Weaving

Lily forbade the Apprentice from leaving the building for a couple of days, explaining to her the issues they were having with the gang of murderhobos and the fact that she had been attacked herself.

Paying the used car salesman, who departed the area with a quickness and in a separate car that was waiting for him, she descended into her basement. Most of the day was over, but she had a lot of things on her checklist.

She hummed and considered her options. She could work on a direct metal laser sintering system, a sort of 3D printer for metal alloys, as this would allow her to fix the truck rapidly. It would take sacrificing one of the laser pistols she had on hand, but it would be worth it. She had plans to construct things out of metal alloys, especially high-temperature refractory alloys, for a long time now, both for her own uses and possible trade, as she has come to the conclusion of constructing everything out of carbon allotropes was a little conspicuous.

However, she couldn't really do much practical work on it until she had the power station online. The laser sintering system wouldn't use all that much power, actually, but the metal recycler would use tons. At least five hundred kilowatts and probably more, she guessed. She already had that recycler built but hadn't even been able to test it. It should recycle whatever she puts in it and separate the product it produces into carbon feedstock, a dozen different elementary metals including iron, titanium, aluminium and a few rare earths, and then everything else, which would be the waste product that she couldn't presently separate.

The system relied on using incredible energy to literally ionize a layer of the recycled object, turning it into a plasma, and then separating the plasma using a combination of a particle accelerator, multi-stage centrifuges and finally, the levitation field emitters from several eyebots to separate out the plasma into its elementary constituents based on the differing masses involved in each atom.

It worked kind of like how uranium was slowly enriched to produce nuclear weapons in her past life, except the process was much quicker, although it was still much much slower than her first recycler, so this second version would be primarily used to recycle metals only.

Lily clucked her tongue. A laser sintering system required very, very fine metal powders to work, powders as fine as ten or fewer micrometres in diameter; otherwise, the system would not function properly.

The power station was scheduled for a run-up test tomorrow that she would have to be present for, but she wouldn't be getting full power from the system for several days yet.

She then nodded. Since she had no way to actually test such a sintering system until she could produce such powders, she decided to shelve working on it at all. While she could complete broad strokes of the design process using her CAD system, she was more in the mood for a little hands-on work this evening to relax her.

Her eyes turned to the boxes of robot parts that she had bought from Grace and smiled. While she had no idea what she would use these Labourtrons for, assembling and fixing them would be a relaxing, mindless activity until she could go to sleep for the evening.

She mentally started listening to Three Dogs radio station while she got to work.

---xxxxxx---

Lily looked at the three assembled Labourtrons. She verified the integrity of all but one of the processors, but her bottleneck on fixing these robots was actually the chassis elements, as there was considerable damage to them across all of the individuals.

The Labourtron looked more or less like a Protectron except that it was a bit thinner as there was no armour in its chassis at all, and they had more sophisticated manipulators -- not quite hands, but much more effective than the two claws.

Lily had to say; she hated it. Lily considered herself something of an expert on synths, and the best bet was always either to either mimic the human form as closely as possible, which had incredibly utility as evolution would tell anyone or diverge wildly from it, which was her usual modus operandi.

This half-assed semi-humanoid form was pretty terrible, Lily thought. And it wasn't like Dr House couldn't make a fairly good replication of humanoid movement, form and capability, either. She glanced over at the Assaultron in the corner, which quite impressed her with its hardy and simple mechanisms.

But, House went all in for a modular platform for many different uses in the Tron series of robots, so she suspected that limited his overall specialization which would have created an exemplary product. Lily glanced up at the ceiling in thought. Was it Heinlein that said specialization was for insects? Well, it was for robots, too, in her opinion.

She decided she would rebuild these Labourtrons, better, once she could build arbitrary shapes out of metal alloys as she could out of carbon. The programming probably couldn't handle anything that diverged too much from a bipedal form, so she would mimic a human much better. She already had scans and models of her skeleton; she could build slightly larger ones in hardened steel, with graphene composite areas to shield critical parts. Just the addition of the fully functioning hands would increase the capabilities of the bot by leaps and bounds.

Lily was absolutely incapable of creating a robot that mimicked a human form without falling deep into the uncanny valley at present unless she started with an actual human and slowly replaced their parts like she was doing to herself, so she would not even try. General utility and labour bots wouldn't need to interface with actual humans much, anyway. Once she got the Auto-Tailor that Grace was bringing back, she could clothe each of the bots in a unique colour of scrubs, and people would likely accept them as they did menial tasks in her hospital.

She had already connected each of these three to her diagnostic console and did a in-depth analysis of their neural networks. She was of the opinion that Protectrons were just incapable of the complex neural network necessary for actual sapience, which puzzled her. Didn't she recall some special Protectrons that would have likely passed a Turing test when playing Fallout 3?

Humming, she thought about it for a while and came to the conclusion such things had to either be custom Protectrons or, alternatively, the Protectron offloaded a lot of their neural mapping into a mainframe computer, and the mainframe plus Protectron might have achieved some level of sapience.

But since these neural networks were so simple, she did not feel bad about resetting them to factory defaults, as she had no real desire to work around whatever primary programming they had received at whatever warehouse they were working at.

She booted the Labourtrons up one at a time, and it went through its initial set-up procedures, registering herself as the principal owner along with a long password that she committed to memory.

Lily had her radio direction-finding system activated. Hence, she noticed when each Labourtron began transmitting, both to one another and also to the actual Protectrons in the hospital proper, which caused Lily to tilt her head to the side in curiosity. It appeared that they were programmed to establish a sort of ad-hoc mesh network amongst themselves.

She used her mental commands to listen to the frequency range used by the Labourtrons and then grabbed her tablet and set it up in laptop-mode. She sighed, this would be a lot simpler if she had the user interface of her development environment already coded for her brain computer, but at present she still needed to use her laptop to do any programming on it at all.

Lily turned off the audible playback of the Labourtron's frequency, which was just digital noise, and ran the signal through automatic decoding for binary or ternary signals instead, getting an incredibly long series of numbers printed on her vision during every transmission.

Sighing, she got up and searched around for a particular book of interest. It was given to her by the Mechanist, and it was a RobCo maintenance manual for the Protectron series of robots, and it was over seven hundred pages of single-spaced texts and diagrams.

If her brain computer was still running a RobCo OS, it likely would have been able to convert these signals into something more useful right away, but her antipathy to using any RobCo OS in her brain was well-established. Still, she could decode these signals. She had the maintenance manual; she had the robot's encryption keys. It wouldn't be hard, but it would be kind of interesting. Just something to distract a woman who only needed three hours of sleep a night for the rest of the evening.

---xxxxxx---

Four hours later, Lily had a preliminary model coded into her own system. It had taken a lot of tries, a lot of reading and a lot of ordering the Labourtron to do specific or random tasks and watching the signals they generated in response to each request before she got a usable protocol established.

She had also come to a startling conclusion about these robots. She was fairly confident that no Tron-series of robot was designed to work alone. They were clearly intended to work in groups along with a supervisory-level robot of clearly superior neural complexity in a mesh network, which would coordinate each action by its subordinate robots into something that wasn't stupid at all.

Utilizing a mainframe to coordinate a group of Labourtrons or Protectrons was clearly suboptimal as most commercial mainframes in Fallout did not actually use quantum processors and were actually slower, computationally, than even a single Protectron was. That said, even if it was suboptimal, it clearly worked.

Lily wondered why RobCo never produced such a supervisory robot model; at least, she did not know of any such model herself. She knew that Dr House was the originator of every robot designed by RobCo, and guessed that he must have gotten distracted by other matters. Did he know that nuclear war was approaching, she wondered? A lot of the smarter people Pre-War felt that such a war was inevitable, she thought.

She sat there typing away at her keyboard, otherwise motionless, for another half hour before the protocol she devised was optimized and tested again.

'Command, Activate Supervisor Emulation', she told her computer, and then saw visualized herself transmit to each Labourtron, and then each Labourtron transmitted back to her a complicated handshake of negotiating encryption methods and keys back and forth before a connection was established into the bots' ad-hoc mesh network.

In her vision, she saw each of the Labourtron's Enhanced Reality tags update to indicate that she had an active connection to each of them and smiled.

If these robots were designed to work with a superior supervisory intellect, well, she could provide that!

It wasn't a perfect solution, though. She had to carefully construct a series of orders and contingencies for even a simple task like 'clean the floor.'

She realized about halfway through constructing one such series of commands and contingencies that they were finite state machines, a type of abstract computational machine she used fairly commonly in her past life as an electrical engineer. They could be visualized as a highly complex flow diagram; for example, completing the task of cleaning the floor required a precise number of steps, the first of which might be finding a broom.

With this realization, she managed to accelerate, creating several complete tasks that she could use for testing and building other tasks.

What Protectrons had trouble with, intellectually, was discovering when a task had reached a failed state and should be abandoned or even when it was completed, so she had to carefully construct such things for them.

The bots would flash over the network constantly at their current state, and her own expert system would handle keeping track and what their next order should be. Each of the Labourtrons was running through the 'clean the floor' task, one on each floor, and they were performing swimmingly! They hadn't run into a wall yet!

She constructed a much more complicated and useful patrol task for the Protectrons, also, so that they would maximize the area that they patrolled at seemingly random intervals while also offering any intruders a chance to either surrender or run off instead of just ventilating them as their default programming would do.

Lily glanced at the boxes full of Labourtron parts. She needed to get them assembled. The feeling of being at the centre of a vast web of robotic minions was both reassuring and nostalgic for her, but she only had five trons listening to her at present, and that was insufficient.

The fact that these Labourtrons were unarmed was a problem too. She could use them as dual-purpose machines if they had some way to deal with intruders or defend themselves, which would make the patrol patterns she could envisage be much more complicated and unlikely to be casually bypassed.

She could build their skeleton-chassis out of diamond, after all, but felt that a refractory hardened steel alloy would actually be superior in a lot of ways, especially as a defence against lasers and plasma, so she would just have to see how much power she could get out of the run-up test tomorrow and the next couple of days and then begin rapid development of a practical sintering system.

But presently, it was well after 0300, and she was actually quite tired now. She retreated to her bedroom and lay in bed until she fell asleep. She dreamt of spiders and their webs, content.