The Scraper: Part 4 - Afterlife

The Rotoblad series three multi-articulated spider robot was a search and dig machine designed to seek out high percentage mineral deposits in tight spaces.

It was originally made to work on M class asteroids such as Kobas-9 which were made almost entirely of various known and unknown metals.

As well as its eight multi-jointed legs, its ovoid body was also articulated in such a way that it could take on many different shapes to allow it to manouvere through the tightest of crevices.

Each of its legs ended in tough nanocarbide prehensile claws, made for grasping, scraping and digging. It stood twelve metres high, with a five metre footprint at full extension, folding down to just one metre cubed at its most compact.

On earth the Rotoblad would have weighed just over four tonnes, its servos and motors allowing it a lumbering gait. On Kobas-9 however it skittered along effortlessly in microgravity as it cradled its fragile human cargo.

The robot was using three of its legs bent under its body to hold the now lifeless body of Sam Kendal.

The ViDoc used the spider robot’s underside passive sensors to observe Kendal, it was hard to tell without a proper internal examination but everything looked fine as there was no obvious signs major head trauma.

The Rotoblad made its way towards the lift, which wasn’t really a lift, rather an internal craft nested inside a warren of omnidirectional shafts leading to various parts of Kobas-9.

The robot reached the doors and placed Sam on the floating stretcher the ViDoc had waiting for him. Once on the stretcher, a two and a half metre long, half metre deep table which served as a remote extension of the ViDoc.

It immediately filled the stretcher with gel completely submerging its human cargo. The doors to the lift shushed close and began its five hundred metre journey to the hollowed out cavity housing the Virtual Doctor Machine in the makeshift medical bay.

The spider robot stayed in the lift craft as it used one long prehensile finger to gently push the stretcher from the lift into the cavern. The stretcher floated out into the small space towards the waiting ViDoc, using its own microthrusters to position it into the main housing of the ViDoc, as male and female connectors made the stretcher and the doctor machine one again.

The ViDoc ran a diagnostic on the human. Kendal’s medichines had already activated the salamander gene GS789tm on several sites in his body.

The salamander gene would allow the organs to grow back eventually, however the ViDoc halted the process. Instead it would need to clone his lungs, spleen and liver in the cloning chamber, the damage to these organs was such that they would take months to grow back to full functionality. Hence it was better, or as Off World Mining Corporation viewed it, more economical to simply clone new parts.

Both of Sam’s legs would have to be amputated as they too were damaged beyond reasonable repair time. His right leg would have to go below the knee and almost all of the left leg.

Being a level two scraper meant that Sam didn’t have adequate insurance for limb clones to be held in storage and cloning limbs onsite was impossible as the cloning chamber which was spun to give the effect of one gee was not big enough to hold entire limbs.

The medical bay boasted an array of medical robots in varying sizes and shapes jury rigged to the ViDoc, they could also be controlled remotely by a human doctor, but were unlikely to be in this case.

The ViDoc took control of one of these robots, at a glance it looked like a smaller version of the Rotoblad Spider-bot. It's half-metre body housed a small cutting laser, which the ViDoc manoeuvred in place above the stretcher and began the double amputation.

At the same time the ViDoc released a horde of its own medichines inside the human which immediately reactivated the salamander gene GS789tm at the appropriate internal sites, the ViDoc noted that Kendal’s legs would take around six weeks to grow back to full functionality.

The Virtual Doctor Machine noted that all automated routines were performing normally and so activated its entanglement communication device and placed a call to Mars.

Cryptogee