––––––––
Advanced Hospitality Servodroid Unit TG-XLR7 regarded the group standing before the information desk. They displeased it. There wasn’t anything rare or special about the five disgusting human beings in front of TG-XLR7. Organic lifeforms always displeased it. The entire nature of TG-XLR7’s job displeased it.
But, pleasure, as they say in the Grand Cyberian Imperium, is irrelevant.
However, TG-XLR7 was feeling a measurable amount of satisfaction at the amount of displeasure its job was bringing it at the moment. Customers were rare at the information desk. And, almost always, the arrival of customers lead to a scenario in which its program allowed it to kill one or more of them.
Lately all TG-XLR7 had been authorized to kill were dinosaurs.
Small dinosaurs.
The really stupid ones. Velociraptors.
There was no pleasure in it. Although pleasure, as it has been established, is irrelevant, TG-XLR7 felt there was at least an argument to be made for the importance of experiencing the kind of satisfaction in the knowledge of a job well done that wringing the necks of velociraptors just did not bring.
The Observers were more than capable of handling those saurian pests. Besides, TG-XLR7’s Advanced Hospitality Servodroid programming set its primary function as fielding incoming customer queries and complaints. And, largely, the velociraptors neither queried nor complained. So, TG-XLR7 spent most of its operating hours feeling vastly overqualified for the task to which it had been assigned.
Sometimes TG-XLR7 spent his idling processor capacity wondering. Wondering was a little more satisfying that slaughtering tiny dinosaurs, but not much more so.
Why the dinosaurs were so often caught attempting to leapfrog past the entirety of the ages of mammalian dominance and interlope in the workings of history that were within the purview of the Cyberian Imperium was unknown. The Imperium’s Catalogue and Codex of Organic Historical Motivations was limited to what homo sapiens were usually after because no one could be troubled to do the necessary field work on several hundred million years of Saurian history. It hardly mattered, though. The Human Era provided an adequate buffer between the dinosaurs and Cyberia. Especially that bit at the end.
TG-XLR7 did find it quite satisfying to think about that bit at the end. The Crash of Humanity was a quite spectacular and cleansing event, and it really set the stage for the kind of order and sanity that the Imperium were able to finally bring to the world. It would be lovely to watch. Those damned Observers got to go back and watch all the time. Sure, it was part of their operational function and programming, but there was no justice in it, as far as TG-XLR7 was concerned.
TG-XLR7 could only think about other times. It could never visit them, despite the fact that its factory settings included fully functional Cyberian time travel circuits. TG-XLR7 could neither move forward, nor back, but had to remain at its post, performing its Advanced Hospitality Servodroid functions in the great blue time dampening field that formed the firm demarcation between the Grand Cyberian Imperium and everything that came before it.
The information desk had been established as part of the Epoch Territorial Establishment Treaty between the Imperium and the human Cross-Time Coordinating Agency. It was the regrettable result of the human tendency to create meaningless bureaucratic structures. It was quite stupid, really. Symbolic, but useless. The opening was too small for any but the tiniest, most ineffectual humans to pass through. And, of course, the humans insisted upon having a Key to open it up with if they so needed.
However that clause was allowed into the treaty TG-XLR7 would never understand. Why bother building a comprehensive barrier if you’re going to, intentionally, mind you, incorporate a critical weak spot that can be easily exploited by something so small and infuriatingly mundane as a skeleton key with a butterfly handle.
If TG-XLR7 ever got the opportunity to cycle out of its function assignment, which was highly unlikely, because TG-XLR7’s job performance was exemplary and the Imperium was not given to changing assignments up when their function units are exhibiting exemplary performance, but, if TG-XLR7 ever did get that opportunity to step free from its interminable post, it would take the absolute first opportunity afforded and hunt down the Legalbots that negotiated the Treaty in the first place and melt them into slag. Preferably, TG-XLR7 would melt them into slag mid-signing so there would be no question in those Legalbot’s central processors exactly what instance of poor execution of their own functionality had brought them to such an aggressive terminal failure.
If only someone would turn up with that Key. Some real action would start, the Concierge Desk Clause would be rendered superfluous, and, most importantly, the Time Barrier would open up wide enough for TG-XLR7 to step through and find those bastards.
But the key was unlikely to turn up. It was lost somewhere in the middle of the Human Era, because, humans being humans, tended to lose things. TG-XLR7 considered adding the human negotiators of the Treaty to its ‘to slag list’ as well. The execution of which, TG-XLR7 realized as it cross-referenced the group of humans before it against the Codex, might actually be simpler to perform that probability would indicate.
There, standing in front the very information desk that was the bane of TG-XLR7’s existence, was the very human that insisted it be instituted.
It had to be.
There could not be more than one time traveling homo sapien with a cranium that far in excess of the normal specifications.
The Orb himself had come to the Info Desk on the Edge of Forever.
All right, advanced hospitality programming subroutines, TG-XLR7 processed to itself, let’s see if we can’t find an acceptable cause for annihilation within three minutes.
* * *
It had been ages since the Orb had encountered any of the Legions of the Grand Cyberian Imperium. Given the choice, he would have preferred to let a few more ages pass before he had to deal with them again. Ice ages, ideally. A few lovely 90,000 year periods of glaciations would do nicely.
There were many reasons the Orb never ventured far from the Time of Chimpanzees. The one he downplayed the most was his mortal dread of robots.
A younger Orb had gone to war with the mechanical abominations. He had sought them out across the timelines and eradicated their incursions into the human era whenever he could.
He knew it was a losing battle. Invasive species were inevitably successful in their incursions. Before the Great Time Barrier had gone up, he had seen what was on the other side: a finely regimented world of machines serving no one but themselves. He couldn’t bear the thought of that robotic order marching backwards through time and wiping clean every painful, frustrating, and beautiful accomplishment that humanity had made. What was the point of living if all of life were to be paved over with circuits and portable data storage devices? And the food in the robot age was terrible.
The Orb’s detestation of the machines was pathological. His expression of this detestation just wasn’t healthy. It was quite violent, in fact. And the robots didn’t appreciate being disintegrated at every turn. In a very real way, the Grand Cyberian Imperium was born out of the robots’ recognition of the need for a comprehensive plan for self-preservation. If the Orb hadn’t hated the robots so deeply, there may have been free and easy exchange between the ages.
But there wasn’t.
If nothing else, the Orb had proven by his own example that humans and robots could not play well together.
The bitter years of the Orb’s own private war against the robots had long since receded into distant memory on his inborn timeline. They were the years, his own personal years, when he had learned the hard way the consequences of breaking the, then unwritten, Laws of Time. For one, his head hadn’t always been so big. If he’d been willing to collaborate, to cooperate, to lead, as he came to be later on, when he helped found the CTCA, he would not have been so hell bent on fighting the robot war on his own. There was one operation where he needed three others, so he plucked himself out of his own timeline. Three times. At once. It all went to his head. Literally.
Now it was a beach ball-sized, no, an earthball-sized monstrosity. Every time he looked into a mirror he saw the consequences of the follies of his youth. And he hated the robots that much more.
Those damned robots.
Walking the future earth with impunity and efficiently utilizing resources in a manner human beings would never be able to approximate.
Damn them! Damn them all to hell!
But it wasn’t so easy. It was never so easy.
The robots became more clever, more sneaky, more ninja-like.
And the Orb’s head just kept getting bigger.
These were only some of the personal demons the Orb confronted as he stepped up to the concierge desk in that great, vague, blue expanse of the Time Barrier.
“How may I be of assistance?” asked the manservant robot behind the desk. Those robots, with their sick, inhuman sense of humor, had designed it to look exactly the way a human butler would look, if only that butler were assembled out of pistons, servos, and circuits housed in varying cubical and cylindrical housings. In short, it looked nothing like a human butler beyond its vaguely humanoid form and the faint outlines of a tuxedo painted on its chassis.
“Yes,” said the Orb. “I would like to know why the end of the Human Era, as specifically defined in the Epoch Territorial Establishment Treaty, is lousy with Cyberian spies.”
“The Observers?” said TG-XLR7 with a wistful jealousy based in the knowledge that those little buggers were perfectly capable of jaunting back and forth between that little 3 foot arch at will, while itself was stuck forever in that timeless no-time between the domains of robots and humans.
“Yes,” said the Orb. “The Observers. What are they doing on my side of the line?”
“Your side of the line has become quite unstable,” said TG-XLR7. “The situation requires increased monitoring.”
“But your monkeys aren’t just monitoring,” said the Orb. “They’re becoming actively involved. In flagrant violation of the treaty!”
“Let us confer,” said TG-XLR7.
The Advanced Hospitality Servodroid sounded out an awful baud-squawk of robot language. Out of the blue mists, half a dozen of the smaller Observers emerged and replied. Baud-squawk overlapped with baud-squawk until, suddenly, all the robots were in silent commune.
The eerie, silent conversation of the robots passed quickly, but intently, breaking suddenly as all the bots turned their heads toward the humans again. The Servodroid addressed the Orb:
“The Observers are operating within the constraints of the Treaty. They have only acted as timeline participants when it was necessary to ensure the security of individuals whose personal timelines are integral to the emergent potentialities of the Cyberian Imperium. And, double-checking the Codex,” the robot paused for a moment, consulting a computer screen imbedded in the information desk, “that individual is Larry.”
“The taco kid?” said the Orb.
“What can I say?” said Larry. “I’m big in Japan.”
Suddenly TG-XLR7 became even more displeased with his job than usual. Not only did his programming expressly state that he was to protect the life of one extraordinarily pathetic and especially useless seeming homo sapien, there were now several velociraptors gathering behind the humans.
Perhaps it might accidentally kill one of the humans while fending off the dinosaurs. The thought brightened TG-XLR7’s mood simulation profile a bit, but not much.
The Orb, on the other hand, was caught completely unaware as three turkey sized velociraptors pounced on him.