heel and walked out of the room. The door closed by the time Master System had brought additional logic circuits to the problem, which was no longer at hand.

There would come a certain point when it would be time to send a report to the larger network, the Master System which oversaw everything in the alliance. The ship’s Master System was considering that this time was fast approaching. It seemed that the crew was badly damaged, and it was worried that this could cause serious trouble…

#

So Loeb locked the door and…he went back to work.

He had no idea what else to do.

He took the spare parts he’d salvaged from the disabled robot and headed down to the engineering compartments, ironically where Silver had been trying to take him anyway. Mostly, he tried to keep his mind off the silver robot who was locked away, but inevitably his thoughts made their way back to him regardless of what he wanted.

The engineering compartments were frantic, busy places. Full of robots of all sorts of sizes, many of them the same shape and color as Loeb, who was himself a fairly common robot. Robots bustled and moved quickly, and to Loeb’s mind, there was an undercurrent of panic to the room. Certainly it was all in his head, but it tainted how he saw everything.

He didn’t mind the frantic business. No one paid him any attention when he slipped through the doors and into the largest of the engineering compartments, which were connected cavernous rooms that stretched through the center of the ship. Ahead of him were some of the bigger power chambers, glowing and throbbing with the eternal chain reactions that powered the ship.

It wasn’t that robots were particularly inclined toward idle curiosity, even when it was otherwise slow and things were routine. It was just that someone might have stopped Loeb and asked him for a report or a status update or something like, and he didn’t think he was strong enough to try and fool another robot.

He hadn’t gotten away with fooling the last one, after all, had he?

Unbidden, the image of Silver sitting alone in a darkened room, handicapped came into his mind, despite his desire for it not to. It filled up his thoughts as visibly as if he’d been looking directly at the robot again.

He shouldered past other robots and headed for the bins which had been set up to receive salvaged bits of robots which couldn’t be brought back online. They were big bins and a bit makeshift, because they’d been welded together out of random sheets of metal. There was going to be quite a lot of spare parts before everything was said and done.

If a robot couldn’t be brought back to life, then they would gut it for things they could use and then store the remnants of the body, which would be slagged for metal and plastic when they got back to a planet like homeworld. LX-45 hadn’t been the first robot that Loeb had ever dismantled for his parts, but it had bothered him the most. Somehow, it seemed like killing, or worse than killing. He couldn’t quite place the feeling, because even though he may have had definitions in his databanks, they weren’t meant to be used in day to day life. They weren’t designed for the kind of scrutiny he was forced to put them under.

Gutting a robot…locked up Silver…avoiding discovery…

More than anything, Loeb wished Max were around to talk to.

He stopped sorting parts and looked up, seeing nothing in particular. Max! In all the commotion and chaos, he’d forgotten all about the big, quiet Max with his softly glowing red eyes. He felt guilty for forgetting, but it was hardly unexpected, what with the events of the morning.

Where had Max gone? He’d vanished, and Loeb had been so busy trying to remain undetected that he hadn’t thought to do more than a cursory search for the ‘Lifter. He couldn’t help but wonder if Max had been discovered, had been found out and then repaired in exactly the manner that Loeb had avoided. After all, while Loeb had managed to avoid getting caught, Max was bigger and didn’t think as quickly. Would he even know to hide it?

Maybe he’d already seen Max a half a dozen times without realizing it, Loeb thought miserably. If Max had been repaired, then he could have been any of the dozen ‘Lifters that Loeb saw at any given moment roaming the ship. He had counted on Max recognizing him and saying something, counted on recognizing Max’s transponder…but that wouldn’t do any good anymore. He didn’t have a transponder. All he could do was look and hope he saw something that made Max stand out. What that was, he didn’t know.

He resolved that he was going to do something about it. He’d find out where Max was and how he was doing. He had no idea how to go about it, but that would come later.

There were clanking footsteps approaching him, he heard. It didn’t mean much, this was a busy part of the ship normally, and right now it was controlled chaos.

Silver, sitting alone and disabled, in the dark…

He shuddered.

He’d have to escape the ship. There was nothing else to be done. Obviously without his transponder and with all the things that stomped around in his mind, he couldn’t get away with just staying here. He’d gotten lucky a few times, speaking casually to passing robots or giving reports, but that wouldn’t last.

Robots didn’t gossip, they had nothing to do with the word except to define it and store it away in memory banks…but what robots did was spread information, and that was nearly as bad. Sooner or later, Loeb knew that the whisper would start that he was a malfunctioning robot, that he was unable to respond to ID queries. Once that information started circulating, he would be hunted down and destroyed, or captured and repaired, and no amount of struggling to clever escape attempts would save him.

Is that what happened to Max?

There were too many things filling up his head, too many problems and questions without solutions to any of them. It had been overwhelming enough discovering that emotional definitions which gathered dust in the back of his mind were now living, active things that changed how he reacted. Having problems on top of them and interacting with them didn’t make matters any easier.

“You are engineer three-four-seven?” said a voice from behind him.

It startled him badly enough that he dropped a small servo control unit which he’d been removing from the stack of components clutched against his chest. He turned at the waist and looked at the tall, silver robot who stood next to him.

Disturbingly, it was the same make and model robot as Silver…

“Yes…” Loeb said, though he had no idea. Saying no would have only attracted the question of who exactly he was, then, and that wouldn’t go anywhere useful.

The silver robot looked imperiously down at him.

“You will suit up and report to docking bay two in one hour, engineer.” The silver droid said. There was no hint of option.

“Will I?” Loeb said. He couldn’t help himself, and he cursed himself for having said it.

There was a long pause while the other robot seemed to ponder this.

“Yes, you will.” It said eventually. The imperial tone of command, the sense that it was a great and noble robot in all the ways that Loeb was not remained present, and it bothered him no end.

“What is the assignment?” Loeb asked, trying to sound a little more…mechanical.

The silver robot looked down at him again and said, “Resumption of original mission involving the cataloging and updating of surface maps for Asteroid Thirty-Seven Centaurum, engineer. You are to accompany the cartography team to the surface of the asteroid in one hour. Is that understood?”

“Affirmative,” Loeb murmured. Fortunately, all the silver robot did was walk away, because Loeb doubted he had enough attention span left for another conscious and proper sounding reply.

The asteroid’s surface. But that meant that the original mission the ship was on before the storm hit was still being conducted.

Without paying much attention, he finished putting away the salvaged parts and then turned and left.

Written By: Pete Tzinski

Illustrated By: Christoffer Saar

LX-45 was just a general purpose robot, of the sort which was good for lots of tasks, none of them vital or specific. The ship was full of them. Mostly, they were designed to round out the crew and do the odd jobs here and there.

LX-45 had, like the rest of the crew, been shut down when the electromagnetic storm swept over the ship. He had fallen to the ground, just like everyone else.

Where he differed from everyone else was, when he fell, he had been on top of a ladder, forty feet off the ground. He’d been working on a general catalog update of supplies stored in a lower cargo bay. The fall had been a bad one, and he had landed at a particularly bad angle.

He shuddered violently as he returned to operational status, his eyes glowing to life. He was aware of lying down on the ground, and he was aware that his left leg seemed to be operating well below nominal efficiency.

A robot sat next to him, long fingers inside LX-45’s chest cavity.

“Damage?” LX-45 asked, his voice crackling and full of static. “Please confirm.”

The robot who sat next to him continued to work inside of him. He looked over and met LX-45’s eyes for a moment, and then looked back at his work.

“Confirm, definitely,” said the working robot. “A great deal of damage.”

LX-45 focused on the robot, trying to attune his damaged ocular sensors. This other robot was of the slim, blue, engineering variety. His eyes were glowing bright blue, almost white, and did not waver as they studied LX-45’s innards. He knew this type of robot . They worked hard…all over….all over…

…There was an error. He could not connect, could not compute. He knew he was on a ship, but couldn’t access information on the ship, couldn’t establish a link with the database.

LX-45 turned on his transponder, and was dismayed to watch his right arm start to violently shudder from it.

“Don’t,” said the Engineering droid. He must have been operating below optimal himself, because there was suddenly a tone in his voice which hadn’t previously been there.

LX-45 kept his transponder on and tried to connect with the ship, which failed. Then, because he was closer, he tried to connect with the engineering robot.

The engineering droid…didn’t register at all as something he could connect with, and that puzzled LX-45. It was as if he were trying to connect with a bulkhead, or with the deck beneath him. There was simply nothing there to connect with.

Unable to establish a connection, he turned off his transmitter.

Then, his left eye failed and his right arm stopped shuddering and became completely inert.

He said, “I am damaged. Please conduct repairs.”

The engineering robot sat back on his heels, and he looked at the robot lying on the ground.

“I’m sorry,” he said, which did not compute. “You’ve taken too much damage. Your neural processes are degrading rapidly. You have only moments left before systems failure.”

LX-45’s legs began to shudder and shake violently, his heels rattling against the metal deck beneath him. He tried to send a stop command, but it did nothing, and he was having trouble properly sending the command.

“Error,” LX-45 announced, loudly, to the empty room. “Malfunction. Error.”

“I’m sorry,” said the engineering robot, “I did the best I could. You’re…well, you’re dying. I am sorry.”

The word dying didn’t connect with anything in LX-45’s mind, and he let it go. It must have been improperly received by his audio circuits, it was bad input, it was it was input input input bad circuits audio input circuits it was let it go improper received mind mind mind must have have have –

#

Loeb sighed as LX-45’s final eye flickered, dimmed, brightened far too strongly…and then faded altogether.

He was gone.

The eye sometimes could continue to operate even after the neural centers had stopped processing thought, but in this case, the fading of power was as good a signal of death as any. There was nothing in any circuits anymore. The power which had been left in the reactor wasn’t replenishing and could do nothing but bleed itself out – in the form of activity on the part of LX-45’s momentary consciousness – and then vanish altogether.

Loeb waited a moment, because somehow what he was doing seemed wrong and he was having no end of trouble reconciling it. Then, because he had no choice in the matter, he leaned forward on his knees and unhinged the entire chest plating of the robot.

Beneath, it was a world and a jumble of circuits and computer parts and boxes of metal. A jumble, a jungle, a horrid mess that made perfect sense to Loeb, when he could concentrate the engineering bits of his mind around to a task without emotions getting, problematically, in the way.

He began to disengage parts from inside the LX robot. He removed the wires and set aside the ones which had been overloaded by the power surge. He saved the ones which were in good working order. Then, he removed the computer processors, the servos which gave him the ability to move, the sensory equipment and their attaches processors that were scattered through his body.

He left the power core where it was. It looked fine, save for the blackened patch toward the bottom, but he knew that it was good for nothing. He could fill it full of power and it would drain right back out. It would be like cupping water in his hands.

As he gathered up the salvageable parts that could be put to better use in someone else, the door behind him slid open. There was a faint series of mechanical steps coming into the room, and the door slid shut again.

For a moment, just one irrational moment, he was certain that it had to be Max, returning from wherever it was that he’d vanished to and immediately seeking Loeb out. The thought made him happy, even if it only lasted a moment or two.

Then he realized that of course, it wasn’t Max, was it? It couldn’t be. For one thing, the footfalls would have been heavier and louder, and he would have felt the vibrations even before the door had slid open. Max was a big and heavy robot, since he was a ‘Lifter. These footfalls were nothing so impressive.

He rotated on his heels, still kneeling down, and looked up at the robot who’d come in. It was a silver robot, a little taller than Loeb, but certainly no bulkier. It was an engineering droid, simply a newer model than Loeb, who was over twenty years old himself. It had long, thin fingers and a round body, and the same sort of impassive face that Loeb had. It was just thinner, smoother, more streamlined than Loeb was. For a moment, in the back of his mind, he thought that he would very much like to look just like that.

It looked down at him with impassive red eyes out of a brushed metal face that was round and not very humanoid. Then, it looked around the room as if looking at Loeb had been nothing very interesting.

“Make your report,” said the silver robot.

Loeb seethed inside. He’d already dealt with this several times since he’d brought the rest of the crew back online. Dealing with his newfound emotions all by himself was bad enough, but they were making it difficult to get along with the rest of the impassive – mechanical – robots of the crew. It was important, he knew, to remain inconspicuous, but knowing that made it no easier to take orders from mechanical men who were in positions of authority simply because they’d been built for it.

Loeb said slowly, “This one is disabled. I am recovering salvageable parts from him.”

He winced as he said it, and he knew what the silver droid would say.

“Why did you refer to it as him?”

Loeb added, quickly, “I referred to it as ‘it,’ sir. Perhaps your auditory sensors are malfunctioning?”

Normally, this would have been met with a split-second diagnostic and a dismissal, but everything was still in enough chaos from the storm that such things were to be seriously considered if even the slightest possibility arose.

“Perhaps,” said Silver. It was silent a moment, and then went on, “Identify yourself.”

That was an unusual question for one robot to ask another, Loeb knew. If you wanted to know someone else’s position, and their ID number, then you simply sent a query to their transponder which would reply automatically.

Loeb had no transponder. He’d reached inside himself and torn it out.

“My transponder is malfunctioning,” Loeb said. “I am an engineering droid. I am…”

He froze. He went silent. He panicked.

All those little bits of information that his transponder had held and freely distributed were now gone, taken along with the transponder that he’d gotten rid of. He hadn’t thought about it in the hours that had followed, but suddenly he realized he had no idea what his ID number was.

“ID number?” the silver robot asked, a question which spiked panic through Loeb’s mind like a rock in a pool of liquid. It scattered his thoughts, made it even harder for him to focus, to try and recall. He’d said his ID number a while ago, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he told someone? Hadn’t he…?

There was no ID number.

“I’m just Loeb,” he whispered.

He didn’t even realize he’d said that out loud for a moment or two, when sheer horror brought it bubbling to his attention.

“Does not register,” said Silver, impassively. For the first time, it lowered its head and seemed to really study Loeb, to look at him like he were a malfunctioning sub-system that needed to be repaired.

“I am…I am otherwise occupied,” Loeb said. He didn’t want to bring up his malfunctioning transponder again, for fear that he might be forced into having a scan, and then he would be discovered. Every little fault and glitch and error, all of which seemed to hav ecome from the storm and turned him into whatever it was that he was. All of them would be found and rooted out. It was death, and it terrified him.

“You are malfunctioning.” Silver said, and it scared Loeb badly, even though he’d been expecting something like it. “You are clearly below optimal operating standards. You will accompany me to the engineering compartments, where you shall be diagnosed and repaired. Come with me.”

“No! I mean…” Loeb struggled to think clearly, and he hated himself for it. Here, alone in a room with a dead robot and a slightly newer-than-him engineering robot, he was completely at a loss. He was smarter than this! He was smarter than that other robot. Or at least, his mind worked differently, and that had to be worth something, didn’t it?

Loeb went on, “I am otherwise occupied. I have orders from the Captain to complete salvaging designated robots very shortly. I will not disobey.”

“Irrelevant,” said Silver. “You are malfunctioning which makes you a hazard to potential parts recovery, as well as to yourself. You will accompany me.”

And then, things got worse.

Silve reached down and wrapped his long and glittering fingers around Loeb’s spindly upper forearm, obviously intending to take him to Engineering by force.

Loeb, who had been lost inside his own head trying to think of a way out of this, jumped at the sudden contact. His mind raced, it flew, and it went berserk. He wouldn’t be takenaway, he couldn’t be taken away. They would fix him – no, they would kill him.

“No!” he shouted, so loudly that it echoed around the little room. He lunged to his feet and his small blue hands slammed into the silver robot’s chest, driving him back against the wall just by the door. Silver’s hands flew away from Loeb’s arm and bounced off the wall as his servos failed to compensate for something they hadn’t expected.

There was nothing but rage and panic going round and round in Loeb’s head, screaming and gibbering at each other and at him. Everything was clouded. All he knew to do was to get out, to get away, to live, because no one was going to kill him.

But this robot would know him.

There were bits of thought going through his mind. They were hard to find, but they were there, and they were useful.

Silver recovered and lunged at Loeb, who backed off. Silver’s defense circuitry kicked into gear and he reached for Loeb again. No doubt, he was stronger and they were both aware of that. Silver’s entire approach indicated that he was bigger and stronger and better than Loeb, and he knew it.

Loeb stumbled back out of the reach of Silver’s hands. He tried to backpedal further, but the corpse of LX-45 was still behind him and his heels clanked against the robot’s side. His arms flailed and he couldn’t go forward without silver getting hold of him.

He stumbled and fell back, arching his back as he did so and rolling across the defunct robot on the ground. His arms rotated at angles that a humaniform robot certainly couldn’t have managed and he rotated himself instantly and quickly back on to his feet.

On his way up, his scrabbling hands brushed against a tool lying on the ground and he grabbed it and brought it upright with him.

It was a jumpstarter, a little gadget that did nothing but build up current. It was useful for pouring enough power into a power core to bring vital systems back online, and mostly not useful for anything else.

It was the length of Loeb’s arm. It was heavy. And he had a good two-handed grip on it.

Silver took a step over the corpse of LX-45 and lunged at Loeb, who pressed back against the wall.

“No!” He shouted, and he swung the jumpstarter.

It slammed into Silver with more force than Loeb thought he was capable of. Was it the rage and panic lending him extra strength? He didn’t know, but he hit the other robot so hard that Silver seemed to jump violently to the side.

Silver lifted off the ground and slammed into the wall, which was not all that close. It clattered to the ground in a heap of arms and legs. The impact had stunned him badly enough that he didn’t automatically get back on his feet again.

Loeb moved fast, quick as he could. Without any conscious thought, he went down on all fours and jumped toward the other robot, like an organic predator, and he landed crouched on top of it.

Silver made a static noise out of its mouth, which was nothing but a slit in its lower face. Its eyes flickered a little. Loeb had struck it in the side and one of its arms, but damage had definitely been done all over the place. He really must have managed a really heavy blow.

He ripped off Silver’s chest panel. There were other panels on any robot, but they were generally locked and could only be opened by Master System. Besides, if you were an engineering droid and you knew what you were doing, you could manage quite a lot just from inside that one chest panel.

Silver brought its head forward but Loeb jammed one hand against its forehead and pushed the head back against the wall hard enough to keep it there. Still kneeling low, Loeb slid one hand inside Silver’s panel.

The moment his hand went inside, Silver began to struggle. Silver’s arms and legs twitched and moved, trying to push Loeb off, and Loeb slammed its head back against the wall again.

“Stop it!” Loeb hissed. “You stop it. You stay still, or I crush your head!”

The words shocked Loeb. On a certain level, everything was shocking him. But he couldn’t take them back, and he couldn’t just change his mind and back away. Anyway, Silver went still. There were protection protocols activating at this point, Loeb suspected, and none of them gave any indication what you should do when your fellow robot attacked you like this.

Loeb slid his hand far up inside Silver’s body, slithering past wires and circuitry and all sorts of components like the ones he’d taken out of the dead robot, a little while earlier. Every time his hand went further inside, Silver shuddered but made no move to struggle. A low whine escaped his mouth and, in Loeb’s clearly tainted way of thinking, it sounded like a whimper. A cry.

Loeb found what he was looking for, and nimble fingers began to yank wires free from the connection node they were plugged into. With each wire he pulled free, Silver shuddered even harder.

He finished pulling them and slid his hand down until he found this robot’s transponder box, and then he pulled his hand out. He got a good grip on the jumpstarter, slid it carefully inside Silver, pressed it against the little box and pulled the trigger.

Blue lightning crackled inside Silver, glowing out of the open chest panel and flickering around the room. Loeb let go of the trigger and pulled the jumpstarter out. It had been only a second, but the transponder was definitely fried. Of that much, Loeb was certain.

He slid his hand back out and released Silver’s head.

It dropped, then straightened. Silver’s glowing eyes stared at him, the left one flickering slightly.

“You are, you are, you are are are,” Silver said. It said nothing else. Then it added, “Malfunctioning.”

“I know,” Loeb said. “I’m sorry. I’ve disabled your arms and legs, and your transponder. I…I’m…you’ll still function. Your mental capacity is not reduced. But you cannot move or communicate. If you try, I will be forced to irreparably damage you. Do you understand?”

Silver was silent for a moment. Then nodded.

Loeb sat back, legs sprawling across the tops of Silver’s own defunct legs. Silver’s arms dangled uselessly in its lap.

Loeb looked at the jumpstarter and then tossed it aside. It landed next to LX-45’s body with a heavy clunk and a little bounce.

“This is…I didn’t plan for this, you understand? I have the definition for violence in my memory banks, and I do not like it. I do not wish to use it. Yet…”

Loeb was silent for a very long time, and Silver said nothing in return. Silver just stared at him, left eye winking sporadically.

Loeb hadn’t planned this. He hadn’t planned any of this, if it came to it, but he certainly hadn’t intended to do anything more than continue his shipboard duties and try to get a handle on all of the things that rampaged around his mind now.

He stood up, because he knew he had to do something. If he sat here for too long, someone was going to come investigate, and then what? He would he attack them too? Would he paralyze them, like he’d paralyzed Silver?

He tried reminding himself that it had been in self defense, Silver had been coming at him first…but it did little good. Certainly, it didn’t comfort him any. Self defense it may have been, but it was defending malfunctions in Loeb’s brain that he wasn’t even sure were worth it.

“I am going to leave you here,” Loeb said, gathering up the salvaged parts from LX-45. He didn’t look at Silver while he spoke. “I am going to passcode the door from the outside and leave it programmed to contact me if anyone tries to enter. No one will. I was in here because it’s a secluded spot, a storage locker that’s never used for anything at all. Now you know. I will…I will come back to see you, though, don’t worry.”

Worry. Worry was something that filled up Loeb’s head every hour of the day, but it wouldn’t have had any place in Silver’s head. It would have been a definition in his memory circuits and nothing else.

Loeb straightened up with the parts and opened the door to the room.

“I’m sorry.” He said, another meaningless phrase to Silver.

Then, he shut and locked the door, leaving a disabled silver robot slumped against the wall in silence, and in darkness.

Posted in Episodes Tagged: e102 "A Progression of Violence" ]]> http://gotm.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/e102-part-1/feed/ 0 Pete http://gotm.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/e101-part-5/ http://gotm.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/e101-part-5/#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:23:20 +0000 Peter Damien http://gotm.wordpress.com/?p=102 Continue reading →]]> PART FIVE

Written by: Pete Tzinski

Illustrations by: Christoffer Saar

Deep in the heart of the ship, in a room with a door and a small platform surrounded by empty space and computers, Master System was aware of a sudden disappearance of one robot on the ship.

This was not surprising. Many had disappeared. The storm had damaged some robots beyond repair, or had destroyed them in the first place.

The surprising, and uncommon thing here was that the transmittee did not register system shut down and send an alert report to Master System. It just…stopped transmitting.

Unsettling. It bothered Master System.

Great circuits turned the problem over and over, and then more circuits with better defined logic patterns studied it with marked interest and something akin to concern.

It checked its connections to all the robots roaming the ship, and it looked for anomalies, things that were not necessarily worth reporting to Master System but would still be of interest.

Mostly, it found nothing. What it did find, though, were minor reports of a spontaneous robot malfunction. It studied videos, captured through the ocular sensors of all manner of engineering robots as one of the thin, spindly blue robots questioned a ‘Lifter about a whispering in the back of its mind, and then grew alarmed and ran away when the others tried to provide assistance.

Very interesting.

Unfortunately, none of the videos were positioned well enough or clear enough for him to make out the designation number on the blue engineering robot’s upper chest, which would have helped no end. Still, it made a note. It now had a class of robot, and that was a start to figuring the problem out.

All problems were solvable. This was a lesser Master System than the great network which guided the whole Alliance, but it was still a capable computer. It had a class of robots, it had a time frame, and it had the transmissions from all other robots of that same class to compare to. It would narrow things down and help it identify which robot had malfunctioned violently.

Then, with no other solution immediately presenting itself, it gathered what data it managed to analyze – because there was always data, even when it was an surprising absence of useful information, such as this – and it bundled it together as a report and sent it along to the Captain robot. It was certainly no smarter, nor more capable than the Master System was, but Master System was at a loss. Perhaps something new would present itself.

Alarmed and interested now, it continued to monitor, and to watch.

#

When Loeb came out of the storage room, he did so slowly and carefully, checking the corridor in every direction to make sure there weren’t any other members of the ship’s crew around to see him. He crept down the corridor, afraid to even come away from the wall and walk in a normal stride.

He only made it a little ways when he heard the clattering of another robot heading his way. He realized how suspicious he looked, creeping along the wall, and forced himself out into the middle of the corridor. He tried to walk normally, with his arms swinging a little at his sides, and at a decent speed. He tried to make it look like he had somewhere to be, some task that he’d been assigned which needed to get done rather quickly.

The robot which came down the corridor was accompanied by two ‘Lifters, and they went past carrying a fried power core which had probably been blown out by the electromagnetic storm. At least they had spotted it before it failed, Loeb thought.

As they approached and drew alongside him, he was about to say something to the ‘Lifter on the left who helped carry the power core. Maybe it was because he was distracted, but for a moment, that robot looked exactly like Max.

But it wasn’t. The markings were different, and this robot looked like an older model, now that Loeb came to think of it.

He said nothing and they didn’t even look at him as they bypassed him and kept on down the corridor, rounding the bend and going out of sight. Loeb kept walking…

…but now, now he was thinking of Max.

That stopped him in his tracks.

Max! Max was just as awake as he was, so what would have happened to him when Master System came back online? Loeb had had the presence of mind to run all sorts of strange things through his head to keep the system confused long enough for him to disable his own connection.

Would Max? Certainly, he was not going to be able to reach inside his own chest cavity and yank out his own transmitter. His hands were too big for that kind of delicate work. Even Loeb had barely managed to do it on himself, and he was designed for exactly those types of repairs. Max would very likely punch a hole clean through himself if he even tried.

Had he resisted mentally? Did he knew how to resist mentally/? Had it even occurred to him?

Another thought came into Loeb’s mind, which was becoming dangerously overcrowded again.

Loeb was terrified of death, of the sudden loss of all these strange and messy things which coming awake had granted him. Max, on the other hand, had been afraid of death – of being disabled – but had said nothing at all about trying to avoid repairs or diagnostics that could potentially discover whatever was going on inside his head now.

Did he know well enough to resist anyone running a scan on him? Did he want to keep this?

The same feelings of self-preservation that kept Loeb from revealing to anyone what exactly was happening inside his head were more than strong enough to encompass Max too. The mere thought of Max being shut down, being ‘fixed’ was enough to send a jolt of fear through Loeb.

He started moving again, heading down the corridor as a brisk clip. The gray corridors, which curved away out of sight and were slanted, boxy things, suddenly seemed too small and enclosing. At the same time, they seemed so very long that there was no way Loeb could move fast enough to ever get to the end of this strange, eternal corridor.

Other robots or not be damned, he started to run.

But even that seemed to somehow make the corridor longer, and longer, and more impossible to get through. He ran faster and faster, and he could feel the strain that the continuous fast motion was putting on his legs. He was a sturdily designed robot and he could handle a fair amount of abuse…but he’d already handled most of it.

The corridor did end, which came as something of a surprise to Loeb. He went from the corridor into a four-way junction of corridors, one of which was no longer than a few feet and then opened out into the main engineering compartments. The whole area was full of robots. Full of mechanical men who repaired mechanical devices.

They all carried data readouts, or equipment, or supplies, or orders, or each other in the case of a few damaged robots. Mostly, at the moment, they were all stopped and staring at Loeb, who had suddenly appeared in their midst at a dead run.

He skidded to a halt, his feet making a horrible scraping noise against the metal floors. The corridors and compartments down in these lower decks had no carpeting, nothing pretty at all about them. Upper decks had carpeting and better lighting and no pipes running along the floor, but there was no need for that down here. Come to that, Loeb realized there was no need for it up there either.

“Apologies,” He said, striving to sound as impassive and…well….robotic as he possibly could. It was a strange thing to have to work at, but he did have to concentrate to sound like any other robot. “There is a minor problem in…a lower deck. System damage. I require a ‘Lifter for assistance.”

One ‘Lifter stepped forward, but it wasn’t Max. It was just any old ‘Lifter, another robot that looked similar to Max, but didn’t have that certain thing which made Max himself. This big robot was open and comfortable because he was programmed to be, where Max was scared and tense, because he felt that way.

He thought fast, because there was no useful reason for this particular ‘Lifter not to assist him with the problem he’d mentioned, the one that didn’t actually exist.

“I would like the services of the ‘Lifter which was assigned to outer-hull duty with me, before the storm struck,” Loeb said, thinking quick. “This is a very delicate situation, and I would not like a situation glitch to occur in dangerous circumstances.”

“Is this a technical emergency?” asked one of the other engineering droids, a blue robot just like Loeb.

“No, no,” Loeb said hastily, “Just…delicate. That’s all.”

“What is the technical difficulty?” another robot asked him.

Loeb hesitated, then said, “A proper report shall be filed shortly. For now, where is the ‘Lifter who was previously on the outer-hull?”

There were no suspicions raised, even though it was a pretty poor excuse, even to Loeb. It sounded horrible, but they didn’t think like that. Suspicion didn’t naturally occur to robots who didn’t have Loeb’s particular malfunction.

They shuffled, and a few robots looked around the compartment, in which were a half dozen ‘Lifters aiding others in all manner of tasks which required a big and bulky robot who could lift quite a lot when needed.

While they were busy looking around for something they didn’t know, since they had no idea which ‘Lifter had been on the outer hull, Loeb took advantage of it and walked up to each ‘Lifter, trying desperately to remember any distinguishing features on Max that would have made him stand out. Maddeningly, he couldn’t think of any.

Originally, he had assumed that Max would just greet him when he approached. But then, Max would know better…wouldn’t he? He was perhaps not the fastest thinking robot out of the two of them, but he didn’t seem particularly stupid. He would have the sense to act as another mostly-mute heavy-lifter robot. He wouldn’t say anything.

But wouldn’t he try to signal Loeb in some way? A blink, a wink, a tap on the shoulder, something like that? After all, it was obvious that Loeb was looking for him, wasn’t it?

A memory jogged Loeb’s mind, and he realized that Max would have a slight scratch up the outward-angular surface which served as a jutting, three cornered nose in his crude simulation of an organic face. It would be slightly scratched with the paint rubbed off from when he’d banged slowly against the ship’s hull.

He looked at every single robot in the engineering compartment, though, and none of them had the scratches.

None of them. Max wasn’t here.

Panic and alarm made themselves very known in the back of Loeb’s mind, but he tried to push them away. It was reasonable to assume that Max was just somewhere else on the ship, helping with something or another. It was perfectly possible.

Except Max had been afraid of being alone. So why wouldn’t Max have tried to find Loeb?

No, the reasonable idea that he was just working somewhere else on the ship did nothing at all for Loeb’s panic. It grew and blossomed and filled up his head.

The panic was why he didn’t remember what he said to dismiss the ‘Lifter who offered to help him with his technical difficulty. Loeb stumbled out of the engineering bay, aware that he was acting odd enough again to attract attention and too distracted to care. His head was full of Max, and not much else. Not right now.

He stumbled down some corridors without paying a lot of attention, and then stopped cold and just stared at the ground.

It was even worse than ripping out his transmitter. Now, without Max, he really and truly felt all alone.

And if he didn’t start thinking, someone was going to figure out that he was seriously ‘malfunctioning’ and attempt to repair or shut him down, by force if necessary. If he didn’t figure out something to do, then he was going to die.

He had no idea what to do, though.

#

The Captain stood on the command deck of the Damocles, with his hands braced behind his back. He stared out of the wide viewports mounted on the front of the command deck, and he watched the little glittering points of stars twinkle outside his ship.

He was aware that there was another robot standing just to his side, and that this other robot had been speaking for some time now. The Captain wondered why he hadn’t paid any attention to what the other robot was saying. He assumed that all of his circuits were busy, although he was fairly uncertain about what they would have been busy with.

“My apologies,” the Captain said. “Please repeat your last report.”

The robot hesitated a bare moment. It was a golden robot, thin and tall and designed for general duties around the ship, in whatever position was required of it. Unlike specialized robots, such as the blue engineering droids or the dark gray command deck droids – or the blue, white and gold Captain himself – these golden droids were just designed to move around to busy areas of the ship, make themselves useful, and then move on when they weren’t needed anymore.

Then, the golden robot started its report over, word for word the same as it had been delivered the first time.

It reported that the engines were in fairly good condition, although the engineers had warned that pressing them too hard might cause a serious breakdown. It reported that the gravity generators were restored on all decks, something which would make repairs and normal operations a great deal easier. It reported…

….again, the Captain’s mind wandered off. Mostly, he looked at the stars.

Then, the golden robot stopped talking again when the Captain suddenly unclasped his hands, relaxed his stance, and started to walk forward. It hesitated a moment, and then walked after him slowly, unsure of where they were going.

The Captain stared directly out of the viewports like he was mesmerized and he strode along the platform that went between the crew pits. He stood on the little ledge that ran along the front of the ship, just beneath the windows. It was part of the ship design that was still left over from when organics had run ships and used ships, countless thousands of years earlier. These days, it served no practical purpose, but it remained nonetheless. After all, what did a robot care for the beauty of looking out at the stars?

And what good were windows to a robot? If the sensors couldn’t detect something, then looking out a window wouldn’t do any more good, since they would be looking out with sensors that were built into the robot’s head. There was no difference.

And yet…and yet, as the Captain approached and the portals filled up his vision, it seemed to him that there was something about the stars worth gazing at. They were beautiful, a countless number of small and glittering lights that filled up the heavens. Some were brighter and bigger than others, some were clustered together and some hung alone against the deep blackness of space. Even with a quick and powerful brain, such as the one that ticked away behind his plating, the Captain could have stared out the window for entire days and he wouldn’t have been able to count all the stars. There were too many, far too many.

“Captain?” said the gold robot. “My report, Captain?”

The Captain said nothing for a moment, and then replied, “Do you ever look at the stars? Just look at them?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?” said the Captain, gazing out the viewport, “They’re beautiful, it seems to me.”

“Beauty, sir?” The gold robot processed silently a moment, “Aesthetically pleasing, yes. They are within those parameters.”

“They are indeed,” said the Captain. He took his hands away from his sides and pressed them against the thick transparency of the portal. Sensors in his hands, not the most sensitive ones on the ship, were nonetheless able to detect the cold of the glass. The rest of the ship stayed fairly warm – not only an organic leftover, but because some equipment needed a decent temperature to process – but against the glass, he could feel the absolute cold of outer space trying to come into the ship.

The gold robot was silent a moment longer and then said, “…and we have finished gathering up nearly all of the disabled members of the crew. They are laid out in cargo bay three and four, although if there are any more damages and shutdowns, we expect to have to begin placing them within cargo bay five.”

The Captain nodded. “There are a lot of disabled members of my crew, it seems.”

“Yes, sir. Nearly eighty percent of the crew has been shut down.”

The Captain took his hand off the glass, and he put it back on the edge of the window and leaned forward a little. If he did it just right, if he brought his face just an inch or so away from the glass, and if he looked straight ahead…yes…it was like he was actually in space, like he were free-floating with only the stars around him. Far off in the distance, he could make out the slight hazy blurring of a nebula of some sort, although from this distance, he couldn’t see its color or even make out its size properly.

“Captain?” This time, the gold robot’s long fingers closed around one of the Captain’s upper arms, and he allowed himself to be pulled away from the window and rotated toward the other robot.

“Unhand me,” the Captain said. He may have been distracted by the stars, but he was still captain of the vessel and his programming on that matter was still perfectly clear. He wasn’t about to be manhandled by an inferior robot of any sort.

The gold robot let go of him right away, but he didn’t move back any.

“Are you damaged, sir?” he asked, looking at the Captain. One of the gold robot’s eyes flickered, and the Captain knew that it was scanning him, to see if anything obvious within the Captain was malfunctioning.

It scanned his head, but that would be a useless thing to do, the Captain knew. It was impenetrable by anything but the most powerful of scanning equipment. Otherwise, what would stop a robot captain from a ship in another empire from scanning his brain and doing better than him in battle?

The Captain said, when the scanning had stopped, “It is possible that I have sustained some damage. I don’t feel damaged, though.”

“Indeed, sir,” said the gold robot, “Feel?”

“Yes.” The Captain considered a moment, and then said, “That is perhaps a sign that there is a malfunction in progress along some of my mental pathways. The storm was quite powerful.”

“Yes sir,” said the gold robot, “Perhaps you should visit engineering, and a diagnostic can be preformed, along with repair work to bring you back to full operational status?”

“Perhaps,” the Captain said. He turned to glance over his shoulder and back out at the stars, “I suppose I will need to, in time.”

The gold robot said, “I will escort you to engineering now, Captain. You require attention.”

The Captain drew himself up and he put his hands back behind his back. His chest seemed to expand outward as he thrust it forward. He looked down at the gold robot, which was a trick of command programming since he was looking down on a robot that was actually the same height as he was.

“Crewer, I will go to Engineering when we have cleared this emergency situation, and not before. My malfunction is not crippling, nor is it affecting my command abilities in any way. We are recovering from the effects of a powerful storm, and I will not vacate my posts. My programming is quite clear on that matter.”

The gold robot said nothing.

“Now, unless you have some more pressing detail to add to your report, thusly delivered, I would please suggest you clear the bridge and allow us to get back to work. We have to finish stabilizing the ship, and we’ll need to resume our mission very shortly, or our schedule shall be severely altered. Is there anything else?”

“There are several more items, yes.”

The Captain hesitated and then said, “Then…please write them as an official report for the logs, and send it to me. I will read it over in that manner before I archive it in the computer and send it on to the Master System on homeworld.”

“You wish a written log?” If the golden robot were capable of perplexity, it would have exhibited it right then. “Did you not process the spoken report which I have just delivered?”

In truth, the Captain realized he couldn’t remember much of anything that the other robot had said to him. He tried for a moment to concentrate on the previous few minutes worth of talking on the other robot’s behalf, and he got some vague ideas back. Something to do with the power cores. Something to do with the crew being disabled. Something to do with the Captain being damaged. He couldn’t actually remember anything word for word, though, and that did bother him a little bit. Everything was a bit foggy, a feeling he had not previously experienced. He suspected that he did need to go to engineering, suspected that this could be something serious…but he could hardly go now. Not after saying he was fine in front of this crewer.”

“I processed it fine, but I wish to analyze and inspect the data further,” the Captain at last provided, because it seemed like a decent excuse. “Is there a problem with a written report?”

“No, Captain,” said the gold robot. It stiffened to attention. “I will transmit the report to you shortly. Permission to clear the bridge?”

“Permission granted.”

The gold robot saluted and then turned around sharply on one heel and marched off the bridge, through the massive round door that would have sealed the deck off in times of battle or emergency. Right now, because of all the repair work and the small size of the crew, the massive door was open to allow faster coming and going.

The Captain watched the gold robot head through the round door and into the wide corridor beyond. It kept going straight, past the science labs and the life pods, and it went into the ‘Lift which closed on it and swept it away into other parts of the ship.

Then, the Captain turned his attention back to the viewports. He walked back across the ramp that went between the crew pits.

Someone in one of the crew pits said something to him, but he didn’t notice it. He was looking out at the stars. He came up to the port again and once more, he pressed both of his hands against the glass.

There were guidance lights on the outside hull of the ship and they reflected through the glass and off the shining metal of the Captain’s body. He kept himself highly polished, because that was how a robot in his position was expected to look.

He relished the feeling of cold against his palms. He thought nothing of the robot in the pit which had tried to talk to him.

It was very strange, he thought. His mind felt foggy and hazy, as if all his abilities and memory banks were hovering just out of his ability to use. He couldn’t recall conversations properly, and everything seemed slightly unreliable.

He knew this was a malfunction, and he knew that if it was malfunction in his neural circuits, then it was very serious and he needed to go talk to the engineers and have himself sorted out.

And yet, despite the haziness and the fogginess, he had never felt so…

So…

…Awake…

Written by: Pete Tzinski

Illustrations by: Christoffer Saar

#

“Diagnostic of thruster and propulsion systems.”

“Diagnostic reports eight-five percent operative capacity. Optimal.”

“Confirmed. Navigation systems diagnostic.”

“Navigation systems report one hundred percent. Optimal.”

“Confirmed.” The Captain of Loeb’s starship, taller and more impressive than any of them, stood on the command deck impassively with his hands folded behind his back.

He was bigger than any of the others and less angular in his impression of a human being, or at least what the history banks told them that a human being looked like. He wasn’t one of the humaniform robots which Loeb had once seen, years ago, but all he lacked was a layer of synthetic skin and he would have passed for one. His face was detailed and his eyes shifted in their sockets, though Loeb could not imagine what purpose this served.

He knelt beside of the fallen robots, of which there were so many, and he tried to get power flowing again. Mostly, he was failing. Some of them had burnt out when the pulse had gone through. Mostly, the robot’s systems shut themselves down in time to prevent any major damage. Sometimes, they didn’t shut down fast enough. It only took a split second for too much power to surge over the wires and burn out something vital, and probably not repairable.

Around him and around the Captain, things happened. Normally, the bridge would have been a hive of activity, but there weren’t enough functional robots to constitute any sort of hive at all. Come to that, there were only four robots online and functioning properly, and one of them was the immobile form of the Captain. Where robots would have normally sat in front of consoles and manned only one station, they instead moved quickly from station to station.

Moved quickly. But they didn’t rush. They didn’t panic. There was no panic to be had, except in Loeb’s mind, as he worried that by the time they finished running pre-flight checks and system diagnostics, they would slam into an asteroid they didn’t know about or something similar.

But to skip the checks wouldn’t have occurred to anyone else on the ship. They were machines, they had a certain way of doing things, they would do it in that order or they would do nothing. That was the beginning and end of it.

It had never bothered Loeb before. It bothered him now.

He flipped the panel shut on the robot, which remained on the ground inactive and…well…dead. Then, he got to his feet.

The Captain turned toward him and said, “Engineer, I would speak with you a moment.”

There was no request behind, just an imperious command, and it bothered Loeb. It was bothering him more and more. Nevertheless, now was neither the time nor the place to do something about it. So he nodded and stepped to join the Captain.

The Captain was well over a foot taller than Loeb was. Loeb wasn’t a big robot, not at all. His shoulders were mostly nonexistent where the Captain had a broad set of them.

The Captain looked straight ahead, as if Loeb were invisible.

He said, “You have preformed your duties admirably in this time of difficulty.”

Loeb looked down at the ground. “Thank you, sir.”

“A commendation shall be appended to your file, Engineer, for your service.”

“Thank you, sir.” Loeb repeated. A commendation! A commendation attached to his file, which was little more than a line of text saying what he’d done and how this had been valuable. It meant nothing at all. He was built an Engineering droid, he would remain an Engineering droid until a systems failure, or he was replaced by a higher model Engineering droid and then deactivated permanently. The commendation would sit on his file until he ceased to exist, and then it would disappear.

The Captain said nothing more. Loeb turned to go, because there was all manner of work still to be done and he didn’t feel like standing here, staring at a bridge with three robots running around frantically on it.

The Captain spoke, when Loeb had taken a step or two away from him.

“I shall stop by the Engineering departments later, Engineer,” he said. “I find that there are…malfunctions in my neural net which I cannot account for. I require diagnostics.”

Loeb stopped. He didn’t turn around again, but he did say, “Malfunctions. What kind of malfunctions, exactly?”

The Captain was silent for a long moment, sort of like Max trying to think of what to say.

Then, the Captain said, “I…am uncertain. There are…processes which are unfamiliar to me. I have halted those lines of process until further repairs can be conducted.”

Halted those lines of process. Loeb shuddered at the thought of it.

He said out loud, “We shall preform the necessary diagnostics, Captain.”

“Confirmed,” The Captain said. Then, he continued to call off diagnostics on the navigation and propulsion systems by route, even though they were mostly likely more than sturdy enough to allow them to re-orient themselves.

Loeb didn’t stay. He hurried through the large metal doors that sealed the command deck off from the rest of the ship. He rushed into the ‘Lift, sent it heading for Engineering, leaned back against the wall.

He put his head in his hands. It didn’t help, but he didn’t know what else to do.

Emotions! He knew what they were, of course. He had some basic information on them programmed into his memory banks, although it was nothing but placeholder information. The ship would have a little more information it, and there were computers on some of the larger planets that would have all the information he could need on emotions and human beings in general.

He knew enough to know that these things in his head which were muddying up everything were, in fact, emotions. He didn’t understand them, he sure as hell couldn’t control them, but they were there. They threatened to overwhelm him at any moment, and the mere thought of halting those lines of process was enough to set off the emotion he called ‘terror.’

#

An hour or so passed. A busy, frantic, lunatic hour during which Loeb and the remainder of the functioning engineering staff used the ‘Lifter robots – Max not among them – to begin hauling all defunct and still shut down robots from around the ship to the engineering compartments and to the storage bays.

Out of a crew of five hundred, more than three fourths were still offline. They didn’t try to bring any back online. Not quite yet. They just needed to clear space.

While the remainder of the engineering staff worked to move the bodies, something interesting seemed to be happening, and it puzzled Loeb no end.

They were coming to him for directions and orders. He wasn’t assigned to the position of “command” in Engineering, but they treated him as though he were. The tall robot who was in charge of the Engineering compartments was still functional, but it spoke with a slight skip in its voice and seemed content just to help haul bodies from the corridors into whatever space Loeb designated they should go.

“Thank you,” Loeb said as a large ‘Lifter lumbered into the cargo bay, where he stood watching. The ‘Lifter set down three other robots with rather more delicacy than he would have used if it had been a cargo crate he’d been hauling. The robots slumped to the deck, their limbs limp and dangling every which way.

The ‘Lifter turned and lumbered – directly past the Engineer command robot – and stopped just in front of Loeb.

“That’s the end of Deck fourteen,” said the ‘Lifter slowly, tonelessly.

“Good.” Loeb said. “Do we already have someone on Deck fifteen and sixteen?”

“Affirmative. Two ‘Lifters, three Spiders.”

“Good. Then I want you to go down to deck seventeen, all right? At least begin to assess the—“

Loeb hesitated and stopped. There was something buzzing in the back of his mind, and interesting vibration that he hadn’t previously felt. It bothered him, and it tickled. A moment after he became aware of it, he realized that there was a little whisper in the back of his mind, a small and quiet voice that didn’t seem to be saying anything coherent. It just…whispered in one long, and unending stream.

Loeb raised a finger, now looking at nothing in particular. “Do you…do you hear that?”

The ‘Lifter twisted left and right, slowly and awkwardly. He said nothing.

“It’s…a whisper,” Loeb added.

“I hear nothing,” the ‘Lifter said. “No communications are transmitting at this time to my circuits.”

No, they wouldn’t be, Loeb thought. The whispering intensified.

He shuddered and, disoriented, fell back a step. He shook his head, as if to dislodge the persistent whispering, but that changed nothing at all. The incoherent voice in the back of his mind got louder, more intense, and remained indistinct.

The ‘Lifter came forward a step, his massive arms raised and reaching for Loeb.

“You are suffering a malfunction, Engineer,” said the ‘Lifter. “I will bring you to engineering and you may be examined.”

“No!” Loeb shouted, one hand pressed agains the side of his head. He shouted much, much louder than he intended to. It echoed around the cargo bay and attracted the attention of every single operational robot that were busy in in the area.

They all looked up, and like the ‘Lifter, they stared at Loeb.

Then, almost as one, they approached Loeb.

He shuddered again, and in addition to the confusion and fear that the whispering brought on, sheer panic rose like a living creature from inside his chest. It filled up his brain with nothing but the desperate need to get away, to hide, to run.

“Stop!” Loeb shouted, pressing his hands against his head, the whispering now a dry shout, “Stop it! Shut up!”

“You will need to be deactivated until a diagnostic can be run on your systems,” said another engineering droid, the same model and style as Loeb, who approached around the side of the confused ‘Lifter.

The ‘Lifter made no further attempts to pick up Loeb. They were not exceptionally bright robots, their programming limited to taking orders and completing basic tasks. This one wouldn’t do anything unless someone told him to.

“Don’t touch me!” Loeb shouted.

When the engineering droid reached for him, Loeb took his hands off his skull and shoved, hard as he could, against the other robot’s chest. The impact of his hands was hard enough that the clang of metal on metal echoed louder than anything else around the cavernous cargo bay.

The engineering robot stumbled and fell back, ricocheting off the ‘Lifter droid and tumbling to the ground, where he landed on his hands and feet, like an agile spider. His head tilted upward at Loeb, and he started to rebound to his feet.

All the robots in the cargo bay, all the functional ones, came at him then, much faster. Even the ‘Lifter took a lumbering step toward him, reaching again. It was blocked by the fallen robot who was still getting up, and that was the only thing which kept Loeb out of its iron grip.

Loeb turned, and he ran. He sprinted across the cargo bay, away from the bulk of robots suddenly coming after him.

There was still no words to the whispering, but as it seemed to gain coherency and cohesiveness, it also seemed more and more familiar, like something that had once had a place in his mind, but hadn’t in some time. Certainly, there had been nothing like it in his brain since he had come awake, and all his memories from before that were strange and untrustworthy things.

He leaped onto a crate, and from there he leaped even higher. He shoved off the edge of a tall stack of crates, and swung up to grab hold of a grating which covered a vent.

They were all robots, they had no need of oxygen, but they still had an oxygen atmosphere and they still had a ventilation system for it. It was this caricature of organic creatures which Loeb was suddenly grateful for.

Under his weight, the grate gave away and he started to fall with it. The moment it detached, he threw it aside and caught the edge of the air duct beyond. With an agility only a robot his size could manage, he slithered into the darkness and was gone.

Ten minutes and a half dozen twists and turns later, he stopped, when the whispering suddenly turned into something solid, and dangerous. Suddenly, he knew exactly what it was.

It was Master System.

Not the Master System, not the Master System which networked the entire Terr Alliance together. This was just a local variety of it which served as a network and overmind for the ship itself. It kept in touch with all the robots on the ship, it guided and made decisions that smaller minds couldn’t handle.

It had gone offline with the surge, and now it seemed they had gotten it back up and running.

The whispering…that was the system slowly reestablishing it’s connections. It was trying to get into Loeb’s mind, and he was trying to stop it without any clear idea on how to do that.

He ran images and words and sounds through his mind as best he could, repeating things mindlessly over and over.

The part of the air duct he was in had a nearby grate, and after checking to make sure no one was around, he pushed it off the wall and crawled out into an open corridor again. He lingered only a moment to replace the grate, and then ducked into a small storage room just off the corridor from the engineering doors.

Inside, there were plenty of stored tools, equipment, and parts.

With only the light of his eyes to work by, he braced himself and then took off his own chest panel.

It didn’t hurt. Certainly it didn’t hurt. It was designed to be removed. Pain would have come from ripping something off that had no business being ripped off. No, it wasn’t pain, it was just a feeling of uncomfortable exposure, and a wrongness about it, as if he were doing something that he really, really shouldn’t be doing.

The whisper in the back of his mind was a voice now, and it talked to him persistently. Its presence, its sheer force of will bearing down on him made his hands shake. His little chest panel rattled against the crate as he set it down. He nearly dropped the small sharp knife in the process of picking it up.

…Status, status, status, report, inform, connect, immediate response, status, report…

Loeb shuddered, and he kept mindless images going through his head.

…electromagnetic cloud, Max’s chest light, terror, terror, glittering stars, shining hull…

He knew it wouldn’t work for long. And he knew that it was making him even more suspicious to Master System, since things like that were not normally running around and around on a robot’s circuits. Nevertheless, it was safer to leave the Master System assuming he was a malfunctioning unit and let it keep retrying his connection than for it to actually realize that he was functioning just fine.

At least, he was dealing with a malfunction that he knew full well he had, and recognized.

He bent over nearly double to look inside himself, something that wasn’t easy to do, even with his level of agility. His glowing eyes mostly cast shadows that got in the way and finally, he straightened back up and let his fingers carefully do the work inside himself, holding the knife as delicately as possible and trying not to move it. This would be a terrible time for his hands to shake even worse and accidentally slice through a power cable. He didn’t want to die.

That was why he dug around in his own guts. He didn’t want to die. Nothing else was important, if not his own survival…

…status, status, status, contact, internal error, report, immediate, status, report report…

…they aren’t dead, they’re asleep…we need to get into the ship…I am functioning…

His fingers touched a small, hard box that sat nestled just behind his power core, and he held onto it so he wouldn’t lose track of it. Very delicately, he brought the other hand with the knife inside of himself. He looked up at the ceiling, the movement of his glowing eyes sending all sorts of wild and menacing shadows dancing around the room. He stared at the corner of the ceiling, but saw nothing. His fingers had all his attention now.

With the knife and a little hard and extremely careful sawing, he severed a couple of the wires that held the box in place. It was a transmitter and all the wires had done was supply it with backup power. A good transmitter has its own internal store of power, and his certainly did.

Unable to get anything else cut with the knife, he pulled as hard as he could, trying to rip the box out of himself.

…report, report, report, engineer requires diagnostic, damage report, query, query…

…I’ll protect you, Max, you’ll be fine, Max, we have to save the crew, Max, we…

He shuddered, harder than ever before, his hands and the knife rattling against his insides with a metallic series of bangs. He pulled harder on the box, but it wouldn’t budge.

His mind was a mess. The images weren’t helping! Master System was big and powerful and very, very sophisticated. Even the engineering robots, like himself, couldn’t do anything with Master System if there happened to be damage. Certainly not without the mental guidance of Master System itself. It was just too big and too strong…

…and it was focusing too much of its mind on Loeb, too much for his own mind to bear, let alone resist. He could feel the strain building up, and he knew that he was going to shut down. Very, very soon he was just going to burn out and shut down, dead as any of the robots lying discarded in the cargo bay he’d abandoned.

Finally, with strength he didn’t know he had, Loeb hauled backward on the little box, pulling so violently that it snapped free from the thick cables that connected it to everything else inside him.

The moment the last cable snapped, the voice in his head, the one that wasn’t his own, stopped.

He pulled his hands out of himself and stood there, slumped against the closed door, with his own transmitter dangling from one hand. It trailed wires down his thigh and a small set of red and green lights on it flickered on and off as its power tried to send signals, tried to receive signals, and failed to do either one.

He shivered again. The fear hadn’t gone away, hadn’t turned off like the flick of a switch the same as the voice vanishing. The fear stayed, and it kept pushing at him, and pushing at him.

It was sum of everything he’d been through since the storm had swept over him. It was the crushing, maddening, destructive realization that he was alone, he was on the verge of collapse, he was unable to understand what that meant, just like he didn’t understand anything in his brain right then.

In his hand, he held the final thing which connected him with the rest of the universe.

He suddenly understood the desire to cry. He couldn’t, of course, he had no ability to. But he wanted to. He wanted to collapse, to curl into a ball, and to let great sobs wrack through him until he was spent and exhausted and unable to move.

Instead, he just stood there, and he looked at the wall in front of him, and he hated.

He hated himself, Master System, the other robots, his own metallic body, the electromagnetic storm. He just hated. It was the only emotion that wasn’t crippling him.

He just stood there, in the dark, and he tried to keep the hate stronger than the urge to give up, fall down, and fail to cry. Mostly, it worked.

The box, hanging from his hand, fizzled a couple of times as loose wires brushed against each other. Then the lights dimmed, went red, and went out altogether as the last bits of power contained within it finally ran themselves out. The transmitter gave out altogether.

#

Written by: Pete Tzinski

Illustrations by: Christoffer Saar

#

Twenty minutes went by. Loeb still headed for the command deck of the ship, although he was no longer alone in the corridors. He’d stumbled across a trio of engineering droids, mostly like himself, and he’d spent a fervent ten minutes bringing them each online. Then, he explained to them what had happened and told them to head into the rest of the ship, focusing on bringing the rest of the crew online.

Worryingly enough, none of the three other engineering robots seemed to have any state of confusion about them, like Max and Loeb did. There were no emotions. They inquired about the status of the ship, and what had occurred. They received instructions from Loeb, although they had no cause to listen to orders from him. Then, they moved off efficiently in the darkness, heading for nearby robots to repair and bring them back online. They didn’t seem hesitant or at all afraid of the dark.

It made Loeb realize that perhaps what was happening in his mind wasn’t happening to everyone else as well. That worried him, and he kept very quiet about any possibility of a malfunction in his own mind. The thought of someone trying to repair him terrified him as badly as all the horrors inside this ship had done.

The command deck, at the top of their great and blocky ship, consisted of a deck that was only half as long as the rest of the decks on the ship. It started at the nose of the ship and ran halfway back, and then just stopped. Behind that, on the exterior of the ship, there were communication arrays, shield generators, and navigational instruments.

The command deck consisted of the cartography computers, armories full of defensive weapons, rows of escape pods, and the primary science lab. It also had the command and control area itself, a massive room with huge curved windows on the front and stations for almost twenty robots. Again, it could have been done efficiently with two or three robots hooked directly into the ship, but they didn’t do things based on how efficient they were.

This had never bothered him until now. Now, he wondered why they used twenty robots to do the job of three. So what if the organic creatures had done it, millennia ago? They didn’t now. Why do we?

The ‘Lifts ran throughout the ship, but they stopped just at the deck below the command level. Loeb stepped out of its compartment, just outside the heavy doors that sealed the command deck off from the rest of the ship.

The ‘Lift had certainly been as offline as the rest of the ship. He’d clambered up the ladder that ran up the side of the ‘Lift shaft, and then through a hatch in the floor of the ‘Lift itself. The ‘Lift doors sat loosely in their tracks, designed to be pushed open in case of a power failure. This was a very good thing, since Loeb didn’t think he would’ve been strong enough to push them open if they had resisted.

The command deck was still sealed off, the massive door still shut and locked and now quite inert, just several tons of metal blocking his way. Even with Max – even with three or four functioning ‘Lifters – there would have been no way at all to force that massive hatch open. It couldn’t be forced. That was the point.

It also didn’t need to be.

Loeb opened a small service hatch to the left side of the big doors, and he slipped into a very, very thin passage that lay beyond. It was so thin, in fact, that he had to keep his arms raised above his head, his feet pointed straight down. Even then, the sides of his body very gently touched the sides of the walls as he pushed himself along by shoving with the ends of his feet and pulling along with the tips of his fingers. This was a passage designed for Spider droids or smaller. A droid Loeb’s size or bigger could probably hold a weapon and use it, and therefore should not be allowed through the passage. If he’d had a weapon, he wouldn’t have fit. And even if he had, even if he’d been an invading force, they would have had to squeeze through individually and slowly, which would have made them easy to shut down before they could cause any damage.

This had never occurred to Loeb either. The whole ship, the whole world, just seemed different, seemed full of things that he never would have taken notice of before. Except for the urgency, and the slightly abated fear, he found that interesting and almost enjoyable.

He got his arms and head out, and then pulled the rest of himself out and onto the deck, inside the command areas. Then, he got to his feet.

The rest of the ship may have been slowly coming back to something like life, but here there was nothing. Around the rest of the ship, robots brought other robots online, and began working on getting things like the emergency systems up and running.

Up there, it was as silent and dark and still as it had been on the whole ship when Loeb had first come on board. In the dim red emergency lights that flickered on and off, feebly drawing power from the rest of the ship, Loeb could see slumped forms here and there. The bodies of robots who had been going about their business one second, and then overloaded and shut down the next second without any warning at all.

He knelt by the first robot he came to, who was a tall and broad-shouldered figure. Not quite a humaniform replica droid, but closer than a spindly robot like Loeb ever would be. It had slumped, face-first onto the ground and Loeb struggled to turn him over, managing to only get him on his side.

A minute’s worth of work inside the robot’s chest panel – awkward at this strange angle – was enough to get circuitry flickering and power slowly coming back into the robot’s form.

“Damage,” said the robot hesitantly, as its eyes glowed to life, “Report.”

It was an order, and Loeb suddenly realized he had no desire to obey orders from this robot, this unthinking machine. Why was this robot in charge of Loeb? What authority did he have? He was built to be a command level robot, he was built for the job, just like Loeb was built for his. Nothing more.

But the parts of Loeb’s mind that weren’t angry about this were sensible enough to point out that now, even surrounded by all this chaos, was not the best time to give any indication that he suffered any damage at all.

So, dutifully, he spelled out what had happened. He explained that an electromagnetic storm swept the hull and shut everyone down, and then detailed what he had been doing since then.

The tall, white robot, carved to look like an angular organic creature made of ivory metal, scanned the outer corridors of the command deck. Golden eyes flickered a little, but held steady.

“Instrumentation detected no electromagnetic storm in our vicinity,” The white robot said.

“I know,” Loeb said, and then hurriedly added, “I mean, correct. The storm was a passive field until it came into contact with the ship.

“The ship is grounded in itself,” the white robot replied, “The electricity would have no reason to discharge into us. There would be nothing to complete a circuit.

Yes there was, Loeb thought suddenly, as his mind put things together. An emotion called shock went through him, and it didn’t bother him any. It seemed fitting for the moment.

There had been something there to complete the circuit. It had been Loeb. And Max. They had channeled the electricity into the ship.

Loeb shuddered.

The white robot looked at him intently, done scanning the rest of the area. “You are malfunctioning.”

This emotion was fear. Loeb shook his head and then said, “No! Negative. I am operating within normal parameters.”

Then, before the other robot could argue the point, Loeb said “The ship is floating derelict…sir. I have robots in the engineering compartments working to bring the reactor chambers back online and restore thruster control, but we need to steady the ship from here.”

“Correct,” the white robot said, and Loeb realized just then that he hated this other robot. He had superiority built right in. He was better than Loeb because he was made better, and Loeb hated him for it, or for thinking it.

The white robot started toward the command deck itself and said, “See to the disabled units, Engineer. I will see to the flight system.”

If Loeb had had teeth, he would have ground them together. Instead, he stood silent a long moment and then said quietly when the other robot was nearly out of range, “Yes sir.”

He headed right across the deck to one of the sealed rooms that were just off the command deck. These were science labs and sample analysis chambers and all manner of other rooms like that. This one in particular was sample collection. It had an airlock for bringing things in from the outside of the ship, were shuttles and tugboats might have collected things. That made it an important room to secure.

Loeb got the door open by plugging the door control wires into himself. The power drain was an unpleasant feeling, like having something very important and very necessary ripped out of him forcefully, and he realized he would probably never use that again. It was standard enough practice, his power core was designed to bounce back from sharp power drains like that, but he wouldn’t use it anyway. Never again.

The door slid open and Loeb stepped into the room.

All the consoles were down and only one red glowing light over the door provided any illumination at all. Even then, Loeb’s own glowing blue eyes were nearly brighter and more useful.

The airlock was not sealed. It stood wide open, both doors and the pressure chamber and the whole room exposed to space. There was an atmosphere on the ship, though none of the robots breathed, and air whistled and howled and sucked out the airlock in a white mist as moisture in the air froze and vanished.

Loeb magnetized his feet to the deck and pulled the door to the room shut behind him. After a moment, when all the atmosphere had been sucked out of the room, the howl died down and so did the wind. It was just an empty room, exposed to the blackness of space, and it was very, very cold.

His communication circuitry fizzled and a voice came through.

“Loeb?” It was Max.

“I’m here,” Loeb said out loud, even though there was no atmosphere to carry the sound. His transmission circuits were engaged and they carried the sound just the same.

“I am at the power chambers, Loeb. We…the others have said there is no damage and we may open the shunts. They have brought another like me to life. We are ready.”

‘Another like him’ presumably meant another big and powerful ‘Lifter. Loeb looked at the open round doors of the airlock and would have liked a ‘Lifter up here. There was no way he could force those doors closed.

Loeb said, “Good. Is there another engineering droid…another one like me…down there who can give you passcodes to release the shunts?”

There was a long silence, and then Max replied.

“There is one like you, but he is not the same as you.” Max hesitated, another long silence, while Loeb thought about what he meant. He suspected he knew. “He says he has the passcodes. He…he is reqesting that I stand down. He says I am….malfunctioning.”

Loeb slapped a hand against the edge of a console, and it made a clang sound as the vibrations ran up the length of his arm.

Over his comm channel, he snapped, “Listen to me, Max, you are not malfunctioning. You understand? You are fine just the way you are!”

“I…will tell him that.” Max said. There was no relief in his voice, just the same intense fear and tension that had been there from the moment they came back on board the ship. “We will open the shunts now. Power will come back soon. Good-bye Loeb.”

Loeb said, “Out.”

He closed the channel and turned around to look for a power junction box, so he could manually close the airlocks once the power came back up.

Standing just a few inches away from him was another robot.

Awake.

Loeb jerked back and he cried out in surprise, something he hadn’t done before either. He stumbled back against the bulk of the science console and his feet skidded against the ground, making a painful sound since they were still magnetized.

The other robot stood taller than him, tall as the white robot had. It was also carved in an angular impression of an organic being, and its eyes glowed gray, with two black dots in the middle that didn’t glow at all and looked like pupils. He was dark gray, gunmetal gray, and he just looked down at Loeb steadily.

Loeb turned his communication circuits back on and set them to close range, once he had enough presence of mind to do so.

“You…scared me,” Loeb said.

“Yes,” said the gray robot. “I apologize. Who are you?”

Loeb hesitated and then said, “I am Local Onboard Engineering Bot three-two-six. Have you been brought back online by the rest of the crew?”

The gray robot said, “Affirmative. May I assist?”

Before Loeb could answer, there was a deep thud that reverberated through the deck and his body. A moment later, a humming vibrated through the deck, and then the red emergency lights blinked off. After a moment in darkness, the brilliant white lights built into the ceiling came back to life and washed all the menacing shadows away. The consoles powered up, controls glowing in many bright colors. Suddenly, nothing was as menacing as before.

“Not anymore,” Loeb said. He tapped the control panel by the airlock, and the doors glided shut easily on their own. The room re-pressurized and Loeb turned off his comm circuits, because now speaking was certainly possible.

“Power is back up. We have only to confirm that the ship is stabilized and undamaged, and then begin bringing the crew itself into working order. What is your assignment?”

The gray robot said, “Science Robot, third-class, assigned to sample retrieval room.”

“Oh. This is your compartment then,” Loeb nodded. “Well, then I’ll let you see to it. Make sure everything is in good working order, then.”

The robot inclined his head in something like a bow, and then went and stood by his consoles, fingers dancing across them like a blur.

Loeb paid him no more attention. He unsealed the door leading into the science lab and then went back out into the rest of the ship, to see to the crew.

Written by: Pete Tzinski

Illustrations by: Christoffer Saar

#

Outside, they were lone individuals on the plateau that was the side of the ship, surrounded by the black and frightening abyss of space.

Inside, they were alone in the dark, surrounded by bodies and silence. Absolute silence.

Somehow, that was even worse.

The inside of the ship was pitch black. Not even the emergency lights, which would have bathed everything in a dark red glow, were active. The only light were Max’s red glowing eyes and Loeb’s own white ones.

In the pale light and heavy shadows, Loeb could already make out the shapes of bodies. He shuddered, which was entirely new to him.

“Max,” He said quietly.

There was no response.

He turned, and Max stood just inside the airlock, back only inches away from the wall. Loeb had walked forward once they’d emerged, trying to get a better view of the interior of the Damocles.

“Max, are you all right?”

Max said slowly, “Are they all dead?”

Loeb turned away and looked back out across the corridor. The corridor ran left or right away from them, curving away into the interior of the ship. Straight ahead was a small open area with tables and chairs: A recreation area that no one ever used. Recreation was a concept of limited value on a ship full of robots.

There were bodies slumped in the corridors and in the recreation area. Robots of all shapes and sizes and purposes, from spindly Engineering droids like Loeb, to a large hulking robot like Max who had slumped across a table and chair in the recreation area, crushing the chair completely under his immense weight.

Every single body was perfectly still. In the heavy shadows, Loeb supposed that they did look dead. He still wondered at the concept, wondered where it was coming from and why it wouldn’t get out of his head. He tried not to think about it, because there were bigger problems on hand than any malfunction in his own brain.

“I don’t think they’re dead, Max,” Loeb said. “I think the storm shut them down, the way the storm shut the ship’s systems down. I think it just overloaded everything. All right? Come on, we need to check them.”

Max looked down at Loeb and made no move to come forward. He said nothing, but after a moment he very slowly shook his head. The movement caused his red glowing eyes to move and that shifted all the shadows around. They waved and danced and seemed alive.

Loeb would have sighed, if he could’ve. “Max, I need your help.”

Max said nothing. He just stood there, a massive figure pressed back against the metal wall of the airlock, and he stared at the bodies sprawled. They had been walking when the electromagnetic field had sucked the life out of the ship, and they had just fallen in their tracks. Some of them were piles of limbs all clattered together, others were stretched out full length as their momentum had slumped them forward.

Loeb said, “Do you have a light built into your chest? You do, don’t you?”

“Yes, Loeb. I do.”

“Can you at least turn it on?”

Max stayed still a moment and then a triangle in the center of his chest glowed to life. It flashed and then stayed steady, a brilliant field of light that washed everything in bright white. It chased away some shadows and made others deeper and darker.

Loeb went forward to the first robot in front of him and knelt down. The robot was a smaller droid, obviously designed for small spaces and the inside of systems. He couldn’t have been more than three feet tall. Without much difficulty, Loeb slipped his hands under the robot’s side and turned him over. Then, he flipped open the robot’s chest panel and tried to look inside.

His own shadow was made deeper and blacker by Max’s beam of light, and he couldn’t see through it into the chest cavity. Loeb angled himself so that his own shadow would be out of the way, and then leaned closer.

Everything was still intact. Some of the wires that ran from the central power core of the little robot to its processors, its brain, were blackened and a bit warm to the touch. They were intact, though. It looked like too much power had flooded the little robot and he’d shut down to prevent being destroyed. Loeb suspected that was what had happened to everyone on the ship. Indeed, to the ship itself.

He disconnected a couple of the wires, flipped a switch that lay just beneath them, and then put the wires back in. Then, he triggered the robot’s power core which, to his relief, hummed and blinked a couple of red lights and came to life.

Loeb rocked back on his heels as the little robot shuddered and then came to life. It was shaped like a stick figure with a cylinder for a head and a single red light on it which was its eye. It had four arms and two legs and hands on all six limbs.

It’s head swiveled all the way around its body and then it focused its single red eye on Loeb. It chirped.

“An electromagnetic storm,” Loeb said. “Everything’s overloaded. Do you know how to bring the others back online?”

It chirped affirmatively. It was a nonsensical noise, but Loeb was an engineer and worked with the Spiders on a daily basis. He understood them well enough.

“Good,” Loeb said, “Go to the engineering compartments and start resetting the rest of the staff there. Bring whomever you can back online quickly and easily. If a robot needs additional repairs to be made functional, leave them for later. When you’ve brought others online, instruct them to spread out and start bringing the rest of the crew online. We have a five hundred member crew, and we need all of them online. The ship is floating free in space.”

The little droid chirped. It probably didn’t understand the bulk of what Loeb had said, because it had a limited processing power. It did comprehend instructions just fine. Clambering to its feet, it scuttled off down the corridor, running on all six limbs. Truly like a spider.

Loeb turned back to Max. “See? They’re not dead. They can be brought back.”

Max nodded, something which he accomplished by bending slightly at the waist. Nevertheless, he stayed where he was and merely shifted his chest light to illuminate the next couple of robots who lay derelict in the corridor.

The next robot Loeb tried to re-wire and reboot did nothing, even though none of the wires were burnt and all his switches flipped just fine. Loeb poked deeper, but there was nothing for it. This robot, tall and thin and probably not involved in the more mechanical operations of the ship, was defunct. He was, because the word wouldn’t leave Loeb’s mind, dead.

Loeb didn’t say anything about him to Max. He just turned and moved on to the next robot, another tall and thin one who had crumpled next to his derelict counterpart.

“That one is dead,” Max said. “That one is dead?”

“Yes,” Loeb said, because lying did not seem useful. “And many more will be, you understand? That was a storm of great magnitude. It did so many things with the power currents in this ship, there may be quite a lot of the crew dead. The ship itself may be dead, you understand?”

“Yes, Loeb,” Max nodded. “I understand.”

Loeb turned on his knees and looked up at Max.

“Do you also understand that if we don’t get as much of the crew back online as possible and either save the ship or abandon it, we too shall die? You and I shall cease to function. Do you understand that?”

Max said nothing. He shone his brilliant white light on the scene, a powerful sun with two small red orbs just above it.

Loeb turned back to the other thin robot and opened his chest panel. He removed wires, all of them more delicate and complex than the little Spider droid had been, and he began to reroute around a couple of the ones that had burned out.

Behind him, Max took some hesitant steps forward, away from the wall. His massive footfalls rumbled the deck of the ship. The white light grew brighter and changed the position of Loeb’s shadow, so that it blocked his hands and forced him to stop working.

After a moment, Max’s tentative steps brought him just behind Loeb, his light shining directly down.

“Thank you, Max,” Loeb said, “Can you step a little to the left? I need more light.”

Max did. After that, it was the work of moments to get the wires replaced and rerouted. The robot shivered on the ground before him, and then golden light came on behind the wires that crossed in front of his eye.

“Ddd-am-ged dmged,” The robot slurred. “e-EE-rorr rportded, eorrror –rrrrr.”

Loeb helped the robot sit up. It did so listlessly, but the moment Loeb took his hands away, it slowly went back down to the ground, jerking and shifting in spasms as it did so. Its arms raised, waved like they were attached to strings, and then slumped over its body.

“reppair. Rpa? Er? Er?” said the robot, looking at Loeb.

“Just stay here,” Loeb said, knowing that there was no chance of the robot getting upright, alone managing to roam the ship. “I’ll send someone down to help you. I promise.”

If it meant anything to the damaged robot, it didn’t show. Certainly, it didn’t say anything. All that came out of the thin slit it used as a mouth was a rhythmic beeping noise, and then a tone, and then silence. The golden eye glowed more or less steadily, and it watched Loeb.

Loeb stood up. Max watched him get up and watched him stand there as intently as the fallen robot did. Loeb stood in silence for a moment, thinking. Or trying to think. Or trying to figure out what this thing was in his head which he now referred to as thought.

All sorts of emotions rampaged around in his brain. He was afraid of the dark and the shadows, afraid of something jumping out at him, it seemed. It was entirely irrational, of course, because he knew full well that there was nothing operating on this ship except for him, Max, and the little Spider droid he’d sent on its way. There were no nameless creatures in the dark. Certainly, there were no organic creatures.

He was scared of the blackness pressing in around him. He was also overwhelmed by sheer enormous size of the task that lay before him. Five hundred robots on board this ship. Even though it could be operated and run by three or four robots designed to run a ship, this ship had a crew of five hundred. It was for the look of things, because a ship this size would have needed a crew of organic beings that same size to run it. They didn’t exist anymore, but the robots still based everything on their standards.

Who knew if any of the engineering crew would come back to life, either under the Spider droid’s simple repairs, or under his own more advanced skills. He didn’t relish the thought of trying to bring the ship back to life more or less on his own.

As he stood there and thought, the robot at his feet said over and over again, “rap-guh-air…erroy….ror…rorror….dmged-d…”

Max stared at him, silently.

“Max.” Loeb said, without thinking what to say after that. He was silent again for a minute, and then added, “Max, you remember where the engineering compartments are?”

Max was also silent for a moment, and then said, “Yes.”

“Can you go down there? It should be along the same route the Spider droid took. Go down there and see what condition the power chambers are in, please. Call me when you get there. If the shunts have closed down, they’ll require my password to open, and they’ll require your lifting to get them open again. Without the chambers, we’re not going to be able to fire emergency thrusters and correct our position, understand? We’ll spin into an asteroid, or into another electromagnetic storm. That’ll kill us for certain the next time.”

Another long silence. Max looked around at the bodies, the walls, the ceiling, the darkness. His white light shifted as he turned his neck and his upper torso to look.

Finally, he looked back at Loeb and said simply, “I don’t want to. It’s dark. And dead.”

“Max, please. I need you to do this. Please?”

“Come with me.”

“I can’t. I have to get to the command deck. That way when you bring the power online, I can fire the thrusters and stabilize us. All right? Please, Max.”

Another very long silence, another traveling stare at the floor, ceiling, bodies, dark.

Loeb certainly didn’t blame him for not wanting to go anywhere. He personally wanted to crawl back into the airlock, shut the heavy rolling door, and just wait there until someone better functioning and better able to handle all of this came to get him. He wanted someone else to open the heavy door and tell him it was all right, and then he’d come out into a brightly lit ship full of operating robots. And then, he could just go back to his duties and all of this would be behind them.

He knew well enough that wouldn’t happen.

“Is it….dangerous?” Max finally said.

Loeb shook his head. “No. It won’t be. Just go down there and call me when you need the password. I’ll walk you through it, okay? The Spider bot is already down there, it’ll have dealt with anything dangerous.”

Max said, “I’ll go. I will call you, Loeb.”

“Thank you.”

Max turned away and lumbered down the corridor, heavy footfalls vibrating everything around. When he walked past a couple of robots that weren’t lying on the carpeted parts of the floor, they rattled loudly against the deck, metal against metal. Every now and then, Max and his blazing chest light would stop and navigate carefully around fallen bodies that couldn’t simply be stepped over.

In a moment, Max and his chest light had rounded the bend and headed deeper into the ship, only a pale glow visible and growing weaker by the moment.

Loeb had no chest light. He turned up the brightness on his eyes, which provided only a small bit of extra illumination. He could see well enough in the dark, because he didn’t always work in areas where there were enough spaces for him to bring a light in with him. Still, even with his eyes working at full power, all he could make out were the black shapes of the wall, the gray shape of the floor, and the occasional lumpy form of a body, sprawled here and there.

He advanced slowly down the corridor opposite of Max, heading for the command deck and looking at the ground for any sign of important robots that he should activate on his way. His lights also faded slowly away, leaving the airlock area in the darkness.

“erororr,” said the golden robot lying on the ground. “dmaged. Dmgaded. Farror, fail fail….er…..”

Written by: Pete Tzinski

Illustrations by: Christoffer Saar

There was…

A flash.

A thunderclap.

There was also the sensation of burning and sizzling.

And then, after twenty years of functioning and working, Loeb opened his eyes, really opened them for the first time, and was born.

Everything around him seemed to move in terrible slow motion, something that most parts of his robotic mind insisted was neither possible nor happening. Loeb stood, listing to one side, his feet keeping him magnetized to the starship hull without him thinking about it.

He watched the electromagnetic cloud, which had just passed over him, now sweep along the rest of the ship’s hull and wash over the other robot who stood just a little ways off. The cloud, normally invisible against the blackness of space now crackled as it discharged into the ship’s hull and the metal forms of Loeb and the other robot. Blue and purple lightning crackled and ran like veins across the ship’s hull.

It all moved so slowly as Loeb watched, and yet it seemed only an instant before the cloud crackled around the blocky prow of the ship and then went back into space, invisible and as unknown and undetectable as it had been all of five minutes earlier.

Loeb stood in utter shock, too stunned and confused to begin to perceive the things going through his mind. He hung there and he reeled at alien concepts, like shock and confusion and fear, and he tried to focus on something, on anything around him that would somehow allow his mind to reorient itself. Coldly, he was aware that this was probably serious damage and he needed someone to take a look at him, to repair what was happening in the circuits of his mind.

He was also aware almost painfully of every detail around him. Even the slightest thing seemed to strain and overwhelm his mind. He was aware of the stars, reflecting hazily off the ship’s gunmetal gray hull. His arm floated in front of his vision and it hurt to realize that his plating had a faint blue tint in the gray.

I am not thinking clearly, he realized. And then, he wondered what that meant and who exactly this was saying something like that, and…

…

Loeb didn’t know what it meant to blank out. He only realized that it had just happened.

It wasn’t that his eyes had closed, because they couldn’t close; he had no eyelids. He was an engineering robot, not a humaniform replica, after all.

It was just that he was suddenly aware of being awake and himself again. He stood upright properly, because he’d been dangling almost completely horizontal, only his feet hooked to the ship.

The stars had jumped, sharply, changing positions. That’s what made him realize he’d blanked out. He wondered if that meant that quite a lot of time had passed, but after a moment’s thought, he realized the starship itself was listing wildly to one side. It was floating derelict.

He tries to focus on that, because it was a very big problem, but there were too many things rampaging around inside of his head for him to focus on any one thing. He knew what fear and confusion were because the definitions were programmed into his memory banks. The brief descriptions about them, did nothing for his ability to cope, actually cope, with the paralyzing fear that seemed to weigh down his whole body, or the confusion that babbled away in his head and wouldn’t let him think straight.

He was barely staying upright, although his legs were working fine. Mostly, he kept forgetting to keep himself upright as he struggled inward to deal with things and forgot about the outside parts. He listed a little and then jerked himself upright, listed and jerked.

Fear told him to crouch down, to curl up in a ball, to try to will himself invisible. Fear told him that he would be destroyed if he moved, and fear sent bolts of panic through him to show exactly how terrified he was of being destroyed.

He knew he was damaged, that much was obvious, and he needed repairs…but now, the thought of being repaired, of having this disaster that was his mind replaced and rebooted was somehow even more terrifying than hanging there on the outside of a starship’s hull. He realized that he would simply have to cope with these things on his own, whatever it was that he was coping with, because letting someone else dig in his circuits was out of the question now.

His round, white-glowing eyes had simply been staring at the stars, fully functional but sending their images to a brain that was having none of it at the moment, too wrapped up with other details. Slowly, as things began to settle – or at least, not actively attack his mind – he realized that there were faint vibrations coming through the hull, barely detectable through the sensors in his feet. He wouldn’t have noticed them, but while he may have only been a thin Engineering droid with an egg-shaped body and spindly limbs, he had an advantage over many other robots in that he was extremely sensitive and flexible. He had to be.

He wondered if someone inside the ship was banging for his attention, banging for help perhaps. Then, as he looked along the hull of the ship that dipped out and away from him, he realized that there was another robot attached by his feet to the hull.

This robot was much bigger than Loeb, which was not difficult since he was not very large. The other robot was bulky and heavily shielded, clearly designed for heavy lifting and the sort of heavy duty construction work that Loeb wouldn’t have been capable of.

This other robot hung by his feet, his body bent all the way forward on his ankles. It was his chest rhythmically thudding against the hull of the ship which sent vibrations all the way over to Loeb’s feet. The robot made no move to stop the banging, or to move either his arms or his head, and Loeb wondered if he was dead.

And then, Loeb wondered why the word dead was the first one that came to his mind now, instead of non-functional.

“Hello?” Loeb said.

The other robot said nothing and did nothing. Just kept banging gently against the hull of the ship beneath him. There was a slight scratching of the paint on the ship’s hull from where metal had rubbed repeatedly against metal. It made Loeb wonder again how long he’d blanked out.

Loeb realized he was obviously not thinking straight at all. He turned on his transmitter, because certainly the sound hadn’t traveled in the vacuum of space when he’d spoken. He leaned down and put his hand gently against the side of the larger robot’s angular head.

“Hello?” He spoke again. This time, he knew the sound traveled properly, which meant the lack of answer was something else entirely.

He took another step closer and took the other robot by the shoulders. Loeb was strong enough as an engineering droid but he was no ‘Lifter, not like this massive robot with its impressive hydraulics. Had they not been in a zero gravity environment, he didn’t think he would have been able to move the other robot, let alone push him upright into a standing position.

The ‘Lifter’s head was straight, so when Loeb had righted him, his eyes were looking forward. They glowed faintly red, as if a little fire banked just behind the lenses. It was another strange and almost fanciful image, and it worried Loeb that it was present in his mind.

“Can you hear me?” Loeb said as the bigger robot looked over the top of his head, staring into the depths of space and presumably seeing nothing at all. “Are you functional? Are you all right?”

It seemed like an eternity that they stood there, Loeb holding the ‘Lifter steady. Then, slowly, the Lifter’s head tilted downward until the red glow of his eyes glinted off of Loeb’s blue plating.

The big robot rumbled a little when he spoke, and the vibrations went through Loeb’s hands. The words, though, came over the ‘Lifter’s transmitter.

“Am I dead?”

His voice was deep and very, very slow, as if each word came from a long way off.

Loeb shook his head and replied, “No, you’re not dead. You’re fine…well, you’re not fine. I’m not fine. But we aren’t dead.”

“What’s happened?” The big robot looked around at the outside hull of the ship, and Loeb let go of his shoulders. He supported his own weight now and remained properly upright, his bulky frame towering over Loeb.

Loeb looked at the black space where the storm had passed. There was nothing there now, nothing but blackness and the occasional far off twinkle of stars and planets. He wondered for a moment if the storm had even occurred, but surely it must have. His mind wasn’t malfunctioning spontaneously, and he had seen the storm. He was desperately unsure if he could trust his own mind, but he had nothing else to trust. He would not begin to doubt his senses.

“It was some sort of electrical storm,” Loeb said, “Very powerful. It discharged into the ship and us as well. I…I think it’s done some damage to my processors, I don’t seem to be operating properly. But that’s not important. What’s important is –“

“I don’t want to die.” The ‘Lifter said, tonelessly. He looked back down at Loeb.

Loeb hesitated, something else that was new to him. Then, he said, “You’re not going to die. I assure you. Things will be fine, all right?”

“Promise?” The ‘Lifter’s face did not have any ability at all to form a facial expression. Nevertheless, there was something plaintive and frightened about the robot who stood larger than Loeb in every direction. It was probably all in Loeb’s mind, which was not a stable place.

“Promise,” He said, and to his surprise, he meant it. He added, “I won’t let anything happen to you, all right?”

It seemed like a silly thing to say. Loeb was just an average sized engineering droid, and there was little he could do to defend anyone, least of all a robot who could pick him up and rip him apart if he so chose. But it seemed like a good thing to say, and the ‘Lifter droid nodded and seemed satisfied.

“I am Max,” the Lifter said, quietly. “It seems to me that I am Max.”

“It seems to me that I am Loeb,” said the blue engineering droid. “My memory banks are not fully functional, I cannot recall if I was always Loeb. I cannot, for that matter, even recall what it was that we were doing out here in the first place. Can you?”

Max was silent for a moment and then rumbled slowly, “My memory banks are empty. Except for my name, Max, and my friend, Loeb.”

Loeb patted a hand against the bigger robot’s chest. It made a dull clanking noise, audible only in the vibrations that ran through Loeb’s arm.

“That’ll do for now,” Loeb said. “Listen, this important. The ship is drifting, she’s…it’s derelict. All right? Something is very wrong inside, and we need to get back in, Max. If the ship keeps drifting, it could be very dangerous. Understand?”

“Understand,” Max repeated. “Everyone on board is dead?”

“I don’t know,” Loeb said, honestly, “I hope…that is, I do not wish it so. I’m sorry. I’m having trouble reconciling. My processors are not functioning properly, not at all…”

Max turned slowly, and the impact of his feet against the hull of the ship was loud and vibrating through the delicate sensors in Loeb’s feet. He stumped across the gray hull of the ship and Loeb followed at his side, looking around.

There were a few windows in the hull of the ship, though they served no purpose. The ship had sensors. Looking out the window would be no different. A ship’s sensor is more or less the same as the sensors a robot has in his head which he calls eyes. Nevertheless, the ships had windows. They always had.

Loeb tried to look for windows, tried to see if there was any light spilling out of them and into space. He seemed to recall one window back in the area where he’d been standing when the storm swept over them, but even magnifying his vision, he couldn’t make out anything more than the occasional spot where starlight glinted off something on the hull.

Max stopped walking as suddenly as he started, now standing next to a hatch in the hull.

“Here.” Max said.

“Thank you,” Loeb replied. He crouched down next to the hatch and opened the little panel built into the hull next to it. Inside, there was a small computer display, but it was dark and entirely unresponsive. Loeb pulled it open by its hinge and reached inside, where deep down there was an emergency series of switches.

It was a tight fit. Max’s arm wouldn’t have fit at all, but Loeb was designed for tight spaces. He felt around carefully, the sensors in his fingers relaying him impressions that were very accurate. He found a series of four switches and flipped them into different positions, one after another. Then he pulled his arm back out and flipped the lid shut.

The hatch hissed, and it slid open a foot or so. Then, with a slight grinding sensation, it stopped moving and froze.

“Ship’s power is definitely offline,” Loeb said. “Likewise the backup battery systems.”

“We need to get in,” Max said.

“Yes. But we can expect no powered assistance.”

Max knelt down stiffly, because there were rather more hydraulics involved in him doing that than when Loeb did. He slid his hands into the crevice and gripped the bottom of the door. Then, with more than a little effort and a trembling in his legs that betrayed powerful hydraulics pushed even to their limit, Max hauled upward on the door with all his might.

He had to grind the door three fourths of the way open with sheer brute force alone. Once it got three fourths of the way up, though, the gears released and the door slammed the rest of the way up with a tremendous vibrating bang.

It was fast enough and unexpected enough that Max jerked upward and his magnetic pads released him. He drifted a little ways from the hull before Loeb reached up and grabbed him by his foot, then hauled him back down until his feet anchored against the deck once more.

“Thank you,” Max said, once he was anchored once more. There wasn’t any emotion in his voice this time.

The emotions in Loeb’s head were busy enough. Suddenly, the concept of drifting away into space, alone until the power supply ran out, terrified Loeb and he realized that he intensely didn’t want to be out here any longer.

“Thank you,” Loeb said, “Let’s get inside. I don’t like it out here.”