Scip and Squidboy Establish a Reputation

Planet Tau races starless through space, with its own little sunlets to light it. It collects visitors from every passing world. Tau City has been the home of a thousand species, for a million years. Humans have lived there for decades. Earth is now far away.

The planet is made of machines. They go all the way down. Tiny machines that alone can do a single thing, see a single thing, remember just one thing. But they join together in agreements, and the agreements are themselves machines.

The largest of these machine collectives are like Gods, with their own cities of robot worshippers.

Scip — for Self-Contained Integrative Prototype — is a robot born from the machine crust. Scip emerged among organic beings, and has acquired human norms of perception

Squidboy was born in the sea, but the males of his species live on land for a time. Their nature is to mimic. The first of his kind to encounter humans, Squidboy has joined their society.

Scip and Squidboy formed a partnership in the laboratories of Dr. Crueller, a human who studies the alien beings and robots of Tau. They left Crueller’s lab to make their own way in the City. Today they are preparing for their first job as Licensed Operators. They are detectives.

“The Mother sings our song!” warbled Squidboy. He sat half in his tank, three limbs in the water and two fleaming his picosaw. The fixing agents for the saw weapon had taken the rest of the money, after Scip’s power draw for tractor charge and weaponry. Warrants had been posted, and they finally had a chance to begin their operations.

Gleaner Collective 17 had gone off the rails. The Parent of the Collective went rogue, embarking on a career of stealth. Its units began to salvage viable mechanisms. Machine persons were abducted, their quantum potentials harvested. Their components were then subjected to a staged destruction, deposited and re-harvested under the Gleaner’s license. But they took one of the Hollow Man’s protégés, a Machine Person known as Paragraph.

Paragraph was coated in pingers, and the Friends of the Toaster paid a visit to the Gleaner’s processing facility. They shot it out with units of the Gleaners, Reclamation autocarts with bolted-on kinetics. GC 17 went to ground. The Hollow Man spoke to the council, and Gleaner Collective 17 was placed, itself, under warrant of salvage.

The Gleaner units made their way into the hinterland. They set up hidden charge stations, and ambushed small cargo conveyers. Hollow man sweetened the deal, putting a bounty on Gleaners destroyed. All Scip and Squidboy had to do now was go and get some.

“You are not in the Dream of the Mother,” bellowed Scip, the gain high on his plasma-driven audio emitters. He had upgraded their power busses, enabling their use as sonic weapons. The Cloachals next door hooted in annoyance. “Your pardon,” said Scip. “I have culled the Level Two machinula responsible.”

“It saddens the Mother when you do that, boss,” said Squidboy.

“You are in the Level 1 simulation, junior colleague. When you are eaten by your mother, if you exist in her dream you will inhabit the Level Two. A simulation within the Level 1. Perhaps this is why you feel empathy for the Level Two’s.”

“But it was just a single mistake. Tentacles grow back.”

“A Level 3 persona was elevated to take its place, Junior Colleague. Would you deny that one its chance?”

“Aw, it’s all as the Mother Dreams it, boss. My blade is ready.” He hopped out of the glass tank, rippling water from his glossy hide. He slid the nano-edged blade into its blackout scabbard, hungry atoms leashed until need. He hefted up a pack, and Scip deployed tractors. A pair of bars slid from Scip’s upper chassis and Squidboy curled a tentacle around each. Together they rolled from their crumbling cubetat, Scip arming security charges behind. They cruised through the streets of Tau City, through Poortown where the charge trickled and the crawlers wiggled. They headed for the DownArm Gate.

DownArm was the direction of Planet Tau’s travel. Down the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way. Tau doesn’t rotate. It’s the Sunlets that move, meandering across the sky. Go out the DownArm and you are looking ahead into the dark.

As they made their way to the gate they fended off grabbers and moochers. Half-sprung chippers from teetering Parent collectives. Larval Maw entities. A Xylem macrospore pinched at Squidboy’s tentacle. Scip needled it, a sharp pop and a whiff of violets.

Credit that might have gone to renting a transport chassis had gone instead into bribes. Scip had negotiated with a trade entity, acquiring the security contract for a caravan. It had cost more Entangled Potential than the position was worth. Their rating was low, the risk penalty high. In effect they were buying the cargo of Entanglement Modules, and giving it away in return for the privilege of having it stolen.

“Having worked on the docks, I am familiar with the concept of bait,” Squidboy had said of the Plan.

“Level Two trials have achieved success rates of 90%,” said Scip.

“How many culls did that take?”

“Many cohorts.”

Their clients consisted of two medium haulers perched on flexible metal legs; six panniers the mass of mules; and a trio of Xylem merchants in their reflective capes, living shrubs perched on eight-legged blankbeasts. They were pulled up in a bunch at the DownArm Gate.

“You are late! The light of the Delta dims,” twittered the bushes.

“Dry your roots, Privet-brain,” shouted Squidboy, in Human. Scip replied to the Xylem with an emission from his olfactory monitor. It was a parting gift from Paza, from Crueller’s lab where he first entered the Level 1. Scip could speak Xylem. They were, among themselves, an excessively profane race. They spent days cursing the ground, each other, the sunlets for not being bright enough. Scip’s retort smelled of mulch, and fronds fluttered indignantly.

“Departure commences,” announced Scip, by plasma arc and binary string. The City Complex acknowledged his credentials, and the DownArm gate creaked open. The caravan trundled through, leaving the Free Collective for the wild crust of Planet Tau.

Armward, Tau city faced sand, or what appeared to be. The docks, where Squidboy first came from the sea, were on the other side of the city. The highway was a string of tenders and collectors. As long as travelers broadcast energy, the road would remain firm beneath their feet. It was a line of machine agreements. In return for energy beamed into the collectors, the micromachines of the crust agreed to be a road. Before the Gleaners, roadfeed had been the main cost of transport. Now security was growing more expensive for trading entities. The Gleaners had plugged into the collectors. Travel drew them.

Scip was counting on it. To sweeten the trap he kept sending inventory queries to the trundlers, in compromised code. As the Blue Delta slipped over the horizon behind them, the collectors began to glow a normative blue with helpful pulses of mesorange EM. Red Alpha was low to the right, with little usable illumination.

Beyond the road, the crust pursued unknown agendas. Sinkholes and crevasses might open; great chandeliers could emerge, pushing up and shattering over the landscape. Meter-wide snouts might belch flame or loft boulders a klick a second. Aimed boulders, smashing foolish pilots. Flying over the wild crust was impossible. Only the great armored aerostats travelled the air, by plowing the ground beneath them flat at the least sign of action. They broadcast that intention as they sailed, riding a great pillar of threat across continents. It was wise to avoid the path of aerostats. Travel on them was in pan-species luxury, and enormously expensive.

Squidboy tired of his perch and jumped from Scip’s chassis. “Patrollin’, boss,” he called, pinwheeling down the roadway. He coiled his limbs and sprang onto a trundler, past the blur of whipping metal legs.

The trundler complained, gimballing its upper deck until the Squidboy pulled two cents of picosaw. The hum steadied the hauler. He took a monocle from his pack and scanned the road ahead. There was none, not past the few meters of emitter range. Behind, it disappeared again as soon as the last foot of the last BlankBeast lifted. Scip’s roadfeed algorithms were efficient. Beyond that, Tau City glowed like an ember pile in the Red Alpha’s light.

The Alpha loitered and began to set again. It was rare Tauan night until another Sunlet wandered onstage. Squidboy could see the galaxy emerge. Ahead was the meat of Sagittarius arm; to the right the clouds and glow of the center. He could see their path, sailing deeper into the Arm. A galactic escape path, the Humans said. I’ve come very far from your side, Mother. I am so far from the Sea.

But Squidboys don’t get scared.

The Xylem were drooping in the dark, too passive to curse. Scip hailed his imp. “Junior Colleague, please carry out Resting Protocol One.”

“Five hands on it, Boss.” There were kraal stakes to put down, customized tenders with their own power packs. They would stabilize a compound while the caravan was halted. Next he inspected everybody’s transport components. His pad was loaded with details to check. He was looking for tomorrow’s breakdown, like one of Bower’s field techs.

Bower ran the techs that kept the Hollow Man’s war machine in action. The Rufos did the Rapid and Ugly, in the Field. They stuck together, and Bower stood for them with the Hollow Man. Too important not to be assholes (something Squidboy didn’t technically have). Bower and the rest of them hated aliens. They hated robots, and they didn’t seem too keen on the rest of the humans. It was Bower that first put a sword in Squidboy’s tentacle. Bower’s cruelty sent him to the dojo, it sent him into partnership with Scip, and now it had sent him out to the machine deserts of Tau.

The Mother would sing his song. Maybe she sang it now.

Squid appeased his pad. Scip always gave him detailed, branching protocols. They were loaded into the pad, constantly updated. It was like one of Scip’s Level Two sprites lived in there. Maybe it did. When the list was complete, he sprayed himself with gel. The outer layer hardened into a shell. Inside he stayed moist, as if lounging in his tank. He’d take his rest when he could, like a soldier in the field was supposed to do.

He dreamed that the Uncles still pursued him. He often did, but this time they caught him. They held him coiled firm and drew him to their beaks. And when he woke up, they still had him.

Scip was blaring Primary Alarm. Something held him down. Squidboy struggled, squeezed and stretched. With a pop and scatter of hydragel he came free. Where he’d lay there was an impression in the ground, as if he had sunk in.

Power trains whined. All of the vehicles were trapped. At some point, the kraal stakes had failed. Everything had sunk twenty centimeters into the crust, which then re-firmed. Only a Squidboy could have gotten out. Even Scip’s tractor chassis was engulfed.

The Gleaners. The stakes had been hacked.

“Follow Protocol 17 BX4!” bellowed Scip. His sonics were ready. Squidboy looked at the pad.

17-BX4

MODULE 1

TAKE ONE KRAAL STAKE

KEEP IT ACTIVATED

ESCAPE AND EVADE THE GLEANERS

NOW!

The Gleaners came over a rise, sliding down on tender-made ramps of slick crust. They came in a cloud of hard white stars: an activated cutting torch on every unit. Squidboy grabbed stake, sword and pack and he skittered. Out onto the wild, ungoverned crust of Planet Tau.