“Alpha, I don’t think I can fix your arm. I’m wondering if you can, with your good arm. I could get a mirror so you could see inside-”“I am sorry. Without a Robotech cube in my library, my abilities in this area are limited to diagnosis only, sir.”

“I figured as much,” Derec said. “But it never hurts to ask.”

“Sir, I detect a deactivated robot in the room. Perhaps it would be possible to salvage the appropriate parts from its mechanism to repair me.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Derec said gruffly. “I can’t do it, not without micromanipulators. Besides, there’s some structural damage in the shoulder mount, which isn’t replaceable.”

Sighing, Derec pushed himself back from the bench and crossed to where his paltry inventory of robot parts lay spread out on the floor. As it had many times before, his gaze fell on Monitor 5’s arm. For the first time, he picked it up and examined it closely.

“I guess you’re just going to have to make do with one wing,” he said. “There’s a lot of it going around.”

The robot made no reply. Derec turned the Monitor’s arm over and tried to flex the elbow. It resisted-consistent with the fact that the hand had been locked in a literal death grip on the silver artifact.

Consistent, Derec realized with a sudden shock, except that the arm contained no joints. Not at the elbow, not at the wrist, not at the knuckle. Oh, the elbow was bent at an obtuse angle, the wrist twisted slightly, the fingers curled. But insofar as he could tell from looking at it, the arm was incapable of movement.

There were any number of syntheskin coverings which would flex and wrinkle realistically while masking joints. But this was no covering. It was rigid to the touch and absolutely seamless, like a plastic casting. Puzzled, Derec carried it back to where the robot sat.

“What magnification are your optical sensors capable of?”

“Only a limited amount, sir-one hundred power.”

“At what resolution?”

“That would vary with the distance of the object being observed, sir. The maximum resolution is approximately ten micrometers.”

“That’s better than I can do with that thing,” Derec said, nodding toward the inspection scanner. “See what you can tell me about the structure of this arm.”

“Sir, I am not knowledgeable in this area.”

“You can see and you can describe. I’ll settle for that at the moment.”

“Yes, sir. May I hold the limb?”

Derec surrendered the arm, and the robot held it at eye level in its rock-steady grip. “At ten power, the surface is undifferentiated. Increasing magnification now. Granularity becoming evident. There seems to be a regular pattern. Pattern resolving now into hexagonal planar surfaces. Maximum magnification.” The robot paused for a fraction of a second. “The surface appears to consist of twelve-sided solids in close association.”

“What?”

“The surface appears-”

“I heard you. Look at another spot.”

The robot turned his head slightly to the left. “I observe the same pattern.”

“The end,” Derec snapped. “Look at the end, where it broke off.”

“The surface is much more irregular, but it is made up of the same dodecahedral units.”

“All the way through?”

“Yes, Derec.”

Derec stood staring, dumbfounded. What the robot had described suggested a completely new approach to robotic design-not an evolution, but a revolution. It sounded as though the Supervisor robots had been built-no, it couldn’t be.

“Kill your right shoulder control bus,” Derec snapped.

“The circuits are now inert,” the robot said.

Derec separated the three-conductor control wire from the damaged right arm and threaded it out through the opening where he had been working. He touched the connector to the stump end of the Supervisor arm, and it clung there as though it belonged.

“Activate the control circuit. Send a command to bend the elbow.”

Almost instantly, the disembodied Supervisor arm slowly began to flex. “Look at the joint,” Derec demanded. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“The changes are taking place more quickly than my scan rate allows me to observe,” the robot said. “However, I infer that the dodecahedrons are undergoing some type of directed rearrangement.”

“Flowing into a new shape. The material of the arm is transforming itself.”

“Those descriptors are imprecise but consistent with my observations. The technical term for such reorganization is morphallaxis.”

Derec felt for his chair and sat down shakily. The Supervisors had been built out of billions of tiny crystalshaped modules-a cellular structure. Each had to contain kilometers of circuit connections, megabytes of programming. It was the cells that were the robots. The robots were more like organisms.

What a feat of engineering they represented-the essence of a robot in a package a few microns in diameter. Properly programmed, they could take on any shape. A Supervisor was an infinity of specialized forms held within one generalized package.

As he marveled, Derec was reminded of something he had not thought about for several days. The cellular design bore the same distinctive stamp that the asteroid colony’s lifts and environmental system had. Superficial simplicity-achieved on the strength of hidden complexity. Elegance of design, novelty of approach. It was another brush with the minimalist designer, and it gave Derec one more reason to seek to escape from the raiders.

Because somehow, somewhere, he had to meet the designer.

Chapter 10. More Than Semantics

After a short break for a late lunch of the same monotonous foods, Derec set about installing the cellular arm in place of the robot’s original limb.

It was not an easy task, requiring both structural and functional marriages between two wildly divergent technologies. Derec worried about the functional link first, and not only because he expected it to be the tougher challenge. If the robot could not control the new arm, there was no point in going to the trouble of attaching it.

But the cellular arm apparently used the standard command set and carrier voltages. Though there was no evidence of any contacts or wiring in the stump end, the arm responded no matter where Derec attached the control bus.

Experimenting, he found that the arm responded even if he attached the control bus to the skin of the forearm, the palm of the hand, even the tips of two fingers. It seemed as though the cellular microrobots were smart enough to accept the command input from any location and channel it to the appropriate sites.

Once attached, the arm responded not only to all the robot’s basic motor commands, but even to some novel commands. With coaching from Derec, the robot was able to “think” an additional joint onto his arm between the elbow and wrist. In another test, Derec asked the robot to try to modify the cellular thumb and forefinger into long, slender microclamps.To his delight and amazement, it could. With the right command codes, the material of the arm seemed to be infinitely malleable.

But no matter how Derec prepared the mounting ring the arm was connected to, the right shoulder joint remained weaker than the left was or the original had been. At one point, the cellular arm broke loose completely when the robot tried to lift an object weighing less than twenty kilos. Even after he reattached it, Derec had doubts it would withstand the stresses of, for instance, a brawl.

“Looks like you’re going to have one strong arm and one smart one,” he told the robot. “Try not to forget which is which.”

“It is not possible for me to forget, sir.”

“This isn’t an off-the-shelf replacement,” Derec said sternly. “Until you’ve burned what it can do and can’t do into your pathways, you be careful with it. And never let anyone but me see you doing tricks with it, understand?”