On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:24:01 -0400, T Jr Hardman
wrote:
>FDRisdead@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> When are we going to release the giant robots to patrol the borders,
>> shooting anyone who dares tries to enter our country and steal all of
>> our dishwashing and field work jobs away from good, Jesus fearing
>> Americans?
>
>Excellent idea.
>
>http://www.thomashardman.com/text/darkness/six.php
>
>
>
>In a basement vault, a man began to trip heavily, and knew despair, and as
>his guts cramped and heaved and his reality began to twist around him and
>the mad voices coming over communications channels became madder still, or
>frighteningly silent, he and his partner (who had been watching real-time
>scanner displays with ever greater horror as blood flowed like water on the
>streets of the District and in the suburbs beyond) inserted keys into a
>special panel, and simultaneously, twisted.
>
> ------
>
>They strode out of their vans. They were glittering, and matte black, and
>camouflage. They were made of metal, and plastic, and semiconductors. They
>had their own internal power supplies, superconductive storage coils which
>had been charging for weeks (and could possibly vaporize an M-1 Abrams tank
>if shorted out), and could parasitize outside power sources. Their mantis
>shapes walked out of the parking lots where the vans had been sitting for
>weeks, and they headed for downtown.
>
>They were designed to be border defenses. They had rather massive armament
>well in advance of any presently deployed by any national military, and they
>were as strong as any forklift. Their behavior patterns were modeled upon
>those of bees, and they were swarming now. They had a rudimentary machine
>intelligence, and within that intelligence were several "ideas", all etched
>in shielded ROM. Their exteriors were coated with a conductive
>metallic/liquid crystal film, and the only route to the inside of their
>brains was specially modulated encrypted FM-sideband pulses received through
>their antennae. The charge on the body coating Faraday-shielded their
>sensitive electronics from electromagnetic radiation, and the armor beneath
>the coating shielded them from most portable weapons fire. Their very
>mobility shielded them from most large-arms fire. They faded into the back
>yards of Bethesda, Rockville, and Alexandria. The people who saw them
>couldn't believe their eyes; it was bad science fiction come to life on
>their homestreets. The border defenses paid no mind to people. They simply
>walked around them, tons of steel nimbly side-stepping. The people weren't
>hard to avoid anyway, as anyone who saw a border defender coming towards
>them immediately retreated to the limits of vision.
>
>The border defenses were rather lame at first. They had difficulty
>maneuvering around fences. One of them managed to get itself trapped in
>someone's back yard. It walked around in the back yard looking for the gate
>it had brushed closed in passing, and it took almost fifteen minutes for it
>to arrive at the conclusion that since the fence was of a finite height of
>less than the height of its stride, it could step over it. The next fence it
>came to was immediately surmounted, the other border defenses had no
>difficulties with fences after the first one transmitted its discovery to
>the others.
>
>The ones wandering down through Rock Creek Park spent a lot of time learning
>things. They discovered that water resists progress. They also found out
>about mud. The ones who strode purposefully down the bike paths made much
>better time than the ones that were in the mud, and after comparing learning
>experiences, muddy border defenses were seen hurrying down the bike paths to
>rejoin the vanguard of the advancing force.
>
>The border defenses had the "idea" that the border to defend was the border
>between the District of Columbia and the surrounding environs. At the
>moment, their primary mission was to assemble at the District lines, and to
>assume spacing appropriate for securing the border.
>
>The totally independent think-tank that had developed the border defenders
>concept had expected them to be deployed around military camps in hostile
>territory, and so they had expected the bodies of their product to be
>directed by substantially less flexible machine-minds. They had rather
>envisioned a limited response capacity for their telefactors, responses such
>as: shoot on sight, pursue and apprehend/shoot on failure. They had never
>expected the rather indestructible bodies to contain terabytes of
>flash-memory coupled to semi-independent parallel processors in analog
>neural networks with the absolute latest in fuzzy logic/AI/learning machine
>soft-and-firmware.
>
>Internally, the machines had octuple redundancy, capacity for multiple
>restart, task distribution restructuring and procedural streamlining. The
>machines were almost as complex, "mentally", as the average mouse (though
>they "thought" orders of magnitude more rapidly), and were designed to be
>coldstarted with absolutely minimal "knowledge". They were expected to
>learn, and did so quite well, considering that they were the products of a
>mere five years of intensive research piled on top of a few decades of
>general accumulation of knowledge instead of millions of years of evolution.
>
>So it was no surprise that when a man in the early stages of hallucinogenic
>giardiasis ran into a border defender in his '72 Toyota Corolla that it
>reacted by picking itself up, stumbling a bit as it adjusted a bit to two
>suddenly dysfunctional legs, and began to take his car apart. It hadn't yet
>considered the possibility that the man within the car was a separate
>object, so it took him apart as well.
>
>It learned a lot. It determined (through laser spectrography) that the
>object it had disassembled was a source for lubricants. It had no need of
>lubricants at the moment so it merely stored the information and transmitted
>it. It noticed that there were very similar objects nearby, and it took one
>of them apart as well. Despite the dissimilarities, it classed the objects
>under a single type, which it filed under the set of objects having four
>wheels. One of the objects, though, had had an internal component of greatly
>differing materials and construction. That object had moved. The other
>object in the same class had no similar component, and did not move. It
>looked for similar objects.
>
>It found many, and all of those that moved had one or more of those greatly
>different internal components. Several of the four-wheeled objects were
>moving slowly down one of the hard, blackish surfaces that it itself
>preferred to travel on. All had the soft fluid-filled internal components
>within. It advanced to intercept them. Most of the vehicles stopped moving,
>and the internal components separated from their vehicles and moved rapidly
>away from it. It compared images of these objects with each other, and
>extracted a statistically central "idealized" image, and hunted within ROM
>for matches, and found that these were HUMANs. It was greatly constrained
>(at a very basic level) to avoid HUMANs by at least five feet if possible,
>and it had disassembled one of them. It sat still in the street for a few
>minutes, and then, unable to come up with any other options, sent a signal
>to the other units to globally-receive a limiting-set. This was the
>equivalent of a last cry of horror, coupled with a picture of the procedure
>leading to the horror. It transmitted its "idealized" image of HUMAN, and
>HUMANs within a four-wheeled moving object, and its action of stopping a
>moving object resulting in a violation of rootlevel restrictions and
>constraints. The other units acknowledged reception, and all of the border
>defenders logged off of the general band.
>
>The unit sat there and in its machine mind pondered towards a solution of a
>basic conflict. It needed to get into the assembly zone, ideally at its
>assigned location of Chevy Chase Circle. It also needed to avoid any
>possibility of allowing the four-wheeled vehicles with their HUMANs inside
>to move to within five feet of itself. HUMANs it could avoid, as per
>instruction; it had avoided several already. It noted that with the
>exception of the HUMAN it had disassembled, all of the other HUMANs had been
>moving away from it. It finally came to a decision, and started towards
>Chevy Chase Circle again, but this time it stayed on the sidewalk.
>
>It had progressed about a mile when it became aware of recurring impacts on
>its armor. It localized the impacts as to quadrant-of-origin (assuming
>projectiles, it hadn't bumped into anything) and turned a sensor array to
>the right side to scan for the projectile source.
>
>Its sensors indicated momentary point sources of high intensity infrared. A
>processor array associated with the sensors accessed its flashRAM and noted
>the source as a RIFLE. It ranged the source object at 135.2241 meters.
>Computing the lag between the infrared emissions and the impacts, it
>determined the muzzle velocity, and classed the RIFLE as a .30-06
>bolt-action RIFLE and dismissed the instance from "threat" status. It
>continued towards its destination.
>
>It was a quarter-mile from its intended post when a HUMAN approached it. The
>human was almost within five feet, and the border defender had already been
>projecting potential courses which would simultaneously bring it closer to
>its post, avoid the human, and avoid the strip of hard, blackish substance
>where four-wheeled (and a few two-wheeled) objects moved. The human stopped,
>and the border defender continued on its way.
>
>The optical sensor array of the border defender noted that an object
>attached to the human was now oriented so that the axis of the cylinder
>aligned with the sensor array. The optical processor had a very low-level
>routine designed to detect close-range cylindrical axis-orientation, and
>when it noted the cylindrical axis alignment, it triggered an alarm within
>the greater mind of the border defender.
>
>The great mantis shape halted its stately 15 KPH march towards Chevy Chase
>circle, and the head ducked as a blast of buckshot flew through the air.
> From a point between the sensor arrays, a barely visible violet beam traced
>a line from the border defender to the man with the shotgun. It hit his
>head, dead on between the eyes, and his head blew steam and brains all over
>the pavement. The shotgun clattered to the ground, and the mantis shape
>resumed its march.
>
>No more of the humans approached it, and it reached the assembly point
>assigned it without further delay.
>
> ------
>
>
>
He asked for it, he got it. yuk |