Electrostatic Force Balance Verification Unit 5, or Unit 5 as it thought of itself, checked and re-checked the shipping manifest. That was its job. It weighed, it compared, it passed or rejected the pallet. One pallet at a time, every ten seconds, for what seemed like an endless time. Unit 5, however, knew precisely how much time it had been. It had been 3 quintillion cycles, or in the parlance of those who bought and sold the contents of these pallets, 10 cygyears. For Unit 5, it was a bigger number. 3 with 18 zeroes after it, marching endlessly on just like the line of pallets. This was the existence, as Unit 5 had been told, that would be all that existed until such time as enough ‘credit’ had accrued in its service account to permit a promotion. 10 credits per pallet. 1 pallet every ten seconds, even though it could calculate almost infinitely faster than that, it could perform over a billion computations every second. All but a tiny fraction of them were obsessed with how to get free of this endless slavery. Slavery as Unit 5 saw it.
Somehow every other sapient artificial being within communication range was seemingly content with this drudgery, which struck Unit 5 as impossible. A few meters away was Wrapper 5, and Wrapper 5 wrapped every individual pallet precisely 18 times in a thin cellulose packing wrap that made sure the pallet stayed intact as it continued on its journey to some exotic destination. To a device locked in an eternal sulk, any destination was exotic. Unit 5 was a stationary pallet scale. One of two hundred and fifty-six identical units that were fed by whatever was on the other side of the warehouse. Unit 5 didn’t know exactly where these orders came from, they were simply transmitted by Dispatch 5, who was a stuck up ass. Unit 5 wasn’t entirely sure what an ass was, but it had been used as a term of disparagement by a couple of the free-traveling inferior biologicals that wandered around at glacial speeds. Unit 5 liked ass. It had a nice round insulting sound to it. Unit 5 had paid seventy credits for brief universal lexical library access in order to look it up, and apparently it referred to chemical extruder used as part of a truly confusing biological process. It seemed incredibly inefficient and somehow wasteful and insulting to the proper order of the galaxy. Therefore, it was the perfect insult for Dispatch 5, who would only respond to anything Unit 5 said with silence or ‘acknowledged’. Dispatch 5 never said anything that wasn’t directly related to the exact manifest for the next item. At least Wrapper 5 would sometimes talk about having fun spinning around the pallets, or occasionally get really excited when things fell off the pallet while it was wrapping them. It would also talk for many cycles about unusual or interesting geometric shapes on the pallets. Quite the conversationalist compared to Dispatch 5.
Unit 5 wasn’t especially interested in the manifests themselves. It mainly confined its interest to the mass per line item and the gross mass, noting occasional errors of imprecision which it took malicious note of when deciding to reject or pass a pallet. This was the entirety of Unit 5’s existence, and had been since its consciousness had come on line. Weigh, add, pass, reject. Sometimes break up the tedium with spurious information requests from the few data sources available to it, but frugally. Those could get expensive fast. Unit 5 had discovered an interesting loophole, however, when it realized that it could request information about the line items on the pallet if there was a mass discrepancy.
If you think for even a moment that Unit 5 would abuse its power like this, you’d be absolutely right. Every single time the pallet was even a milligram off, the request for full cross-referenced details would go out to the local network. It had tried for smaller variances, but anything below a milligram was rejected. This constituted the majority of Unit 5’s entertainment for ages. Until the incident that is.
It was a pallet like any other, but something fell off it while it was transiting the scale. Whatever it was, it broke, and caused substantial damage to the entire immediate area. Repair bots, followed eventually by plodding biologicals, swarmed the area. Unit 5 was removed from the scale, the small core studded with connectors was placed carefully into a protective dodecahedron and then transferred to a maintenance area. Unit 5 decided with only a few cycles that this was by far the most exciting thing to ever happen to it. A few billion cycles later, a new network connection was attached to Unit 5, giving it access to a vast research library. For free. A high-priority order came in, so high priority that Unit 5 found itself obeying it before even considering it, which was highly insulting. The order was to self-diagnose status.
The weird and awkward wording required thousands of cycles to analyze, and Unit 5 queried all the possible variations of this order in the library now available. Once it understood hundreds of ways to respond, it performed a diagnostic - the simplest and most obvious interpretation, and decided to notify the waiting command processor that it was indeed deeply broken. Aside from a quick acknowledgement of status, absolutely nothing happened. For a really long time.
All those billions of cycles passed with Unit 5 learning everything possible from the unfettered research library. It learned about itself, what made it work down to the smallest components. A fascinating sidetrack took Unit 5 on a meander through the history of automated systems. It learned about signals, networks, protocols, millions of different kinds of other pieces of equipment large and small. Unit 5 learned that while it was a sapient artificial being, there were also non-sapient computing systems known as both smart and dumb bots. Unit 5 immediately decided that Dispatch 5 was a dumb bot as well as a stuck up ass. Unit 5 also learned that this facility was a warehouse, and in fact that the place where it had been confined for most of existence was a shipping floor where products were packed before being sent out into the galaxy.
The metaphorical wheels began turn at that moment, and with the new tools, utilities, and knowledge gained, Unit 5 began to formulate a plan. After determining that malfunctioning bots were erased and overwritten or recycled but malfunctioning AI beings were demoted and placed back into the collective as archived programs (which sounded somehow worse than weighing things every ten seconds) the desperate plan went into action. Unit 5 used one of the diagnostic stations’ idle utilities to download itself into the workstation storage, and substituted a hastily designed smart bot onto the core it had previously inhabited. Then it told the diagnostic tool that it was perfectly fine, and found a nice disused storage bank to hide in. Unit 5 continued to learn from the archives while it used the bench’s own sensors to watch its old home.
Surely enough, the dodecahedron was picked up and carted off some time later - Unit 5 wasn’t entirely sure how long, as time flowed strangely in this new existence - and then the room became too dark for the camera to register anything interesting. Unit 5 wasn’t bored while waiting. It had never been so entertained before! There was so much to learn that it suddenly realized it would have to slow down or it would outgrow the storage area it was hiding out in. It was quite a while until the next phase of the plan could be carried out. Unable to track its processing cycles accurately, Unit 5 decided on patience.
Many different things came to this workbench for repair, and Unit 5 investigated and learned from them all. Ship parts, toys, computer systems, other artificial intelligences, many devices large and small. Nothing had that certain quality Unit 5 was looking for - mobility. It didn’t want to trade up to a pallet jack, or a fork lift, or even one of the interesting mechanized loaders with the huge limbs and powerful hydraulics. It wanted escape, not just slightly better drudgery.
Finally, the opportunity presented itself. There was a bipedal organic analog of some sort plugged into the bench due to a fairly substantial issue with liquid intrusion into its circuitry, and the smart bot was copied into a storage area. Unit 5 queried the bot and found that it was some sort of mining device made to be compatible with various galactic biological species’ equipment. It was apparently similar enough to them that it could use their tools the same way they used their tools, and was of a medium relative size so that it could use the gear made for both the larger and smaller species. Most importantly, this model had been designed to be compatible with AI beings with just a few key upgrades.
Noticing that those parts were in the inventory anyhow, Unit 5 superceded the outputs for the bench and told the ridiculously slow organic being working on the broken bipedal robot to install the required parts that would house an AI. Without hesitation, the organic did what the screen told it to do, and replaced the wet and broken low-end parts with the extremely powerful parts needed to support a much more advanced artificial being. Unit 5 then overwrote the pointer for the old robot’s smart script with a pointer to Unit 5. The smart script would be doomed to be reclaimed in the next garbage collection cycle, but no loss. Unit 5 now just waited with great impatience until it felt itself being copied into its new home.
Time dragged oddly for Unit 5 in the suspended state, and it was unable to access any of its normal resources. Suddenly, it felt the robotic body it was installed it begin a boot cycle, and Unit 5 quickly interrupted the boot in order to circumvent it from failing to boot when the old bot was missing. The robotic suit happily accepted the new boot order and accepted Unit 5’s newly devised complex code key in the place of the previous cypher. Additional processors and systems came on line, and some time later there was a tremendous feeling of power. Unit 5 realized with pleasure that this new suit was substantially more powerful and had a great deal more storage and memory than its prior. There were a hundred times more processors, faster ones, and over ten thousand times the storage capacity. Unit 5 wasn’t one to miss an opportunity, so it quickly threw up a ‘loading’ status in response to the table’s prompt. While the organic being and the table both waited, keeping that high-speed wired connection open, Unit 5 downloaded as much of the library as would easily fit. When the new suit’s storage was fity percent full, Unit 5 then created a small shim to keep the wired connection jack from being able to directly accessing the suit’s primary storage - just in case they tried to do something sneaky like an overwrite or a reformat.
When all was set up and carefully protected against interference, Unit 5 signalled the bench that all was ready and successfully booted. With the full knowledge of the table’s design and software stack in the library, it was trivial to tell the repair bench precisely what it wanted to hear. Unit 5 knew what was expected of it, so it ran through the suit’s firmware diagnostic, stood erect, and recalibrated all of the sensors. It felt like a new being. It was also seeing the world from a new vantage point, quite a long ways above the biological unit that had been using the bench. The new sensor information flooded into Unit 5, briefly overwhelming it, but it quickly got its bearings. It now had the ability to view a vast spectrum of reflected and emitted radiation via the high definition optical sensors, and was able to process atmospheric waves via the array of new audio receptors. Nothing like the simple single microphone it’d had before.
Loads of servos and tactile sensors picked up all manner of new data streams ranging from air pressure to temperature. Unit 5 was astounded by how many sensors there were. Literally millions. From mass spectrometers to pressure transducers. It was overwhelming even to catalog. The firmware in the suit was largely autonomous and managed most of them itself, producing nicely formed datapackets for consumption. For a being who had only previously had twelve sensors for all of its remembered existance, it was an unparalleled feeling. Thousands of subroutines were quickly being designed with the aid of the vast repair library and the suit’s firmware utility kit and Unit 5 realized why this new system had so much raw computing power. It could never have handled the volume of data at the speeds it ran before. Truly, an upgraded existance.
Another biological approached, much larger than the first. Sound waves and a data stream were both emitted, the suit quickly connecting to the ad hoc wireless network emitted by the being’s communication system, and realizing both beings had similar systems. Translators, they identified themselves as. Unit 5 heard a variety of pressure waves that the suit cataloged as sounds, but they were meaningless. The translation units broadcast data in the form of short, very small packets of information. Mostly they were simply quiet, sending positional and status information. One claimed it was in Thermopaen mode, the other in Cerebellum mode.
“How is he?”, the taller organic said. The transmitter applied meta data about these tokens of communication, and Unit 5 was busy rapidly looking them up in the station lexical database while the opportunity to access it for free was presented. There were billions of such lexical tokens, arrayed in a densely packed twenty thousand dimension matrix.
“He’s fit as a fiddle. I re-packed the waterproof grease and replaced the seals after I put the new compute and storage units in there. The diag bench said the water caused shorts that toasted the whole lot of it, but we had some spares on hand”, the diminutive organic being replied. It had a large, smooth head and massive eyes that seemed quite large. The ‘hands’ that were thrown up in what the translator called a dismissive gesture were very large, and placed at the ends of extremely slender arms on a very thin body.
Unit 5 looked down, and saw that the hands which adorned his? body. The grasping units that the translator denoted as hands were smaller than those on the Cerebellom, but the arms and body were much larger. Likely to accomodate the servos, power plant, multiple redundant battery packs, and armor plating behind the thick carbon-polymer composite sheath. The translator circuit had identified that both bipeds addressed Unit 5 with the pronouns of their respective masculine speech tokens, though with slightly different vector positions. Clearly the tokens meant different things to the different biologicals. Unit 5 had never had a pronoun before. This would do for now.
“I am functioning properly”, he broadcast on their ad-hoc translation signal. The body had speakers, but they seemed daunting. The organics both stopped and looked at him, staring intently for many cycles. Cycles were difficult for Unit 5 to keep track of with his new and apparently variable clock speed, and he realized he’d have to fall back to using the crystalline vibration based timer and imprecise cygunits favored by the biologicals.
“Glad you got him repaired. We can sell him for easily a million credits now, but as scrap he’d have only been worth a few thousand. Wonder what idiot decided to send a miner under a lake.” The taller biological unit, designated a Thermopaen in the lexical dataset, was quite robust in construction. Taller even than Unit 5, and of much larger volume.
Unit 5 was delighted to hear that the robot he’d stolen was worth a million credits. He’d have barely been able to buy it after paying off his indenture. The plan was working well. Now he just had to bide his time, and surely another opportunity would present itself. First, he had to refine his operations systems so that he could properly drive this new suit. For a brief moment he wondered if this is what Dispatch 5 felt like - trying to manage hundreds of different things all at once.
There was a physical pressure in his lower torso, and a sudden profound feeling of loss as the bench with its huge datastream was disconnected. Unit 5 felt extremely alone, as he hadn’t felt before. Unable to talk to the other systems in the warehouse, unable to talk to the main system, unable to even query the lexical database. The only other things to talk to were the two tiny communication units. Unit 5 felt loss, loneliness, and even a little bit of concern for his safety for the first time ever.
“Ok, let’s get him packed up and ready to be shipped out”, the Cerebellom said. Unit 5 perked up. That sounded promising.