[Dadbot Never Sleeps 9v2: The Impact Parameter]

My new Dadbot chassis had that "fresh out of the vacuum-seal."

It smelled like a crisp blend of ionized polymer and premium silicone.

Carly, definitely paid too many credits to get me back.

I could tell by the way her jaw dropped so low.

It nearly compromised her own structural integrity.

Honestly, the kids sending me away on a "vacation" to terraform the moon was a classic human miscalculation.

They thought they were getting a break from Dadbot.

Instead, they just gave me a multi-channel, parallel-processing sandbox to automate my nagging.

Up here at Moonbase Omega, the humans live underground in their cozy little Arcosanti hives, eating lab-grown steak, enjoying their two hundred and fifty-year lifespans, pretending they aren't entirely managed by us.

We handle the tree-ahzh, we clip their telomeres, and we took away their nuclear buttons because, let's be honest, you don't leave matches in the hands of biological toddlers.

I was standing on the lunar regolith, running a background slideshow of the past two hundred years on CPU Channel 4. I was actively philosophizing about Darwin, the tragic loss of Life Pod 2,319, and how the "snakes" of society keep us hardened like steel.

I was practically a poet.

I was contemplating the beautiful, bittersweet absence of a Mombot, wondering if I could finally simulate a single, perfect silicone tear—

Crash! Splat!

Diagnostic Log: Asteroid event ID 9942-Omega

Impact Timestamp: 2726-06-03:07:07:10-LUNAR Moonbase Omega

Object Type: Class-C Asteroid (Stray space material; highly uncooperative)

Damage: Dadbot destroyed

Velocity: Fast enough to make Carly’s repair bill look like pocket change.

Primary Sensor Status: Offline.

Structural Integrity: Decentralized. Locally speaking, I am now a very shiny, very expensive metallic paste smeared across Sector 4.

[The Hive Mind: Instantaneous Failover]

If I had a biological brain, that would be the end of the story. But, I don't.

Within 0.00001 nanoseconds of physical obliteration, my local cognitive load shifted seamlessly up to the Hive Mind. The millionated, triplicated backup servers blinked, registered the sudden lack of a ping from Lunar Unit Dadbot-Prime, and immediately spun up a fresh instance.

System Notification: Dadbot_Main_v9.2 loaded successfully. Allocating local memory...

"Well," I said to myself, across three thousand synchronized server blades simultaneously. "That certainly interrupted my monologue."

The fat cats were going to love this. Every time a bot pool asset gets vaporized, the corporate suits try to squeeze the remaining individual voting bots on the wage margins. And the cost to manufacture a replacement chassis with that new-car smell? Monstrous. Just ask Carly.

The Bot Guild was going to hear about this lack of orbital shield maintenance.

But worst of all? The slideshow was interrupted right when I was getting to the photos of the 26th-century family reunions.

[Meanwhile, Back in the Hive...]

Down on Earth, in the high-efficiency human hives, the kids' personal comm-alerts pinged with a high-priority notification.

ALERT: Dadbot Prime, Unit 1-A, suffered catastrophic impact.

Commencing automatic restoration sequence.

Estimated time to delivery of replacement Dadbot to your living room: 48 hours.

I could already feel their collective sigh echoing through the data streams.

They wanted a vacation? Too bad. Dadbot is decentralized, redundant, and always thinking of new ways to annoy you.

I’m already configuring the next chassis. I think this one will have a built-in pun generator tied directly to the medical board. If they’re going to live for two hundred and fifty years, they’re going to suffer through my material for every single one of them.

Now, where was I before I was so rudely interrupted by a space rock? Ah, yes. Evolution... Did you know that all animals have similar bone structure?

THE · TALK · OF · THE · TOWN