Budo smiled, a rare event. Self-satisfied, she initiated the download of the information she found from the subspace fabric directly into her memories. She then looked over at Mirage to share her good news, but he was asleep, slumped backward in his chair.
With her task completed, she considered waking everyone and sharing the information she had found, but thought better of it. They would need their strength in the upcoming days and this information could wait ’til breakfast. In the meantime, what other task could she accomplish?
Process ZPTS-0001 reminded her for the umpteen-billionth time that memory address AB07CD43:375FCA48 was inaccessible due to its location in a locked region of memory. Exasperated, Budo tried, once again, to kill the ZPTS-0001 process. Doing so was easy enough, but the memory reference manager subprocess, aptly named MemRefMgr, kept trying to fix the broken reference link and would restart ZPTS-0001 in order to satisfy the original request. Her main processing units were trapped in a cyclic loop of memory scans and process destruction and creation. While non-fatal and certainly not computationally intensive, Budo was working at less than peak efficiency. At least, that was the excuse she relied upon to rationalize her subsequent actions.
She firmly nudged Mirage awake. “My name’s not Judy,” he mumbled into consciousness.
Budo raised an eyebrow. “Neither is mine,” she replied, smiling again.
“Hunh?” Mirage rubbed his face and looked around the vid-wall for the chronometer he always had running. When he saw the time, he was fully awake. “Budo? Do you know what time it is?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I need you to run a diagnostic series on me.”
Mirage blinked. “Now?”
“Yes, now. I have a runaway process that is consuming processing cycles. It is … irritating would be the word.”
Mirage yawned then and audibly farted for good measure. “All right,” he conceded. “Where does Feld usually do this sort of work? What tools does he use? You know I’m not at all ready to do this.”
Budo rose from her chair. “Oh, you’ll be fine. I’ve seen you work.”
“Yeah, well, flattery will get my ass out of this chair. Alright, let’s go.”
Together, they descended the stairs and walked down the connecting tunnel. Every now and then, Mirage would yawn and stretch and let out a gaseous expulsion whose sound would echo off the cement walls. It wasn’t a quiet walk by any means. “I think I need to walk more often than I do,” he said off-handedly.
As they climbed the stairs, Mirage asked Budo, “So where do we do this?”
“My room,” Budo answered. “All the tools you need are there as well.”
Mirage replied, “Ok. I’ll meet you there. I need to get a drink first.”
Moments later, with a can of Cold Fusion firmly in hand, he paused at Budo’s door. He’d never been in Budo’s room. Come to think of it, no one except Feld had ever gone into Budo’s room. There was never any reason to, except for the periodic maintenance she required. He was nervous and newly caffeinated, but curious now as well. What did a robot’s private room look like? His curiosity piqued, he opened the door and walked in.
His jaw almost hit the floor. Budo stood before him stark naked; her simple full-length sashed dress lay on the floor about her feet. As he stood there transfixed, she reached up and removed the clip that had held her hair in place behind her head. Now, it fell in coppertone waves around her face and shoulders. She was beautiful and not merely anatomically correct to suit the purpose of her design. Mirage stood there enthralled, staring.
Budo smiled a third time. “Feldy had the same reaction when he first did this.” She paused then and asked, “Mirage, do you think it is possible that I was a boudoir unit?”
Mirage swallowed. “Yes. I think it’s very possible. Or, rather, I’m sure that you were built for such things. I can’t be sure of your past, though.”
Budo’s smile faded away. “Neither can I,” she said softly to herself.
“Ummmm, soooo, how do we do this?” He looked around then at the room. The furnishings themselves were spartan, as he expected, but the walls contained many posters. Three were of cats in humorous poses, including one kitten hanging from the end of a rope. Another was an ancient movie poster advertising an Asimov classic, of course. The rest were blacklight posters with bright yellow, green and orange patterns on black velvet paper. The patterns seemed to be very complex mathematical functions in 3-D. Mirage was most curious about what those looked like in blacklight.
Budo sat on her bed and opened the drawer of a night table. She pulled out a small black box measuring roughly 15cm x 10cm x 2cm. She also pulled out a power cable, an RJ-145 patch cable and a wired set of vid-specs. She then motioned for Mirage to bring a side chair next to her bed.
After connecting the cables to the box and plugging the unit into Barscape Prime’s power grid, Budo laid down on the bed. She then pinched a square perimeter of synthetic skin around her hip joint. As she did this, Mirage took another, closer look at the beautiful synthoid before him. The details of her construction were amazing, exquisite even. Her skin was unblemished, perfect, pale, but not sickly. Her attributes were not overly sultry, but inviting. If she’d indeed been built for pleasure, she would have been in the upper-class strata of the sex trade and would have fetched an obscene amount of coin.
As his eyes wandered over her admiringly, he found a mark high on the inside of her opposite thigh. Without thinking, he reached over and ran his finger over it to gauge if this was a built-in mark or a post-construction branding of some sort. The mark looked like two Kanji characters (武道). The skin around them was silky smooth and undamaged. He made a mental note to look them up.
“Mirage,” Budo said evenly, “even among robots, that familiarity is considered rude.”
Realizing where he was touching her, he removed his finger as though he’d been electrocuted. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly as his face flushed a few shades.
When she completed the square, the dense skin flap pulled away to reveal a titanium access panel. Mirage inspected the panel and, finding the catch, opened it and looked inside. There, he found the RJ-145 socket for the patch cable. It was a clean, yet obvious hack that Feld must’ve built into the unit to aid in diagnostics. What caught his eye, though, was a socketed chip module protected by a thin, bright energy field. It looked…
“That’s dangerous,” Budo confirmed. “Whatever you do, don’t touch it.”
“I won’t.” His doubts resurfaced. “Are you sure this can’t wait for Feld?”
“No. There’s no need. You’ll do fine.”
Unsure, Mirage exhaled noisily, put on the vid-specs and plugged the RJ-145 patch cable into the socket. Immediately, his vision filled with hundreds of abstract models of memory regions, subsystems, connections, processors, servos, hydraulic pumps and catheters, everything, all interconnected. It was an interactive living diagram.
“This is unbelievable,” he said in awe. “You are eye candy inside and out.” Moments passed as he immersed himself in the visual roadmap before him. “Is this stock or did Feld build this? And why the wires?”
Budo answered, “Feld built the interface. The box is a dedicated signal translator. It’s wired for security. He didn’t think that a wireless connection was appropriate.”
Mirage nodded. That made sense. As he floated around the 3-D map and learned the system, he saw the ZPTS-0001 process and the locked memory region. “I see it. ZPTS-0001 right? I assume I’ll need an administrative access code.”
Budo nodded. “Alef, bet, alef, kaf, alef, bet.”
Mirage chuckled. ‘Abacab’ spelled in Hebrew. Genesis references. True Feld.
Mirage tried the easy way first. He killed the ZPTS-0001 process, but it restarted as before. He considered killing the MemRefMgr process, but he was unsure what that would do to Budo’s memory handling algorithms. He also didn’t know how to restart it if it was necessary. So, he set about trying to unlock the memories.
It took about an hour of interactive dialog coupled with actively tracing through memory references and process tables and using up lots of patience, karma and caffeine. Eventually, he found a hidden, unnamed process running deep in her subconscious regions. That was curious, more so when he could not discern the reason for its existence.
“Budo, I found a process buried deep in your process tables. It’s running, but it has no name, nor any spawning information. Do you know what it is?”
“Which one?”
“PID: hexadecimal: CAFEBABE:5C0FFEE5.”
Budo did a deep internal scan of her own. It took about a minute, an eternity. “I see it, but I can’t see it. I mean, I have no knowledge of it. It doesn’t register in my primary or secondary caches and it denies all attempts at focus. Most peculiar.”
Mirage pondered the situation before asking, “Well, what do you want to do? I’ve exhausted just about all of my debugging skills on this. We could leave it alone, and wait for Feld, but you’re going to be stuck in that infinite query cycle. Or, I could try to access it or even attempt to kill it outright, though the latter might affect lots of other processes. Do you want to keep going?”
“Definitely don’t kill it. Although, frankly, I’d be surprised if you could. Otherwise, see what you can do. I don’t want to wait anymore. This whole situation is making me more and more nervous,” a state confirmed for Mirage through the process churn seen through the vid-specs.
“Ok. I’ll do my best.”
Moments later, Mirage discovered a hidden compiled code module in Budo’s memory banks named “__cinq_cafes__”. Without consulting Budo, he decided to launch it, which immediately presented him with an access code query. On a whim, he entered ‘武道’, the two Kanji characters from her leg.
It worked, but the results were less than satisfactory. A series of processes were initiated and immediately pegged all of Budo’s processing power.
“What’s happening?” Budo asked with growing alarm. “Mirage, what did you do?”
“I found a hidden code module and launched it. It seems to be related to CAFEBABE.” Mirage’s vid-specs were flooded with process status reports. “It seems to be unlocking and accessing the memory region, among other things,” he answered nervously. “Should I relock it?”
Budo began to panic. “I don’t think you can.”
ZPTS-0001 finally entered the locked region of memory and reported that Budo had never been to the Zonthra Pearls star cluster. Its task completed, it died quietly. That was the only good news.
The other processes began to reveal Budo’s hidden past as a steady collage of visual memories. Both Mirage and Budo could not help but silently watch and relive. Half an arn later, it stopped. During that time, Mirage tried to leave, but Budo’s forceful grip on his arm prevented him from doing so. And so, they relived Budo’s past together. When complete, the energy field over the socketed chip module failed and the module ejected itself and bounced off the bed and onto the floor.
~/~
In light of the previous night’s news from Proteus-VI, the morning’s breakfast was subdued. Bern looked troubled and Sondra’s eyes were tired and bloodshot. Everyone was quietly eating.
Mirage shuffled into the main room with a dazed and pained expression. Lippy noticed his entrance and called out to him, “Mirage, any more news from last night?”
When he didn’t answer and walked behind the bar instead, everyone stopped and took notice. With trembling hands, he opened a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and took a long pull. He then put the bottle down, rubbed his face, put his hands on the bar and hung his head.
As everyone looked on worriedly, he suddenly blurted out, “I need to take a shower,” and left the room.