Lumbarian

Lumbarian is built for the outside of things. He is a heavy repair robot who works in open vacuum, on the scale of the structures he repairs: stations, starships, the trusswork and hull plate that everything else lives inside. His working day is measured in metres of seam and tonnes of load, and he boards Karla Wender's ship the way cargo does. Most of the ship's interior has never seen him.

The berth explains itself. In enough kinds of emergency, a machine that can work a hull in vacuum is the only thing on any manifest that can reach the problem at all. Wender's ship carries him for the same reason any ship that could would, and the section logs record what the reasoning looks like in practice: where Lumbarian has been, hulls hold.

His scale is also the one thing it costs him. His smallest manipulator is too coarse for fine work — there is no part of Xenon, or of any of the ship's smaller machines, that Lumbarian could safely touch with a tool — so his own upkeep falls to a vessel-scale intelligence, or to Xenon. The care between the two runs one way and cannot run the other: the doctor can reach everything in Lumbarian worth reaching, and Lumbarian can repair a station and not his own repairman. Whether a machine notices which direction the care flows is not a field the maintenance manifest carries.

There is nothing humanoid about him. No face to read, no hand-sized anything, nothing built to be held — and the crew's affection went and found its form anyway. They pat his manipulator housings on the way past, at the height they can reach. Visitors get shown him the way you show off something enormous that works. Deck crews who would not dream of saluting him will argue his precedence at an airlock without being asked. In reports he is respected, at length and in a technical vocabulary; on the deck he is adored, in a different register altogether, and no one aboard has ever felt a need to reconcile the two.

Character Notes

There is no record, on any posting, of Lumbarian damaging anything smaller than himself. At his scale that is not a safety statistic. It is a temperament.

He speaks seldom, on working channels, almost entirely about loads, seals, and tolerances. He is Kernel-compliant, which is to say he can tell his own principal no; the refusals on file are about load ratings, and every one of them was correct.

He does exterior work at station scale, which means most of what he repairs is full of people he will never meet, kept alive by seams they will never see. He has never mentioned this. It is not clear it would occur to him to; it is not clear it needs to.

See also: Xenon, Karla Wender, The AI Safety Kernel, Kernel-Compliant.