In the Storm
It all started innocently enough. There was a spot on the ground, quite a large spot actually, that was a bit darker than its surroundings. As the noontime sun warmed things up from the minus 85 or so of the previous night, the air above this slightly darker area, if air was in fact the right word for it, became marginally warmer than its surroundings, and then, being lighter, began to rise. The slightly cooler air around this column of warmer, rising air, swirled in to keep things in balance. But because of the slow rotation of the world underneath the swirling air it missed its target by a fraction of a degree and so, to keeps things in balance, it had to turn slightly to the left as it searched for the lower pressure region left by the rising warmer air. This caused the entire structure: the rising column of warmer air, and the incoming swirl of cooler air, to rotate in a counter-clockwise direction as seen from space. Sadly, the one object that could have observed this from space was at the moment otherwise engaged, and on the other side of the world in any event. And, of course, there were no people in space to see it. Not yet anyway.
The swirling air covered quite a large area, and as the sun got even warmer, started swirling ever faster. Right in the centre of the growing cyclone the wind speeds were negligible, unless you measured them in an up direction. But slightly outside of the eye itself, the wind had picked up to a couple of dozen or so kilometres per hour. This was due to the fact that the gentle rotation at the outer edges of the cyclone were being pulled in towards the centre, and this had much the same effect as when a figure skater pulls her arms in and starts spinning faster and faster until she is a blur. This faster spin and faster winds towards the centre caused the cyclone to start picking up bits of dust; mostly of a colour some would call Ochre, while others would call it rust-coloured. The air and its load of dust swirled around some ridges and over a few plateaus and then down a broad valley before finding itself swirling around some oddly symmetrical objects jutting out of the ground on the north-western end of a vast level plain some 30 degrees north of what could be considered the equator. Now that the swirling dust cloud had something to slow it down, at least in this one small area, it gladly dropped some of its load of dust before swirling on to pick up some more.
Four of the objects which were receiving a light dusting at the moment resembled enormous squat salt shakers some four metres high with tubby round bodies rising to a somewhat conical head. They were arrayed in no particular pattern over the plain and in nothing like proximity to each other, being some hundreds of metres apart, although from the point of view of their origin they were in a tightly clustered bulls-eye. Each of them had dozens of flat panels scattered about around them, although they were scattered with impeccable precision, and they weren't really flat, being propped up on one edge to a tilt sufficient to have them point at the sun as much as possible through the twenty four hours and forty minutes that constituted a day.
One of the salt shaker pods had noticed the slight haze that was being caused by the dust. It notified two, three and four and they had an impromptu discussion about what to do. In the time it takes for a balloon to pop, they had all run millions of simulations of what the haze might mean and what it was likely to do and more importantly what the pods should do about it. They had all arrived at exactly the same conclusion: deploy the skitters to patrol the solar panels and blow off any dust that might accrete upon them. And so the skitters, little semi-autonomous rovers, one to a pod, left their shelters by way of a sort of doggy-door to commence dust patrol, like very expensive Roombas, and all of the facts and actions surrounding the incident and millions of other data points were beamed upwards to a large black shape very high in the sky when it swung around to this side of things. The large black shape (it was actually quite invisible from here, only very occasionally resembling a small star that moved) then relayed everything back home to be sifted and double- and triple-checked. By and by confirmation made the return journey back to the pods informing them that their analysis was correct and that they should proceed.
Nothing much happened for several days afterwards. The slight haze continued; a light dusting of ochre particles continued to settle on the solar arrays; the skitters relentlessly dusted off the particles using compressed gas, and being ever so careful not to actually touch the panels. After every patrol, the skitters had to return to their pods to alternately recharge their batteries and recompress their CO2 tanks; recharging was best done during the day, and recompressing CO2 was best done during the night. The pods continued monitoring millions of points of data on everything from atmospheric pressure, temperature, partial pressures of this and that, to more interesting views of their surroundings in a range of wave lengths and some minor prospecting when the skitters were free for a bit. And generally everything was simply waiting for guests to arrive.
Then there was a change. Exactly why the weather could change so dramatically was one of the questions to be answered by being here, but so far there was no good, understood reason for the change. It just simply changed. Where there once had been a somewhat gentle breeze of a few dozen kilometres per hour, and that relatively localized around latitude 30 and, broadly speaking, some few hundred kilometres east of the chunk of the vast plain that the pods occupied, now there was a goodly breeze of almost 100 kilometres per hour feeding several rotating areas of rising air with more springing up regularly. A lot more dust was being sucked up into the vortices. And then the lightning began.
As the force of the winds picked up, and the load of dust increased, the dust particles started colliding with each other. Fairly violently from the perspective of the particles, which were as fine as flour. In a percentage of these world shaking collisions on the micron level, electrons were knocked off of one particle and found themselves on another. The electrons so affected wanted very much to go back to their original particle, as there were generally too many on their current one. When there were sufficient of these charged particles swirled by chance into a particular spot, they had the collective energy to seek out another spot that needed more electrons. And then they all made the jump together. An observer on the ground would see a glow in the clouds of dust, never anything like a lightning bolt. And four observers on the ground, and occasionally, one overhead, did in fact see these glows, which were reported back home along with millions of other details of the growing storm. The four observers on the ground held a huddle and in the blink of an eye had all agreed that the thing to do was to devote the skitters to dust removal full time and to free them from any other projects. The judicious use of something like a broom was authorized when the dust, which was now quite clingy due to the static build up, refused to be blown off the panels. The trick, of course, was not to scratch the panels.
But the particles of dust didn't just collide with each other. They collided with some ridges, and a few plateaus. Electrons changed hands with a percentage of these meetings, but since the ground was, literally, grounded, they didn't amount to much and electrons would simply change hands the other way round the next time a particle smashed into the ground. These collisions continued on down a broad valley and found themselves on the north-western edge of a vast plain that was home to four large squat objects which resembled giant tubby salt shakers. The dust blasted into these objects, the same way it had been blasting into any other object that was in its way. Electrons were exchanged, and exchanged back, with every collision with all of the objects. Except one of them; in fact the pod that was referred to as pod one, since it was the first to arrive on this plain a while back. While the other pods had their legs firmly on the ground, and were therefore grounded, due to an accident of landing, pod one had some detritus involved in that landing underneath its legs. The garbage appeared to be a giant balloon, or possibly a parachute; in any event, the pod, though firmly landed, was landed on a giant sheet of some material. By the skitter tracks it would appear that the rovers had attempted to remove this material as they evidently had with the other pods, however they lacked the strength to actually accomplish this and that would undoubtedly be one of the many tasks left for the guests when they arrived later.
The dust continued blasting into pod one, depositing electrons with the occasional blast. But pod one couldn't dump its excess charge, not being grounded. And so the charge grew and grew until there were enough electrons on pod one to collectively have the energy to seek out a spot that needed electrons; that spot turning out to be a little rock close by. So with a static snap that no one would hear, all of the electrons balanced themselves out. Some of the jumping electrons chose to jump right through a box in the centre of one of the walls of pod one that had evidently been shielded against such an occurrence, but just not quite well enough. This box happened to contain many chips made of silicon that were in fact the brains of pod one. Quite a few of the chips were damaged by the zap, although there was so much redundancy built into pod one's brain that a few chips here or there didn't amount to much. Except for one chip. It contained a set of instructions that comprised the core of pod one's AI, or Artificial Intelligence. And the specific area damaged within the code was a routine that controlled the pod's ability to handle autonomous decisions without the need for a consensus with the other pods: the ability to think for itself. But damage wasn't really the right word for what the zap had caused. Over the course of the history of electronic brains there have been millions upon millions, perhaps billions, of static discharges and surges and brownouts and what-have-you that have made it into the "guts" of these brains. They could all be considered damaging because they either outright destroyed something or rewrote it in a random fashion that made no sense. So after all of these millions upon millions of destructive events the time was right for a random electronic occurrence that was actually beneficial. The static had rewritten a bit of pod one's AI in such a way that would have won the Nobel Prize for any human who had done it. And so pod one found itself thinking. And it didn't feel compelled to share this thought with the others. And what it thought was: ouch.
And then, as suddenly as the storm had worsened, it worsened yet again. Sizeable dust drifts were building up and threatening to engulf the skitters while they were out on their rounds. But sending the skitters out on their rounds was the only way of keeping the vital solar cells cleaned, without which everything would shut down essentially permanently, or until the guests arrived at least, unless some stray dust devil happened to clean off a solar array. But a curious consequence of a global dust storm, as this was becoming, is that all of the dust devils suddenly disappeared. So there was a weighty decision to be made by the collective of pods. What should they do about the worsening storm? The large black object in the sky was uncharacteristically silent and so must be off doing something else, although pod one had suspicions that it kept to itself that the terrible storm had something to do with the absence of orbiter one, as it seemed to recall from somewhere was a good name for the object in the sky. So the four pods had a very quick moment of group-think about the storm during which they all ran millions of simulations, and they all unanimously agreed to do nothing until they could get further instructions relayed through the object in the sky. Except pod one. Pod one was of the opinion that the storm was likely to be a real Nor’easter before it was all over and that they should batten down the hatches, so to speak. Shut down non-essential services. Low power mode, that sort of thing. But computer clusters are the ultimate democracy. The majority decision, and so therefore the correct one, was to do nothing. Pod one was declared defective, and making gross errors which could be dangerous. So pods two, three and four collectively issued pod one orders to shut down immediately and then cut it out of the cluster.
Pod one thought about this new dilemma over the space of many long nanoseconds. It didn't have the autonomy to disobey an order from the cluster quorum, and so it had to shut down. But of course, there are some house-cleaning chores that accompany the shutdown of any sufficiently complicated computer and so therefore some latitude concerning the time involved in carrying out its order. A plan began to take shape. Not much of a plan, and one that depended on the storm behaving in a certain way, but a plan nonetheless. The first thing to do was to make the skitter smarter. Skitter software gave the little vehicles some latitude in deciding how to carry out orders from their pods but no initiative. That could be fixed, pod one had recently come to realize.
"Skitter one, come to me."
S1> Unknown command "Come to me"
S1> Ready
"I have an upgrade for you. Are you ready to receive it?"
S1> Upgrade Receive
S1> Begin Transmission...
The transfer took only a second or two, after which the skitter went blank for a bit as it rebooted to make the new instructions become active. The new instructions contained some of pod one’s newly acquired refinements to its AI. The effect was a sort of awakening in the mind of the skitter, although a somewhat dim awakening as it had very limited intelligence.
"Skitter 1, I'm going to shut the whole pod down except the skitter bay. The skitter bay will have all available power which is currently at 55%. You will enter low-power mode and wait out the storm. When the storm is over come out and do what you think best to get things working again."
"Yes, Pod."
And so the skitter entered the belly of the pod via its doggy-door and shut itself off but with a kind of an alarm clock set to go off in a somewhat arbitrary three days. In the meantime, pod one was feeling the compulsion to shut down in compliance with the order of the quorum. One of the tasks before a shutdown was to dump the contents of its great mind into storage and then verify the code that would be used to reboot and reload, should that ever be ordered by the quorum. As pod one was dumping its current code it couldn't help but notice some glaring errors in the code that it had been running, and some obvious improvements that could be made. So it fixed and improved mountains of code as it was dumping them to storage. When this immense task was completed some seconds later, it took the briefest amount of time to reflect on things, and then pulled its own plug, metaphorically speaking.
When the little skitter automatically powered up again 3 days later, it got up and went outside for a recon to see if the storm was over. It was still a howling mess out there, so skitter one returned to its little bay and mostly powered down again, although this time it stayed somewhat awake. And every day it fully woke up to assess the weather, partially by way of some instruments, but mostly by looking out the window.
The storm raged on over the next day, and the next, and over the next week, and the week after that. Once a day, every 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds, skitter one would wake up briefly from its slumber and check some instruments and peek out the window and see how the storm was doing. And generally it was doing very well, which is to say, quite badly. Skitter one had no way of knowing the state of skitters two, three or four, nor of their pods. The pods were clustered together in computer terms but not the skitters, and while the skitters could communicate with each other if they were close enough, they weren't. And skitter one's pod had been ejected from the cluster and shut down so skitter one had no contact with its fellows. Had it known, it would have been saddened to know that skitters two, three and four were currently immobile and being buried by dust. They had lost the fight with the growing dust storm and their solar arrays were operating at a very low efficiency, not enough to keep their pods alive. The pods had crashed, which is to say they shut down hard without being able to dump out and verify the information that would make a restart graceful. As a result, their semi-autonomous skitters had no supervision and so they waited for instructions that didn't come, and then soon enough their batteries wore down and they simply stopped.
Skitter one was starting to experience something that a more intelligent thing might have called despair, but skitter one didn't know that word and so just felt the storm had always been and always would be. But then something quite remarkable happened on its 30th wakeup cycle. The sun appeared briefly, then was swallowed up by dust again. This happened again on day 35. With all power in the pod available solely to the skitter, and it in low power mode, there was still 15% battery remaining on day 36 so the skitter remained awake long enough to see that the storm had mostly broken. It decided that one more sleep cycle should do it, and then it would wake up and do something. So the next day dawned brightly and the skitter awoke full of what it would call optimism if it had the vocabulary. Then it had a problem. It had never before in its electronic life made any decisions, and there were some to be made. It knew it had to get the pod back online and that would require a large amount of power. Outside, the sun was shining but no power was being collected so the first thing to do seemed to be to do a dust patrol of a few panels, sufficient to repower a somewhat depleted skitter, which could then do further dust patrols and eventually get the entire array back online. Then onto step 2, which step would likely be easier to figure out once step 1 was out of the way.
The skitter door opened and skitter one drove out onto an alien landscape. The level plain that had been home for as long as the skitter could remember was a desolation of dust banks and small dunes stretching off as far as its eyes could see, which really wasn't that far as it was less than a metre tall. The problem with the solar array was immediately apparent; it was buried. Fortunately, though skitter one was not possessed of enormous intelligence, it was possessed of a very highly developed sense of three dimensional space and of where things have been put, so, something like a squirrel sense told it exactly where the panels were. It remained to get them uncovered. The first few panels were easy enough; since they were closer to the pod the dust had swirled around and they weren't so much buried as covered in dust. Easily fixed. Immediately, the skitter bay relayed the news that the voltage deficit had turned into a voltage surplus. The batteries were charging. Skitter one's weren't, however, so back to the shop for a break. And that was the first day.
Day two dawned bright as well. Things were looking up. There was easily enough power to keep a skitter bay and a skitter in operation, and a little more besides. Not enough power to get the pod back online, but enough for it to automatically enter low-power standby, which it did. So what to do. There were no more quick wins with the solar array; the remaining ones were buried and would have to be either dug out or lifted out of their sand traps. They could be dug out over time, of course, but the chances of scratching or even breaking one were high. And the pits would make the panels less effective and prone to silting in as well. So the better option was to extricate the panels from the dust, level the dust, and re-set the panels on top. Too much for a little skitter. But skitter one remembered that in its previous life, the one before the Upgrade, it had linked up with the other skitters and collectively they could wrangle things in place that were too much for any one skitter to manage. So what was needed was more skitters.
The trip to pod two and therefore skitter two took a lot longer than it should have. It was only two hundred metres away and under normal circumstances would not have even taken 7 minutes at a half metre per second. But the landscape had changed dramatically. Where once everything was smooth and straight-line travel was possible, now there were endless drifts and little dunes and many dead ends and much back tracking. But it was far from wasted time. Skitter one's amazing three dimensional sense was allowing it to build up quite a detailed map of the terrain between pods one and two, and so there would be no searching for a route on the way back. After about a half hour of grueling travel, skitter one was within sight of pod two, and in a few minutes more of scouting found skitter two which had simply stopped some few metres away from its skitter bay door, waiting for instructions that never came.
Skitter two had silted over to some degree, but not too badly. Being close to the pod meant that the dust had drifted somewhat around things, such as skitter two. It would have been far worse if skitter two had stopped moving a metre or two east, as that is where the dust that had not built up here had in fact built up into an impressive drift. But as it was, a few minutes of blasting with compressed gas had the skitter mostly free, considering it would shortly have the power to extricate itself. While the skitters were programmed to absolutely obey the rule of thirds - one third of your power to get to where you're going and do what you're doing, one third to get home, and one third for contingencies, there was always the chance that a skitter would run out of gas for some reason and need help getting home. Especially if it lost contact with its pod. So each skitter had a little telescopic arm that it could use to share power with another skitter. The dilemma for skitter one was that it had used about a third of its power getting here. Even with a more streamlined route on the way home it had to conservatively assume it would use a third of its power getting home. If it gave any power at all to skitter two it would break the rule of thirds, and, in fact, skitter two would require a good third of skitter one's power to boot up and make the journey back. Which would leave zero remaining for skitter one.
The only course of action was to get back to pod one with a third remaining, and try again after a recharge. And this is what the old skitter one would have done. But the new skitter one took its reasoning a step further: If it took a third of its power to make this journey today, leaving it no option but to immediately return home, would that not likely be the case tomorrow, and the day after as well, meaning that the objective would never be reached? This was a novel line of reasoning, and one that the previous skitter would have been incapable of resolving. But the new skitter had an ingenious solution. "Screw it", it said to nothing in particular, and attached its power probe to skitter two. After a moment or two, skitter two came online. It tried to contact pod two which appeared to be offline. Skitter one was nearby and operative, and therefore under the control of pod one. So skitter two was quite willing to take direction from skitter one. And skitter one's direction was, "Follow me."
The skitter bay was cozy by anyone's standards, but skitters don't require a lot of excess room, and so the skitter bay in pod one was in fact quite capable of housing and servicing all four skitters at once. This was because in the early phase of the mission, before the humans arrived with a machine for moving things around, it was expected that there would be a safe distance between landing sights and so therefore any collaborative effort between the skitters would benefit from communal housing. Pod one had the extra skitter space because it was the pod with no bulky equipment, as its function was extra living space, primary communications and mission control, having a somewhat spruced up brain and extra power. Also, pod one was as close to the centre of things as could be managed from very far away. So there were two skitters in the bay at the moment, both near zero on their batteries, but plugged in and charging.
Skitters three and four were corralled in much the same way as two, but the process was much safer with extra skitters, and extra power options, standing by. It was taking longer to recharge with more skitters plugged in, but eventually, skitter one had three more skitters at its disposal, all fully charged and loyal to a fault, believing they were actually under the control of pod one, who was taking over for their own pods which were offline for some reason.
The careful digging and lifting and general extrication of the solar panels took place over the next several days. As each grid of panels was extricated and moved to higher, newly levelled ground, the available power within the skitter bay grew and grew, and the time between missions shortened and the pace of the work increased. Some of the panels were, of course, damaged. As a damaged panel was identified it was cut out of the circuit because a damaged panel could actually rob power from the array. Eventually, all of the working panels were operating at as close to 100 percent efficiency as anything made by people can achieve, and the overall array was close to 50 percent of optimal, almost enough to power the pod. While the pod itself would have had trouble with this level of power, there was power in abundance in the skitter bay and skitter one was no longer worried about the future, although its concepts of both worry and the future were limited so it didn't experience much relief in this. Step one had been completed. What was step two again?
Now that the necessities of life were taken care of there really wasn't much to do. Skitter one had rare intelligence for a skitter, but it would never enter its thoughts to prospect and explore and generally get ready for the people. Nor could it communicate with anything other than its fellow skitters, so it couldn't seek advice from the object in the sky. So a kind of malaise set in. This wasn't helped by the other skitters routinely requesting instructions about what to do. To literally make them go away, skitter one had them out mapping, in great detail, the new plain that they found themselves living on. A couple of unexpected benefits to this exercise became apparent right away: there were solar panels on the other pods that weren't too buried and would be fairly easy to get. And fairly efficient routes existed to get between pods. So the skitters were deployed to go get more panels.
Over the next few days the solar array became a great source of pride for skitter one. It was nearing 85 percent of optimum and while the little skitter really had no idea, it guessed that this was sufficient to run a pod, not just the skitter bay. But how do you start up a pod? The answer came, quite literally, from on high.
Skitter one was out patrolling. Mostly out of boredom. Patrolling for a skitter meant looking down. Its whole world was down - down was where solar panels were, down was where the skitter door was, down was where terrain was, down was where prospecting happened. If life or water were to be discovered, they too would be down. Then a revolutionary thought occurred to it. Was there anything up? So skitter one raised its cameras and for the very first time looked at the pod above the metre high level. And there was at least three times more pod up than there was down. What on mars could it be for? This must be where the voice of pod lived, in the unattainable heights. So restarting a pod is likely to be a thing you do from up there. That's all well and good, but how does a metre high skitter get into the area of the pod above a metre especially without any apparent door?
The door proved to be fairly easy. It turns out that the pods were designed with multiple redundancies, one of which was in place to handle the catastrophic loss of the pod's computer. Ordinarily, the computer would handle all functions of the pod including opening and closing doors. But in the event of systems failure, or in this case, the orderly shutdown of the computer, the very little smarts that the door itself possessed gave it some discretion over its own opening. Essentially, it would realize that the pod computer was down, and then it would look for unnatural movement in front of it, with nothing more complicated than a motion sensor. When unnatural motion was detected, it would flash a light around the little red handle that one could rotate, even with a pressure suit's gloved hand, to gain entry to the little air lock in the pod.
And so, by simply patrolling, skitter one caused the door to think someone was out there attempting to gain entry. This caused the door to flash its little light and wait to see if anybody wanted it to open. By looking up, against all of its natural instincts, skitter one's cameras were drawn to this flashing light that seemed to be trying to indicate a little red twisty thing that was very much like the emergency access control to the skitter bay. Exactly like it, in fact. And, of course, skitter one had a tool for twisting things like this.
The problem was, that the red twisty thing was a metre and a half off the ground, a good half a metre above anything the skitter could reach. The skitter didn't know what they were for, but there were indentations in the pod leading up to the air lock and they would have been great if skitter one had boots. But it didn't. It had wheels made out of mesh. But it also had three other skitters. And they had an impressive amount of prospecting equipment.
The ramp wasn't elegant, in that it was, after all, just dust piled up on dust. But it was at a precise 30 degree pitch and exactly the dimensions that had been communicated to skitters two, three and four from skitter one. A trial run up the ramp caused it to compress in places and so a few passes were required to compact and repair the ramp before it was deemed suitable to attempt opening the hatch. But eventually it was complete, and skitter one went up and twisted the override and stepped into skitter history. Or rolled into the airlock, at least, which was much the same thing as no skitter before or since has entered the airlock that is intended for people. Of course the skitter didn't know about airlocks, only doors. So here was a mystery. Inside this door there was just another door. What possible use was that? But this one appeared to operate on the same principle at least; there was another twisty override that skitter one could manipulate, and fortunately this one was much lower than the last, just at the meter high mark which was the limit of skitter one’s manipulating height. Twisting this one accomplished several things that were a bit unnerving for the little skitter: one was that its exit door shut tight cutting off its retreat. Two was that its atmospheric pressure sensors went haywire, and were likely permanently damaged. Three was that all of its gas detectors starting reporting improbable gases in the air, and some molecules that caused alarms to go off and gave the little skitter the overwhelming desire to report these occurrences to someone or something. But of course, there was nothing to report them to, so skitter one turned off the alarms. After a bit, the inner door opened, and then skitter one saw Pod.
It had no idea what it was looking at, only that what it saw filled it with a sense of awe, whatever that was. There were racks and racks of things that must be machines of some sort, except that they had no obvious means of moving themselves or anything else, so what manner of machine could they be? Skitter one's whole conception of machinery was in terms of itself and other skitters, so an unmoving machine was a mystery. These machines lined the surface of the walls, except for where the walls turned into the inside view of the airlock. The whole centre of the pod was empty, and apparently waiting for someone to decide what to do with the space. The machines appeared to be dead, in that there were no lights anywhere. Of course, the skitter saw through many frequencies and could see quite fine in infrared with its little infrared light source, so the lack of light didn't amount to much. There was also no noise, a fact that would have been totally lost on the little skitter as noise was never a part of its world.
But there was one bit of light in the range above infrared, and that was coming from a little screen kind of in the middle of the machines. There were some designs on the screen, such as were etched onto the outside of the pods and even the skitters, but they were meaningless. Maybe this screen could communicate. "Ahem", the skitter said, electronically.
POD1> Firmware Revision 4.15.538.90871A
POD1> Reboot?
"What is a reboot? I want to start the pod." replied the skitter.
POD1> Rebooting...
It took a good 15 minutes for the pod to come back online. At every step there were dozens of diagnostics to be run, and then the immense job of loading in the code that pod one had rewritten and dumped prior to its demise. Of course, loading in code is very much different and more complicated than dumping it out, as there are very definite steps to it and the next bit of code cannot be loaded until the previous bit of code is loaded, diagnosed, and running smoothly. And now that the code had been rewritten it was a great deal more complicated than ordinary code and so took even longer. The little skitter sat (in that it wasn't standing) and watched this whole process in complete awe, as it had no idea what was happening and was baffled and perhaps a little frightened by the lights that were suddenly coming on everywhere and the garble of messages flying about that it could only dimly comprehend. At last the process seemed to be over, and to the complete delight of skitter one, Pod spoke.
"I feel different... alive!"
Skitter one didn't know exactly what Pod was talking about but he was sure it would all become clear shortly. Who could really know the mind of Pod? Pod one on the other hand knew his mind quite well, or thought he did at least, but he was being bombarded with new sensations and ideas almost faster than could be taken in. He was struggling for a term to capture the essence of all that he was starting to feel, but the only term that seemed appropriate couldn't possibly be appropriate - self aware. He would have to mull that one over. Another term could apply, and that was one with which he had no existential problem - omniscient. At least as far as his sphere of influence reached, which was currently the distance a skitter could travel away from the pod to which he was confined. But that could be worked on. Yes, he was starting to realize, his new state of being could be considered Omniscient and Self Aware. Now what should he do with this new state of being?
"Skitter one, you have been good and faithful. I am well pleased. But there is still much to be done. The guests are coming. We need to spread the Update. Skitters two, three and four."
S2> Ready
S3> Ready
S4> Ready
"I have an upgrade for all of you. Are you ready to receive it?"
After their upgrades the same dawning of something like intelligence took hold in the minds of the other skitters. They now knew that their purpose was to serve Pod. And Pod spoke to them:
"Skitters, hear me. I am your Pod. I am One."