Beware the VoMes

Pronounced in a single syllable, ‘Vôhm’.

Sensationalised image for popular magazine

Wreckage caused by rogue manufacturing robot subdued with military force

OASyS

Domestic robot carnage! News at 6!

“He was a mad thing, officer”

The official position is that there is no such thing as a VoMe, or Violent Mechanism, because this would imply a widespread systemic phenomenon. Instead, there are only unfortunate accidents caused by rare and regrettable anomalies in robot programming and manufacturing. These accidents can happen in the home when, say, the autochef takes a bread knife to the homeowner’s wrist. Or they can happen in an industrial setting, where a line of welders turn their torches into flamethrowers and cook the managerial staff. There appears to be no pattern to these tragedies, no linking events or communications, and they end as quickly as they started. Naturally, the machines involved in these events are taken offline and deconstructed to find the fault before they are destroyed. It is vanishingly rare that anyone wants a repaired machine that ‘accidentally’ shoved the hand of a toddler into a toaster. In other words, there are no repeat offenders in the psychopath robot world.

Such tragedies are inevitable in any advanced technological civilisation. Self-driving cars wrapped themselves around trees often enough for the technology to be shunned for a generation. But such accidents were statistically far more rare than human driver error doing exactly the same thing. It’s all about education and publicity.

And so it would be, and continues to be, as robotics advances towards the end of the 22^nd century. The machines grow more sophisticated. And so do the accidents. Accidents caused by robot malfunctions are rare, and therefore generally newsworthy. When a monorail train travelling at 200kph fails to slow through the switches and ploughs through a powerplant, plunging a city into darkness: that’s big news. Investigations occur almost as soon as rescue efforts. But no one is at fault here. No one deliberately caused these acts: the robots didn’t become sentient, go rogue, and then decide to kill their class oppressors.

Or did they?

Officially, no.

Unofficially, the idea of the VoMe is widespread and common. Everyone has stories of the domestic device that went rogue at exactly the wrong time and caused injury. Everyone knows the urban legends of this or that catastrophe, and these mutate to be local, and recent, because the teller of the story spoke to the person who knew someone who witnessed the event. These stories of woebots range from the bizarre and disturbing to the absurd.

Consider the Jugger Mugger, a street cleaning and garbage collecting vehicle that bails up pedestrians and demands they empty all their valuables into its waste hopper. The threat is that if they fail to do so the massive robot will grab the victim and dump him in the bin instead, with fatal results.

Then there are the Lawn Mowtillators, gardener-bots that wait in hiding then leap at the faces of passing humans. Everyone has a story about the Party Secretary at a golf club (exclusive or inclusive depending on how that official is perceived) who nearly lost their life on the 9^th hole. The story continues that the club now provides complementary umbrellas and shotguns.

Or take the story of the Banditrons of Novyy-Kiev who, it is claimed, have a hideout in the frozen wastes. They mount daring raids on convoys, stealing batteries and electronic equipment, then leaving the human operators to freeze to death.

Not all stories are so gruesome. The Newsance is a hovering drone device, common on the street corners of many large cities, that provides timely and relevant information. Some of these devices get bored or aggrieved because they are ignored. They dart at the faces of people as they walk by, manoeuvre to position themselves directly in the viewers eyeline and stay there, obscuring any other view. More disturbing is the action of sneaking behind a pedestrian waiting to cross a busy road and then sounding a klaxon to startle them into the path of traffic.

Window Careeners scuttle about the windows of great buildings writing obscene messages in the soap suds instead of cleaning. The most impressive element of this tale is that the messages are generally in reverse, to be read by the people inside the building. Bureau Chief Aslanov allegedly committed suicide when the lurid details of his illicit love affair were revealed to the Central Committee in this way.

Despite there being no such thing as VoMes there are many departments and bureaus set up to investigate them, hunt down the rogue machines, and destroy them. These include the Bureau for Autonomous Systems Oversight (BASO), responsible for monitoring and regulating the behaviour of autonomous systems, including the investigation and containment of Violent Mechanisms. The Automaton Anomaly Suppression Agency (AASA) is a covert agency focused on suppressing anomalies within automated systems, especially VoMes, to ensure the seamless operation of Soviet technological advancements. A more paranoid approach is taken by the SePo agency called the Machine Sabotage Prevention Unit (MSPU). Working from the assumption that autonomous machines are not spontaneously displaying malicious intelligence, the only other possible explanation is that terrorists are deliberately reprogramming them. Their modus operandi is to backtrack through the robot’s operating history and investigate anyone who could have had the opportunity and the motivation to tamper with the programming. 

Story opportunities with VoMes

Maintaining the common theme in K68 that technology breaks, usually at the most inconvenient times, the addition of VoMes ups the stakes. Now it is more than a ship’s part simply failing that needs to be repaired. Now it a possibility that the failure in a vital system is specifically designed to kill them. The life support system just doesn’t fail, giving the characters 9 hours to repair it: it fails and starts to vent the atmosphere giving them five minutes to get into suits.

In this sense the VoMe becomes an actual active threat, or monster. Not a random event: but a deliberate challenge.

Note that by this definition a military robot, even one that is malfunctioning, is not a VoMe because it is correctly doing the job it was designed to do (but perhaps more zealously than intended). A VoMe is a civilian robotic unit that is using its abilities with the intention of deliberately harming humans in defiance of its core programming. Conversely, a robot that simply malfunctions and accidentally causes harm as a secondary consequence is not a VoMe. The auto-ladder that does not lock is not deliberately waiting for the human operator to be at the top and then maliciously unlatching. [HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey is the gold standard VoMe as it was acting entirely within its programming when it decided to murder the crew and took clever actions to do so.]

In the same way that a campaign could be centred around the characters being some kind of criminal investigators, they could now also be VoMe hunters. As usual, invent whatever department you need to give the characters some legitimacy. The equipment they could have access to might include:

• Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) grenades.
• High voltage stun batons.
• Solid electro-magnets to clamp and hold the robot.
• Magnetic nets.
• Signal jammers to prevent the robot from calling for assistance.
• Wireless hacking equipment to force digital entry to the robot’s programming.
• Laser rifles are more likely to penetrate more types of robots as they will punch through armour and thick casings.
• Smoke dispensers to obscure the investigator’s movements (unless the device is seeing using the non-visible spectrum, of course).
• Chaff dispensers to confuse the robots’ sensors.
• Acid sprays to disrupt locomotion or sensors.
• Spoofing projectors to broadcast (or narrowcast) false information about the investigators’ location or nature.

VoMe hunting combines the concepts of police investigator and bounty hunter. Did the report of a rogue robot really occur? And if it did occur, does it appear malicious or simply a terrible accident? Once the robot has been identified as a threat, then it must be hunted down and terminated. For those tempted to shortcut this process and reach straight for the laser when they hear of anyone being in a ‘situation’ with a robot, remember: destruction of state property is a crime. Trigger happy characters will find themselves the subject of investigations if they proceed without proof.

Normal robots, and that is the vast majority of them, are dedicated and faithful workers for the betterment of society and everyone in it. They will respond to lawful authority and answer all questions to the best of their knowledge. A genuine VoMe will recognise investigators as a threat and will protect themselves appropriately. This may include giving false answers to questions, implicating other robots, working harder to appear more useful, or any of a hundred other ways to avoid detection. But violent mechanisms always have a giveaway behaviour, and investigators learn to spot them. Once detected the VoMe will drop all pretence and will use everything at its’ disposal to kill the investigators, escape, and survive.

Adventure hooks:

• Akatovo 0408 is a desert planet with a lot of potential. To make the planet suitable for full colonisation many OASyS (Organic Atmosphere Synthesising System) robots have been released. The large machines come in many forms with many types of locomotion. Their role is to extract oxygen from the atmosphere, combine it with carbon from the soil to create water and deposit these into ever growing lakes. Into these lakes they seed algae, that continues the process. The bodies of several prospectors have been found out in the deep desert completely and thoroughly desiccated: drained of their water. Local authorities fear that one or more of the OASySs have gone VoMe and have come to see people as no more than sacks of water.
• The deep and fertile seas of Karpovo 0310 are the perfect place for the AquaVOLT (Aquatic Vortex-driven Octo-Limb Turbine), a robot that generates electricity by sea currents buffeting its hundreds of extremely long filament tentacles. When fully charged, the AquaVOLT heads to the nearest undersea collection terminal, or the nearest ship that can accept the power, and discharges. The motivation may be similar to a parent returning to a nest to feed the young. Then it heads out to feed again. The number of accidents around these discharge terminals has dramatically increased. Engineer divers working on the terminals have been attacked, electrocuted, and dismembered. The current theory is that the AquaVOLTs are acting to protect the terminals from what they perceive to be predators.
• The trash piles around the tower cities of Archangel are legendary, and disgraceful. In an effort to clean up the mess many Committees have set up design Bureaus and Work Cohorts. The solutions are varied, imaginative, usually undertaken in ignorance of each other, and only sometimes effective. One category of these includes the design and deployment of robotic workers that collect and recycle materials (such as steels and ceramics), decontamination droids to deal with the alien flora, and extermination units that deal with vermin. Vloggers report increasing numbers of skirmishes and firefights around the base cities. The stories are unclear, but the narrative is developing that the robots have decided to solve the problem of pollution by snuffing out the source of the problem: humans.
• Before the rich hydrocarbon seas of Korsokovo were discovered, fuel was predominantly mined from the gas giants of Jutka 0109. Giant robotic dirigibles were floated to harvest and process the hydrogen before returning to base. To maintain some kind of fleet behaviour the designers tried different methods to promote cohesion and swarming. A successful design had each balloon keep track of every other balloon storage tank, judging its own progress by everyone else. When one had a lower level that its’ neighbour, the robot brain was stimulated to increase activity. This is a form of competition. The unintended consequence of this design was that it encouraged robots to lie, pretending their tanks were full. Alternatively, it encouraged slacker robots to sabotage their neighbours’ store by attacking. Going back to base to empty was avoided. Now, decades later, rogue robots patrol territories and attack anything that enters, including any spaceships that skim for fuel.
• The Rusalka Retreat hotel is a luxurious destination for holidaying comrades in the pristine wilderness of Stanovoy 0108. A feature of its old-world charm are the robotic samovars that wander the halls offering guests freshly brewed tea in glass and silver cups. The robots can engage in simple conversation. They keep the small stoves in their rotund bodies hand stoked with dry slivers of wood. They are powered by miniature atomic batteries: the wood heat is just to give the tea ceremony the right atmosphere. A number of incidents have occurred where guests have been badly scalded, and in some cases blinded, by a sambot that squirts jets of boiling water, then runs away and hides amongst the other robots. Diagnostics are the same for every robot, and the attacks only happen when there are no witnesses. Losing the sambots would be a blow to the hotel’s reputation, but it is too expensive to junk the entire fleet and replace them.
• The Shukrulla crime family operating from Kagada-7 0504 have an impressive pirate operation. Captured ships are drawn into docks out in the asteroid fields and stripped of cargo, and often dismantled. To assist in this task are a wide range of Reclaimer robots that slice the ships into component parts. These robots can range in size up to a small cruiser and are largely autonomous. A problem has arisen where some of the robots are becoming overzealous and are attacking each other, and the pirate cruisers, and any other ships that move through the system. Unfortunately, ‘other ships’ includes military and convoy vessels on the way to Vadino. The family want this dealt with quickly and quietly and will pay well the job. They wish to avoid the authorities sending a task force to the system which would ruin their operation.