The Life Engineered by J. F. Dubeau Page B

and repair? Shouldn’t you do something?”
    I didn’t like being snapped at, not after being nearly blown up twice and ensnared by a little twerp of a Capek. How was I supposed to know what was wrong with him? I’d only technically been alive for at most thirty-six hours. I was in no position to rescue anyone. In fact, so far it had been other Capeks that were forced to pull my synthetic ass out of the fire.
    Then again, perhaps it was time I started pulling my own weight.
    Without a word I pushed myself toward the closest of Koalemos’s bodies. There was something melancholy about the pile of lifeless shards floating around the bridge, bumping lightly against one another. I put the thought out of my mind and started pulling the little robot into pieces.
    As I began to disassemble the shard to reach its guts and brains, I accessed all the information about the Von Neumann I had available. There was, to put it lightly, a lot. Luckily, it wasn’t hard to narrow down my field of research. Unlike the data from the Spear of Athena, my logs were neat and tidy. Von Neumann– class Capeks are a fairly unique breed. While all classes of Capeks are drastically different from one another, Von Neumanns are particular in that they rely on a stable, continuous quancom network to hold their consciousness together. The immediate assumption about them, seeing as they behaved like a swarm, was to think they were a collection of individual, linked entities. If that was the case, the removal of a single part of the swarm, while a blow to the whole, wouldn’t have that dramatic an effect. In this case, however, the loss of a shard was almost synonymous to a combined lobotomy and amputation.
    The cognitive shock and subsequent gap in the network left the victim unable to function normally. Like a biological brain, new pathways had to be constructed for the consciousness to function once more. Automated systems might have been able to do the trick, but without external aid the little Capek might remain unresponsive for a very long time.
    There was a long list of things I needed to accomplish to revive the remaining shards of Koalemos. Three dozen of these involved tricking the consciousness into thinking the network was intact. Another handful required replacing systems proprietary to the missing shard (that part took the longest). Then I had to build a brand-new system that would prevent the synaptic net from crashing each time it noticed it was incomplete.
    All of these fixes were temporary. I didn’t have the tools or the means to effect all the required repairs to make the little Von Neumann whole again. The best I could do was patch him up to basic functionality and hope to bring him back to his progenitor, but even then there were no guarantees that he would ever be the same.
    After running a handful of tests to make sure I wouldn’t turn him into the Capek equivalent of a drooling vegetable when I flipped the switch, I looked at the individual-specific files Yggdrassil had uploaded into my memory. Almost all of them were locked down, preventing me from accessing personal information about each Capek on record. Yggdrassil had told me that, should my own on-board systems recognize the need, the file on the specific Capek I was helping would unlock. As I sifted through the directories, two files were flagged as unlocked—mine and Koalemos’s. I sighed in relief.
    The Von Neumann’s file answered several questions I had about the interactions of certain subroutines. Nothing dramatic, but details that could in certain circumstances have caused minor problems with the relationship between the shards and various parts of his personality. I addressed the issues accordingly and started putting the little robot back together. Thankfully, since there was nothing physically broken on him, I didn’t have to repair or modify each of the shards individually.
    As I put in the last few pieces, I went through the file a final time and noticed a