Polished Performance

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RUBY WAS A surface-hygienic unit: a class-one floor scrubber.

She was a squat red rectangular box with multiple rotary brushes. She had a body profile low enough to help her slip under chairs, the hems of tablecloths, and through general-utility service ducts. She ran a class two-point-eight cognition engine.

One day, about halfway into the Resplendent’s century-long interstellar crossing, Ruby was summoned to the starliner’s forward observation deck. Forty-nine other robots had gathered there. Ruby knew them all. Several of them looked human; a few more were loosely humanoid; the rest were mechanical spiders, praying mantises, segmented boa constrictors—or resembled highly decorated carpets, chunks of motile coral or quivering potted plants.

“Do you know what’s wrong?” Ruby asked the robot next to her, a towering black many-armed medical servitor.

“I do not,” said Doctor Obsidian. “But one may surmise that it is serious.”

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