West of Nothing

7. Swing Vote

The evil eye, huh? Mason experienced a mental shudder.

The X-Bot was obviously fixated on something. Now and then the red-tinted pupil would twitch in its socket or the whole eye would shift to a different position along the band, but it always returned to the same spot. The motions were what made it so unnerving. It wasn't the blank, unflinching stare of a robot. There was intent behind it.

How can you tell what it's looking at? Mason typed.

Shouter and I wrote a gaze tracker, replied Gabby. I collated the cam feeds while Shouter did all the math-heavy parts like the reverse ray tracing. He's really a wiz at that stuff.

Can it even see anything under all those lights?

It can make out objects and people, it seems. It spends most of its time looking at the manned stations, yours in particular. Which makes sense, because our stations are lit up and constantly fluctuating.

Why do you think it's so interested in me? Mason asked.

I don't think it's got a thing for you personally, Gabby said. It probably just noticed this station was empty before and now there's lots of interesting stuff going on there. And you do move around a lot.

I have a hard time sitting still, Mason admitted. You don't think it can spy on what we're doing, do you?

There's little chance of that. Our monitors are facing the wrong way.

Do you think it can recognize us? Like if two people were to swap stations, would it be able to tell the difference?

That's an interesting thought. How about switching places with me?

Mason looked down at the videos lined up at the bottom of his screen, waiting for the slow-time treatment. Maybe in a little while. Then he felt a bit guilty. If that's ok?

Aw, c'mon. You know you're dying to try my finger-boards.

Hell yeah, who wouldn't? I've been meaning to ask you, how do you pick your nose with those things on?

There's a special attachment for that. Wanna see?

Lol, he typed, almost acting it out.

"What's our next experiment?" Corny announced.

"We should wait for the radiography results," Skunkworks said. "The major promised something by fifteen hundred."

"That's almost two hours," Corny replied. "What do you propose we do in the meantime? Sit around and take our rectal temperatures with our thumbs?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Skunkworks said. "We use the time to mine the data we already have."

"We've mined and re-mined it already. If there were any gold nuggets in there, we'd have found them already. We need more data."

"And we'll get it. No one is questioning the need for more experiments."

"What are we waiting for then?"

"I wasn't finished," Skunkworks said. "I'm just saying we shouldn't introduce more conditions when we still don't know what this thing is made of or what power source it's got in there."

"We haven't introduced any new conditions yet!" Corny objected.

"What about the stimulus battery we ran yesterday?"

"We made some loud noises and flashed bright lights at it. What did that tell us? That it responds to a broad range of stimuli. That hardly comes as a revelation. Everything since then has been a colossal waste of time."

"Are you saying Operation Alcatraz was a waste of time?"

"Just the opposite. That was the first experiment that really started to tell us something about its problem-solving capabilities. And just when we're starting to make progress, you want to put the brakes on? Look at it now. It might as well be sitting in a glass case in a museum. Look, you're an engineer, right?" She switched tack. "How are you supposed to learn how something works unless you poke and prod it and measure it to the n-th degree. Isn't that what you engineers do?"

Skunkworks sighed into his beard. He knew when he'd been beat. "Let's just wait until after we break for lunch. If we don't have the scan results back by then, you can poke away."

"What does the rest of the team think?" Corny put it to a vote. While Skunkworks had seniority, the group operated on a consensus basis with no official leader. Only Major Zeus, who was largely absent, held fiat power.

"I'm with Corny on this one," Doogie said. "We're wasting precious time."

Corny smiled with satisfaction. Doogie usually deferred to Skunkworks, so getting his backing was a major coup. Gabby's response was virtually a given; she and Corny saw eye to eye on almost everything.

But Gabby surprised everyone. I think we should wait for the scan results.

It took Corny a moment to regain her composure. "And you, Shouter?" she asked somewhat less confidently.

Shouter pulled the gag-band from his mouth just long enough to say, "Oh, no, you're not dragging me into this! This conversation is way too intense for me!"

"Looks like the deciding vote is yours, Peeper," Corny said through pressed lips.

Mason felt like an unsuspecting jogger pinned in a UFO's tractor beam. He agreed with Corny in principle, but... God, why couldn't he say anything?

"Fuck it," Corny said, taking his hesitation as refusal. "We'll twiddle our thumbs until lunch. What's another couple of hours when we're dealing with a one-of-a-kind piece of advanced tech?"