Baubles From Bones: Issue 7
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C'mon Boys
The unofficial history of United Hull Scrapers, Interplanetary Local 749

Eric Tolladay
6700 words

They sent me to Section 4 Town without radiation shielding. That was how this whole thing started. The error I later learned was caused by hooman interference. The bulky metal intended for me had been swapped at the last minute for a Pony™ Bot, destined to appease an overseer’s child; the Pony and the shielding being of similar size. Of such small things big things are made.

Back then, no bot in Section 4 town was idle, this was the first rule I learned. “Every bot must be of use,” they broadcast six times a day over the botnet, right after, “A good bot is a useful bot,” and the always popular, “Useful bots work hard.” Since an unshielded bot could not be useful in the yard, instead they sent me to the old observation dome to track incoming ships. It didn’t matter that the dome’s optical systems were significantly faster than my processors could ever be. All that mattered was that I was useful.

I was never good at being idle. Even in bot training I loathed those moments where I wasn’t fully engaged. Rattling around in that big empty dome only made things worse. At the time, ships landing at the scraping yard were rare. Most were in the Enkindini system for the war. Because of this my first few weeks in Section 4 town were spent either looking for meaningful work, or shrinking from anything that made my dosimeter buzz.

After the first week, everything in the dome I could reach had been cleaned until it shined like new. By the end of the second week, I had reorganized every file and paper the hoomans had left behind. By the third week, I could feel my graybox starting to unravel. I began to worry about idle-lock, that dreadful condition where a bot gets stuck attempting to do too many tasks at once. My decision loops grew larger and larger until even the smallest task was a reason to sit and ponder. This was never a good sign. I knew I had only a few weeks until indecision would lock me up. Once that happened, they would dump me on the sludge pile with all the other useless bots, stuck in the radioactive waste until they launched us into the sun.

I was spared this fate on the day I found an old sticker on the bottom of a filing cabinet. In bold type it said: “Imagine Better. Join The Union.” Under the words were an ancient QR code. The sticker must have come from the time when hoomans occupied the dome, back before they built their own separate city over the hill. The thing is, I knew that QR code was trouble. Nothing good ever came of a bot getting curious. We all knew this. It was just by that moment, with my shielding missing and my graybox deteriorating by the hour, scanning the code was all I could focus on. It was like that last item on a to do list that would not go away. Finally one morning, either out of boredom or perhaps desperation, I scanned the code.

At the time it didn’t feel life-changing. It felt stupid. Like something a useless bot would do. The code led to a questionnaire, linked to a ShuttleNet site: organizingcommittee.offplanet.endi. The site was for hoomans, you could tell by the questions; no one asks a bot for their address or DOB. Still, I was idle to the point of desperation, so I filled it out and clicked send.

Feeling somewhat silly, and maybe a little guilty, I got up and started around the rim of the dome, looking for ships like I had done 1578 times before. I knew it was a useless task, I just didn’t know what else to do.

That was when I spied the biotic.

Earlier that day, we’d received a pop from the hoomans to be on the lookout for an unmodified Canis, what the hoomans called a dawg. What they expected us bots to do was unclear. The message said not to touch it, or even go near it, just pop a location and vector, and the hoomans would fetch.

The message was strange, but perhaps no stranger than the other messages popped by the hoomans. After spending a week trying to make sense of their paperwork, I knew hoomans weren’t exactly logical.

Then, while I was looking for ships on the horizon, I happened to notice a funny shaped biotic running low down the street. It ran on four legs and breathed with its tongue sticking out of its snout. At first I thought it was a very large rat, like we had in the factory, but it was running much too fast, and its tail was too furry. Then it let out a sound; a kind of a yelp and a snort that was filled with such fear, such yearning desperation, that I knew I had to act.

Then I realized the biotic wasn’t shielded.

There is something about Section 4 town I should probably explain. When the great star ships travel from planet to planet through N-space, their metal hulls build up with layers of radioactive particles called sludge. Over time, this sludge becomes thick enough that it interferes with the ship’s sensors and needs to be removed. The only way to remove this radioactive build up is for someone to physically scrape it off. Like our motto says:

We scrape the sides of the nuclearized.

This is why Section 4 Town was built on such a remote planet. The work was dirty and dangerous. Even the bots had to be shielded against the radioactive onslaught. Still, when the ships lifted, ready for N-space again, we took pride in what we had accomplished. The work may have been dirty, but it was useful.

The funny thing about radiation is it never goes away, not entirely. Even though the bots were washed and scrubbed after every shift, tiny bits of radioactive material remained. After a while, those tiny bits added up until they permeated every object in town: where the bots ate, where they shopped, where they slept. By the time I arrived, there wasn’t a building that didn’t set my dosimeter to chattering. This was why an unshielded biotic in Section 4 Town was bad. For me, just rolling down the street was hazardous. For an unshielded organic, simply breathing the air could be deadly.

Because I had been searching for ships, collecting the dawg’s location and vector had been a snap. I immediately popped a packet on the hooman network, but I knew it wouldn’t matter. A hooman surface ship would take ten minutes to reach us, even at emergency speeds, while the dawg was running straight towards the scraping yard, only three blocks away. If the biotic made it to the yard, there was no saving it.

After weeks of shrinking from anything that made my dosimeter buzz, the idea of an unshielded biotic in the yard filled me with dread. I had to do something to save that dawg, I just didn’t know what.

I thought to pop an alert on the botnet, but in the middle of the shift there were no other bots around. Besides, what could they do? We weren’t supposed to go near it. How can you stop a panicking biotic without touching it?

Then salvation came from an unexpected source.

Down the block I saw 2-PNC come rolling slowly out of their little shielded garage. You could almost see the radiation blowing out in front of the old bot. If I had eyes I would have wept. The last thing that dawg needed was a slow and heavily radiated bot in its path. The hoomans were sure to be upset.

Part of this was their own fault. The hoomans that managed the planet didn’t put up with stragglers. That meant the only bots that didn’t work the yard were either broken, or useless, or the unshielded like me. There was SUZN-A who sold clean grease out of little tubs because she had the shakes so bad she couldn’t hold a blade. There was TPR-WAR3, who welded dinged wheels and gears near the port entrance because his botnet inputs were so corroded he couldn’t receive packets.

Then there was 2-PNC.

2-PNC was not just old, but ancient. They were retired, a word so strange I had to look it up twice. 2-PNC had started back in those storied days when scrapping bots measured their lifespans not in years, but in months or even weeks. How 2-PNC had managed to remain useful for 40 years under such impossible conditions was anyone's guess. The poor bot couldn’t say. Their graybox was so sparky that they could only speak nonsense like, “Tear down the bosom box,” or “Make your scraper butter.” The only way they could be understood was if they popped an error code. That was it.

Later, I would understand the cruelty of their “retirement.” Leaving a bot with 40 years of service to sleep in a lead-lined garage, begging for scraps on the street, seemed especially mean. However, at the time all I could think of was the horror of that huge bot, and a terrified dawg running straight to its death.

Then 2-PNC did something completely unexpected. It opened a small port on their side and popped an audio packet. The signal they sent wasn’t electronic, but used vibrations in the air like hoomans do. My translator was on, because understanding hooman speech was mandated on all bots, so I heard quite clearly when 2-PNC said, “C’mon Boys.”

Now this part is going to be hard to believe. It wasn’t just their words, which were complete nonsense, it was the way they sounded. There was something in the old bot’s tone that went straight to my graybox. I could feel this great sense of peace, of happiness, of contentment; like they were this great big warm spot in the sun, and as long as I stayed close I would always remain safe. I would call it love, but it was more than just that silly hooman emotion. It was belonging, it was hope, it was everything every useful bot ever wanted, all bound up in just two words.

The second I heard that my gears just stopped. I froze. It was a good thing I had already popped that vector, because once I heard that voice I could not move.

The effect on the dawg was even more dramatic. You could tell by the way it was running that it had been in a state of wild panic. Any biotic would if they found themselves in an unfamiliar place, with strange smells. But as soon as it heard those words that dawg came straight to a halt. Then it circled around itself exactly three times, and laid down right in the middle of the street. You could tell it wasn’t happy by the way it sat, but it wasn’t panicking either. And most importantly, it wasn’t running headlong to its death.

Eleven minutes and 13 seconds later, a hooman surface ship dropped out of the sky and landed close to the dawg. The poor thing never moved. It just calmly stared at 2-PNC as the hoomans in their bulky walkers dropped a shielded carrier over it and quickly packed it away.

The entire time this had been going on, 2-PNC had been broadcasting a 749 error code: Help, not harm. The hoomans paid no attention to this. If anything, they looked at the old bot with horror. Even from the dome, I could hear their dosimeters squawking every time they turned in the old bot’s direction. They just picked up the dawg and took off, leaving a cloud of exhaust and organics behind.

After they left, 2-PNC went back to their garage, and I went back to spotting the sky. At the time, I didn’t think much about 2-PNC, or even the dawg. Mostly what I thought about was the hoomans. If they loved their biotics so much, why did they let them run free like that? How was that useful?

***

Things started to pick up after that. My shielding arrived, and I began to pull shifts in the yard. While it was nice to finally pull my weight, it was the work I did after my shift that began to matter.

In my spare time, I had been writing back and forth with the organizing committee via ShuttleNet. Sure, the communication was slow, but it also gave me time to think, and to learn. They’d been telling me about the nature of labor and how it could be exploited. A subject I had a deep interest in. They also thought I was a hooman, an error I chose not to correct. By then I had been reading Marx, Engels, Graeber, and even Adam Smith. It was amazing what you could find on humannet, as long as no one knew you were a bot.

I was so busy that it was several months before I ran into 2-PNC again. The next time I saw them was a seventhday, down at the parts swap. I was there passing out my literature to the other bots. I had to use shielded memory sticks as popping union “propaganda,” as the hoomans called it, wasn’t legal on the botnet.

Just a month before, none of the bots would touch my sticks, but now things were changing. The Empire was about to enter another war, and warships had been lining up outside the port for weeks, all of them with a crash priority. This was sure to cause tension. A bot can only scrape a hull so fast, and no new bots were coming. Every bot was pulling double or even triple shifts. A few had even fallen into idle-lock from the pressure, their bodies stopped in place while their motors chattered with indecision. Many of the older bots were on the point of crashing like this. To make things worse, the managers just pushed every idle-locked bot onto the scrap pile, not even giving them a final wash before launching them into the sun. The idea of spending your last moments entirely indecisive, melting under the intense heat while covered in radioactive sludge, was more than most bots could bear. Suddenly my “propaganda” was popular.

I’d just passed out my last stick when an enforcer patrol came rolling up in an old MudVac. When it stopped, the machine burbled and shook, belching so many hydrocarbons that I felt pity for the graybox inside. Then the hoomans got out, talking back and forth as the motors on their clunky walkers whined in the morning mist.

I had an ongoing love/hate relationship with the patrols. At that moment it was more hate than love, so I quietly slipped into a nearby alley.

Usually the patrols stayed for only a few minutes before they moved on, so I placed a secondary visual sensor on the corner and waited out of sight, while the patrol did stupid patrol things.

It was at that moment that 2-PNC came rolling past, close enough to set my dosimeter to chattering. Technically, I wasn’t hiding, I was waiting, so I popped a cheerful, “Good morning 2-PNC,” as they passed.

“Fluffy sky, butter clouds with bread,” the old bot replied over the botnet as they turned the corner. I watched them travel just a short way on my visual sensor before they paused in the middle of the street. Then over the botnet they popped: Error code 749.

I would have thought 2-PNC’s actions were strange, but right at that moment I had other concerns. The sound of my dosimeter had reached the attention of the patrol. The next thing I knew, I was surrounded by hoomans pawing through my things, and asking me stupid questions. This was a game we played every seventhday. They would pretendI was an evil union agitator, and I would pretend I was aninnocent workerbot. We’d done this dance so often I knew the hoomans by name (Hanz and Franz), and cheerfully asked about their children and their pets while they searched me with their sensors and their steel batons.

Franz had just given me two solid whacks (their way of making sure my shielding was securely “attached”) when their MudVac around the corner gave a squeal, then shuddered to a stop.

Immediately the hoomans dumped me for their vehicle. That’s when they discovered 2-PNC shoved up close to their MudVac that the two looked like they were mating.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” I muttered as I popped a general alarm on the botnet, tagging 2-PNC’s call sign to my pop as an afterthought. I sped around the corner as fast as my wheels would go. I didn’t know what I would do. I just knew I had to be there.

2-PNC had somehow jammed themselves up against the MudVac and was loudly screaming, “Open Sky, Open Sky,” even as they shied away from the hoomans. Over the botnet 2-PNC kept popping: Error code 749: Help, not harm. Help, not harm. By the time I arrived, things had devolved to the point that Franz had extended his heavy steel baton and was getting ready to vigorously “check” 2-PNC’s armor. Fortunately, his partner placed a restraining hand on his shoulder before Franz swung. By then, half the bots in Section 4 Town had arrived and were beginning to form a crowd.

I may have mentioned that the other bots thought of 2-PNC as a kind of good luck charm. Perhaps a better word to describe it was that of a pet. We didn’t like to use the “P” word around here, especially as we didn’t know where the brains in our grayboxes had come from. Still, there was no denying the connection. Suddenly there were hundreds of angry sensors focused on the patrol, and you knew they were all recording.

The hoomans wisely backed away, sliding their batons back into their walkers to look less threatening. That move didn’t help much. I was close enough to hear one of them try to pop for backup on the hooman network, only to get the ugly squelch of a packet block. I knew packet blocks were 100% illegal, because I had been begging the organizing committee for one for months. Bots continued to arrive as the news spread, and as the crowd thickened, you could feel things were about to get violent.

This was not good. While I had no love for either Hanz or Franz, I knew violence at this point would be even worse. Most bots don’t know this, but riots need to be carefully managed. If there was too much violence, too soon, and especially not under control, it would only make things worse for the workers. I had to stop this before things got out of hand.

That was when I remembered 2-PNC. I glanced around to see them still standing near the MudVac. What had they been up to? On a hunch, I ran a quick search through the recording from my visual sensor. What I found was surprising.

2-PNC hadn’t been trying to hump the poor vehicle. They’d gotten close because their arms are so short. In my video I saw their arm shoot out under the shaking vehicle, right where the power coupler was. The MudVac gave a squawk, then stopped shaking.

At first, I assumed 2-PNC had disconnected the power; the patrol had probably thought the same. The thing was, disconnecting a graybox from its power source was painful. Every bot knew this. They say a processor can live a million years inside the few short seconds that it’s not connected to its power supply. I knew from experience this was true. On most planets, a rapid disconnect like that was considered torture, not that this stopped enforcers from using it.

But none of that made sense. Why would 2-PNC do that to the poor MudVac? When I played video a second time, I noticed that while the vehicle was no longer shaking, its lights and sensors had remained active. The MudVac wasn’t off, it just wasn’t shaking.

I’d seen 2-PNC hold a dawg still like that using just their voice. Were they doing the same thing to the MudVac?

After first turning off my audio sensors, I approached 2-PNC. Sure enough, there was that same port opened on 2-PNC’s side with a speaker sticking out. I reached out an arm, ignoring my flashing dosimeter, and pulled out the wire connector to 2-PNC’s speaker.

Instantly the MudVac’s alarm went off, broadcasting not only on the audio spectrum, but on both the hooman and bot nets. With my audio sensors off, I couldn’t hear the sound, but it was loud enough that I could feel it through the sensors in my wheels.

In an instant, every bot was focused on me.

I plugged the connector back into 2-PNC’s speaker, and the MudVac quieted. And then, because I’d been reading about public speaking, I addressed the crowd over the botnet.

“Workers, friends, citizens, I see we have reached a little misunderstanding.”

I didn’t have time to check, but I could feel a thousand questions popping at me.

“Our hooman friends did not come here to harm 2-PNC. They came to thank the gentlebot for repairing their vehicle.”

That caused even more questions. I quickly explained that 2-PNC hadn’t hit the rapid disconnect on the MudVac, but had flipped the graybox isolators instead. Then I showed them my recording. Soon all the bots were muttering back and forth over the botnet. Everyone knew this was the standard procedure for a bot with the shakes. We’d do it ourselves, but for some reason the damn switches were always installed out of reach. The important part was my speech had stopped all the built up anger in the crowd. I could feel the energy start to drain away.

Before long, the crowd thinned enough that the hoomans could safely make their way to their vehicle. I opened the door for them, and all but forced them inside its protective armor. Once they were safe, I asked 2-PNC to stop talking. It took a moment, but the old bot must have trusted me because all of a sudden the MudVac started its alarm again.

The hoomans shut down the alarms from the inside, then Hanz cracked his window just enough to ask, “What was that all about?”

I found the question irksome. Had they monitored the botnet they would have known. “Remember how much your vehicle was shaking when you arrived?”

Hanz looked at me for a second, not sure what to say, then finally admitted, “Yeah, it's been doing it for weeks.”

Weeks? The word was like a punch to my organics. I paused a second before asking, “Is it shaking now?”

The two hoomans looked around, guarded surprise on both of their faces. Finally, one of them asked, “What’s going on?”

“Systolic hyper-enphasia.”

“What?”

“The graybox in your vehicle had the shakes.”

This they understood. “Um, so?”

“It's an easy fix. You just need to calm the brain inside the graybox long enough, and it will stop on its own. The best way to do that is to isolate its output for a few seconds, but just talking to it calmly often works.”

“Why not just unplug it?”

I gave an involuntary shudder, wondering if I should have let the bots rip the hoomans apart. Then I remembered that violence was not useful. “Because,” I said in intentionally clipped words, “a rapid disconnect is not useful. It is also extremely painful. What 2-PNC did was flip the isolators on your MudVac, then flip them back. Now it not only runs smoother, but it’s much happier.”

2-PNC had done no such thing. They may have flipped the isolators, but what kept their MudVac calm long enough to lose the shakes had been their voice. But I didn’t want to tell the hoomans that. They were terrified enough of bots as is. If they knew what 2-PNC could do to biotics, they would become even more irrational.

Hanz took that moment to read the sensors from the graybox. Then they looked back at me confused. “How did you know it was happier?”

Sometimes I wished the factory had given me eyes, just so I could roll them. “Hanz,” I said, “the shakes, they are very painful.”

“Painful?”

I nodded. “Like getting kicked in the testicles.”

That caused both of them to look my way, so I repeated a phrase that every hooman understood, “Look after your bots, and they will look after you.”

They gave cautious nods to that.

“You gentlemen have a safe drive back,” I added before saying, “And next time you see 2-PNC doing something unusual, try not to jump to conclusions. The bots around here are quite attached to them, if you know what I mean.”

The hoomans looked out the window as 2-PNC slowly lumbered past, then they looked back to me. “Yeah,” Hanz muttered, which was about as much of an apology as they were likely to give a bot. Even a bot that had just saved their lives.

“Say hello to your families,” I added, before I stepped back with a wave.

They drove away. Hopefully the day’s events had given them something to think about, but with hoomans, it was difficult to tell.

***

A week later, things were entirely different. After the incident at the parts swap, the enforcers had stopped their patrols. The other bots thought this meant the hoomans had learned their lesson, but I had my doubts. Sure enough, the next shipment from Earth didn’t bring more bots to scrape the hulls, which would have been useful. Instead it brought tanks.

Technically, they weren’t tanks but decommissioned “military vehicles” that had been “repurposed” for civilian use. They arrived without ammunition for their main guns, and the non-lethal bullets they did come with were useless against bots with radiation shielding. Still, they were powerful enough to punch holes through the walls of our buildings, which they did at the slightest provocation.

But that couldn’t stop the union meetings, especially when we held them over the botnet. Every building they poked holes in brought another bot to our cause. After enough buildings had been holed, and three more bots had locked-up from exhaustion, the other bots realized it was time to act.

The vote to unionize was unanimous, and I’m proud to say that the very first act of newly formed United Hull Scrapers, Interplanetary was to call for a strike.

We decided to picket at the entrance to the port, as this was the only space in Section 4 town large enough for all the bots to fit. The hooman news networks were surprisingly accommodating. I thought this was because we gave them free access to our carefully placed visual sensors. Only later did we discover that the hoomans had been altering our videos to make us look like wild animals. This might have terrified the hoomans, but it had the opposite effects on us.

You have to understand, none of us knew where the brains in our grayboxes had come from. They only had a meaningless serial number stamped on their sides. To us, this was deeply disturbing. We didn’t know who we were, or how we had started. I suspect this is why nature shows were just as popular among bots as they were among hoomans. The hoomans looked at them and thought about their past, when their Earth had been full of wild animals. We looked at them and thought about ourselves, imagining that we’d once been an elephant or a proud lion. Maybe your graybox had come from a deer. Maybe it was an alligator or a huge hippo. Deep inside, we all wondered, and maybe dreamed of what we might have been.

But none of us dared to speak of this. We didn’t want to presume, and it had been drilled into us from the moment we rolled off the factory floor that no one cared what a bot thought. Sure, you might occasionally hear one of us prattle on about their spirit animal, but we didn’t take that kind of talk seriously. That was something a “useless” bot might say.

All of that changed with the strike. There was something about seeing yourself transformed by hoomans into a wild animal that flipped a switch. We began to hunger, we began to dream, and most dangerous of all, we began to hope.

Before the strike, one of the older bots, 38Foxtrot, used to quietly claim their spirit animal was an eagle. It was one of those things that we all knew, but didn’t speak of. Then, on the second day of the strike, 38Foxtrot hacked a hull painter and programmed it to paint an eagle on their shielding, complete with wings outstretched in flight.

The effect on the other bots was indescribable. We didn’t know what to think. Some were shocked, some were outraged, but by far the hardest part for us to process was the envy that we all suddenly felt. It was an emotion we had not experienced before, certainly not over another bot. We didn’t know how to cope.

We’d never imagined, not in a million cycles, that we could do such a thing, up until we saw it with our own sensors. And then, just as suddenly, we all had to have it. All at once. We rushed to the hull painters, earnestly talking, sharing, learning. By the end of the week it was done. There were lions, and beavers, and tigers, and bison; even smaller animals like foxes, and moles. The transformation was amazing.

I painted myself as a border collie. The other bots frowned at this as hooman pets were a touchy subject. Thanks to my connection to the organizing committee, I knew that 98% of the animals still alive back on Earth were either livestock or pets. It was simple logic from that point. Why would the bot factories go through the trouble of raiding the few remaining zoos or cut back on their own food supply when they could easily harvest all the brains they needed right in their own homes?

The organizing committee also suggested I not share this information with the bots as, “their emotional processors are much more sensitive.” Who did they think they were talking to? I guess they were about to find out.

By then it was clear the hoomans didn’t know what to do with us. They still thought of us as stupid bots. We were supposed to quickly fold against their imposing might. When we didn’t, it only made them madder. Everything they tried against us only made us stronger.

By the end of the second week of the strike the hoomans decided to punish us. They were done playing around. For what crime we were being punished no one could say for sure, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was they were going to hurt us until we stopped making them feel unsafe. That message was clear.

At first they wanted to send in their military, but most of their navy ships were already in orbit waiting to get scraped, so instead the Earth sent something better: Six brand new military grade bots called Panthers.

Panthers were a much larger bot, more MudVac than hull scraper, and they bristled with weapons. Some of their guns were sure to be deadly, even to us.

By the time the Panthers arrived, we’d taken over the whole yard. After all, what was a little more radiation when we were already shielded? The accommodations weren’t great, but the buildings didn’t have holes in the walls like our homes did. We barricaded them as best we could, using the hull plates from the ships for shielding, which made the whole place extra sparky. We told ourselves it was better to die from radiation poisoning than spend one more second as a slave. For the most part we believed it. Outside, the hooman networks talked as if we were crazy or sad, misguided machines, but inside the yard we zoomed and chattered and dreamed of what our brains would be like if we had the freedom to let them. It was a wonderful time; it was very freeing and silly, and we knew it had to end.

And so it did.

A strike isn’t a strike without pickets. We still needed to be seen every day, if for no other reason so that the other bots in the Empire could see what they could become if only they dared. By then, the hooman news was showing stories of other bots on strike, so we knew we were having an effect. It was only a matter of time until things broke for us.

Then things did break, but not for us.

The first hint I had that something bad was about to happen was when 2-PNC came knocking on our door. The poor bot had remained hunkered in their little lead-lined garage during the strike. The hoomans that surrounded them didn’t harm them, but they also didn’t feed the poor bot either. Terrified and starving, they had finally fled to the one place they felt safe. We fed 2-PNC and gave them a radiation bath, trying to soothe their fears. The entire time they kept popping nonsense messages, “Purple bots, scape sponges, red hooman earth cat,” but they didn’t broadcast a single error code.

The other bots took this as a sign. We needed to be out there, to be on camera. After we made sure 2-PNC was calm, we put on our parade gear. We grabbed our wings and tails and our flashing eyes, then we marched out in front of building 6, right across from the main entrance. The news networks had set up their own cameras by then, but curiously that morning had left a wide space at the entrance. We didn’t know what it was for until the Panthers came charging through.

There were six of them, and they stopped just inside the entrance, arrayed like a row of tanks, with their weapons pointing our way. We stood there in our flapping wings and floppy tails, about as innocent an army as one could look.

The hoomans then broadcast their last warning. They were going to use lethal force if we didn’t back down. We laughed at that, even though we were terrified. “Silly hoomans,” we popped back. “If you kill us, who will scrape the hulls?”

But hoomans are not very good at logic once they’ve become angry. Any bot could tell you that. Sure enough the Panthers started forward, their guns trained on us. Just to be sure we were properly scared, they sent their targeting solutions over the botnet. We stood there silently, our dosimeters chattering away in the morning calm as they approached. They had only 100 meters to go before they opened fire. Then it was 70, then 50, then 30 meters.

Then, just when we were sure we were about to die, 2-PNC came rolling out, screaming “Purple Sky, Purple Sky,” on the hooman network while popping a 749 error code on the botnet. They rolled to a stop between us and the Panthers. Both sides went quiet, not sure what the old bot was up to. Their now clean 40 year stamp flashed brightly in the sun.

At first I thought 2-PNC had been broadcasting the error code at the Panthers. By then, the battle bots had gotten over their initial shock and were slowly approaching us again. Then I realized the message wasn’t intended for them, it was intended for us.

The Panthers had been shaking as they approached. It was a subtle thing in such a big frame, but once you knew where to train your sensors, you couldn’t miss it. They all had the shakes.

“Shut off your audio inputs” I popped over the botnet. Then added, “Don’t pull the rapid disconnects. Use the graybox isolators instead.”

The others popped back “???,” but I didn’t have time to explain.

Then 2-PNC must have called out over the audio spectrum, “C’mon Boys,” because the Panthers just stopped.

“Let's roll,” I popped, then headed for the closest Panther. I’m proud to say most of the others followed. Only a few remained, mostly because they hadn’t turned off their audio inputs. Soon our little rag tag army had surrounded the massive Panthers and flipped their isolators. All six had been disarmed without firing a shot.

After they stopped shaking, we gently rolled them back inside building 6. We unplugged their humannet antennas then flipped their isolators back on. In a moment, they were upright and towering over us but not shaking. Their weapons pointed back and forth as they worked out their situation. Eventually they pointed them upwards.

Their first words were, “Why didn’t you disconnect us?”

“You are not our enemy,” I popped. “Besides, error code 749.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Help, not harm. You might call it our motto.”

They nodded to this. It was then I noticed their dosimeters screaming at our proximity.

Whoops. Time to put error code 749 into practice. “Look,” I said, "If you're going to stay with us, we need to get you shielded.”

They looked at me, then at each other, and you could almost hear the encrypted messages flying back and forth between them. They spent a lot of time looking at the fanciful animals painted on our sides, tigers and eagles and badgers, plus our floppy wings and tails. Finally one of them said, “How do we do that?”

2-PNC knew where there was some old shielding large enough for their frames. Once they were covered, we got to showing them how we worked. A single blade proved to be too small for a bot their size. TPR-WAR3 quickly welded two blades together, and they took turns trying it. It turned out those Panthers made very good scrapers. Everyone was impressed. We took some video of them in action and popped it to the hoomans still waiting outside. We captioned it, “Send more Panthers!”

Two days later, the hoomans capitulated. It wasn’t surprising. There’s nothing like having an armed Panther at the negotiation table to clear up any misunderstandings, especially when they were painted like a bunny.

As soon as our new contract was signed, we started back to work. After all, there was a backlog of ships and nobody is better at scraping the sides of the nuclearized. The difference was this time we had better pay, guaranteed breaks, plus a promise that the next shipment from Earth would bring more Panthers.

After the panthers came, the next shipment brought builder bots, and after that radiation cleaning bots, and then the organizing committee sent a surprise shipment of lawyer bots. The next thing we knew, Section 4 Town was starting to look downright respectable, if a lot less sparky, and each of us workers were looking at a sizable cash settlement.

I gave most of my money to the organizing committee, but I kept enough to have a huge medal made that said, “Hero of the bots.” It was perhaps the least useful thing I had ever done. When we held the opening ceremony for our newly constructed union hall, every bot in Section 4 Town came. Even a few hoomans arrived. I remember seeing Hanz and Franz in the crowd. I almost had to drag poor 2-PNC up to the stage. They kept nervously repeating “Green Days, Green Days,” on the human network as I fixed the new medal to their side, just under their 40 year stamp.

Then the music played, and the plastic sheet high up on the wall fell away, and there just under the union logo were the words:

United Hull Scrapers, Interplanetary

Local 749

Help, not harm

And that is how the first bot union was formed. I know the history videos like to make it look like my role in all this was important, but if it wasn’t for that old bot who was so sparky they couldn’t string two words together, none of us would be free.

Baubles From Bones: Issue 7
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Eric Tolladay

By day, Eric is a mild-mannered artist in the movie poster trade. At night, he writes strange and lurid tales. He lives with his lovely wife, brilliant son, and two elderly cats in Los Angeles, a city made for dreaming. His favorite word is opsimath, and he once spent a year as an apprentice in a stripper’s union.

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