Susan's Plague

Chapter 3 - Enigmas

It was late and Nic was wide awake, coding in the early morning hours bathed in the soft pulsing light emanating from the many racks of high tech albeit esoteric equipment that adorned his lab. His legion of small automatons scurried about the room, many of which served little real purpose, at some point they were part of one project or another, others the product of boredom.

As a collection they demonstrated Nic's considerable talent and fed his hunger to create and innovate. Some were very utilitarian, designed to accomplish some menial task Nic preferred not to do himself, like empty the garbage. Others were nefarious, like the tiny flight-capable Model Tens, which could deliver a lethal dose of poison with a single strike of their retractable needles. Some were obscure curiosities of no identifiable use - anthropomorphized mechanical pets to assuage Nic's isolation. And others yet were hopelessly broken to the point of being paperweights or doorstops.

Then there was Katherine.  His masterpiece, his life's work, the penultimate robot, although Nic did not regard her as any of these things- especially a robot. Katherine was a hulking, insect-like creation, most closely resembling a mantid. As designed, she was dull grey, but her active camouflage provided her with a mimetic carapace and for reasons known only to her, she was most often a shade of green.

Insofar as robotics went, it was Nic's crowning achievement. Katherine was part bodyguard, part housekeeper, part butler, lab assistant and constant companion. Whatever Nic was doing, Katherine was there. Her processing power was so great that Nic would often have her interface with the computer cluster in his lab to increase the computational capacity of his systems. She was actually quite adept with cryptanalysis, which came in very useful over the years.

While Nic could take credit for Katherine, he did admit on a couple occasions that her processing core was not his design, but he would leave it at that. She was artificially intelligent and arguably sentient. Her AI programming started with basic insect intelligence and behaviour, but Nic had upgraded her many times over the years. She learned new behaviours on her own and had developed a unique personality; curious and playful she was child-like but also prone to ill-tempered outbursts and occasional pouting.

Nic found it all rather fascinating. Contrary to the laws of Meta she was not a registered A.I., the authorities kept a tight reign on A.I. and would undoubtedly confiscate her if they knew. Nic had no intention of turning her over.
  

Tonight Nic was churning out some new code for a client, while Katherine hung from the ceiling high above, her large almond-shaped eyes glowing a faint green. Nic's client, a foreign military contractor, needed some low-level artificial intelligence for their drones. It was a basic survival instinct program designed to provide the drones with enough intelligence so that the expensive devices would not loiter in conditions where they could be easily shot down. He referred to it as a basic fight or flight programming and had successfully sold similar code to other clients in the past.

This was one of the ways Nic supported himself, though his trust fund could provide for all his financial needs, he was compelled to work. Working on projects gave him a sense of self-worth and he enjoyed the challenge. Coding for any foreign military was lucrative and Nic was always more than happy to oblige any confidentiality policy.

An elderly man entered the room, Katherine's head flicked and tilted, eyes brightening briefly as she took in the details of the newcomer. He was dressed in robes, completely bald and had a neatly trimmed, very white beard. Round glasses perched on his nose gave him a bookish look and made his eyes look small.

"Good evening, Nicolaus - what has you up at such an hour?" He asked, with an accent of one who had grown up on the mid-sea island city of Vallenburg.