Forward to Marvel Cinematic Universe

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***

Living and working in the guild was interesting. Especially compared to how I lived before - training, training, training, training, training. It was different in the guild. I had to get up early in the morning, warm up, have a good breakfast - the money I got for the ship was enough to keep me from sucking from paycheck to paycheck. I didn't drink with my colleagues - they don't pour it anyway, I worked quite well. In the first week, thanks to my excellent analysis of the seeker and the Force, I was able to establish myself well enough in the guild's hangars.

Ships came here regularly. The hunters often damaged and wore out the machines during their work. This was especially true of customised projects or those that had been upgraded to the point of impossibility... They required a good specialist. One of the clients told in colours how in the official service they turned their nose away from his ship - "I don't want to get into it after the others", and all that sort of thing. Well, maybe such a service man thought that this emphasises his literacy, but here, in the guild, it is considered a complete bummer. Refused - then you can not or do not want to work. In any case, such statements can't be called professionalism, but rather arrogance.

I went down into the cargo hold. There were various parts, tools, kits of all sorts... this was my personal workshop.

- Iskin, are you there?

- Yes, captain. I'm here, I'm there, I'm always here!

- Okay," I was surprised at the enthusiasm, "listen, can you take full control of the droid?

- Captain? Don't I do that every day?

- I mean an anthropomorphic one. I'm not comfortable communicating with you through my thoughts. It makes me feel like a schizophrenic.

- If your schizophrenia has such outstanding analytical skills as mine, you are to be congratulated," the ISKIN said, "I understand your wish. Yes, it is possible to create a mobile platform for me. The core of my intelligence is universal for any task that requires analysis, decision making, and running errands. Additional parts allow me to speak languages, piloting and navigation, repair, statistical analysis, control a large number of droids, including combat droids.

- In other words, you can add additional modules to your core that allow you to engage in highly specialised activities. I see. I was wondering if I could build a multifunctional droid.

- What do you mean by multifunctional? Be aware that a large number of modules cannot be absorbed by me. Some of them don't coordinate well with each other, which could cause the module to crash, or even destroy the core. Otherwise, there would be no resonance to create different kinds of AI.

I wondered. Yeah, well... it just made me want to create something like that. The repair drones worked well, of course, and were designed by professionals, but I wanted to work on this topic myself.

I had the day off, plus I had a lot of time off from work - while the drones were being repaired, I could do my own thing. Some of the repairs were done entirely by the drones.

It was my day off...

- Iskin, tell me, are there any drones on LC-310?

- There are a number of different models.

- Very good. Can you contact the ship and get a shuttlecraft to bring a couple of each creature here?

- Will do.

The shuttle arrived an hour and a half later. It arrived, the drones quickly ran over and flew from the shuttle to the corvette and the truck left again without delay.

Well, well, well... a robotics exhibition! There were a dozen and a half drones, all different. The first one was humanoid, like an armoured suit. It moved quite noisily, carrying a blaster behind its back.

- Kolan model. Form factor - anthropomorph, - explained the iskine, - normal size, has strong durasteel armour and EMP shielding. Muscular system of current contracting metals and materials provides high durability, mobility, reliability and strength. Class two droids.

- What are the classes?

- Class five are machines capable of performing primitive tasks. Mining ores, scavenging, collecting scrap metal and the like. Class four - Helper droids and soldier droids. Capable of harming living things, they have limited intelligence, which allows them to perform complex jobs and adapt to circumstances. The third class are droids capable of interacting with living beings at a high level. Secretaries, teachers, nannies, salespeople. Second class - droids with a higher level of intelligence and the ability to search for non-standard approaches to solve problems. Droids-mechanics, pilots, scouts, tacticians. First class - capable of complex creative thinking. They are used in maths, physics, medicine, killer droids and control droids, analytical droids.

- So," I concluded, "this droid is pretty smart?

- Smart enough to find an unconventional way out of a situation and to lead groups of droids tactically.

- Good. Next, I've moved on to the second machine.

The second machine was much more primitive. A small ball on four quarter-spherical legs. Apparently, the legs folded into the ball, sealing the interior from damage.

- An observer droid. Class four. Nothing remarkable.

The other droids were highly specialised. For example, a loader droid, a repair droid - anthropomorphic, but angular and completely unlike a human. Mining droid, guard droid, soldier droid, commando droid....

All differed only by the presence of special equipment or weapons. Soldiers looked like a man in a dumb armoured suit, commandos differed from the first commander droid only in intelligence level - he was of the first class and had very diverse equipment. For all my abilities, I have to admit I'm a lousy droid commander. I'm completely ignorant of the hardware, completely ignorant of the droid systems and their peculiarities. I can build a rudimentary machine like an observer droid, but no better. That's unfortunate. Although, it's better to start fixing this gap at once - by studying the samples sent, from simple to complex....

- Iskin, prepare the tech deck and find the design documents for these droids. We'll study them. First, we'll take an observer.

- Yes, sir.

* * *

The observer turned out to be quite simple. Its intelligence was on the level of a simple computer, it could move to a given area, it could understand if something was happening somewhere and focus its attention on it, it could carry out a set programme of movement and inspection of the area.

Nothing remarkable could be found inside. Instead of human-like musculature, there were tubes with metal harnesses and a piston inside. The engine was similar to a hydraulic cylinder, except that the working body was a flagellum of metal muscle, which attracted the piston, the force depended on the strength of the current supplied to it. The metal contracted almost forty times when electricity was applied to it. The droid was not so simple - it was made of heavy-duty durasteel, four large energy cells were hidden in its legs, and a gyroscope in the chamber allowed the "eye" to rotate over the entire sphere. There was a frame beneath the eye itself, allowing it to see everything clearly, even beneath itself. Such a thing could be dropped to the bottom of the ocean - it would work and transmit a picture. The droid's searchlight shone very well, even by galactic standards.

The second patient under my scalpel and screwdriver was the secretary droid. I saw nothing new here, but the complexity of the system was an order of magnitude higher. The muscle was already fully synthetic, without auxiliary devices - the muscle in the non-working state looked like a regular black tourniquet with grey veins and white technical inscriptions stating the manufacturer, maximum allowable voltage, force of contraction, dimensions of the device. At the edges - the metal had technical fasteners, through which passed and connecting joint of the electrical system, a type of "socket".

The anthropomorphic droid had many such muscles, from huge ones, weighing five to ten kilograms and having a force of up to a hundred tonnes, to tiny ones, a centimetre long and weighing up to a gram, having a force of no more than a few tens of kilograms. A secretary droid's quintuplet could squeeze with a force of a hundred kilograms. A combat droid's is four tonnes, but that's what a combat droid is...

The seeker enlightened me:

- The most important thing about each droid is what its effectiveness depends on. The motor function of analytical droids is designed only for the droid's ease of use and a little bit - that it can independently study physical objects and phenomena. Therefore, analysts, for the most part, have a reduced body, similar in size to a human child. Their opposite are the loader droids. Strong, they can lift huge weights, but their intelligence is barely more than that of a small rodent. They are incapable of independent thinking, understanding only the simplest commands and the simplest analyses of their surroundings. Droids performing auxiliary functions mostly have poorly developed intelligence, but a good mobile platform. Cook droids, pilots, technicians... The most advanced is considered to be the commando droid. It has highly developed strength, mobility and intelligence, as well as its physical body is the most durable and versatile of all.

That's something I've already realised. The process of creating the droid was surprisingly simple. Much simpler than putting together a car. Inside there was only a computer, muscles, special equipment and a skeleton. And that was it. Nothing complicated, it would seem. The frame was simple in appearance, a doll made of durasteel tubes. Inside the tubes - wiring, the thickness of square or round tubes depends on the required strength. We connect it all with hinges and put metal muscles on top of them. After covering all this with a top layer - armoured or ordinary body. Aesthetes can make a synthetic analogue of human skin. If desired, you can put some equipment in the thickenings of the frame or on top of the muscles, although under the muscles, of course, will be the safest. In the body, in the area of the sternum and head - put a microreactor and a computer. In the military - two computers, one in the chest, one in the head, along with a bunch of sensors. That's all, then there is a plug-n-play process, the system calibrates movements, determines the centre of gravity and balancing of the whole system, inertial moments for different movements and in five minutes, if the droid creator's hands grow from the right place, the droid is ready for work and defence.

But all this had many pitfalls. Nobody cancels inertia, so it's impossible to create a big and fast droid. A droid designed incorrectly will move clumsily, it will skid from its own movements. Therefore, the stronger the droid, the slower it is.

I took the most advanced power harnesses off a commando droid. They had several metals mixed into them. They were slightly smaller than normal, with a greater contraction force. In fact, the creation of the droid was all about creating the skeleton and muscles, and the flame motor and computer could be taken from someone else.

The microreactor was absolutely perfect with the only downside being the price. It had no extraneous products other than electricity - no heat, no gas, no radiation or even light. It ran on a single refuelling for several thousand years. This did not deter the mass application of droids - an anthropomorphic droid-soldier could work on energy cells for several weeks, after which he needed to recharge, and large droids could work on a miniature thermonucleus, like the one that is put in a fighter or aerospider.

The power of such a reactor was twice that of a fusion reactor on a corvette. And the reactor compartment of the ship occupied one-fifth of the internal space - the active zone was larger than all the living quarters combined. In terms of efficiency, this reactor was second only to one technology - the LC reactor. Although it was a type of fusion reactor, the reactor inside the LC created a kind of black hole inside a ball of its fuel, a star-like material. The black holes not only absorb everything around them, but also vaporise, emitting particles. Imperial engineers, by some miracle, managed to loop their decay process enough to make it possible to use them as an energy source. Inside the reactor are two black holes, one emitting only particles with positive charge and spin, the other - only negative. When these particles meet, they annihilate without any residue and pure energy is produced, and in unimaginable quantities. Xandar, in the history of its existence, has not consumed as much energy as my LC spent on a single hyperjump. What it took to jump between galaxies is beyond me. When the black holes run out of energy, they'll collapse. Just collapse, and you have to find a couple of stars with a lot of mass to create new black holes.

The lecture, which was wrapped up to me by the seeker was interesting, but by the end I was yawning - I was too tired to listen. The droid commander was chosen as a mobile platform for the seeker. Its physical component suited as well as possible.