Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief Read Free Page B

motors and joints. Junction boxes hung from the shelves, strapped-up masses of PVC conduit dangling like drying laundry.
    A couple of chunks of crumpled gold foil, something that might once have held and protected some piece of delicate equipment, lay on a shelf. Each shelf was neatly labeled: “Proprioceptive joint indicator.” “Visual/Tactile signal mixer.” “40 & 60 watt bulbs.” A bucket, a mop, and other cleaning equipment lay on the floor by the door, along with a shattered fluorescent tube and a transparent garbage bag filled with empty Diet Coke cans.
    He looked carefully, so he perceived it, but he also took pictures, as backup. If it came down to a question of how many Coke cans had been in the bag this particular morning, he didn’t want to rely on his unaided memory.
    There were fresh scrapes along the battered and stained concrete floor, along with mud and weeds, still wet. He followed the trail past a folded-back accordion door; into what looked like a vehicle maintenance and repair area.
    A heavy rack against the brick wall held complex legs ending in wide pads, springy wheels, a part of a carapace, an aluminum chassis, a collection of oculars, antennae, and other sensing equipment.
    What looked like a gigantic bug hung from a sling.
    Crude welds marked its carapace, and its six legs didn’t quite match. Spare legs hung askew, and a toolbox had been knocked to the floor, spewing nuts and bolts.
    Ungaro was Muriel’s private project, but Bernal still knew a bit about it, just from the invoices. A few years ago, a local start-up called Hess Tech had built a prototype planetary rover under a speculative NASA contract, supplemented by a grant from the state, which was trying to move some research business outside the Harvard/MIT zone near Boston. The rover, called Hesketh, was meant to explore earthlike planets on its own and had incorporated a lot of experimental technology along with its AI. Like anything that experimented with more than one thing at a time, it hadn’t worked that well, and a new administration had not renewed the contract. The company had gone out of business, and the developers went their separate ways.
    But one of them, Madeline Ungaro, had acquired the company’s assets and settled some of its debts. With a further grant from Muriel, she had moved Hesketh, its various parts, and its support gear out here to this lab, and continued working on it.
    Bernal looked at the mess of complex mechanical gear. Ungaro, as he understood it, was on the cognitive, not the mechanical side. She’d developed the intelligent processor that would guide the vehicle across rough terrain and, if possible, contact whatever life lived on that mysterious planet circling a distant star. More than once, he’d wanted to call her, just to chat things over. He’d been out of the field since Muriel had hired him, and he’d never managed the call.
    This ugly thing had to be Hesketh itself, or, rather one of its bodies. The name applied specifically to the processing unit, which contained whatever identity a self-directing planetary explorer had. The thing was supposed to be flexible and easily modifiable.
    This vehicle configuration was about six feet long and vaguely arthropod. One side of the carapace was open. A half dozen manipulator arms, very much like something you might see in an automated manufacturing facility, stood at the ready above the interior. Each arm was lipped with a different tool. They looked like they had stopped in the middle of something, but Bernal couldn’t tell what they had been working on or what had stopped them. A constellation of glowing LEDs communicated a message about the state of Hesketh’s universe that he could not interpret.
    The entire setup mixed sophisticated with crude. A lube gun lay on the floor, with two rubber gloves on top of it. If Hesketh had to be lubed up like this, how would it ever have managed to move around alien planets? Back when Hess Tech was