Chapter 21
Nanobots and porous circuitry?

Auto/Self repair unit

Lister originally took to the tedious task of rebuilding the dismembered mechanoid as a sun dried tomato, bacon and mayo with mustard on whole wheat no less, takes to the wide open untamed sea. Not very at all well. But bit by bit and bob by bob he started to get the hang of it.

He'd spent the last two days and a night in the technical library, then another morning working with Holly in the science lab where the larger portion of the dismantled mechanoids body rested in several plastic containers. In the last fifty six hours he'd learned many things. He had started off thinking that the structure and compositions of mechanoid physiology were incredibly boring. But now he was completely certain of this.

The thing of it was the actual physical mending of a robots body parts was relatively easy, seeing that you have a pair of pliers, two spanners, a welding torch, a set of instructions, two scutters, and a computer with the IQ of six thousand or so to help.

This was the way it went: All body parts from Deva Droid International were numbered and scannable. And the skeletons of most Deva Droid domestics were pretty much all the same, this made replacement parts interchangeable from one series to another.

So even the clumsy clawed scutter could help in the recognition of the parts.
Once inventory of what was had was finished and saucing out of which parts were damaged beyond repair and which parts were missing all together missing. What couldn't be repaired had to be replaced or rebuilt, it was just so incredibly tedious and time consuming.

"The yellow leg tension cables are done for. They'll have to be replaced."
said Lister.

"Guess I can have inky run down to stores and fetch a couple of meters of
hydro suspension replacement cables. They should work about the same I suppose." Holly's voice droned across a white table especially set up for rebuilding of the dismembered machine.

Bits of Kryten lied here and there on the table top.
A lower leg, its covering melted, lay next to his right shoulder. A mass of multi colored wires with torn burnt edges rested higgly piggly across his
right arm.

Lister was tired and his feet hurt, and he was craving a cheese and chutney sandwich. Some times his vision would double on him and he'd have to nap on and off.

"Part number Kr1342917036 is useless. So is most of his exoskeleton."
I'll just replace it at the end with the back up we found."
Holly urged the seven month pregnant LIster to get proper rest.

"Hey mum you want to knock off now for a couple of hour I'm done in"
But Lister was firm.
"Come on Hol. Just hang in there until we finish he rebuilding specs."
"All right Dave", Holly said unenthusiastically. " I'll give it a go."

Finally after three consecutive days and two nights the doors split open and disgorged a tired but happy Lister onto the habitation deck corridor.
All the inventory had been done, all the parts that needed to be remanufactured or recreated from scratch were being do so by the scutters.
All the plans had been set up by a tired and somewhat giddy Holly.

"All right dudes here the plan, the neck bone is connected to the mech. bone, the mech. bone is connected shoulder bone, the shoulder bone is connected to the arm bone. Ah come on you guys join in you know the rest."

As Lister turned the corridor and had heard noise coming from his quarters as a Rimmer shape blur passed him. Before he could think his tired momentum had carried his the few feet and he was already in his quarters before he could think to turn around.
He found himself staring at the thing which had caused the Rimmer shaped hologram to become a Rimmer shaped blur in the first place.
It was Kryten. More precisely it was Kryten's head. It must have been that which caused the blurring incident.

Lister had had the scutters remove Kryten's head away from the science lab and put it in his quarters,as not to have it staring at Lister while he mucked around with the ex-mechaniods inners .

The first problem which Lister could see was that the skutters had placed the head facing upward on Rimmer's pillow. He still wasn't that tired that he couldn't appreciate the little joke. The second thing which he couldn't appreciate was that the dismembered head was whistling. And whistling Yankee doodle at that.

The first week of the salvage of Kryten was the most difficult. Once past the initial identifying and general accounting for of all parts, the repair became more like the assembly of a do-it-yourself living room set with dodgie
origins.

During the second week Dave Lister would spend the whole of the day mending major and minor welds in the Kryten's frame. Then spend the final few hours working on the mechanoid's head. Each evening he would test a patch of circuitry. One by one he would test. If it was flawed he would solder it, then test it again. Little by little Kryten's mind was coming back to him.
So was his body now that you come to mention it.

Lister had help. As unknown to him as the elves to the shoe maker, while Lister dreamt of Kris Kachanski and the perfect shami kabob. Kryten's auto repair unit, with the aid of it's arsenal of nanobots, worked feverishly on a sub atomic level rearranging the very molecules of Kryten's damaged parts into new ones.

Deva Droid wasn't Deva Droid for nothing. Their Mechanoids were to be an exact replica of a human being and it's basic functions. More of less. More times than not a human part on a Mechanoid would serve very different purposes. But the one constant they both shared was DNA
strands.

Each component of a Deva Droid is numbered, stamped, indexed, and encoded with the DNA for the entire Mechanoid. This enables relatively small groups of nanobots to work freely in the event a mechanoid is separated into
several pieces.

So while the Lister slept clutching a circuit board in one hand and a sonic screw driver in the other, the nanobots were hard at work.
Taking full advantage of any and all help give to them by Lister during the day.
If Lister reconnected a dismembered limb and started rewiring the connections, the nanobots would work while he was working unbeknownst to him. Lister assumed that all he had to do was put the pieces in place, according to the owners manual, and that was that. All was as right as rain.
Which was true, thanks to the nanos.

The nanobots had no time off and would also worked while he slept. They would often finish jobs Lister had started the night before. Without them the chances of Lister successfully rebuilding the mechanoid were zero squared.
The entire rebooting and testing of all major syntho-nerve functions
and their counterparts was completed during a particularly bad spell of diarrhea that Lister encountered after trying to eat the entire contents of a pot noodle. Some pregnancy cravings are meant to be ignored.

When Kryten had been deemed in working order it was slightly over six weeks since they had rescued him. Now it was his turn to play doctor. Lister was seven and a half months pregnant.