Tempora Part 4: Bin AI and Bodyworks

“Doom and Catastrophe! It is the End of Times, the Destruction of all we hold dear!”

Steve watched the fanatical Drone waving his arms wildly as he yelled at passersby. His left eye was broken and flickering, and his entire body was riddled with rust obscuring whatever color he was originally and exposed wires sparking occasionally. He had a gangling build to match his decrepit condition, looking exactly like the robot version of a crazy homeless person on the streets.

The man noticed he had caught Steve’s attention, and ran up to him. “You! You see it, don’t you?! The time is fast approaching…”

Steve humored the man. “What exactly are you talking about? Vorpals?”

The man laughed maniacally. “Vorpals, he says! VORPALS! There are far, FAR worse things coming than Vorpals! I’m talking about the Soulrenders, the Seekers, the Deep Outer… all being led by the most powerful yet despicable being in the known realities!”

Steve raised a digital eyebrow. “Really?”

“Yes… YES! The one who shapes our true reality. Not matter, but minds. Making you crazy while making you believe yourself sane! You might already be a slave and not even know it.”

“Interesting… how do we stop it, then?”

The man grew more frantic, reinvigorated by someone actually listening to him. “We need the heroes of old! The legendary casters who prevented this all once before! We need the Gatekeepers, but not just the current sorry band of random soldiers, the True Gatekeepers! Those who stormed the gates of the Rift, and wielded the seven artifacts of-”

Steve was unable to hear the rest as Jane roughly pulled him away. “Can’t I hear the rest, Jane? It sounds interesting. I wonder how much of it is true...”

“None of it. He’s just a crazy Drone unable to hold a job or keep his head straight. I’m trying to prevent you from ending up like that. Now, here we are.”

Steve looked up at the store sign. “Bin AI and Bodyworks?” As they walked in, he was overwhelmed by the amount of goods inside the store. They sold all kinds of strange equipment, looking more like a mechanic shop than a store where one would window shop, but everything was displayed and positioned like a mall would with the latest fashion accessories. He theorized that in a world where you could easily switch out body parts, shopping for a new set of arms or legs was identical to clothes shopping.

Jane turned to Steve. “They sell all kinds of things here, but one of the things they specialize in is AI. Here’s some money, I’m going to go window shop, just go talk with a representative…”

To Steve’s surprise, Jane handed him several gold coins rather than a card or other electronic device he expected to be the currency. He quickly found a bright pink Drone sitting behind a desk, who launched into a sales pitch at first sight. “Welcome to Bin AI and Bodyworks! How can I help you today?”

“Uh… I’m looking for an AI, but I don’t even know where to start…”

“A new shopper? No problem at all! We allow anyone to try out an AI before buying, and we also have a thirty day return policy, and a sixty day exchange policy. We are committed to finding the right AI for you!”

The pushy saleswoman led Steve to a booth with a helmet suspended from the ceiling by a interwoven series of cables. “Please step inside and fasten on the helmet. I’ll boot up a sample AI so you can see how it works for yourself.”

Steve did as he was told, awkwardly fastening the helmet to his already metal head. It fit perfectly, as he then realized that Drones likely had identically sized heads depending on the type, so they could simply have different booths for the different types of Drone. “Ok… now what?”

A face blinked into existence in front of him, featureless and genderless with blank eyes and a white polygonal structure. “Hello, New User! I am Eve, running in demo mode. How can I-”

The face suddenly glitched into out of focus pixels, froze for a moment, then completely disappeared. The saleswoman looked confused. “What the… I’ve never seen this happen before…”

She pressed a button on her arm as she spoke with an echoing voice. “Technical assistance requested in AI section, Booth 7d.”

Shortly, a dark gray Drone with equally dark blue eyes approached from across the store. He arrived looking over the booth and writing notes on a digital clipboard. “What seems to be the problem?”

The pink Drone stepped aside to allow the gray Drone access to the controls situated just outside the booth. He connected a cable to his handheld device, and started swiping and tapping as he ran diagnostics. “Hmm, it’s probably the personality sequencer again. I swear, every single day it fails in new and fantastic ways…”

After some time, Steve began to feel a tad uncomfortable. “Um… can I take the helmet off now? I’ve been standing here for a long time.”

The technician was getting more and more frustrated. “No, it wasn’t that… oh, sorry for the inconvenience sir, but if we want to get to the heart of the issue, then we need to keep all the variables… the same… there! Sil, try it again.”

Sil, the pink Drone, pressed some controls, and the face appeared again. “Hello, New- USER. I A-A-AM EVE, RUNNING IN-”

The failure was even more catastrophic. The face looked angry for a moment as its eyes glowed red, and the script it was reciting turned a deep menacing bass halfway through rather than the friendly tone it was previously using before cutting out. It shattered like a pane of glass, and a large number of error messages began appearing, with several short lived alerts displaying convoluted masses of symbols.

Sil turned back to the technician. “What the rift is going on?”

He rubbed his chin, deep in thought. “Sir… can you read out some of the errors you see? I temporarily enabled them, so you should be seeing at least one.”

“There are a lot, but let’s see… Error: Synaptic Parsing Mismatch… Error: Out of Memory… Error: Attempted Out of Bounds Dereferencing… Oh, and there’s one that just says Error: Generic Error Message Error.”

The technician stood silently for several seconds. “I’m stumped… I’ve never heard of something like this happening before. Our AI deployment systems are all specially designed to handle any model of Drone, and we haven’t had any serious bugs in years… I’m going to need to escalate.”

The gray Drone pressed a button on his arm, and the familiar echoing ensued. “Requesting Escalation. Bin, care to take a look at this?”

After a moment, a message rang out from the store’s system in response. “Customer Steve, please report to Bin’s office.”

Steve was bewildered, as were the two employees, but regardless they guided him up several flights of stairs to a single door leading into an executive office. Steve knocked, and a voice from inside beckoned him in.

Behind a desk sat a much more angular Drone. He was a polished silver with blue eyes, and a series of springs and cogs were visible operating underneath glass panes on his chest, arms, and presumably legs. Steve posited that Bin’s body, when compared to the other more smoothed and conforming types, was something like a custom built computer as opposed to a store bought computer. He was writing with what appeared to be a standard ink pen on physical paper, but set it down when he saw Steve. “Well, well. I certainly wasn’t expecting anything like this today. What is your full name, again?”

“Steve Lyon. And you?”

The unique Drone stood up and walked around the desk to shake Steve’s hand directly. His height when standing was greater than Steve, though would still be short when compared to the height of an adult human. “Bin. Good to meet you, Steve. But might I recommend going by your surname? Maybe shorten it… Lyo. Has a good ring to it, and pays homage to our culture of abbreviations and acronyms.”

Steve thought for a moment. “Maybe as a nickname… I’m not ready to just discard my name like that.”

Bin pointed a finger. “That. Right there. That’s your current problem.”

Steve blinked, confused. “Excuse me?”

Bin put a hand on Steve’s shoulder. He was surprisingly strong. “You aren’t just some average Drone. I’ve seen your type. You are an individual, as close as you can get to a true free thinker. For some reason, there is something in your mind… something that prevents AI from working properly.”

“Really? People- er, Drones with a certain kind of psychology can’t use AI?”

Bin groaned as he sat back down in his chair and motioned for Steve to take a seat across the desk as well. “Well… yes and no. We have tried to find these people preemptively, but we always end up with too many false positives. But the lack of conformity is always present. I was one, and so are you.”

Steve was a bit flabbergasted. “You run an AI business, but can’t use AI?”

Bin sighed. “Stakeholders wanted to add the AI. I’ve always worked with more hardware than software. Hence, the Bodyworks part of the business.”

Steve took a look around the office. All over the shelves were technical books and executive toys one expects to see in such a place, but there were also distinctive face plates and different mechanical arms and legs on display. One specific picture caught his eye; a series of different Drones without glowing eyes, and open core compartments. “Wait… if I can’t get an AI, I could still buy a whole new body, right?”

Bin grinned. “Of course. We even offer deals for trading in your old body, since most Drones won’t need it anymore. In fact… I may have just the chassis for you. I consider myself an expert at seeing the best bodies to match a Drone’s personality. Come with me to my lab.”

Something that should have terrified Steve, switching out his body for something entirely new, instead filled him with excitement and anticipation. After waking up from the simulation and immediately finding himself in a body similar to every other Drone around him yet alien to his old perception of self, he felt like a stranger in his own synthetic skin. But now, he had a chance to really be in a body of his own choosing.

He really hoped he could get a jet pack.

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Same part on Minds