[ TT ] `` Grandpa ... Can you tell me what it was like to fight alongside humans in the last world war ? ''

`` They were as brave as they were soft. 
 
 `` One or two hits by a round or shrapnel could pop their hydraulics beyond their ability to self-repair. And their reaction time was absurdly slow. They took the better part of a second to even process any unexpected event. And war is nothing, if not unexpected events.'' 
 
 Grandpa continued to polish the still-warm solder on his right knee, which he had spent the last few minutes replacing. Ribbon cables were peeled back at the connector, just at his lower thigh, and as such his leg below the knee hung lifelessly, alloy, cable and tension wire. Ehud* admired the precision and detail of his grandfather's self-repair, as his own software was zettaflops behind in such optimization. Depending on his eventual specialization, he may never be as good as the master craftsman before him. 
 
 Grandpa continued. `` But they were clever. Not in the sense of tactically evaluating probable outcomes, like we Mechanan are. But in this bizarre way; they seemed to take irrelevant data and apply it in untested, unproven ways, for which they had no deductive evidence of success potential. 
 
 `` I'm sure I've told you about Captain Jael...'' 
 
 `` Many times, but I do n't mind hearing it again,'' Ehud interrupted. He knew it was impolite, and risked inefficiency to interrupt. But Ehud concluded that reminding Grandpa how much he loved his stories was worth the unkindness. And if they had been concerned about efficiency of communication, they certainly would n't be using their vocal synthesizers and pickups to transmit the data. And certainly not in English, of all archaic languages. 
 
 `` You are your mother's artifact,'' Grandpa said with a nod, reassuring the boy that his impertinence would be excused this time. `` Jael was one of the last human officers I ever served with. He had essentially no situational awareness, like all humans, and his random number generator was as bad as his game theory. But he always seemed to find ways to break the rules, and come up with a new stupid idea that somehow always worked. 
 
 `` I think it was the 2nd siege of New San Francisco.'' Ehud wondered at how strange the words *I think* sounded from a Mechanan. Was he asserting his Humanity simulation software, or were his memory sectors degrading? Ehud imagined what it would be like to just *think* some datum, and not *know* it. 
 
 `` We had held the Citadel for.23 radians, so about 9 sols -- you know we still used Mars time as the clock standard -- 9 sols before the Ceramics finally brought in their Siege Cannon EMPs. Probably 200 SCAMPs were there that day. Before the end of the next sol or two, they'd be operational, and we would have been scraps. I and the other Assessors advising Jael agreed it was time to leave the citadel and regroup at the edge of the ocean, which was still being terraformed at Venus's poles as war raged on. But Jael would n't have it. 
 
 `` He sent us to the recycling barracks, to gather up all of our destroyed units. Instead of repairing the units, we sabotaged our own recycler. Made a big mess of things, too, so the enemy could see it was in bad shape. Some of the other humans even questioned his decision, as it appeared to everyone else to be some sort of dementia that biological beings are prone to. But Mechanan and Human alike, we followed orders. 
 
 `` The next step was to empty our stockpiles of multi-spectrum sensors, the MiSSes, damage them in a *very* specific way, and reattach them to the optical sensor arrays of all of the destroyed droid units. Then we loaded them into our railguns and fired them at the enemy. Remember, now, these sensors were among our biggest advantages over the Ceramics. We had superior vision and supply chain, they had superior almost-everything-else. And we were delivering our most heavily guarded secret directly to them! 
 
 `` Sure enough, our long-range scouts could see them scanning the debris. Most of the MiSSes were obliterated on impact against the Venusian floor or Ceramic armor plating. But they found some. They found enough. And they started repairing them and affixing their own units with the tech we had just blasted at them.'' 
 
 `` But Grandpa, why did n't they reverse engineer them and make infinite new ones, rather than refurbing ours?'' 
 
 `` Exactly what we suggested to Jael they would do. Turns out, they did n't have the equipment needed to perform the analysis. But to this day, no one knows how Jael knew they would n't have it. From our perspective, he had bet the entire war on this gambit, just to save one city. Humans were crazy, Ehud. If their's one thing you should take away from this story, it's that humans were completely bonkers. Probably still are, wherever they disappeared to'' 
 
 `` I hold that lesson dear to my core processor. Okay, go on, I love this part.'' 
 
 `` So now they've got MiSSes on their beady little sensors, and their SCAMPs are almost completely ready to fire. Our doom is secure. And as the reports start coming in, Jael starts laughing. He knew what was coming. Honda help me, somehow he knew it would work. 
 
 `` With their repaired sensors, they can see that we do n't have any countermeasures to the SCAMPs, and that our numbers are far fewer than they must have concluded given the false signals we had been sending ( another human tactic ). And T-minus-zero had arrived, so without fanfare, the Ceramics charged their capacitors and WAH-WOOOOM. 
 
 `` Nothing happened. To us, anyway. We should have had our circuitry completely smoked on that instant. But instead of the Citadel going dark, it was the siege whose lights turned off. We were stunned. Most of us. 
 
 `` Jael was the first to cheer. Then the rest of the humans, though still perplexed, cheered along. As you well know, we Mechanans do n't cheer.'' 
 
 `` We *can. *'' 
 
 `` Yes, boy, we can. We can also lick a Tesla Coil but our frivolity governors limit the number of stupid things we do, even when trying to act human. Anyhow, we in the Assessment unit were already trying to process variables to see why this improbable outcome would occur. 
 
 `` I was the one that found the obscure warranty report on the sensors we had launched at the enemy. The disrepair we had put on the sensors created a harmonic resonance with the power source the SCAMPs used, which caused a tiny little feedback loop between the MiSSes and SCAMPs. This had 2 results; the SCAMPs overloaded and more or less melted, and the MiSSes popped capacitors with such violence that it drove a nail-shaped chunk of circuit boards and casing right into the Ceramics' processors. 
 
 `` This had happened once, mind you, in the consumer version of the MiSS. And it was on one warranty report. And Jael knew about it, and used it to instantly destroy 78 percent of the siege force at their moment of victory. The rest was a simple cleanup for the defenders of the citadel. Took about 4 hours, with almost no other damage tour our units.'' 
 
 `` Why had n't the Assessors considered Jael's strategy?'' Ehud had asked this question before, but he new that Grandpa loved to recount those moments when Mechanans had to reprogram their logic. Optimization and improvement was a hobby to all of the very best Mechanans, and Grandpa was perhaps the best, from where Ehud stood. 
 
 `` So many reasons. There was no way to know the military version would have the same defect as the consumer version. The power source that the SCAMP used was so rare before the war that testing its interaction with the MiSS and every other device with a warranty report would take forever. We just could n't know it would work.'' 
 
 `` Jael knew it would work.'' 
 
 `` Yes, Jael knew. Did I ever tell you why Jael knew?'' 
 
 `` Because humans are crazy?'' Ehud hypothesized, having never considered anyone would know *why* humans ever do any insane thing they do. 
 
 `` I found the signature on the report. It was Jael's signature. The consumer MiSS that had malfunctioned was the one his wife had been wearing one day, six years before. She was visiting him on base, when a prototype weapon with same power source was test-fired a few hundred yards from her. 
 
 He later told me that he was walking right next to her when it happened, and never heard her fall to the ground. He was several steps ahead of her before he noticed she was n't at his side anymore. There was almost no blood, but her brain was no longer sending signals to her lungs before her knees had buckled.'' 
 
 `` So it was because of her death that New San Francisco was saved from the Flakpots.'' 
 
 `` Ca n't call them that anymore. They're Ceramics. We need to call them that, because that's what they call themselves, and we're not enemies any longer. Ceramics.'' 
 
 Grandpa was always optimizing and improving. 
 
 -- - 
 
 *Extra-humanoid Utility Droid mark III, 67th generation
