BONUS: observe how LED's improve this depiction of a robot
___________
By Mo Martin
(retroactively added)
Of all the various myths, rumors and legends that surrounded the Heathtron J model Serial No. 707 - known almost universally as Joy Heath, and referred to, by her own choice, in the feminine - the only one that was completely accurate was that she was, at nine hundred and twelve, the oldest operating robot, android, cyborg or other mechanically dependent intelligence in the known population. The stories that she had been George Washington's personal nurse-bot in his childhood; or an effort of Einstein and Oppenheimer to create life in atonement for their role in the creation of the atom bomb were gross anachronisms, symptomatic of the deplorable state of historical instruction in C.I.T.Y.'s floating, carbon dioxide spouting slums. The closest she had come to the widely believed tale that she had once taken a bullet to protect President Barack Obama was the incident-free appearance of the then ex-president and elder statesman as one of many dignitaries at the press conference that had honored the first production of her and the other nine hundred and ninety-nine robots as the first thousand robots produced by America's industry. The great sequence of writers, artists, philosophers, physicists and intellectuals that owned, repaired, upgraded, named and eventually emancipated Joy -now fully self-aware and capable of creative and independent thought, like all Produced Intelligences of that and subsequent eras- were of course a matter of public record. They had maintained her boxy, original form out of their various affectations of nostalgia and eccentricity, and she had maintained it out of a fierce and instant self-love dating from her earliest memory of the influence of her nano-circuited electro-amygdala.
The second most accurate legend about Joy Heath was the story of her regular trips outside C.I.T.Y. to The Wastes, but besides knowledge of their regularity, few details were correct. They were assumed to be annual by some, once every decade by others, and most ridiculously, considering Joy's highly publicized nonacenturianism, once every thousand years. In reality, they followed a unique numerical order based on the posthumously unified theorems of two mathematicians, bitter rivals in life, both of whom had been very dear to Joy 576 years earlier. The possible explanations for these pilgrimages ran from the most wild - Joy met a lover, human, as aged as her through magical means as she was through scientific- to the more practical: that she had in her some longing, schadenfreude or remorse or nostalgia, to see the remains of her various deactivated and desposed fellow robots. There was some truth to that theory, as she often counted, referenced and logged the rusted and fading serial numbers, identification marks, corporate logos and half-sensible pre-recorded responses as they bleated against the cruel wind. She spent a great deal of the walk thinking about those very same winds; how the generation she had been built into never could have appreciated them; the natural roar and whooshing was so often confused back then with the hustle and thumping of the vehicles of commerce and travel, as they went about their noisy work. She, who had lived to see this age of the silent whine, whispers and small implosions of electric transport and teleportation, could now truly focus on the overwhelming roar and rush of the awesome gusts.
At the end of her meandering but steadily-walked path, Joy came upon her destination: a small circuit board, half-buried by the ferrous sand that filled the Wastes. She would carefully excavate it, and for hours, she would meditate silently on its green, chipping fiberglass, its verdigrised copper and still shining tin. With optics and memory banks beyond the imagining of all those who had seen the tenure of this board within her, she reviewed and mentally restored its full health, felt the warmth and crackle of electricity strumming through it, through her. She saw in it the simplicity of her choices the, of capability of action or incapability, process or can't process, everything slow and binary and calm in its way. She remembered with equanimity the iterations she had gone through since then, from the barest glimmer of her surroundings, to the deep contemplation that she now regularly occupied herself with, the advice and experience she joyfully shared with leaders in a variety of fields. She saw the entire complex history of herself, mapped in this tiny green plank of 0s and 1s.
Eventually, she would place her old self down carefully, and turn her back on it. Then she would stride steadily, out of the Wastes, back to C.I.T.Y., to the present, and the future.
The second most accurate legend about Joy Heath was the story of her regular trips outside C.I.T.Y. to The Wastes, but besides knowledge of their regularity, few details were correct. They were assumed to be annual by some, once every decade by others, and most ridiculously, considering Joy's highly publicized nonacenturianism, once every thousand years. In reality, they followed a unique numerical order based on the posthumously unified theorems of two mathematicians, bitter rivals in life, both of whom had been very dear to Joy 576 years earlier. The possible explanations for these pilgrimages ran from the most wild - Joy met a lover, human, as aged as her through magical means as she was through scientific- to the more practical: that she had in her some longing, schadenfreude or remorse or nostalgia, to see the remains of her various deactivated and desposed fellow robots. There was some truth to that theory, as she often counted, referenced and logged the rusted and fading serial numbers, identification marks, corporate logos and half-sensible pre-recorded responses as they bleated against the cruel wind. She spent a great deal of the walk thinking about those very same winds; how the generation she had been built into never could have appreciated them; the natural roar and whooshing was so often confused back then with the hustle and thumping of the vehicles of commerce and travel, as they went about their noisy work. She, who had lived to see this age of the silent whine, whispers and small implosions of electric transport and teleportation, could now truly focus on the overwhelming roar and rush of the awesome gusts.
At the end of her meandering but steadily-walked path, Joy came upon her destination: a small circuit board, half-buried by the ferrous sand that filled the Wastes. She would carefully excavate it, and for hours, she would meditate silently on its green, chipping fiberglass, its verdigrised copper and still shining tin. With optics and memory banks beyond the imagining of all those who had seen the tenure of this board within her, she reviewed and mentally restored its full health, felt the warmth and crackle of electricity strumming through it, through her. She saw in it the simplicity of her choices the, of capability of action or incapability, process or can't process, everything slow and binary and calm in its way. She remembered with equanimity the iterations she had gone through since then, from the barest glimmer of her surroundings, to the deep contemplation that she now regularly occupied herself with, the advice and experience she joyfully shared with leaders in a variety of fields. She saw the entire complex history of herself, mapped in this tiny green plank of 0s and 1s.
Eventually, she would place her old self down carefully, and turn her back on it. Then she would stride steadily, out of the Wastes, back to C.I.T.Y., to the present, and the future.
LED's did NOT improve the robot. The first one was better.
ReplyDeleteAlan
www.RobotNine.com