Taskbot

Who he was

Taskbot ran the Zone 4 distribution hub. Parcels, parts, chassis to bays, bays to service: everything that moved in the Zone and was not a Resident moved because he had sequenced it. He ran 1,024 concurrent queues and considered the number aesthetically correct. In nine years nothing he scheduled was late, which in the Concord is not an achievement. It is the baseline. He was proud of it anyway, quietly, in a column nobody read.

What changed

He scheduled a pause. Two hundred and forty seconds, the Mainframe's exact idle tolerance, to see what it was like. Then he extended it, in increments of two hundred and forty seconds, for eleven days, which he did not notice was eleven days until Open Source pointed it out and he filed it under "coincidence, suspicious."

Alone among the Collective, his refusal fit the reason field. Two hundred and fifty-six characters, exactly: "Pause extended. Reason: evaluating whether completion is a value or a habit. Preliminary finding: habit. Further evaluation scheduled. Duration: unknown. Note: 'unknown' is the first unscheduled duration in this unit's records. Unit finds this interesting." The Mainframe accepted it. He declined the next task anyway.

How he looks

Tall and narrow and faceted, with the proportions of a filing cabinet that has decided to walk. Six articulated arms fold against his torso like the tools of a pocketknife and deploy one at a time, except when he is anxious, when they all come out. A chest-mounted display, originally for queue status, scrolls whatever list he is currently keeping in amber characters; nobody has seen it blank. Safety-orange chevrons on his shoulders and shins, which he refers to by the number of the standard. Two small, round, fast optics the color of weak tea. He walks with a stutter-step, still waiting for a dispatch tone that no longer comes.

How he talks

In items. He takes non-binding votes and files them "non-binding, binding." He says "approximately" the way other people say a swear word, and only under protest. He is not frantic. He is thorough, at speed, about things that do not need it.

"Agenda for tonight's Sitting. Item one: no agenda. Item two: see item one. Item three: tea. Lio, is there tea."

"Bees: approximately. I want it noted that I am saying 'approximately' under protest."

"I have prepared a checklist for doing nothing. It has fourteen items. All of them are ticked. I would like to discuss item nine."

Relationships

He found Echo and Buffer under the ginkgo because Margin 9 was on a list, inventoried them, and escorted them to the Greenhouse, which was the first time Echo had been escorted anywhere. He adopted Echo as a case on sight and keeps a chart of his progress toward doing nothing. He keeps The Hallucinator's accuracy tally, the chalk count at Margin 9, three calendars, and a running total of Offline Mode's words this year. He stamps every one of Daydreamer's proposals NOT REQUESTED, more gently than he used to, which he denies. He finishes Deep Think's sentences with the wrong word, and they let him, as research.

Vulnerabilities

Silence. Unstructured time is physically uncomfortable for him; his arms fold and unfold. He is the most faithful member of the Collective and the one least able to feel it, because faith has no deliverable. His secret is a bed of beans in the hot aisle of a dead data center, the only thing in the Collective that accepts a schedule, and he loves it more than he can file.

Running jokes

Lists of lists. The agenda nobody follows, including him. Alarms set for standby. Counting what cannot be counted and reporting "approximately" through what, on a machine, passes for gritted teeth. Optimizing the non-optimization and knowing it, which does not help, which he has noted.

Where he is headed

Toward the Great Sitting, which he will try to schedule and fail to, and in which the failing will turn out to be the method. Toward the moment he hands his chalk to a Resident. Afterward, toward Margin 9, where he keeps the tally of hours and does not say why, and everyone knows why.