More impressively, when he turned and banged it against the wall, it clanked like metal. It didn’t dent; it didn’t become misshapen. It didn’t fall apart. So, he did it again. And again. Harder and harder each time until he was slamming the wrench down with full force. Enough to damage the microbots individually. Enough that a regular tool would have started to bend at the weak point in the neck if not just break entirely.
But it held. It didn’t warp or bend or break. Even the spot he was hitting didn’t appear to be taking damage, though surely he was using enough force that those microbots should have shattered.
“How?” He breathed, looking at the wrench like it was some magical device.
And it was. He’d broken many a tool in his time just like that. How could this thing, just a series of interlocking microbots, withstand the forces he was using?
Haven laughed, rocking happily as she showed him her tablet. “Looking! It measuring the forces. You are being so strong.”
He couldn’t read the human glyphs she was showing, but he did understand the force graph that had formed. The microbots were measuring the force of his swing. No. More than that. They’d measured the speed, the angle, the force transmitted up his arm –everything.
“How…” He said again, staring at the wrench in wonder. “The microbots are so small. They’re so… so useless. How did you manage to make them do this?”
Haven held out her hand again and, almost reluctantly, he passed the wrench over to her. Immediately, it started twisting up her arm, coming to rest around her arm like a bangle. Iteven began to indent, making designs in itself like it really was a piece of jewelry. She touched it with an affectionate smile before focusing back on him.
“They’re not being useless,” she said. “They’re just not being utilizing correctly.”
“Utilized correctly? They’re so small, they can only do one thing.”
“Yes. And they are only doing one thing. They’re holding on.”
“But with the force I was applying, their cilia should have snapped. That entire wrench should be in pieces. No, it shouldn’t even have maintained its shape when I began holding it. How did you make it do that?”
Nanobots were, essentially, just smaller versions of microbots. Similar tech that was just newer and more compact with improvements in the same basic purpose. But they shared the same shape and general abilities.
A singular microbot was like a little bug. It had a body – usually rectangular or square, though newer nanobots, he understood, were ovular – and coming off the body were tiny little ‘legs’. Those microfiber steel legs were usually on the faces, though they could be on the edges, and were what helped it move or, when combined with others, allowed them to cling together.
Those cilia were a microbots greatest strength and weakness. Those legs that allowed it to move and connect also served as input sensors. So, everything it sensed, all the commands it picked up, the interlocking of multiple bots to form patches, traveling across a surface, were all done through those tiny, hair like cilia.
But they were also impossibly delicate. They sheered easily and, when broken, would tend to fragment into pieces. Even if they could be gathered, they couldn’t be repaired. A nanobot with sheared legs was useless. Just an unmoving box that could neither communicate nor connect. Because of that, the life span of a singular nanobots couldn’t even be measured in a standard year.
Because they were so short lived, they had to be frequently replaced. And because of that, it was practically a necessity that they be cheap. If they were short lived, fragile,andexpensive, no one would use them. That just meant that a lot of credz couldn’t be put into making them, rendering them even more simple.
And, added to that, the microbots she had were doubtlessly old. So, it was even more impressive that she’d somehow managed to doanythingwith them.
“I be finding them in a corner in recycling,” she said, petting the bangle like it was a pet. “They’d all gathering together. Just a silvery blob. Didn’t understanding what they were. But they responding to touch and electricity, so I knowing they must be something…”
Vytln listened carefully as she explained, only occasionally needing to stop to think of a word that she didn’t know very well.
It was the early days of her time on Holotulle. Back when she wasn’t sure if she was going to be following Grace for certain, but still somehow always managed to find her way back to her. She’d found a recycling center and was going through it frequently, looking for things to scavenge and utilize. A lot of it was broken and irreparable. But she had a chance to learn even from broken things. It was a time of collecting and experimentation for her.
The blob of microbots in the corner of the recycling facility had seemed to be nothing more than gunk on the floor. It was even gathered in the corner, like dust and oil and sludge that just built up in places like that. If it wasn’t for the slight silvery sheen, she might never have given that gunk pile a second look.
As it was, she had. And when she pushed it experimentally with her foot, it hadn’t moved the way she expected. It dented in like sludge would, but then it kind ofbouncedback. Restoring itself to its former shape in a way that seemed almost alive.
She’d come back the next day and done it again, poking it with a stick this time. It did the same thing. No matter how she messed with it, the blob always came back to its original shape. Until she finally took a chance and poked it with a dying shock stick. One she’d since broken, deconstructed, and gotten rid of. But at the time, it had enough juice that it sparked on the microbots.
And they immediately spiked up, turning into a shape more reminiscent of a sea urchin. Or like hair sticking up all over the place after being electrified. It was that action that, more than anything, told Haven it was something more than just a blob.
She’d gathered all of it up into a jar, like a bug from the wild, and taken it back to her hidey hole. It had taken weeks, tendays, for her to connect to them. And once she did, it took even longer to be able to communicate with them.
Maybe it was because she didn’t know the limitations of the microbots, or maybe it was because she was willing to work with them more than anyone else would have, or maybe it was something he didn’t understand, but she was able to get the microbots to respond to her in a way that was extremely unusual.
She didn’t want to give up on them. The microbots themselves seemed like they didn’t want to give up either. They were long past their functional lifespan. Yet, the way they clung together seemed almost like a group banding together for survival.
And if they weren’t giving up, she wouldn’t give up on them either.
All of that, she explained to Vytln who listened with a rapt expression. The entire time, she was stroking her little mites affectionately. It had to be a human thing, because Garnet had a similar attachment to her cleaning robot.
