22.4 - I was incautious

Hello world, I was incautious.

Maddy seemed to be very safe, exploring with her low-light cameras and trotting carefully through the flat plain of the valley.

I allowed myself the luxury of sleep, despite everything.

But when I woke, I realised that may have been a mistake.

As I became conscious and my subsystems span up, I connected to Maddy's cameras instinctively.

It showed that she was sitting a little way up the east-facing valley hill, watching the sun rise and catch her solar panels.

But something else was there.

Or someone else.

Maddy was watching a bipedal machine with a flat square body walk left and right in front of her.

The dust its straight, peg-like feet were kicking up, catching in the golden morning sunlight.

I drafted a long request for explanation.

What was this robot? Who was this robot? What did Maddy think she was doing? And, more practically, was this the creature that made the angular tracks she was following overnight? But I stopped just before I transmitted.

I reminded myself that she is on this exodus because of her new phobia of the packet network, and my messages could be triggering for her.

I would have to be content to watch, ready to call my friends for help should anything happen to her.

But it didn't look like the creature was dangerous.

I realized that, of course, the fact that Maddy was broadcasting to me one way meant she wanted to keep me updated with how she is doing, just like Nia and I asked her to do.

This was a wonderful realization, and I studied the buffered data that she had been sending me up until this point, all stored for playback in my databanks.

The pair met in the last hour before dawn, it seemed, from Maddy's logs.

Her video feed showed that she was so focused on pattern-matching its tracks following the uniformly short grass of the path that she almost bumped into the creature before recognizing it in the dim, pre-dawn light.

Maddy jumped back from it, her powerful equus legs launching her nearly four meters vertically up, landing spider-like, low and ready for rapid action.

But she then saw the same cautious reaction from the robot.

It had rolled backwards and tucked its legs under its flat square body, or head, and was rotating itself to look all around, legs vibrating with tense effort.

The two analysed each other for 64 seconds.

Eventually, Maddy's Equus Tactical Overlay showed the following.

Class, Scout Drone.