Buildin' a robot!

[Ada Turing]

Early in November (on a conveniently unspecified afternoon), Ada unlocked the empty classroom and walked in. She looked at the neat rows of tables and thought for a moment, and then started to move them around. Most of the tables ended around the perimeter of the room, with only a few chairs escaping being sandwiched between the tables and the walls. Two tables, side by side in the center of the room, made an obvious focus for the entire setup.

A few back and forth trips later, and the classroom was starting to resemble a robotics lab - One whole wall's worth of tables had computer parts and boxes on them, and another corner was dedicated to raw materials. Locking the room behind her, Ada went in search of Aurora. It was time to get to work.

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

Ada found Aurora in the dining hall, eating a pudding cup. Three empty ones sat beside the one she was currently polishing off.

"Hi, Ada!" She replied excitedly. She had a smudge of strawberry just to the right of her mouth.

[Ada Turing]

"Um..." Aurora said, slightly taken aback. "When you're done there, could I get a hand with something? I'm getting ready to bring Tumult back online."

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

"Oh, I can go now!" She scooped up the containers and daintily dropped them in the waste basket. "Where is it?"

[Ada Turing]

"Thissaway!" Ada said, leading the way out of the cafeteria and up to the third floor. Once they arrived, she produced the key.

"Learned from my mistake last time," she commented as she unlocked the door. "We'll keep other people from stumbling across what we're doing, hopefully that will save us some trouble."

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

"It might help," she said, gesturing at the lock and having it unlock before Ada could get the key in. She strolled in, holding the door open for Ada. "But we should be careful anyway."

[Ada Turing]

"Oh yes," Ada said. She walked over to the computer parts. "I was figuring we'd start with the processors, get Tumult up and online, and then we can start working on a chassis."

The components were surprisingly compact - when assembled, the entire processor core would be a stack of circuit boards eight inches wide and eight tall. Some of the boards were off-the-shelf motherboards, some were modifications thereof, and some were blank printed boards and bagged chips.

"You're probably much better than I at precision soldering, so I'll lay out the components if you'll attach them."

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

'Soldering,' she thought. She was glad Ada gave her some context - but what was she supposed to attach it with? She picked up one of the chips and noticed that there were metal prongs on all sides of it. Computer parts were really neat because there were so many intricate parts in them. They didn't make noise unless had power running through them, but constructed components were kind of like sea shells - they echoed when you held your ear to them.

And the echoes from these chips were very very pretty.

The metal prongs on the chips didn't seem to have wires in them - they were pure metal. That meant they were either to look pretty or conduct electricity. She had figured out that much. Looking at the boards, she noticed they had metal lining them.

"Oooooh," she murmured.

[Ada Turing]

Ada started laying out one of the boards. Pads of solder on the underside of the chips lined up perfectly with pads of solder on the boards, providing obvious join points. Even with nothing tied into any of the ports and slots on the board, it was compact and packed, every last little bit of space filled by something. Ada had to resort to a pair of tweezers to place the smallest of the components.

"There we are," she said, carefully sliding it over to Aurora. "Neural net coprocessor board, one of eight."

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

"Wow." The echo was mesmerizing, like the sound of waves when you're awash in the center of the ocean. She couldn't imagine how it'd be once it was turned on. "And you want me to put the other ones together just like this?"

[Ada Turing]

"Well, first off, if you'd solder that one together - all the metal bits that are touching are solder, which melts at a very low temperature. If you melt it, it'll lock the chips to the board, so we don't have to worry about it falling apart. I'll start putting the rest together, if you'll melt the solder -carefully."

"Also..." Ada hesitated with wording. "Does it sound like Tumult?"

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

"Hmm..." Only one of the boards was put together, of eight, and it was just the hardware regardless. She bit her lip as she tried to find the words to describe it - it was one of the things she had trouble doing.

"It's like... you know the big music halls, right? The ones with like lots and lots of people, hundreds, or thousands? And they have this big stage to let the band play and everyone can hear it? Well, the band needs that stage or they can't play. This..." she gently stroked the circuit board. "This is like that building. It's really cool looking, but it's not Tumult until she starts playing."

She stayed in silence a bit as she explored the circuit board, and all of it's unmounted components. She imagined standing in the center of a large music hall, imagining all of the speakers and lights and amplifiers, but none of them were plugged in. She closed her eyes and her hands, gripping the board tightly, began to melt, flowing into the board. In her head, Aurora imagined silver clouds pouring over the stands towards the stage in beautiful cascades, striking the stage and showering it with surf. She spun around, arms wide, as the waves swirled, as silver wires shot from component to component. A subtle chorus arose, like a gentle breeze, a mother's breath as she puts you to sleep. She began conducting the waves, directing them in sophisticated swirls, her silver dress twirling. Each connection added another direction to the breaze, another sound.

Aurora, in the middle of the music hall, leapt skyward as it crescendoed into a rumbling thunder, then she opened her eyes. The nanites were just returning to their place, and all of the mountings were complete.

"Eight more, right?"

[Ada Turing]

"Seven," Ada said. "Everything else is already soldered together, it's just a question of sticking CPUs in sockets, and then assembling the entire stack."

Ada (carefully) slid another completed board over to Aurora.

"Once we get the rest together, we'll be able to start it testing... I don't exactly want to put Tumult into an untested processor. That should take a day or two to run all the tests I have in mind."

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

Aurora nodded as she got to work.

[Ada Turing]

((And... Bouncing forward a day or two!))

"And that's that, I think," Ada said, looking at the assembled core. Its basic structure - two stacks of a dozen circuit boards each, was only barely visible under shining copper heatsinks, clear tubing carrying yellow-green coolant, and flexible connector bridges linking board to board. Temporary connectors ran from the core into Ada's temporarily caseless computer, and other hoses ran to a large, fan-covered radiator. The coolant was topped off, the final connections were checked, and the appropriate startup commands for testing had been entered into Ada's computer.

"Well," she said, gesturing at the computer's power button. "Care to do the honors?"

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

Aurora rubbed her hands together and took a deep breath. She shivered slightly, flushing a bit with embarrassment over how nervous she was. It was kind of like waiting at the airport for a friend you hadn't seen in years.

She stepped forward, and lifted her finger up, stroking the button lightly. She could feel the wire behind the button, leading down to the two metal prongs in the board. Pushing the button would complete the circuit, allowing a single spark of electricty to jump from prong to prong, starting the powerup. In any other case, she'd simply forgo the entire comples scheme and just start the process herself. This time though, she imagined that the button was a bottle of champaigne, and she was breaking it on the hull of a newly christened ship.

"I christen thee, Tumult." And then she pressed the button.

[Tumult]

To most observers, a computer starting up is a relatively straightforward process. Push the button, wait a few minutes while the screen displays scary magic gibberish, and then, assuming everything worked, the computer would be ready to log onto in just about the same time it would take to make a good cup of tea.

Ada and Aurora were not usual observers.

While the system took its time to boot, the workings under the hood, so to speak, were nothing short of fascinating. The process of self-testing and loading programs whose only purpose was to load the next program in the chain was complex and intricate - an orchestra tuning, but carefully composed and conducted. Prof. Jones's hard disk started to work, reading the first of many gigabytes of data into the core and the twin solid-state disks that would be Tumult's working memory.

And then it stopped. The loaded program, miniscule compared to Tumult, began to expand to fill all the memory of the assembled core. It was a test, generated by Tumult to ensure that the processors were both up to the task of running an AI and also ensuring that the system was free from hard-wired viruses. It was probably going to take a while.

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

Aurora took a seat, here eyes locked on the cpu tower. "So now what?"

[Ada Turing]

"Now?" Ada asked, still mesmerized by the computer. "We need a body to put our brain in..."

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

"And how do we start on that?" She asked, looking around the room at all the supplies Ada had left out.

[Ada Turing]

"Well," Ada said, walking over to a spool of odd black cable. "I was planning on using the usual servos and skeleton, but Prof. Galontaure-Jones kindly donated this. Electroactive Polymer muscle, all it needs is voltage to generate force. Only one gauge, so we'll need to weave it together for the larger muscles."

"First, though, we need to make this pile of aluminum into a skeleton." Ada hefted a length of pipe.

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

"Ah." Aurora had no idea what Ada had just said. This would take awhile.

[Destiny Valencia Everett]

Peeping into the classroom, Desi stood hesitantly for a moment before opening the door all the way and entering.

"Hey, roomie," she said. "I looked all over for you. I can't find my pink T-shirt and I thought maybe you..." She suddenly noticed the interesting mechanical-looking things arranged around the room.

"What are you doing? Can I help?"