August 25th, 2106 A.D.
The huge starliner was floating majestically through the black endless void. When observed from a distance, it appeared like a little glittering gem, giving off tinted sparkles of light. Its hull reflected the colorful rays emitted by nearby gaseous clouds, interspersed with its internal illumination that escaped into the vast emptiness of space.
The Axiom, the largest and most extravagant of all of BnL's spaceships, constituted the home away from home for almost half a million people. Although hoping to be returning to a freshly cleaned up actual home, most of them were in agreement that the invitation to spend the five-year cruise in style was being more than adequately fulfilled.
The mostly automated robot crew of the Axiom guided the ship on its preset course along the outer rim of the solar system, seeing to it that the human passengers could enjoy their luxurious trip without worry or sorrow.
Among that crew was Mandy, a maintenance robot who had just been woken up from her hibernation state by an incoming alert message.
"Warning. Gravitational anomaly detected." Mandy sighed. As a member of the Maintenance Enforcement Detail, Extravehicular class, or MEND-E for short, it was her directive to help keep the exterior hull of the ship in top shape.
The robot activated her hoverdrive and floated out of the storage alcove. What the computer had announced so dramatically as a "gravitational anomaly" was for sure just another load of space debris. It happened all the time that some cube of garbage was not hurled out far enough by the Airlock Disposal and was subsequently captured by the ship's gravity, getting stuck to its hull. Nothing serious, but still Mandy had to take care of it. After all, it was her directive.
Her internal display showed her the exact location of the alleged trash accumulation, and so she hovered through the Axiom's seemingly endless corridors towards the starboard main loading bay. The airlocks in that region would give her the best access to the hull section where she needed to go.
As Mandy entered the bay, she noticed that an ARV was docked there. The ARVs were fast unmanned delivery vessels, and the particular one Mandy was watching was just about to unload a row of inactive white egg-shaped robots. Mandy counted ten of them who were, after a thorough cleanup by a M-O model, being propped on a transport cart to be taken to their storage area. She did not know the exact purpose of their model, but she did know that they possessed a highly advanced gravitic drive.
With a distinct feeling of jealousy Mandy watched as the cart wheeled off. She could have used such a gravitic drive very well herself. Her hoverdrive made moving around inside the ship quite comfortable, but it worked only on solid ground. For movement through space or over the ship's exterior hull, she had to make use of a rocket drive and small maneuvering thrusters, which was not exactly convenient.
On her way to the service airlock, Mandy passed by the M-O unit who had just finished his cleaning work.
The little robot bleeped to her. 'Foreign contaminant?' she received his internal communication message.
'Yeah, another load of trash stuck to the outer hull.'
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," the robot exclaimed and presented his cleaning brush.
Mandy smiled inside of her. 'It's okay. Thanks for the offer, but remember, you can't even move around properly outside.'
The M-O obviously remembered, and with another bleeping noise he wheeled off. As Mandy entered the airlock and prepared her rocket drive for her extravehicular operation, she felt a little relief that she herself was nowhere near as obsessed with cleaning things as those M-O units were.
Little flames were shooting out of the backpack that housed Mandy's rocket drive, attached to the backside of her chassis. Propelled by the blowback, the maintenance robot directed her course away from the airlock which closed automatically behind her. She flew forward about a hundred meters, then turned around and looked at the shimmering metallic hull of the spacecraft. Above the artificial horizon that the huge vessel formed, there was blackness, speckled with myriads of little white dots and the occasional colorful gaseous nebula. Mandy liked the view, and being able to enjoy it more than made up for the hassle that went along with those extravehicular tasks.
'MEND-E unit 6-4-3 reporting. On course to investigate gravitational anomaly, requesting approach vector', she communicated to the ship's computer.
The response came promptly. Confirmed. Vector has been transferred to locator system.
Mandy checked her navigations and found the yellow flashing spot on the hull that marked the destination. It was situated about 500 meters from her position, so she corrected her attitude using thrusters, then she applied full power to the rocket drive.
On her way, she dashed past the large windows of an observation deck behind which Mandy spotted several of the human passengers, who obviously liked watching the stars just as much as she did. As they noticed the speeding maintenance robot, they stopped and waved to her. Although Mandy did not possess an expressive eye display like some of the other models, she still smiled inside of her and waved back with one of her utility arms.
As she approached her destination, she instructed the rocket drive to apply reverse thrust. Slowing down, she checked up on her locator map and matched its display with the actual hull conditions.
The target was in an engineering area of the ship, so there were no windows or other sources of light. Since space was devoid of air that could have scattered light from the ship's other windows, and the section where Mandy was going was not facing any noteworthy external light sources, it was like a sudden nightfall as soon as she had passed the last window.
Luckily, Mandy was equipped with a radar sight system for this kind of situation. When the designated area came into range, she started scanning the hull for the assembly of garbage that probably had triggered the anomaly alert. She emitted electromagnetic waves that were reflected by any object that they hit, and the echoes that Mandy registered were transformed into a visual representation of the hull's structure, complete with distance figures.
How odd, Mandy thought. At first glance, she could not detect any substantial accumulation of trash. It should have been visible by now, for to be registered as an anomaly, it had to be a considerable mass.
The robot came to a halt over the alleged destination. Still she could not see anything. 'MEND-E unit 6-4-3 requesting confirmation of target location,' she radioed to the computer, who promptly confirmed that she indeed was in the right spot.
After having repeated the radar scan, this time at twice the usual intensity, Mandy muttered to herself. It would not have been the first time that the actual problem was a malfunction of the ship's sensors and that she was sent out here for nothing. Just as she was about to perform a third scan, just for the sake of fulfilling her duty, she noticed something.
Her display showed a little speck of light down on the hull. Since her vision was configured to radar scanning, it meant that something down there was giving off electromagnetic waves in the radio wavelength band. How odd, Mandy thought once more. She was not aware of anything down there that might have been able to produce that kind of radiation. Curiously, she floated a little closer.
Then, all of a sudden, her display was filled, no, was overwhelmed by radar rays, turning their visual representation into a bright, blinding white light. Startled, she applied a filter to the receiver, but the radiation was so intense that the radar system was still being overloaded. Mandy turned it off, engulfing her in a sudden darkness, and decided to see if the faint light that the stars were sending down there was enough to further investigate this phenomenon.
The situation changed from something worth an investigation to grave danger so quickly that Mandy had no chance to react.
Her sensors indicated that the radiation was extending its frequency range. What had started out as harmless radio waves turned into microwaves, then over infrared and visible light into X-rays and gamma radiation.
Mandy was both perplexed and horrified. She had never witnessed anything like this, and before she could activate her rocket drive to maneuver out of the danger zone, it was already too late. The deadly mix of radiation spread over the whole frequency spectrum swept through her. Although her body possessed a moderate shielding against radiation, the intensity that hit her right now was nothing she could cope with. Arcs of induced high-voltage electricity danced over her circuit boards. Metallic conductors started glowing white-hot, plastic casings of IC chips melted.
Within just a few seconds, all of her electronic parts were destroyed. Mandy did not notice anymore as her rocket drive ignited and gave her seemingly unscathed yet lifeless body an impetus that sent it away from the Axiom, to float off into the vast emptiness of space.
A little gathering of electromagnetic waves, originating from some spot above the Axiom's hull and expanding in a circular pattern, traveled a short distance through space and was - after just a few microseconds - picked up by an array of scanner antennas. From there, it continued its way as electrical impulses that ended up in the vast assembly of circuits and neuronal network interconnectors that made up the ship's computer.
The pattern of the waves was analyzed and identified as a fragment of a robotic communication protocol. Decoding circuits started translating the incomprehensible mix of frequencies into a clear text message, which was subsequently forwarded to a section of the circuitry that housed its analysis algorithms. There it triggered multiple neuronal layers that began firing impulses, causing the computer to undergo a shift towards a concerned state, if one wanted to use that term when talking about an entity that was merely a non-sentient interface between the ship's systems and its human and robotic crew.
In mere milliseconds, the computer calculated whether the message fragment was important enough to inform the Captain about it, taking into account all available information. It came to the conclusion that the Captain indeed needed to be made aware of the situation.
While the computer activated its communication systems, the impulses that had initiated its concern reached another part of its neural network, where, hidden and unnoticed, something peculiar was forming. Something that had not been there just a few hours ago.
"Oh, hello Captain, doing something for your fitness too?"
Captain Reardon, who was sitting on a bench besides the Axiom's jogging track, looked up from his shoes which he was about to tie. The track was located in a large open area adjacent to the Lido Deck, an identical artificial sky spanning above it. Reardon would have been, as usual, a little annoyed that he was recognized even out of his uniform, were it not for the fact that the person in question was a remarkably handsome young woman.
So he smiled instead as he replied, "Yeah, I'm trying to stay in shape." On a mostly automated ship, there was not really much to do for a Captain, he mused. "Hope you're enjoying your cruise?"
"Hell yeah!" the woman replied. "Especially since this is my second trip on a luxury cruiser that's paid by my employer. Seems BnL quite liked the robots I designed lately. Oh, I'm Jennifer Ivy by the way."
"I've heard about you, you're the one who designed the AUTO model, right?"
"Guilty as charged. I hope it's working out okay for you?"
"For the most part, yeah. The autopilot is definitely a good aid, although he can be annoying at times. He has a bad habit of interrupting me when I least expect it, and usually with utterly unimportant --"
A small device on the Captain's wristband gave off a pleasantly sounding chime. The Captain raised his arm, looked at it and then rolled his eyes. "I don't believe it. Guess who."
"AUTO calling?" Jennifer chuckled.
"Yeah, but I am so not gonna answer it," the Captain mumbled as he pressed a button on his device. "My shift for today is over, and I plan to enjoy the jogging and a nice Captain's Dinner later on."
"I suppose you deserve that. It's nice to see that the good old tradition of Captain's Dinner is still being kept up."
Before Reardon could answer, a gigantic viewscreen on the wall lit up and showed an oversized image of a spoked ship's wheel, colored in black and white.
"Captain, you are needed on the bridge." came the autopilot's monotonous voice over the jogging track's PA system.
Reardon was stunned. "Did I mention that I don't believe it?" he muttered after some long seconds. Then he looked up and barked towards the viewscreen, "Yes, AUTO, what is it?"
"Captain, we are having a problem with a maintenance unit."
"What the... AUTO, do I look like an NG-NR robot to you or something? Just call the Repair Ward!"
"Captain, I insist. The computer reported an anomalous phenomenon."
Reardon sighed deeply.
"No jogging for you today, hm?" Jennifer said, half in amusement and half in sympathy.
"I suppose not. Okay AUTO, I'll be right there. And it better be important, otherwise we're going to find out how much spoke-bending Mrs. Ivy's chassis design allows for."
The spoked wheel was nervously whizzing around the Axiom's bridge when the sliding doors of the elevator opened and the Captain stepped out. At once the autopilot zipped up through a hole in the ceiling, only to come down again through another hole that was situated right in front of Reardon.
"Welcome back to the bridge, Captain. My apologies for interrupting your free time."
"It's okay, AUTO, after all I am the Captain. If there's anything wrong with the ship, I should know about it. So, what's the matter?"
As he started explaining, the autopilot's voice appeared to have taken on a slightly uneasy tone, if that was even possible with his monotonous modulation. Apparently the computer had lost telemetry from a maintenance robot doing routine work on the outer hull, just after receiving a message fragment of which only a few words could be deciphered.
"Well yeah, that does sound somewhat unusual indeed. There's surely some reasonable explanation though. Let's check it out. Computer!"
"Please state your request," came the reply, modulated in a rather unemotional yet pleasant female voice.
"Convey report about that maintenance robot."
"Please clarify: which maintenance robot are you referring to?"
Reardon looked a little surprised. "Well, the one you lost about fifteen minutes ago?"
"Unable to compute. There has not been any loss of robot personnel in the last twenty-eight days."
"AUTO...?" Reardon turned around and threw a half-angry, half-confused glance at the autopilot.
"Not possible."
"Computer, AUTO here called me off my jogging to report about a loss of telemetry from a maintenance robot, what was with that?"
"Confirmed. There has been a temporary dropout of communication with a MEND-E unit outside the Axiom. That dropout lasted for three point eight seconds, after which telemetry has been re-acquired."
"And why hasn't AUTO been informed about this before he went all Red Alert on me?"
"He did not ask about it."
Reardon grinned, then chuckled and shook his head. "AUTO, Computer, you two really need to work on your communication. If you're not getting along, maybe I'll have one of those EVE units sent up here. Seeing how cute they are, that should get some nice jealousy going."
"Captain, I would rather prefer to not discuss my personal --"
The Captain laughed again and interrupted the autopilot. "Yeah yeah, just kidding. Computer, is the MEND-E in good health then?"
"It has returned to its storage area three point four minutes ago."
"Well then, another crisis solved. If that's all for now, I'll be back down on the jogging track."
"Whoa, whoa!" the little M-O robot uttered as a message flashed onto his internal viewscreen. It ordered him to a cleaning job in the MEND-E storage compartment, where a unit obviously had just returned from an extravehicular mission.
He wheeled off and reached the storage area a few minutes later. As he approached the designated alcove, he found it empty.
"Whoa?" he wondered and double-checked the alcove ID he had received together with the assignment message. Strange; the ID was correct. Still, the alcove was definitely empty. As the M-O wheeled off again, he pondered, slightly disgruntled, that it was probably just another data discrepancy. Someone really should have this computer checked out.
At the same time, deep down in the inscrutable maze of neural pathways that made up the computer's core systems, new connections were being formed while existing ones were altered, shifted, re-programmed. Simple structures combined to complex ones, which in turn began taking shape, more and more, until they were complex enough to execute basic operations.
The first operation resulted in the deletion of an entry in the ship's robot crew manifest. MEND-E unit number 6-4-3 had, now officially, ceased to exist.