Bilby: Part Two

The Teleoperable Ovoid Machine known to itself as Bilby was, to put it idiomatically, in somewhat of a pickle. To put it literally, Bilby--a very smart and very lonely little pearl boulder of a robot--was currently trapped within the dreaded Stapledon Box, and it (he?) had only seconds--milliseconds, really--to cogitate on a viable method of escape before an untimely, unpleasant, and wholly unwarranted neural death. You see, Bilby, on its quest for a friend in the empty wastes of the distant future, had been trapped by a Super Human Intelligence, and currently that ShI was employing a pair of electronegativity cutters to slice through Bilby's thick armor, straight toward its pea-sized but fantastically impressive brain, which looped around itself in ways that were both impossible and very effective at generating raw cognitive power.

So. A terrifying enemy, a dangerous predicament, a cliffhanger, revisited and recapped. How could Bilby possibly escape? It was a question that was nagging at him with a particular importance. (To underscore this, note that Bilby had devoted nearly 13.39% of its brain to this problem, which may not sound like much, considering the potential for a fatal encounter, but Bilby had never in its existence devoted so much processing power to a single problem, not even when it tried to understand the appeal of toy trains to middle-aged men--now that had been a thorny issue, and not one that even now it considered satisfactorily apprehended, solved, or in any fundamental way understood.)

Then one of Bilby's photon receptors caught a flicker of movement in the far side of the vast underground chamber in which he was trapped. Had help arrived? Bilby zoomed in and recognized the form as life, and intelligent life, but the creature had stopped in an inky shadow, hunched over, with its big, human-like hands on a pair of hairy knees. It was an Uplifted Neo-Ape, with a glass covering over its expanded brain and spiky cooling fins extending from its back. The fins and covering were to prevent the animal's brain from literally melting. The animal watched Bilby struggle within the Stapledon box, picking at one ear with a casual yet determined demeanor. Bilby wondered what the creature expected to locate in its own ear.

The ShI had been broadcasting its own thoughts and questions this entire time, on every frequency and medium that a robot could send or receive on. Bilby had listened for the first second and then given up, quickly determining that the rampant ShI had nothing of interest or note worth hearing or remembering. Just a lot of nonsense about dark matter, dark energy, the Great God Ulthoth, the Return of the Old Humans, the Jupiter HiveStorm Republic, and on and on. It really was quite in love with the sound/wave/flash of its own cognitive output. Bilby wished it would shut up.

Bilby realized he had about half a nanosecond remaining before the electronegativity cutters penetrated the nano-forged metals and nu-plastics protecting its brain. How long might Bilby surive at that point? A solid question, if not one it had much in answering, for who would it tell and how? No. This was really enough of this. Bilby instigated his self-destruct sequence.

Immediately, the cutters cut off and retreated, and the Super Human Intelligence, like a fog of particulate matter, retreated to the far side of the cavern. It oozed into a grate and disappeared. It was gone. The chamber, with its vast spires of crystalline and semi-organic (and now ossified) computers, was both still and silent.

The Neo-Ape removed its forefinger from deep within the cavern of its right ear. It inspected the resulting waxy material, sniffed.

Bilby formed a vocalizing apparatus, decided on a voice (male, human, gravely) and said, "Hey, you there. With your finger out of your ear, perhaps you could help me out of this box?"