The Trailblazer
An Iron Age Media Prompt
Travis Beckett couldn’t hear the machine lumbering along a klick or two back, but he could feel the vibrations in the rusty red soil he trudged through as he led the way for the automated monstrosity. And a good thing he was here, too, he reflected. The Davenport-Simmons PAT-34, known among frontier spacers as a “Cornerstone”, was a remarkable piece of machinery, but you couldn’t fake the human element. Driven entirely by preprogrammed algorithms, once it reached an area designated for a new colony, it went to work and began setting up prefabricated housing and manufacturing hulls, atmo converters, ‘ponics bays, anything that might be necessary for the settlers already en-route in a long-term, long-range mass transport.
But if not for trained scouts like Beckett, the PAT-34 would never achieve its mission. It took nuance, decision-making skills, and a trained eye. In fact, the PAT-34, in Beckett’s seasoned opinion, was rather stupid. It would drive through anything, sterilize anything, knock down whatever it had to to reach the goal. This was, of course, a waste of energy, and a scout could use his wristpad to alter the projected course of the towering robot. Beckett did so constantly. Some might call it micromanaging, but he felt he had a surgeon’s eye for navigation, as it were, and he imagined he had saved the reactors that powered these vehicles several minutes of unnecessary burn time in his career. The fact that the reactors would likely outlive both him, and the colony it was powering, were not factors that mattered much to him.
Yes, there was no point sending a robot to do a man’s - Wait. What was that? A rock had tipped on its side about twenty meters ahead. Beckett brought up his pulse rifle warily, and as a small reddish snout poked cautiously around the corner, he opened fire. He never saw what it was, as the flaring energy bursts from the weapon dimmed his vision, and a square meter patch of sand and rock was turned to glass and ash. He secured his weapon as smoke drifted from the target site in the thin atmosphere. Glancing around warily, he satisfied himself that he was alone again, and allowed himself a moment’s satisfaction. By engaging the potential hostile himself, he had once more spared the auto-clearing protocol on board the PAT-34 from solving the problem in its own, mechanical, and very clearly not human way. And the energy the robot would have expended to sterilize the threat would probably have wasted a whole half-second of reactor time. His pulse rifle could have the power cell replaced, so that made it basically free, as far as he was concerned. Why, without him, the auto-clearing protocol might not have recognized what was most probably an existential threat to the mission parameters. Whatever it had been.
Beckett took a moment to alter the PAT-34’s course by seven meters so as to avoid the engagement zone. He wanted to preserve it for his quarterly report. As much as he tried not to think about it, he knew deep down, if he really thought about it, his real job out here was to find ways to justify his job. Which is why he didn’t think about it, and went back to trying to mentally calculate, down to the tenth of a second, how much burn time he had saved the robot’s reactor core.
Yep, that’s me. The indispensable one. Can’t do it without me.