Back in the 90s when I was studying computer science, some students tried testing autonomous drone prototypes inside the CS building. They were slow, with poor battery life, but surprisingly nimble. (They could avoid a slow-moving spiral notebook or tennis racket.) One grad student named Jeff, who'd been part of their construction, decided we should try having them map out the building, and he proposed a route that would take them from end to end of the main corridor on three floors, visiting each room along the way, ending in the Windows server lab. As a lowly undergrad still taking shakeout courses, the only task I was trusted with was to be one of the proles holding the doors open so the Icabots could make it up the stairs to their next test. The first floor went pretty well, with four drones zipping through doors, circling the PC and terminal labs, and heading down the corridor past cheering nerds to where I was playing human doorstop. Icabot 3, the yellow one, was a little wobbly and tended to drift a bit; it nearly hit me in the face as it went past. Probably a loose propeller, since all four managed to make it up the steps to the second floor with their rudimentary LIDAR and fly past my lab partner Cheryl. As I was running up the steps to see how the bots fared on the second floor, though, I heard a metallic clunk and the cheers turned to groans. I finally caught up to the flotilla as acrid smoke began to drift into my nose. Not just Icabot3 but all four of the drones had crashed and two of them had batteries throwing sparks. There was a mad rush to grab fire extinguishers and try to sweep the drones away from the foot of the server cabinet where they'd fallen, so only the little drones would get soaked, hopefully before the building's fire suppression kicked in. 1/2 #ShortFiction