Marcus Manners yelped as the campervan suddenly floored the brakes violently, making virtually no attempt regenerate from slowly braking and simply contacting them hard to grind off all the velocity that the campervan had been having. He woke up, shaking his head, back into the darkened reality surrounding his campervan. “Status report. STATUS REPORT!”
The van purred slowly, before apologising. “Unknown influx of snow into path to next leg of destination. Snow exceeds wheel height by significant margin. Unable to traverse forward or unwind back to last safe charging and rest point. Possible cause: unpredicted snow front. There is a 25% chance of the Alaskan Wild Patrol contacting and rescuing at least all occupants before potential chill-related complications set in due to power depletion. The chance of us actually navigating the entire campervan out safely in either direction is lower than this.”
Marcus started cussing. Clearly thehy were NOT going to make it to Matakus Resort today.... tonight? It was hard to tell when the days and nights melted together in shadow like this for days on end at this time of year... It was time to play smart. He took a deep breath and thought about how to handle this matter. Finally he spoke up.
“Computer, first, divert all power to only minimal inside heating, emergency signalling. Reserve a small amount as well for emergency response from responders and CHEAPOnet relay messages. In addition, provide a short burst of electricity to the water heater and pump for about thirty minutes before cutting it off, and power only the microwave in the kitchenette and the toilet in the bathroom section.”
“Acknowledging, rerouting power as per user request. This will increase our chance of surviving till personnel extraction to 60%”
Marcus wasn’t going to just sit around doing nothing else. As the inside of the campervan slowly cooled down, he popped open a Chinajapese meal bag that was designed to both provide an entire day’s calories as kept-warm food, pouring in water to trigger the 24-hour slow reheat pack to form an impromptu hot water bag. As the first wisps of hot steam issued from the mealbag’s open mouth, he zipped himself into a hot water suit and carefully opened the inlet on one side of the suit, sitting down carefully after a few minutes with the hose and water heater half-filling the microcells inside it. It worked on the same slowness and principles as the Chinajapese meal’s food heater, giving him extra time to stay warm after the heaters cut out to save energy...
It was warmer with all these things. He had dealt with the mockery of the survivalists who had half advised him to go for it and stock at least two or three uses of these items, and half mocked him for relying on inferior Chinajapese ideas of how to stay warm instead of something American, local, and tested in actual Alaskan weather.
What it wasn’t was comfortable. It was still a little cooler than he would like, Marcus reflected, as a piece of what seemed like water-soaked meat jerky of an indeterminate type of animal in a bun from the first pouch. He wrapped himself with the furs from his bed for added slowness in heat loss, and closed his eyes, Perhaps the reverie would help him stay warmed longer... if it would kick in exactly at the time he needed it right now...
His eyes started fluttering shut from a combination of ennui from lack of trip progress, enroaching cold taking tentative taps on his skin through the Chinajapese ‘warmth cheat code’ he had warn on top of slowing down how fast the campervan was depletion of its own power storage...
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Marcus awoke with a start again, looking around the inside of his city runner as it arrived at the garage door of his assigned home. Little Sanctuary was a little peculiar in that with only a few variations due to necessity. Homes were not assigned based on seniority or levels within the offices and factories, but rather based on a combination of family needs, when they started their careers with Arendtcore, what homes had been built and left empty so far, and frankly, just plain old Random Number Generation.
As a result, he was the Chief Design Officer of Arendtcore, but as a single man, he had been assigned only a house fit for three people at most, and still uncomfortable for one person rattling on their own within. It was fitted with all the accountrements the company felt everyone needed: pathways and driveways kept warmed for safe access into the neighbourhood most days, a garage for tinkering with past-times and storing one or two vehicles for familial travel, though a autonomous shuttle could be booked for anyone not fortunate or desiring to own such private conveyances, running centralised heat and water, proper bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom setups based on the number of people living in each house...
Ironically, the janitor in charge of the third floor at the assembly plant had the biggest house, a function of his very Puerto Rican desire to have family, LOTS OF FAMILY. A lot of them did take advantage of the autonomous shuttle to travel out of Little Sanctuary to other jobs elsewhere, though they had to walk all the way up to the front gates on the way back before the shuttle would answer to bring them home.
Marcus had seen the inside once while he and Aymee were preparing slides on the corporate welfare efforts of Arendtcore. The AI in charge of housing configuration had thought offbeat and declared what should have been a combination living and dining room with a announcement pit into a twelve-bed dormitory. After a few queries with the Agents responsible for turning Mr Gujaraz’s home upside down while still somehow barely meeting minimum Arendtcore standards on staff housing, it turned out that Mr Gujaraz had been almost as productive at home as at the factory floor.
They had both agreed that the AI might get kinked into making further wrong decisions if it was interfered with, so they wound up hiring his nephew fresh from MINT as a interning engineer. That solved the problem, as his reassignment in turn had four other cousins bunking in with them at his new home, resulting in some new changes that produced two more standard corporate homes.
There was now a living room that doubled as a dinning room and a discussion pit. Sadly, one of the bathrooms had also been taken off the design and replaced with storage shelving. Such were the vagaries of using AI to manage 2500+ homes and growing...
Marcus grinned as he looked outside the garage, across the road, right at Mr Gujaraz’s unusual little pseudo-mansion, before hitting the button that brought down the shutter.
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Marcus wasn’t exactly lifting much at the company gym downtowin near the gates of South Little Ssanctuary, but he did have enough strength to carry in both carry-all bags into one of the empty rooms near his own bedroom and adjacent bathroom, settling them down, before taking another few minutes to bring in the folders.
Calmly sitting down on the clean floor of the otherwise empty and unused room, pulling the lighter carry-all towards himself and opening it, his hand reaching in and digging a little.
He fished out a small piece of cotton cerulean fabric with white edging. Marcus blinked very hard, thinking about what it could be as he unfolded it. Apparently it was a pair of small cotton briefs, the white edging forming a sort of Y-front as well as hemming the edges.
There were ten more of the same type and color of briefs. He calmly folded each of them and formed a small pile. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was beginning to develop an idea as to what the hell the Arendts had thrown him into for the next few days.
There was more small-sized clothing: suspender dungarees and trousers in firm unworn denim, several T-shirts and shirts of varying casualness, lengths, comfy thin pyjama sets, even two or three sets of innerwear in the form of blue swim trunks and full-body thermal suits intended separately for both wading in water or providing extra warmth underneath. Socks in varoious colors and lengths were an inclusion, as was a comb and a tooth-brush and small tube of toothpaste, presumably filched from some train or hotel room. Three sets of matching cold weather boots, gloves and cute woolen hats with bobbins on top and the brim of a baseball cap in front, like the love child of a Little Leagues uniform headgear and an eviscerated Guppet from the workshops behind Zhimajie or The Street of Cardamom.
Marcus briefly paused to look at the resulting piles. Enough clothing to outfit a single child for several days without washing, though obviously stuff would need to be washed more often or dried depending on the activities of the wearer. Speaking of the wearer... Marcus stretched a little, his hand edging towards the other bulkier carryall...
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Marcus woke up and looked out. A momentary spike of chill had managed to get past the defenses of his still admittedly quite warm hot water suit and meal. The campervan stayed mostly dark, lit up by only strips of mandatory strip lighting running on emergency-power, casting a faint orange hue over the inside of the campervan’s furnishings. The only out-of-gamut color was the dulled greenish blue of the AI’s display, adopted as if to calm and assure its fellow travelers that all would be well.
Marcus fished another bun out of the Chinajap emergency rations/heating sack and bit into it to assuage his hunger and grab a few hundred more calories. It was far more likely that there would still be food left in the sack held bty a frozen hand if things got dire enough, that was how overly provisioned this emergency option had been. He made a mental option to buy another one of them for future use in cold emergencies.
The reverie had lasted on;y one or two hours, the chill and hunger having blunted the enroaching effects of prolonged premium rejuve quite a bit... with his stomach full, Marcus managed to close his eyes and try to flee into the past for a brief refuge, hoping the Alaskan Wild Patrol would find him and get him out before he slipped too deep into an irreversible sleep.
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Marcus’s reverie took him back to where he had been awoken by reality, maybe just a few minutes later. He had fished out a prototype charging pad resembling a sort of folding bamboo mat, its construction carefully made to ensure the safe threading of a dense loop of induction charging cable under air-cooled insulating material. A small wisp of a pillow capped one end of the pad, as if denoting where to rest a head.
Two male 220W outlets jutted out of the pillow, as well as a USB-E female collector presumably for plugging in something or other. He rolled it out properly and inserted the power cables, but did not plug them into the wall outlets yet. He assumed that it would probably be better to treat them the same way he would treat a space heater and directly plug them into separate outlets. Fortunately, the house design had double separated 220W outlets as a common item, so it probably wouldn’t be an issue to do this.
He fished out several more items, carefully placing them on top of the charging mat. They had all be packed in thick bubble wrap, and all had the air of something completely not quite normal to a ordinary household. One, two elongated things, three four differently elongated things... five, a sort of trunkish thing, six, some sort of spheroidal thing, either more protective packaging or the actual shape of the object, another four more smaller spheroidal things, each a pair of two different sizes...
Marcus took a deep breath as he surveyed the contents of the heavier carry-all. After a bit, he decided to get a chair in the living room coffee tables, placing them against each other to form a longer table of sorts so that he could do it without aggravating or causing any injuries by sitting oddly on the floor, calmly placing the mat and all the odd things atop it onto the table carefully.
He noticed a small stick-drive stuck to the trunkish thing and pulled it off, reading the label on it. “Test Unit Elliot-01 custom drivers / control scheme adapter software – please install in BlueTooth4-enabled device before operating unit”.
This he did, carefully slotting the smaller US-E-Micro plug into the connectors running alongside one end of his smart tablet. This started a sort of installation.
Marcus nodded as he watched the spinning alternation between the Arendt logo and a generic rounded square containing the word “INTERNAL TEST – DO NOT DISTRIBUTE” . He had agreed with Seamus and Bellamy on some conventions that everything in the company should follow regardless of where they were intended to go – whether into the shops or onto a test floor... He hadn’t exactly written anything about directly putting it into a customer’s home without any prior steps but the install program was at least trying to adapt those conventions to match, as it briefly flashed another warning:
“WARNING: TEST UNIT DOES NOT EXHIBIT STANDARD SYSTEM ERROR COMMUNICATIONS EXCEPT IN SEVERE EMERGENCIES. PLEASE REFER TO THIS TABLET IF IN DOUBT ABOUT LESSER ISSUES.”
Marcus blinked. Well, it did make sense for a human being not to talk like a machine. What hat worked for the household cleaner robots wouldn’t work for something intended to be... closer to real? Anyways, he should open the rest of the packages up, he thought, reaching for the trunkish thing and carefully ripping it with his bare fingers...
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Somewhere in the innermost sanctum of Arendtcore, Seamus and Bellamy had built something peculiar as a machine. It would have been so easy to just use a standardised industrial wrapping system. Or some form of basic fasteners.Texture would probably not have been a consideration. Marcus had suggested that if they were going to be damned, they should try to be damned for most damning things they could be damned for. Or something.
Thus, The Oven was Invented. The “giant pizza oven / pressure cooker Not For Actual Cuisine” bridged the gap between the forms Marcus or some artist would craft, and the engineering going into said form.
They had examined some of the analogues to human flesh that their medical devices and training items divisions had previously come up with . It had taken a little work to combine a few of them into something that sweated like real flesh to act as a partially closed cooling loop, responded reflexively to certain changes in temperature and prolonged immersion in pool water.
It could blush or pale when directed, though bigger differences of color still needed to be baked in.
It understood the concept of peach fuzz and goosebumps and with a little independent microcontroller work sections could be made to respond the same way in the same locations to the same stimuli as Mother Nature’s original cultivated over nine months...
It could even simulate scabbing to heal over mild injury, though it would still require proper attention to fix or repair any genuine bigger breakages
The Oven took all that, and did magic.
The Oven took the form desired, and laid it onto the electrical and mechanical systems itended to fit beneath. A protective underlayer for the later was followed up by layering to give each bit of skin various responsive capabilities, consistencies and textures...
A gift wrapping service bot that had gone totally nuts, in a way, gift-wrapping a desired covering around a medical device of some sort or other... or althernatively
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Marcus breathed a little deeply for a moment, gingerly setting down the package, now shorn of its protective plastic. The Oven had been a disaster initially, but it seemed to have been refined a lot by now...
The torso of a young boy lay on the charging mat, headless and limbless, actuators and connector assemblies poked out of each arm, leg, and neck stub, betraying the true nature of what it really was, but the human flesh analogue took the uncanniness of it down several notches. Without any active power, it was still cool and rubbery, like a premium reborn doll part, but it had so many of the features people expected from real human flesh – the subtle peach fuzz of thin body hair cloaking every square bit of it, one or two visible moles on the skin, the faint bumping of veins... Elliot-01 was lightly tanned, but lighter skin surrounded the area where a real child would never have been allowed to run around uncovered with clothing of some sort by proper parents, even at the pool or beach.
The anatomical correctness of everything was decent – Eveerything was at least visually, where it should be as per Senator Bundt’s request. After all the work he had done on the visual aspects of Elliot, he would have raised hob if anything had been ratcheted down, made more toy like. He assumed Seamus had worked out the plumbing and Bellamy had figured out how ‘it’ should operate, but damned if he knew how he would even test that properly.
Satisfied with what he had seen so far, he started unwrapping the other body parts. It was about half am hour when he had unwrapped the limbs, the hands, the feet, taking care to place them roughly in a tidy pattern around the torso. The detailing he had first seen had not gone away, each part still given the same care and nano-level detailing on all fronts... he might have lost some more time admiring all the perfect imperfection that had been placed into the test unit...
He picked up the last spheroidal package and opened it up. Another momentary failure to access ambient oxygen... the innocent face of a young sleeping boy appeared in the protective foam coating the inside of the container, a cherub portioned out into pieces. Short hazel brown hair, and a light pink pair of lips sat beneath a pudgy little nose. A matching lighter tan. His eyes were completely closed, as if simply having a deep nap. The only detail betraying his true nature was the series of assemblies jutting slightly out the stump of his neck.
An odd feeling had slightly replaced his detached interest. It was no longer just work, Marcus thought to himself.... Well, it was still somewhat work. He was still checking to see if there were any ideas for consistency in design and methods that had fallen off the truck.
Honest to Goddess on his interest, he thought as he brought the arm stump of the torso up against one of the disembodied arms, watching the edge for the tell-tale glow of two capital Ls on the ends of them as the the metal assemblies suddenly grabbed and dragged each other into a connection, the skin sealing seamlessly as the attachment markings glowed green with a brief chime before fading from view, He repeated this a few more times with the extremities and limbs before finishing up, gently cradling the head unit before carefully edging the stumps together just as before, causing a capital N to start glowing on their edges.
Marcus carefully maneuvered the torso and head carefully until the “Ns” were resting against each other, causing them to glow green and fade as the assemblies did their work again, pulling neck and torso together and seamlessly sealing connecting up dozens of wires and micropipes and datalanes. Everything he had recommended and designed seemed to be working as intended -
He paused. It was no longer a toy robot he had spent two hours assembling and checking over, but something far closer to real – a young boy lying atop two coffee tables and a bamboo mat as designed by someone with some weird ideas, like the fact that it should be made of insulating plastic instead For a moment, he felt like he’d become Gepetto, except Gepetto probably had less of a beard, and used magic wood, not plastics and metal and stuff...
... Well, nothing else was going to get done if he just stood there, he thought. He finally picked up the power cables and plugged in the charging mat, causing the mat to start induction charging Elliot-01... He took up his tablet and fiddled a bit with the control app, tapping a few commands to get him running, and....
There was a ugly error tone, as Elliot-01 stayed still. Did he do something wrong, maybe he should check the manuals for.... Ah. An examination of the scrolling log on the tablet revealed that everything was working, it was just there was a difference between it working and it being ready;
Code: Select all
Project GOLDFISH
Test Unit Elliot-01
Arendtcore (c) 2061
SENSITIVE PROJECT- IF FOUND CONTACT ARENDTCORE CALIFORNIA HQ in LITTLE SANCTUARY, CA IMMEDIATELY. REWARD OFFER FOR EXPEDIENT RETURN WITH MINIMAL NOISE +1-800-255-xxxxx or [email protected]
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BIOS version 2052.852
First Boot Detected
Owner ID – biological – located.
Mode: Initialization
Compiling Personality Matrix... (1/2)
Compiling AI Underlayering (2/2)
Time to full compile + reboot into live mode – 28:59:5....
DO NOT DISCONNECT POWER, REBOOT HARD, OR POWER DOWN UNTIL INITIALIZATION COMPLETE
He tapped out of the controller app and checked his tablet. Time to measure out a room with the lasers on this thing and order up a little economical furniture, and then maybe some grocery deliveries in the morning...
The rumble of a big, hungry tummy resounded briefly.
But first, perhaps, a late dinner. Marcus briefly wondered if it was not too late today to start eating healthily, as he called up the MenuDash app on his tablet to hunt for something with less fried and more greens.