The Girl in the Steel Corset - By Kady Cross Page 0,81
where she tended to do most of her mechanical work. Griffin followed after her.
“Like I said last evening, the automaton spoke to me, or rather, it spoke. I’m not sure if it was addressing me or just running something that had been told to it.”
Griffin frowned. “Told to it? Or programmed into it?”
She made a face. “It’s pretty much the same thing, lad, at least in this case. It told me someone messed with its thinking engine—the one where all its commands are stored. Up until now I’d been looking for defects in manufacture or an incorrect input in its operation system. But The Machinist didn’t change the metal’s programming, he enhanced it. The reason I didn’t notice it before this is because I didn’t physically look for it—I simply ran diagnostic tests. Plus, I think the tampering has become more apparent during the months the automaton has been in storage here, in the dark.”
He tilted his head. “You have my attention. Show me what you found.”
Emily gestured to the bench. There sat a small dome about the size of a full-grown man’s skull. It was the metal shell that housed the automaton’s thinking engine. It was small because most of these kind of laboring mechs had two separate engines—one for normal operations, movement, power, etc., and another for specialized commands. This smaller engine could be filled with a number of punch cards which the machine sifted through and acted upon given specific variables. Its main engine told it to dig and how to dig and what to do with the debris. The secondary, “thinking” engine housed protocol for what to do should something out of the ordinary happen, such as if the digger hit a wall, or needed to adapt for terrain, obstacles—anything that might impede it reaching its objective.
She picked the dome up and opened the latch on its back panel. The two small hatches squeaked lightly on their hinges, revealing the engine within. The gears that moved the punch cards were silent.
Griffin studied the mechanism. “What am I looking for?”
She handed him a magnifying glass. “Use this. Tell me if you see anything strange.”
He took the ebony-handled glass and held it above the dome, leaning down to peer through it. What he saw made him frown. Tiny veinlike tendrils entwined with the machinery, like a young lady’s hair around a finger. “Are these what I think they are?” he asked, glancing up at his pretty friend.
She nodded. “Organite pathways. Somehow they were introduced to this automaton’s thinking engine. I believe it was through The Machinist’s oil. The sample you gave me still had living beasties in it. They reacted when I had it near a power cell—as though it was attracted to it.”
“Did they cause a malfunction?”
This time she shook her head—impatiently. Sometimes Emily forgot that not everyone was as intelligent as she—or were privy to the same information. “No. The engine works exactly as it should. If anything, the Organites made it work even better. The machine reacted to a situation without the benefit of punch cards.”
“It became sentient?” There was no hiding his incredulity.
Emily’s eyes brightened as she practically danced on the balls of her feet, clad as usual in heavy boots. “Yes! Isn’t that amazing?”
He arched a brow. “I suppose that’s one word for it.” So was terrifying. Metal thinking for itself? There was no telling what wonders, or disasters might occur. It made sense now, however.
The Organites lived off rock from deep inside the earth, and the ore was a result of that. One was part of the other, so when energy from the ore is released, any nearby Organites were going to be drawn to it and interact with it. In the case of the automaton, the Organites were drawn to the cell in its thinking engine and changed how the engine functioned.
“That’s what happened to us!” he exclaimed. “Last night we saw what the Organites had done inside Sam’s body. It was because of the power cell in his heart. We’ve all been exposed to power cells our entire lives. It’s the combination of using the Organites and power cells that caused the leap in our genetic evolution.”
He wanted to crow in victory. The mystery of the machines was solved! But then he stopped and his smile faded. Anyone out there who happened to spend much time around the ore and material that contained Organites could be “unusual.” Slight traces of Organites were in the water, in the soil. The ore