Servo 34:1
Servo 34:1
Fortunately for us, bot taxis didn’t charge much to wait. We arrived at the predetermined location and watched as rain bucketed down. I was quite happy to stay in the confines of the cab, although it was fairly cramped with all of us piled in. Most of the area was devoid of light, the only real sources emanated from Servidyne. I presumed they were security lights. From our vantage point, we couldn’t see much of the compound. A large building obscured our view. I did make note of three battle bots on patrol.“Dad? Can you hear me?”“Yes, Jonah.”“We’re at the place. I see three battle bots patrolling the grounds.”“Oh, not good.”“They’re fanned out and walking north to south.”“Can you see the main building?”“Yes, barely.”“Where are they in relation to that?”“Just to the north.”“Can you let me know when they pass?”“I can only see part of the building, but I’ll tell you when they pass the north part.”“Good, that’s where I’m located. The loading dock faces north.”We watched as the bots moved with extreme slowness. It seemed to take them hours to get past the northernmost part of the main building. I had to remind myself the Servidyne facility was massive, and the bots were probably going their normal speed. Checking the time on my tablet, it had been less than an hour from when Dad uploaded the virus. I wondered how long before the system crashed. The battle bots appeared to have passed the northern most part of the building. I waited a few moments to see if they would reappear further down, but they didn’t. Doubt lingered over me. If I told Dad to go, and the bots were close by, they’d surely catch him. “Do you still see them?” asked Dad. “No, they disappeared.”“I need to get out of here, now.”“What’s wrong?”“I hear someone in the hall outside.”“Can’t you get to a charging station and fake a power down?”“I’m too far into the back of the warehouse.”“You can’t hide?”“Nowhere to hide.”Dad moved his head around giving me a view through his eyes. He was right, there wasn’t anything to hide behind. “But I don’t know where the battle bots went.”“I’ll have to take my chances.”“Dad, no!” Rory yelled.“Just be ready to get out of there, okay?”“Daddy!” Suz cried, “You have to make it.”“I will, I promise.”We were jammed elbow to elbow in the back of the cab leaning over my tablet. I think all of us held our breaths the moment Dad pushed open the door. The view on my tablet went nearly dark. I knew Dad could see fine with his enhanced optics. My camera, however, ran on raw data input, so it was difficult to make out anything but rain and blackness. “What do you see?” I asked.“Coast looks clear. I don’t see any battle bots.” He stepped into the downpour. Somewhere we heard loud beeping.“Dad, what’s that noise?”“The door alarm.” “Will that alert security?”“Fairly confident it will. I’m hurrying.”We watched him move though the storm, lights reflecting off the rain-soaked concrete. It seemed that he would make it to the fence undetected. And then we heard:“Halt!”It was the electronic voice of a battle bot.Dad turned and we saw three of them lined up. “You are in an unauthorized area.”Fear gripped all of us. This was our worst nightmare. How could Dad escape? One of the bots drew closer. “You are in an unauthorized area. Security has been notified.”Dad turned his head. In the dim light and pouring rain, we could see the faint outline of the perimeter fence. It was perhaps thirty feet away. A message appeared on the screen:
I’m going to run for it. If I don’t make it, leave and go back to Broken Bow. I love you.
My eyes welled up and I felt a tear run down my cheek. We were powerless to help our father out of this mess. Why had the virus not taken effect? Did the upload fail? I had no way of checking Servidyne’s computers to see if a virus was implanted. To have gone through all this and now fail would be utter disaster. Even worse would be losing Dad. The hundreds of hours of rebuilding the bot wasn’t the issue; it was his precious memory cores which contained who and what he was that mattered the most. I wasn’t even sure if we recovered those and put them in a new body if Dad would be the same. We watched as he took a few slow steps toward the fence. The battle bots remained in position, almost as if confused by his actions. And then Dad took off running. Back in the day, service bots weren’t engineered as athletes. They had none of the “super human” strengths of the newer bots, and certainly were never designed to flee battle bots or jump over ten-foot fences.Behind him, through the audio feed, we could hear the bots moving. And then I heard an odd whirring followed quickly by rapid machine gun fire. Red and green streaks shot past Dad’s head. “Run, Dad, they’re shooting at you!” I hollered.“I know that!” he replied. The sound of bullets impacting on his exoplates rang through the air. He was not designed to handle attacks like this. His exoplates were lightweight and offered no protection from the hail of bullets now engulfing him. “Dad!” Suz screamed, trying to get out of the cab.I grabbed her arm. “You need to stay here; it’s too dangerous.”“Let me go!”“I can’t. Dad wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”“But he’s in trouble!”“We can’t help him. He’s got to get out of there on his own.”The view from the tablet showed Dad getting closer to the fence. Bullets still whizzed by him. “Hurry, Dad,” I said softly. He reached the fence and started to climb. We could see his hands grasping the chain link and pulling himself up. More red and green bullets zipped by his head, but he wasn’t slowing down. As he reached the halfway point, he stopped. “Oh, no!” he said, “A bot’s got my leg!” He looked back and we could see a battle bot holding his lower leg rather firmly. “I can’t shake it!”At this point I was beside myself in a total panic. Dad was so close to getting over the fence, and now the battle bot was halting his progress. I glanced out the window and could barely make him out through the downpour. He was so close, but a world away. Though his eyes we saw the bot with a death-grip on his leg. He took the other leg and tried to kick the bot in the head. Of course that had little effect on the mechanical monster. The remaining bots closed the distance. Soon all three were trying to haul Dad off the fence. He kicked and flailed, desperate to free himself. The bots were too strong. With a firm yank, he was jerked from the fence and thrown to the ground. Dad tried to get up, but one bot still held his leg. All we could do was watch in horror as the three bots converged upon him. I envisioned him being torn to pieces, his limbs being discarded like useless garbage. His head ripped from his body, the precious memory core shattered to bits; and his life extinguished. How could I have let this happen?I was rattled from my doomed thoughts by Rory shouting. “Jonah, look!”Peeling my eyes from the dreadful images on the screen, I looked out the window. Visibility was nearly nothing, but in the dim lights of the facility, I saw the battle bots standing over Dad; apparently immobile. “Jonah, can you hear me?” said Dad.“Yes!” I said far too loudly for the confines of the taxi.“The virus, it must have finally reached their systems.”“Got out of there, now!”“Working on it.”I tossed the tablet to Otto, got out of the cab, and hurried to the fence. Dad resumed scaling the last obstacle to his freedom. He was going as fast as he could, but it didn’t seem enough considering our dire situation. “Come on, Dad, faster!”“I’m going as fast as I can.” He was nearing the top and now faced multiple loops of razor wire. Since he was covered in exoplates, I wasn’t worried about the wire, he didn’t have skin to tangle and slice as a mortal human.My heart was pounding with anticipation. I squinted in the rain, searching for any flesh and blood guards that might be responding to Dad’s escape attempt. The battle bots seemed neutralized—hopefully for good. My curious intellect wondered what havoc was going on inside Servidyne as the virus spread.Dad scrunched down the wire and hefted his body over. I’m not sure if he intend it, but he plummeted to the ground instead of climbing, landing in a heap next to the fence.“Are you okay?” I said, running to him. Most of his body was riddled with bullet holes. “I’ve lost a lot of fluid, my limbs aren’t working as they should.”“Can you get to the taxi?”“Don’t think so.”I waved and hollered: “Otto, come help!”He exited the cab and ran to us. “What’s up?”“Dad sustained damage, he can’t walk. We need to get him to the taxi.”The two of us hefted him to his feet and Dad wobbled across the grass to the cab where Rory and Suz had the door open waiting. He collapsed into a pile, the rest of us clambering in and shutting the door.“Take us back to the hotel!” I called to the bot driver.“As requested,” the bot replied and put the car into drive.The whole trip back to the hotel I was worried about Dad. He was leaking fluid from several bullet wounds that just had to hit vital areas. “Are you going to be okay, Dad?” I asked, trying to stem the flow on the worst one.“I’ll be fine. The fluid is only needed for me to move, it has nothing to do with my memory cores; so if I lose it, you’ll just have to carry me around.”“It still worries me.”“Don’t be. If needed, you can temporarily replace the fluid with vegetable oil.”“And that’ll be okay?”“Yes.”We travelled along in relative silence until we reached the hotel. At nearly every street corner was a battle bot frozen like a statue. They had been rendered inert, their reign of terror hopefully over. I felt good that we’d put a stop to another potential war. The Inner States would somehow rise from the proverbial ashes and carry on as they had since the Great Separation. Dad was no longer able to move, so Otto, Rory, and I had to carry him up to the room while Suz paid for the cab. We got in the door and propped him against a charging station. I already had plans the next morning to go out and find some oil and repair equipment to get Dad back on his feet. Once he was mobile, we’d plan our escape to the Outer States. “We’ll have to leave the way we came in,” said Dad from his slumped position on the floor. “We can’t take any public mode of transport.”“Why not?” Otto asked.“Because Servidyne will have alerted the authorities of our presence. Any bus, train, or airport we try to leave from, they’ll be after us.”“Oh,” I said in dismay. I was rather hoping for a nice comfortable plane ride. Apparently that was not going to happen. It would be another bumpy ride in some boxcar on a train rattling along at a snail’s pace. Suz plopped down on the bed and turned on the TV. Almost every channel was carrying news of Servidyne’s battle bots and several models of service bot no longer functioning. “You did it, Daddy,” she said, a faint smile on her lips. “My Daddy stopped another war.”I sat at the table, tablet in front of me. The screen was blank; the device in sleep mode. I was exhausted, the events of the night had my nerves frazzled, my body weak. I wanted nothing but to sleep, yet I knew if I tried, my mind wouldn’t cease its cerebral ramblings. “Jonah?” Dad said from his position against the wall. “Can you open that file I sent you?”“Are you sure you want to know?” I replied, thinking maybe it was a bad idea.“Yes, I need to know who killed me.”“What will you do about it if you find out?”He uttered a mechanical sigh. “It’s obvious we can’t go to the authorities, the enforcement officers have been bought off by Servidyne…”“So what can you do?”“Nothing, I suppose. But I need to know—for my own piece of mind.”I accessed the file. It was nothing more than a chronological record of everyone who had come and gone out of the development lab over the last two years. I wasn’t sure where to start. Getting up, I went to Dad and knelt on the floor next to him. He looked pathetic in his current state, filled with bullet holes and draining the remains of his fluid onto the dark brown carpet; yet he was still my father.“You remember the day I died?” he said softly.“March thirtieth.”“Bring up that day, please.”I did as instructed, the log was quite full. Then I slid the tablet over into Dad’s lap, adjusting it so he could see. He was silent for several moments; I could only assume he was reading.“Can you index the page?” Dad said.“Sure.” I moved it down, revealing more entries.“There. Just after three o’clock. Whose name is that?”I squinted at the screen, the text was small, although had I thought about it, I could have enlarged it. “It says three-thirty, William Cadburgh.”Dad uttered a faint sigh. “He probably killed me because he thought I was getting too nosy on the battle bot program. Cadburgh didn’t want me to find out about his malicious programming that turned the bots into killers.”“He was breaking Asimov’s laws and didn’t want to get caught.”“Then he took the job as head of enforcement so he could gain control of the city.”“Do you think he would’ve gotten control of the entire Inner States?”“Quite possibly. I’m not sure where else the battle bots had been deployed. But by now the virus has run its course and they are all inert.”“It makes me wonder…If he got control of the Inner States, would he have tried to take over the Outer States?” “It would have been very difficult.”
Fortunately for us, bot taxis didn’t charge much to wait. We arrived at the predetermined location and watched as rain bucketed down. I was quite happy to stay in the confines of the cab, although it was fairly cramped with all of us piled in. Most of the area was devoid of light, the only real sources emanated from Servidyne. I presumed they were security lights. From our vantage point, we couldn’t see much of the compound. A large building obscured our view. I did make note of three battle bots on patrol.“Dad? Can you hear me?”“Yes, Jonah.”“We’re at the place. I see three battle bots patrolling the grounds.”“Oh, not good.”“They’re fanned out and walking north to south.”“Can you see the main building?”“Yes, barely.”“Where are they in relation to that?”“Just to the north.”“Can you let me know when they pass?”“I can only see part of the building, but I’ll tell you when they pass the north part.”“Good, that’s where I’m located. The loading dock faces north.”We watched as the bots moved with extreme slowness. It seemed to take them hours to get past the northernmost part of the main building. I had to remind myself the Servidyne facility was massive, and the bots were probably going their normal speed. Checking the time on my tablet, it had been less than an hour from when Dad uploaded the virus. I wondered how long before the system crashed. The battle bots appeared to have passed the northern most part of the building. I waited a few moments to see if they would reappear further down, but they didn’t. Doubt lingered over me. If I told Dad to go, and the bots were close by, they’d surely catch him. “Do you still see them?” asked Dad. “No, they disappeared.”“I need to get out of here, now.”“What’s wrong?”“I hear someone in the hall outside.”“Can’t you get to a charging station and fake a power down?”“I’m too far into the back of the warehouse.”“You can’t hide?”“Nowhere to hide.”Dad moved his head around giving me a view through his eyes. He was right, there wasn’t anything to hide behind. “But I don’t know where the battle bots went.”“I’ll have to take my chances.”“Dad, no!” Rory yelled.“Just be ready to get out of there, okay?”“Daddy!” Suz cried, “You have to make it.”“I will, I promise.”We were jammed elbow to elbow in the back of the cab leaning over my tablet. I think all of us held our breaths the moment Dad pushed open the door. The view on my tablet went nearly dark. I knew Dad could see fine with his enhanced optics. My camera, however, ran on raw data input, so it was difficult to make out anything but rain and blackness. “What do you see?” I asked.“Coast looks clear. I don’t see any battle bots.” He stepped into the downpour. Somewhere we heard loud beeping.“Dad, what’s that noise?”“The door alarm.” “Will that alert security?”“Fairly confident it will. I’m hurrying.”We watched him move though the storm, lights reflecting off the rain-soaked concrete. It seemed that he would make it to the fence undetected. And then we heard:“Halt!”It was the electronic voice of a battle bot.Dad turned and we saw three of them lined up. “You are in an unauthorized area.”Fear gripped all of us. This was our worst nightmare. How could Dad escape? One of the bots drew closer. “You are in an unauthorized area. Security has been notified.”Dad turned his head. In the dim light and pouring rain, we could see the faint outline of the perimeter fence. It was perhaps thirty feet away. A message appeared on the screen:
I’m going to run for it. If I don’t make it, leave and go back to Broken Bow. I love you.
My eyes welled up and I felt a tear run down my cheek. We were powerless to help our father out of this mess. Why had the virus not taken effect? Did the upload fail? I had no way of checking Servidyne’s computers to see if a virus was implanted. To have gone through all this and now fail would be utter disaster. Even worse would be losing Dad. The hundreds of hours of rebuilding the bot wasn’t the issue; it was his precious memory cores which contained who and what he was that mattered the most. I wasn’t even sure if we recovered those and put them in a new body if Dad would be the same. We watched as he took a few slow steps toward the fence. The battle bots remained in position, almost as if confused by his actions. And then Dad took off running. Back in the day, service bots weren’t engineered as athletes. They had none of the “super human” strengths of the newer bots, and certainly were never designed to flee battle bots or jump over ten-foot fences.Behind him, through the audio feed, we could hear the bots moving. And then I heard an odd whirring followed quickly by rapid machine gun fire. Red and green streaks shot past Dad’s head. “Run, Dad, they’re shooting at you!” I hollered.“I know that!” he replied. The sound of bullets impacting on his exoplates rang through the air. He was not designed to handle attacks like this. His exoplates were lightweight and offered no protection from the hail of bullets now engulfing him. “Dad!” Suz screamed, trying to get out of the cab.I grabbed her arm. “You need to stay here; it’s too dangerous.”“Let me go!”“I can’t. Dad wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”“But he’s in trouble!”“We can’t help him. He’s got to get out of there on his own.”The view from the tablet showed Dad getting closer to the fence. Bullets still whizzed by him. “Hurry, Dad,” I said softly. He reached the fence and started to climb. We could see his hands grasping the chain link and pulling himself up. More red and green bullets zipped by his head, but he wasn’t slowing down. As he reached the halfway point, he stopped. “Oh, no!” he said, “A bot’s got my leg!” He looked back and we could see a battle bot holding his lower leg rather firmly. “I can’t shake it!”At this point I was beside myself in a total panic. Dad was so close to getting over the fence, and now the battle bot was halting his progress. I glanced out the window and could barely make him out through the downpour. He was so close, but a world away. Though his eyes we saw the bot with a death-grip on his leg. He took the other leg and tried to kick the bot in the head. Of course that had little effect on the mechanical monster. The remaining bots closed the distance. Soon all three were trying to haul Dad off the fence. He kicked and flailed, desperate to free himself. The bots were too strong. With a firm yank, he was jerked from the fence and thrown to the ground. Dad tried to get up, but one bot still held his leg. All we could do was watch in horror as the three bots converged upon him. I envisioned him being torn to pieces, his limbs being discarded like useless garbage. His head ripped from his body, the precious memory core shattered to bits; and his life extinguished. How could I have let this happen?I was rattled from my doomed thoughts by Rory shouting. “Jonah, look!”Peeling my eyes from the dreadful images on the screen, I looked out the window. Visibility was nearly nothing, but in the dim lights of the facility, I saw the battle bots standing over Dad; apparently immobile. “Jonah, can you hear me?” said Dad.“Yes!” I said far too loudly for the confines of the taxi.“The virus, it must have finally reached their systems.”“Got out of there, now!”“Working on it.”I tossed the tablet to Otto, got out of the cab, and hurried to the fence. Dad resumed scaling the last obstacle to his freedom. He was going as fast as he could, but it didn’t seem enough considering our dire situation. “Come on, Dad, faster!”“I’m going as fast as I can.” He was nearing the top and now faced multiple loops of razor wire. Since he was covered in exoplates, I wasn’t worried about the wire, he didn’t have skin to tangle and slice as a mortal human.My heart was pounding with anticipation. I squinted in the rain, searching for any flesh and blood guards that might be responding to Dad’s escape attempt. The battle bots seemed neutralized—hopefully for good. My curious intellect wondered what havoc was going on inside Servidyne as the virus spread.Dad scrunched down the wire and hefted his body over. I’m not sure if he intend it, but he plummeted to the ground instead of climbing, landing in a heap next to the fence.“Are you okay?” I said, running to him. Most of his body was riddled with bullet holes. “I’ve lost a lot of fluid, my limbs aren’t working as they should.”“Can you get to the taxi?”“Don’t think so.”I waved and hollered: “Otto, come help!”He exited the cab and ran to us. “What’s up?”“Dad sustained damage, he can’t walk. We need to get him to the taxi.”The two of us hefted him to his feet and Dad wobbled across the grass to the cab where Rory and Suz had the door open waiting. He collapsed into a pile, the rest of us clambering in and shutting the door.“Take us back to the hotel!” I called to the bot driver.“As requested,” the bot replied and put the car into drive.The whole trip back to the hotel I was worried about Dad. He was leaking fluid from several bullet wounds that just had to hit vital areas. “Are you going to be okay, Dad?” I asked, trying to stem the flow on the worst one.“I’ll be fine. The fluid is only needed for me to move, it has nothing to do with my memory cores; so if I lose it, you’ll just have to carry me around.”“It still worries me.”“Don’t be. If needed, you can temporarily replace the fluid with vegetable oil.”“And that’ll be okay?”“Yes.”We travelled along in relative silence until we reached the hotel. At nearly every street corner was a battle bot frozen like a statue. They had been rendered inert, their reign of terror hopefully over. I felt good that we’d put a stop to another potential war. The Inner States would somehow rise from the proverbial ashes and carry on as they had since the Great Separation. Dad was no longer able to move, so Otto, Rory, and I had to carry him up to the room while Suz paid for the cab. We got in the door and propped him against a charging station. I already had plans the next morning to go out and find some oil and repair equipment to get Dad back on his feet. Once he was mobile, we’d plan our escape to the Outer States. “We’ll have to leave the way we came in,” said Dad from his slumped position on the floor. “We can’t take any public mode of transport.”“Why not?” Otto asked.“Because Servidyne will have alerted the authorities of our presence. Any bus, train, or airport we try to leave from, they’ll be after us.”“Oh,” I said in dismay. I was rather hoping for a nice comfortable plane ride. Apparently that was not going to happen. It would be another bumpy ride in some boxcar on a train rattling along at a snail’s pace. Suz plopped down on the bed and turned on the TV. Almost every channel was carrying news of Servidyne’s battle bots and several models of service bot no longer functioning. “You did it, Daddy,” she said, a faint smile on her lips. “My Daddy stopped another war.”I sat at the table, tablet in front of me. The screen was blank; the device in sleep mode. I was exhausted, the events of the night had my nerves frazzled, my body weak. I wanted nothing but to sleep, yet I knew if I tried, my mind wouldn’t cease its cerebral ramblings. “Jonah?” Dad said from his position against the wall. “Can you open that file I sent you?”“Are you sure you want to know?” I replied, thinking maybe it was a bad idea.“Yes, I need to know who killed me.”“What will you do about it if you find out?”He uttered a mechanical sigh. “It’s obvious we can’t go to the authorities, the enforcement officers have been bought off by Servidyne…”“So what can you do?”“Nothing, I suppose. But I need to know—for my own piece of mind.”I accessed the file. It was nothing more than a chronological record of everyone who had come and gone out of the development lab over the last two years. I wasn’t sure where to start. Getting up, I went to Dad and knelt on the floor next to him. He looked pathetic in his current state, filled with bullet holes and draining the remains of his fluid onto the dark brown carpet; yet he was still my father.“You remember the day I died?” he said softly.“March thirtieth.”“Bring up that day, please.”I did as instructed, the log was quite full. Then I slid the tablet over into Dad’s lap, adjusting it so he could see. He was silent for several moments; I could only assume he was reading.“Can you index the page?” Dad said.“Sure.” I moved it down, revealing more entries.“There. Just after three o’clock. Whose name is that?”I squinted at the screen, the text was small, although had I thought about it, I could have enlarged it. “It says three-thirty, William Cadburgh.”Dad uttered a faint sigh. “He probably killed me because he thought I was getting too nosy on the battle bot program. Cadburgh didn’t want me to find out about his malicious programming that turned the bots into killers.”“He was breaking Asimov’s laws and didn’t want to get caught.”“Then he took the job as head of enforcement so he could gain control of the city.”“Do you think he would’ve gotten control of the entire Inner States?”“Quite possibly. I’m not sure where else the battle bots had been deployed. But by now the virus has run its course and they are all inert.”“It makes me wonder…If he got control of the Inner States, would he have tried to take over the Outer States?” “It would have been very difficult.”
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