jobe's physiology

First, it should be understood that Jobe is a kind of robot body, with a kind of artificial brain whose memories have been downloaded from the brain of a living creature. His robot body has a power core that works on the principles of what we would call cold fusion, but functioning slightly differently.

He actually has a skeleton comparable to ours, with similarly-shaped bones, however, they are composed of a type of metal alloy we don’t have a name for in the English language. This skeleton is wrapped in a layer of wires instead of muscle, and the wires are covered with live, self-regenerating skin.

His robot brain is not a motherboard, or any kind of chip. It’s composed of squishy silicone jelly, replete with wrinkles and hemispheres like ours are. The main difference lies in the microscopic make-up of this brain. Instead of neural cells with synapses, he’s got nanorelay stations which communicate with each other using either sounds or flashes of light, depending on where Jobe is.

Human neurons communicate chemically, with the spaces between them being filled with a chemical which a neuron will uptake, then release from its other end to set off a chain reaction. Jobe’s nanorelays work like this in theory, except the sending end plays one of the 12 semitones, and the receiving end is a tiny speaker.

There are benefits and detriments to this system. It’s more efficient than ours because the signals are easily distinguishable and there is less chance for random nanorelays breaking the chains or being manipulated by outside chemicals as our neurons are. When he’s in space, the sender ends flash a color of light, and the receiver end recognizes it and broadcasts it to the next nanorelay. While this system is much faster than the sound-based system, the presence of water and air in the Earth’s atmosphere makes the light-based system unusable while on Earth.

To summarize, sound cannot exist without air, so he has to use the flashing light relay system in space.

Both systems are slower than computer chips, where signals travel just a little slower than the speed of light. However, computers are incapable of processing information in the same way the human brain does. Spacing out a few million micro-relays in the silicon jelly robot brain allows a mock-up of human brain activity at roughly 25x (sound-based) or 100x (light-based) the speed with which humans can react to the present. Humans operate with a quarter-of-a-second lag when interacting with their surroundings, while Jobe’s brain lag is more like 1/20th (or 1/500th) of a second.

The implications of this may not be immediately understood. Imagine being able to see the blades of a turning airplane propeller at full speed instead of circles. Imagine being able to perceive the path of a bullet in flight. In space, Jobe can see light. I don’t mean he notices the movement of it or the way it illuminates objects, those are the effects of light. Imagine turning on a light in a room and being able to see that interval when it actually expands to fill the corners of the room. For us it’s just two states, on and off, with no in-between.

This ability to see in hypertime would be useless without the physical speed to back it up, so he was built with that as well. After constructing the aforementioned robot brain, Jobe’s makers had little trouble building a faster robot body. When coupled with his sight, he can outrun bullets. Think about that. When bullets are actually slower than you are, it makes guns pretty worthless, so he does a lot of hand-to-hand and edge weapon-based combat.

Despite all these seemingly superhuman abilities, he’s not invulnerable. While his metallic frame allows him to withstand incredible amounts of damage, the right shot to his power core can shut him down temporarily. In the story, a rival robot of similar make plunges a quarter-inch wire connected to an amplifier into his ear and plays a guitar chord. Since his nanorelays function on sound, the internalized reverberations of Em (or any other chord) can cause his brain to short out.

An obvious question might be: if Jobe is the robot product of an alien race, why the focus on making him look so much like a human? This is because he is being sent to interact with humans, and despite sending a robot death squad to earth to eradicate a few choice humans, they don’t actually wish to cause psychological damage or political change for the remaining inhabitants of the planet. Also, it’s a display of prowess for the Jobians. When you’ve existed outside time and space as long as they have, your opportunities to do something as interesting as building robot death squads are limited, so you do your very best to make them as perfect as possible.

Another obvious question might be: why send robots in the first place when you could just send your own people. Part of this was already answered in the paragraph above; alien invaders tend to creep out the populace. The more important reason is that Joban bodies, having been outside the contractions and expansions of the universe for so long, would be immediately crushed if they tried to enter the universe the way yours would be if you walked around on the bottom of the ocean.

But that's a whole different story, one I hope to get to fairly soon.
 

(c) 2006 j baugher