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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: Walrus Gideon, head of his own custom cybernetics company is barely getting by. He can undercut his competition on contract bids, but only a few at a time. After all, there's only so much work a two-man operation can take on. That's fine though, until a satisfied customer gives him a gift, an A.Y., or "Artificial You", that thinks it can do whatever Walrus can do, which not only includes bidding on jobs, but making copies of itself, who also then bid on jobs and make copies of themselves, and...

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Low Port, 2003
Fictionwise Release Date: December 2006

20 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [157 KB], eReader (PDB) [31 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [18 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [17 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [78 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [89 KB], hiebook (KML) [67 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [41 KB], iSilo (PDB) [15 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [19 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [47 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [29 KB]
Words: 5476
Reading time: 15-21 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"'Bidding the Walrus' by Lawrence M. Schoen is an entertaining tale about the breakneck, ragged life on the edge of a custom Cybernetics company. Walrus Gideon sells custom robots designed by his schizophrenic genius engineer employee and built by his robotic assemblers. The problem is that he has a number of competitors all vying for the same business, leaving deadlines short and profit margins razor thin. Added to that is the request of an alien creature for Walrus to build a complement of the illegal robots, having the capacity for some level of self- awareness. All in all, this is a fun little tale with a surprising twist at the end that had me laughing."--James S. Reichert, Tangent Online (Learn more about Tangent Online, the Internet's leading SF&F short fiction review website)

Eggplant Jackson warned me about Clarkesons, back on the first day of my apprenticeship. I remember him sitting me down and saying in his best mentoring tones, "Gideon, never take a contract from a Clarkeson. They might look mostly human, but they're not. Every one of them is a colony creature, a mass of self-aware micro-organisms walking around and talking like an individual. They don't think the way we do, chaos can erupt around them when you least expect it." Okay, maybe thirty years of memory has prettied it up some. Mentoring really never was Eggplant's strong suit. What he probably really said was that a deal with a Clarkeson had a way of coming back and biting you in the ass. Like many lessons from my youth, I remembered Eggplant's warning too late.

Randolv Greyce walked into the front office of Gideon Cybernetics within a minute of my opening the door for business. He asked to speak with the Walrus, pronouncing it with the clipped Hindu vowels I associated with tourist sleep learning. He held up a credit voucher with enough digits to lure back all three of my ex-wives. That was my undoing. Money, especially large sums of money, has that effect on me.

"I'm Walrus," I said, and raised a hand to quickly groom my mustache. I tore my eyes from the voucher to give him a quick study. He was dressed in a striped jumpsuit riddled with polka dots. Raspberry hair stuck out from his head like a wreath, made brighter by the contrast with his dead fishbelly complexion. He looked more like a clown than a customer, except that the clown suit wasn't clothing but a decorative sheddable skin produced by an epidermal committee. Randolv Greyce wasn't an individual, he was a colony being. He was a Clarkeson.

I hadn't yet checked the morning mail from the station's bid board, but the Clarkeson had. He handed me his copy of a bidding contract naming Gideon Cybernetics as the second party. Miraculously I'd managed the winning bid on a customized micro-bot job, undercutting my competition throughout the rest of Loophole station by a good five percent of the cost and promising delivery in a tenth of the time. I remembered the contract from earlier in the week; I'd put in a bid at the start of the five day window. I always bid, but a small operation like mine rarely wins. I manage to snag enough jobs to keep the business afloat. Barely. I hadn't known from the bid board that Greyce was a Clarkeson, only that he managed a matrix of industrial properties. He leased short and long term manufacturing shafts on a Jovian moon back in Sol system and needed a flexible and discrete means of handling industrial sabotage to keep his tenants happy. The bid was for writing and producing tiny smart-bots armed with EMP pellet launchers and a typicality-feature matching expert system--something far short of a true AI to keep it within the regs for Sol system--with enough smarts to disable invading spy-bots without harming authorized hardware.

I'd written a similar decision package for a Tunisian agribiz before coming to Loophole, my masterpiece which ended my apprenticeship to Eggplant Jackson. I had the source code in archival storage. Instead of writing fresh code, I could just adapt it to the current particulars, graft a pellet launcher to the standard mini-bot blueprints, and give Greyce what he wanted faster than anyone else on station.