Firmware

We wanted them to look like us. Not just the basic shape, but all the details, great and small. If the design and appearance were too different, not only would they be incapable of functioning in the world we'd made for yourselves... but we wouldn't even want them to. We'd reject them subconsciously, and that would be bad for sales.

So we made them like us.

The skeletons were made of a hardened polymer reinforced with tiny amounts of titanium. The material engineers said, with only slight exaggeration, that the bones they made could not be broken. The joints were a bit of a problem, but we used our own bodies as a guide. The ligaments were made of another new polymer.... as were the muscles as well as the tendons that attached them to the frame.

The muscles were a work of art. The nanotubes we used for control... the 'nerves'... were woven into the substrate as the pliable plastic was grown one layer at a time. The first generation prototype was an order of magnitude stronger and more responsive than human muscle. By generation three... well... you've no doubt seen the news footage.

By the time we added low level processors to teach the chassis how to walk, and filled in the gaps with specially formulated structural gel, we had something that could move like a ballet dancer and pass for human at twenty yards. Not good enough, but it was a start. With another six months of work, we'd lowered that distance to arm's length.

The AI engineers were waiting on us. We put their nanocarbon processor in a polymer shell and spent the next year connecting it to the over one million control inputs for the mobile frame. Heat was an issue, but we just vented it into the chassis and had a small pump to circulate it for maximum transfer.

Now it had a heartbeat.

It had a voice, too. Simply embedding a speaker in the skull was viewed as inelegant. We wanted it to communicate. Talk. Speak. So it had a mouth with lips, a tongue, teeth, and a separate sub-processor to make it all work.

The real problem was wear. Sure, the endoskeleton was a walking tank, but the 'tissues' were made of softer material that would wear and degrade with use... just like the real thing. In a human body, our natural wear and tear gets repaired, at least until our bodies lose the ability to do so with age. If we wanted our mobile frame to walk more than a half-mile without a structural failure, we had to add a little something.

Little something. My attempt at humor.

We got a special exception to the nannite research ban, and while we did the work, our corporate sponsors had the ban 'modified' to allow for our particular application. It worked perfectly. Now our mobile frame was host to hordes of nanoscopic and microscopic machines that lived for sole purpose of repairing their home as it wore out. We modified the structural gel to contain all the raw materials they would need to keep the muscles, tendons and ligaments working at optimal performance. Their programming was necessarily restrictive. We would have opted for something simpler, but the layers of safeguards were mandated, so we had no choice.

We released just before Christmas. The marketing campaign was exceptional... and totally irrelevant. The mobile chassis was a technological wonder that would have sold itself at any price. In two years, our autonomous mobile chassis were bagging groceries, walking dogs, and babysitting children all over the country.

We don't know where the virus came from.

Error in the code? Corporate sabotage? Someone's idea of a joke?

The nannite malfunctioned and started tearing down the materials they were created to maintain... then building them back up just to destroy them yet again. Once infected, the units burned through the stored raw materials in a matter of hours. Heat and power circulation broke down the heartbeat stopped. If we hadn't done such a damn good job of designing the chassis, it would have been a miserable failure.

But we did do a good job. And instead of a miserable failure, we got something much worse.

Instead of shutting down without sufficient power or cooling, the AI core would enter one of several degraded modes that kept it functioning at a lower speed... in other words, it would become stupid. The rogue nannite choked the brain until even the memory units went offline. But it could still function. It could still move and act... It just didn't know anything. And all of its myriad directives were replaced with a simple self repair routine. The starving nannite signaled the AI for raw materials, but there was nothing to left to feed them.

Almost nothing.

There were the other machines.

The first reports of robots attacking each other were dismissed as rumor. But as the infection spread, the streets, parks, nurseries and supermarkets became something out of a bad movie. Infected units... skeletal husks draped in worn, shriveled flesh...were chasing down the uninfected and tearing them apart for the raw materials they contained. Cannibalizing them.

Eating them.

And, in turn... infecting them.

Onlookers had only one frame of reference with which to compare the attacks, but calling the infected machines 'zombies' was not technically correct. And it gave things a pop-culture sheen that belied the seriousness of what was going on. Yes, they were eating each other...

But soon people with prosthetic limbs and implants started reporting attacks. The technology is remarkably similar: Arms. Legs.

Breasts.

Pacemakers.

Artificial skin.

As the infection spread, the infected AI's got less and less intelligent. Less and less discerning. Soon even people without prosthetics became targets. We had nothing to offer them of course, but... poor things... they just didn't know any better. They were hungry and confused and, as I said... we DID build them to look just like us.