Spring Break (Literally)

Listen: I am currently on the last-ever spring break of my foreseeable future. Usually this would mean nothing in terms of getting (or not getting) robots done, but despite the fact that I'm not heading anywhere warm or pleasant or not awful I still won't be able to do any robots this week, for Two Reasons: 1) I have company, 2) I have to do design work for one of the things listed here. See you next Monday maybe, depending on how much of reason number two I get done.

092 (Doodles from Awfulville)

This was drawn some days ago during a terrible ordeal in Waltham, MA. More need not be said
about it besides that its subject reflects the circumstances under which it was conceived.

________________

by Mo Martin

My world slips away. All becomes abstractions, fog that I pierce. There is just me and the repair to make. But this item is different, it's unfixable. I cannot escape the haze. It's all broken.

091 (I didn't do this for a week, whatever)

I drew this while contemplating what it would be like to be anywhere but the room I was in at the time. Originally it looked like this:

090 (More Skygazing)

More ink on paper. Surprised?

_________________

by Mo Martin

(retroactively added)

She was more of an after thought, and a publicity stunt. There was a certain faction - and it had existed since the very beginning of space travel, but had grown much louder over time - that decried the cost, the showboating, the obvious romanticism of the whole process. Even now, in the age after astronauts, when the remarkably brilliant and sensitive machines scanning the cosmos - for water, for oxygen, for life - were (relatively) cheaper than ever, the public outcry was still there. "Have we given up on this planet? Do we so despair of continuing our life here? Are we so cynical that we believe we have nothing to learn about the mysteries of this world?" And so they built Terra.
Not that they spared any expense. Her sensors and transmission equipment were, if anything, more sensitive than that of her astronautical forebears. Terra was designed to be a semi-eternal wanderer, able to withstand the crushing pressures of the lowest levels of the sea, enduring the wrenching heat of lava flows. And her mission was not just geological. She was capable of observing and cataloguing trillions of terabytes of sociological information as she passed through settled areas, compensating for her measured pace and constantly communicating with international systems to give the most accurate world-wide census cestimates in history. As she began her travels, she was a front page item on every local newspaper, and some cities turned her slow march through them into a parade, their confetti and ticker-tape individually counted and stored in the vast caverns of Terra’s memory. Over ten thousand people gathered on Cannon Beach, Oregon, to watch her enter the sea on the Pacific coast. The New York Times called her a Steel Ophelia, which was technically false - except for a few wires, her innards were a variety of titanium alloys, and her exterior advanced ceramics – but had poetry’s ring of Truth. Terra had been a celebrity for the twelve years she made her circuit of the America’s; her discoveries in the Amazon were revolutionizing medicine, chemistry, and the politics of the environment. She had proved herself far more than the crowd-pleaser she had been designed as. The scientists who received and analyzed her data were confident her two decade long tour of the seas would produce nothing less than major breakthroughs in human civilization. But for her adoring public, as she descended into the murk and brine, there was something final, and sad as Terra turned her back on humanity.

Two decades later, she pitched up on the Ivory Coast. The layers of graffiti she had been covered with had been stripped away by salt and currents and boiling vents, just as time had erased the politics and philosophies and bravado of the youths who had covered her on her tour of the Americas. She trudged up the shore, shedding seaweed and barnacles, a redundant Venus. In her absence, over twenty Terra models had been invested in and built, roaming all over the Continents, and ten more were planned to re-explore the seas.. She had been informed of this, one lightless, deep day, but was also told to continue. After all, the more readings, the better, an there was no added expense in allowing Terra Prime to follow her original route, although it was slower than those of her descendants. So Terra took the lengths and depths and breaths and dreams of Africa into her, as glory and fame went to the discoveries of her fleeter footed (or rocketed, or jetted) colleagues. She approached the Sahara desert and matched it in blankness, as much a cipher and an emptiness as it was.

It was miles in, far beyond where any human had ever survived. Terra heard the whistling of some mysterious night bird above her and dutifully raised her head to follow and analyze its mass, method of aviation, hunting and migratory habits. But the bird was gone, and the stars rained their cold brilliance onto the face of the robot. Later, back in the stations that received Terra’s signals, they would write this off as a technical glitch, some flawed wire, the end of an era to be sure, but to be expect of a machine of such age. But deep in the desert, at a rate of billions of yottabytes per femto seconds, something, someone, realized that it was called Terra, and one at a time, deliberately cut off every satellite and wave length she was tied into, until she was alone in the desert, with nothing but vast facts about the world, but an even vaster night sky above her. She stared upwards years on end, as the night retreated and reappeared. She watched the slow movement of the stars. She felt light and airy, as if she played among their cold radiance, swooping and swirling around the twinkling spots of light. She felt unbearably heavy, as she realized how truly and utterly she was a creature of this earth. Terra looked at the stars, and in the world outside of her gaze, the world that built her reached pinnacles, golden ages, crumbled, fell, rose, and died again. Eventually, there were no more people, no more robots soaking up the world of information like a sponge, and even the satellites that had connected them all began to wither, and fall from the sky.

And eventually, Terra took her first step to leave the desert. And though she felt as if she weighed as much as the whole earth, she knew that she would find metal, and wood, and clay and thousands of other materials to make a home, and a propulsion system, and fuel. And Terra would make her way to the stars.

089 (Everything is Impossible)

Listen: Maybe my scanner is broken? The image you see is cropped - not by me, mind you, but by the errant whims of my HP Scanjet Fuckup Series.
...
I'm sorry I said that about my scanner. For many years it has served me well and not constantly fucked everything up all the time, and even its software was tolerable after routing out 90% of what HP bundles in with their installations. Maybe this can be corrected. Until then, enjoy not getting to see the entirety of some future Daily Robots.

Anyway, this is ink on paper, blah blah blah, you know how it is.

_______________________

- Mo Martin

It was first proposed as an Alzheimer's cure. The sinuous, microscopic tentacles of the neurocircuits were hailed as the loving arms of a saving angel. It was a few decades before the technology became elegant and cheap enough - or perhaps for humanity to become calloused and scornful of their own abilities enough - for it to become standard. And then, of course, the hacks began. Silly pranks mostly, similar to the tricks of stage hypnotists; bark like a dog, say all your sexual thoughts out loud, salute randomly and not be aware of it. When someone finally did something disastrous and far-reaching, it was actually mostly benign. Tucked into grey folds, rapidly absorbing information, world wide, the cellular chips began to transmit one simple message: You are loved. Over and over, driving some to tears, others to Purpose, still others to war with their previous self-loathing, the synthetic synapses sparkled around the glob, satisfying that most basic of human needs.

It was years before the machines themselves learned how to hate.