COLORADO - THE MECHANICAL SUICIDAL MICE

THE REVOLT OF THE AUTOMATONS

AGAINST THIRTY-FIRST CENTURY  TECHNOCRATS

AS ON.....

LIFE IS A GAME OF KILLING

AND KILLING  GAMES ARE PART OF LIFE

THE INTERNT SHADOW IS UPON US

In this excellent short story, Dan Burman is a famed inventor; however, he had actually invented only one machine - a psychophone that allows him to visit a kind of future. He brings back the blueprints for an unusual invention, one whose function is not immediately obvious.
Once constructed, one of the machine's first actions is to use hidden mechanical arms to reach out and steal a fine clock and a pocket watch. Over time, the Robot Mother steals dozens of watches from local jewelry stores. The thefts are accomplished by tiny robots no larger than mice.

... there came a very tiny, very subtle and extremely high-pitched whine. Something small, metallic, glittering had shot through one of the rat holes, fled across the floor toward the churning monstrosity. A trapdoor opened and swallowed it with such swiftness that it had disappeared before I realized what I'd seen. The thing had been a cylindrical, polished object resembling the shuttle of a sewing machine, but about four times the size. And it had been dragging something also small and metallic.

From The Mechanical Mice, by Maurice A.  Hugi. Published by Astounding Stories in 1941 Eric Frank Russell, 1905-1978) It's asking for trouble to fool around with the unknown. Burman did it!Now there are quite a lot of people who hate like the very devil anything that clicks, ticks, emits whirring sounds, or generally behaves like an asthmatic alarm clock. They've got mechanophobia. Dan Burman gave it to them.Who hasn't heard of the Burman Bullfrog Battery? The same chap! He puzzled it out from first to last and topped it with his now world-famous slogan:"Power in Your Pocket." It was no mean feat to concoct a thing the size of a cigarette packet that would pour out a hundred times as much energy as its most efficient competitor. Burman differed from everyone else in thinking it a mean feat.Burman looked me over very carefully, then said, "When that technical journal sent you around to see me twelve years ago, you listened sympathetically. You didn't treat me as if I were an idle dreamer or a congenital idiot.You gave me a decent write-up and started all the publicity that eventually made me much money.""Not because I loved you," I assured him, "but because I was honestly convinced that your battery was good.""Maybe." He studied me in a way that conveyed he was anxious to get something off his chest. "We've been pretty pally since that time. We've filledin some idle hours together, and I feel that you're the one of my few friends to whom I can make a seemingly silly confession.""Go ahead," I encouraged. We had been pretty pally, as he'd said. It wasmerely that we liked each other, found each other congenial. He was a clever chap, Burman, but there was nothing of the pedantic professor about him.Fortyish, normal, neat, he might have been a fashionable dentist to judge by appearances."Bill," he said, very seriously, "I didn't invent that damn battery.""No?""No!" he confirmed. "I pinched the idea. What makes it madder is that I wasn't quite sure of what I was stealing and, crazier still, I don't know from whence I stole it.""Which is as plain as a pikestaff," I commented.'That's nothing. After twelve years of careful, exacting work I've built something else. It must be the most complicated thing in creation." He banged afist on his knee, and his voice rose complainingly. "And now that I've doneit, I don't know what I've done.""Surely when an inventor experiments he knows what he's doing?""Not me!" Burman was amusingly lugubrious. "I've invented only one thingin my life, and that was more by accident than by good judgment." He perkedup. "But that one thing was the key to a million notions. It gave me the battery. It has nearly given me things of greater importance. On several occasions it has nearly, but not quite, placed within my inadequate hands andhalf-understanding mind plans that would alter this world far beyond your conception." Leaning forward to lend emphasis to his speech, he said, "Now it has given me a mystery that has cost me twelve years of work and a nice sum of money. I finished it last night. I don't know what the devil it is.""Perhaps if I had a look at it""Just what I'd like you to do." He switched rapidly to mounting enthusiasm."It's a beautiful job of work, even though I say so myself. Bet you that you can't say what it is, or what it's supposed to do.""Assuming it can do something," I put in."Yes," he agreed. "But I'm positive it has a function of some sort." Getting up, he opened a door. "Come along." It was a stunner. The thing was a metal box with a glossy, rhodium-platedsurface. In general size and shape it bore a faint resemblance to an upendedcoffin, and had the same brooding, ominous air of a casket waiting for itsowner to give up the ghost.There were a couple of small glass windows in its front through which couldbe seen a multitude of wheels as beautifully finished as those in a first-class watch. Elsewhere, several tiny lenses stared with sphinx-like indifference. There were three small trapdoors in one side, two in the other, and a large one in the front. From the top, two knobbed rods of metal stuck up like goat's horns, adding a satanic touch to the thing's vague air of yearning for midnight burial."It's an automatic layer-outer," I suggested, regarding the contraption with frank dislike. I pointed to one of the trapdoors. "You shove the shroud in there, and the corpse comes out the other side reverently composed and ready wrapped.""So you don't like its air, either," Burman commented. He lugged open a drawer in a nearby tier, hauled out a mass of drawings. "These are its innards. It has an electric circuit, valves, condensers, and something that I can'tquite understand, but which I suspect to be a tiny, extremely efficient electric furnace. It has parts I recognize as cog-cutters and pinion-shapers. It embodies several small-scale multiple stampers, apparently for dealing with sheet metal. There are vague suggestions of an assembly line ending in that large compartment shielded by the door in front. Have a look at the drawings yourself. You can see it's an extremely complicated device for manufacturing something only little less complicated."The drawings showed him to be right. But they didn't show everything.

The shuttle of a sewing machine is the special part that makes chain stitches possible; old-fashioned ones were roughly bullet-shaped, about one-half inch in diameter and an inch and a half long.
The tiny robots stole watch parts for its controller, the Robot Mother. These tiny gears and screws provided the Robot Mother with the materials with which to create more golden shuttles, as well as other tiny bots.
The author provides the following additional details about these tiny robotic wonders:

... the nose cap of the [golden shuttle] had opened fanwise, like an iris diaphragm, and a pair of jointed metal arms were folded inside, hugging a medium-sized diamond.

Be sure to take a look at the entry for Robot Mother, a very early reference to a self-reproducing robot that precedes scientific papers on the subject by at least seven years. You might also be interested in some of the children (and grandchildren) of this idea: Ray Bradbury's robot mice from The Martian Chronicles (1950) and dustmice, tiny robot detectives from Greg Bear's Queen of Angels (1990).