Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction

Terbium

158.9254

Morphobots

Terbium is to morphorobotics what silicon is to computers. Its

magnetostrictive alloys lengthen or shorten when exposed to magnetic

fields. Since they can store a lot of strain energy, they are the heart

of the nanomotors, artificial muscles, and slight engines that make

morphobots so infinitely adaptable.

It took decades of dedicated research and development to create the

terbium-based micomachinery that made the first human-shaped robot

possible. It took one bored teenager a long and rainy weekend to convert

the family Jeeves into the world's first morphobot.

To appreciate the wonder of these common household devices, try to assume

the mind-set of our primitive, apelike ancestors of the twenty-first

century. Pretend you've never seen a morphobot prepare lunch. Now watch:

At rest, a morphobot looks exactly like an attractive young man or woman,

only far more attentive and eager to please. It receives its order with a

delighted smile and, relaxing its hold on the anthropomorphic, scuttles

down the hall on centipede legs. It flows down the stairs like a snake.

In the kitchen, it resumes human form.

Not too human, of course! The morphobot's fingers become blades that peel

and slice the potatoes, then merge into a cooking pot which is promptly

filled with oil (piped via temporary networks of tubing from a nearby

cupboard) and held over the gas range's flames. While the fries crisp,

one leg has converted itself to a buffer and is polishing the kitchen

floor. Another arm has extruded itself into the workings of the

refrigerator and is performing routine maintenance. A third arm is, of

course, frying up the hamburgers, while spatula-tipped tentacles make the

buns from scratch and flash-bake them in the insta-oven.

Meanwhile, what look like wispy tendrils are sampling the environmental

and biological health of their surroundings. Other microtools are,

perhaps, seeking out, selecting, sorting, and labeling spores from

various opportunistic fungi, for a high school science project one of the

children is working on. These same microtools, incidentally, can be (and

have been) used to impregnate both household pets and the lady of the

house with preselected genetic material.

Imagine your wonder if this were not an everyday sight! Imagine how

delighted you would be!

The chief use of morphorobotics is of course for sexbots?and no need to

go into the specifics of that! Everybody knows as much of the

polymorphous delights of protean sex as they desire to know. It is the

rare citizen who can glance at the Kama Sutra without laughing at its

supremely unimaginative lack of invention.

Sociologists tell us, incidentally, that it's been at least thirty years

since anybody has had the bad taste to have sex with another human being.