“There’s no stairs to the second floor,” said Roger, “and no windows up there. Donar Kupp was intensely paranoid.” As the elevator inched up to the second floor, Roger pointed at a little handle marked ALARM. “Try turning that, Jerzy.” The little handle turned easily, making a small ringing sound behind the wall of the elevator. “It’s nothing but a bicycle bell!” said Roger, shaking his head. “I don’t like to use the elevator when I’m here alone. To make it even more dangerous, the fuse box for the elevator is on the second floor where nobody can reach it if the elevator breaks! I need to automate the factory with a central computer like I did my house.”
We eased to a stop on the second floor and the elevator doors opened onto a huge room with laboratory benches along the far walls. The area near the elevator was packed with stained industrial machinery-plastics compression molders and the like. In the open middle of the room were two robots looking at us. They moved toward us.
“I named them Walt and Perky Pat,” said Roger devilishly. “I was able to patch in some pieces of the Walt and Perky Pat code you and the ants evolved in the Our American Homes at West West.” He raised his voice to address the robots. “Walt and Perky Pat, this is my friend Jerzy Rugby. He’ll be working here with us for awhile.”
Walt, who was a two-armed Veep, wheeled forward and held out his humanoid hand for me to shake. “Hello, Walt,” I said. Now Perky Pat, a three-armed Adze, came forward too, holding out her hand-shaped manipulator. “Hello, Perky Pat.” I shook both their hands.
“Hello, Jerzy,” they said, not quite in unison. Perky Pat’s voice was higher than Walt’s.
“Roger told us about you, Jerzy,” continued Perky Pat. “He said you helped him design our programs.”
“That’s right,” I said. “First I worked at GoMotion and then I worked at West West. How old are you, Perky Pat?”
“Roger and Walt put me together three days ago. I’m one of the first kits West West shipped.”
“I’m a month old,” volunteered Walt. “Roger built me on May first.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Roger tells me that you two are supposed to self-replicate.”
“Yes, Jerzy,” said Perky Pat. “Roger wants us to reproduce by building new robots without human help.”
“I know how,” said Walt confidently. “And instead of putting the standard kit software on our children, we’ll patch together combinations of our own programs.”
“We’ve been casting some of the parts ourselves,” said Perky Pat. “Soon we’ll be able to make everything except the chips. And Roger says that by next year we’ll be able to make the chips too.”
“Yes, we do plastics,” said Roger, gesturing toward the big, smelly plastics machines. “These were Donar Kupp’s, Jerzy; they’re linked into a single system driven by standard industrial microcode. The only catch is that the documentation for the system was handwritten by Kupp in German. But I got GoMotion to send me a German language module for Walt. And now he understands the manual.”
“ Ja,” said Walt proudly. “ Ich verstehe.”
“Can you run the machine, Walt?” I asked..
“ Ja, ja. Es geht gam gut.”
“Talk English, Walt,” reprimanded Roger. “And show Jerzy some of the pieces you’ve made.”
“I’ll get them,” said Perky Pat. These robots were eager as Santa’s elves.
Perky Pat darted across the lab and came back with something in each of her three hands. “This is a leg strut we made. And this is a panel of the body. And this here, this is an imipolex resin bead with an electronic circuit in it.”
“Let me see that!” said Roger. “I didn’t know you’d made one of those already.”
Perky Pat handed him the teardrop-shaped bead of hard, shiny plastic. Roger held it up, peered at it, then passed it to me. The bead was yellowish and transparent. Inside it was the dark filigree of an electronic circuit. Some input/output wires bristled from the pointed end of the bead.
“How did you figure out how to make it?” asked Roger.
“The basic recipe was in Kupp’s notes,” said Walt. “And Perky Pat came up with some modifications.”
“I don’t get what it’s for,” I said. “The Veep and the Adze don’t use any parts like this.”
“I’m not sure what it’s for,” said Perky Pat. “The cyberspace ants told me to make it, but the ant lion on my chip keeps me from understanding why. I hate the ant lion.”
“Creativity,” said Roger. “Initiative. A yearning for freedom. Not bad, eh Jerzy?” He drew out the pack of four new chips. “These chips are just what we’ve been waiting for, Walt and Perky Pat. They don’t support the ant lions, and they run faster! Let’s try ’em out. Walt, could you please turn yourself off?”
“Okay, Roger. But will I lose memory?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not unless the new chip malfunctions.”
Stoic Walt opened the manual controls door in his side and flipped his power switch to Off. His body gave a hydraulic sigh as it settled down onto its folded legs with its hands dangling limply. Roger used a screwdriver to open the access panel on Walt’s other side. He pulled Walt’s old Y9707 chip out of its multipin socket and snugged in the new Y9707-EX. Perky Pat watched all this with great interest. Then Roger replaced the access panel and flipped the power switch to On.
“On,” said Walt. “Six-thirteen p.m., Saturday, May 30. Checking memory. Memory okay. I am Walt.” His voice was fast and high.
“What’s the square root of twenty?” said Roger.
“About four point four seven,” chirped Walt. He talked so rapidly that it was hard to understand him.
“I think your new chip has double the old chip’s clock speed,” said Roger. “Please take that into account in your vocalizations. Try halving your output frequencies.”
“Is this better?” said Walt in something like his former voice.
“Fine,” said Roger. He went on to do some more tests, and when everything worked, he went ahead and changed Perky Pat’s chip as well. Having watched how Roger had adjusted Walt, Pat came through the transformation with her voice timbre intact. If anything, she sounded more mellifluous.
“This is fabulous, Roger. And the other two chips are for us?”
“Yes, yes,” said Roger, laying the two new Y9707-EX chips on the lab bench. “Walt and Perky Pat, I want you to build these two chips into child robots like we’ve been talking about.”
“Oh yes,” said Perky Pat, fondling the chips. “Dexter and Baby Scooter! We’ll build them tonight! All by ourselves.”
“Piece of cake,” said Walt gratingly. “Now why don’t you two humans get out of the way and let us work.”
Weird, weird, weird. I felt weak as a leaf. If I didn’t warm up my feet I was going to catch the flu. It was time to get out of this sealed concrete room. I looked at Roger and asked, “Do you have any food?”
“Yes,” he said, as discouragingly as possible. He wanted to stay here in the lab.
“Can I have some of your food, Roger?”
“Oh, all right,” he sighed. “There’s a camera that Kupp installed in the ceiling, so I guess I can keep an eye on things over the monitor.” Sure enough, there was a big lens in the center of the ceiling overhead.
“Good,” I said, pushing the elevator button. “Now give me some warm food and something to drink, for God’s sake, and show me where I’m supposed to sleep.” The two robots stared impatiently at us until we left.
Outside, the rain had slacked off and the gray sky was veined with the golds of sunset.
“It will be better weather tomorrow,” said Roger. “The first day of a new world.”
The front door opened itself at Rogers’s request, and for dinner the kitchen microwaved us three frozen plastic-packed dinners. I had a pork and a beef; Roger had a manicotti. To drink we had Scotch, tap water, or Scotch and water.