watching and remembering. It takes time, but you gotta build that trust.
And that’s why the insurgents attack the trust.
Which leads us to the incident …
Okay, sure. Like I said, SAP doesn’t fight. He doesn’t carry a gun or even a knife, but if SAP One decides to detain your butt, his metal fingers are stronger than any handcuffs. And the insurgents know it. That’s why they’re always trying to get him to hurt somebody. Probably about every two weeks, they pull off some stunt to get him to malfunction. But they always fail. Always.
Not this time, apparently.
Well, let me get to that.
Normally, I don’t go into the city. SAP walks home to the green zone every few days and we fix him up. I’ll go into the city with the armored squads and sweep for listers, but never without serious backup. Human backup, you know.
The SAPs are pussycats, but our troops have become more, uh, fearsome, I guess. People figure out pretty quick that only humans pull triggers, and, honestly, we’re unpredictable compared to the robots. Locals far prefer a robot with rigid behavioral guidelines to a nineteen-year-old kid raised on 3-D video games and carrying a semiautomatic rifle.
Makes sense to me.
Anyway, this day was unusual. SAP One dropped from radio contact. When the Raptors zeroed in on his last known, he was just standing at an intersection in a residential part of town, not moving or communicating.
This is the most dangerous part of my job: recovery and repair.
What caused this?
That’s what I’m wondering, too. My first step is to review the last transmissions from SAP One. I pinpoint what looks like standard monitoring behavior. Through Sappy’s eyes, I see that he is standing at this intersection, watching a steady flow of cars snake by and scanning the retinas of pedestrians and drivers.
This data is a little funny, because Sappy sees the physics of the whole situation. There are annotations about how fast the cars are moving and with how much force—stuff like that. Diagnostically, though, he seems to be working fine.
Then a bad guy shows up.
Bad guy?
Retinal match to a known insurgent. A high-value target, too. SOP calls for Sappy to apprehend and detain, rather than just catalogs last-known location. But this guy knows damn well that this will happen. He’s baiting Sappy, trying to get him to cross the street and get hit by a car. SAP is strong. If a car hits him, it’d be like someone rolled a fire hydrant into the street.
But SAP doesn’t take the bait. He knows he can’t move or he’ll put the cars in danger. He can’t act, and so he doesn’t. Gives no indication that he even saw the insurgent. Clearly, the insurgent feels that SAP requires more motivation.
Next thing I know, the screen fritzes and starts to reboot. A big gray lump streaks through his vision. It takes me a second to figure it out, but somebody dropped a cinder block on my Sappy. It’s not that uncommon, really. Minimal damage. But at some point during the reboot, SAP stops communicating. He just stands there like he’s confused.
That’s when I know—we’re gonna have to go get him.
I scramble a four-man team immediately. This whole situation is bad. An ambush. The insurgents know we’ll come to recover our hardware and they’re probably already setting up. But the local police won’t deal with broken robots. That falls in my lane.
Worse, the Raptors fail to identify any nearby targets on rooftops or in alleys. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of insurgents with AK-47s; it just means we don’t know where they are.
Are you saying that the incident was just the result of a hard knock on the head? The machine is traumatized on a regular basis and yet it has never responded this way before. Why this time?
You’re right. A knock on the head didn’t cause this. In my opinion, it was the reboot. It was like the robot woke up from a nap and decided not to take orders anymore. We’ve never seen this
And that’s why the insurgents attack the trust.
Which leads us to the incident …
Okay, sure. Like I said, SAP doesn’t fight. He doesn’t carry a gun or even a knife, but if SAP One decides to detain your butt, his metal fingers are stronger than any handcuffs. And the insurgents know it. That’s why they’re always trying to get him to hurt somebody. Probably about every two weeks, they pull off some stunt to get him to malfunction. But they always fail. Always.
Not this time, apparently.
Well, let me get to that.
Normally, I don’t go into the city. SAP walks home to the green zone every few days and we fix him up. I’ll go into the city with the armored squads and sweep for listers, but never without serious backup. Human backup, you know.
The SAPs are pussycats, but our troops have become more, uh, fearsome, I guess. People figure out pretty quick that only humans pull triggers, and, honestly, we’re unpredictable compared to the robots. Locals far prefer a robot with rigid behavioral guidelines to a nineteen-year-old kid raised on 3-D video games and carrying a semiautomatic rifle.
Makes sense to me.
Anyway, this day was unusual. SAP One dropped from radio contact. When the Raptors zeroed in on his last known, he was just standing at an intersection in a residential part of town, not moving or communicating.
This is the most dangerous part of my job: recovery and repair.
What caused this?
That’s what I’m wondering, too. My first step is to review the last transmissions from SAP One. I pinpoint what looks like standard monitoring behavior. Through Sappy’s eyes, I see that he is standing at this intersection, watching a steady flow of cars snake by and scanning the retinas of pedestrians and drivers.
This data is a little funny, because Sappy sees the physics of the whole situation. There are annotations about how fast the cars are moving and with how much force—stuff like that. Diagnostically, though, he seems to be working fine.
Then a bad guy shows up.
Bad guy?
Retinal match to a known insurgent. A high-value target, too. SOP calls for Sappy to apprehend and detain, rather than just catalogs last-known location. But this guy knows damn well that this will happen. He’s baiting Sappy, trying to get him to cross the street and get hit by a car. SAP is strong. If a car hits him, it’d be like someone rolled a fire hydrant into the street.
But SAP doesn’t take the bait. He knows he can’t move or he’ll put the cars in danger. He can’t act, and so he doesn’t. Gives no indication that he even saw the insurgent. Clearly, the insurgent feels that SAP requires more motivation.
Next thing I know, the screen fritzes and starts to reboot. A big gray lump streaks through his vision. It takes me a second to figure it out, but somebody dropped a cinder block on my Sappy. It’s not that uncommon, really. Minimal damage. But at some point during the reboot, SAP stops communicating. He just stands there like he’s confused.
That’s when I know—we’re gonna have to go get him.
I scramble a four-man team immediately. This whole situation is bad. An ambush. The insurgents know we’ll come to recover our hardware and they’re probably already setting up. But the local police won’t deal with broken robots. That falls in my lane.
Worse, the Raptors fail to identify any nearby targets on rooftops or in alleys. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of insurgents with AK-47s; it just means we don’t know where they are.
Are you saying that the incident was just the result of a hard knock on the head? The machine is traumatized on a regular basis and yet it has never responded this way before. Why this time?
You’re right. A knock on the head didn’t cause this. In my opinion, it was the reboot. It was like the robot woke up from a nap and decided not to take orders anymore. We’ve never seen this
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