24 Hour Short Story Contest: Sully Learns a Lesson

Things had changed a lot in recent decades. The powers that be had decided personal robots needed to attend elementary school to enhance their artificial intelligence. Sullivan Henry (his classmates called him Sully) quipped to his friend Mark that, in so doing, they were artificially enhancing artificial intelligence robots.

From what he had seen in the early grades at Premack Elementary, none of the teachers so far had contributed anything to his long-term memory (he still called that his database). The instructors knew nothing that Sully didn’t have preprogrammed when he was “fresh out of the box.” Sure, he had learned how to sleep in class, and play soccer well enough to make the team, but now that he was in middle school suddenly there were challenges for which he was not programmed.

“Why do you think they care so much about girls?” wondered Mark.

Mark had been Sully’s best friend since Kindergarten, and Sully was certain that Mark was a robot too. The powers that be had decreed - in the interests of diversity - that robots and the children they were made for, were not allowed to reveal whether or not they had any robotics in them. In recent decades, as people replaced more and more human parts with artificial limbs, organs, and sensory equipment, it had become increasingly futile to bother figuring out where the human left off and the robot began.

“Frankly I don’t see any reason to worry about girls,” Sully observed. He was, after all, only in 5th grade and still had a lot to learn. “But I am curious about the emotions that these girls have, they must serve some kind of purpose.”

“The guys certainly don’t seem to care about that stuff,” Mark remarked, “so it can’t be all that important.” “Except maybe anger,” he added as an afterthought.

“Well as best as I can figure, maybe feelings are sort of like our senses. Maybe they alert us, like a signal, that something needs our attention. But I just don’t get what they are trying to tell us.”

Sully had secretly confessed to Mark that he was a robot and Mark had hinted at his own true origin. That allowed the two of them, in private times, to examine how being a robot mattered. Robotic life involved being both a little different and socially alienated, but also markedly superior in most endeavors. Their digital world-view gave them certain logical and rational advantages.

Mark and Sully were able to use Bayesian and game theory statistics to win at poker, and most other endeavors. Sully was the stiffest member of his middle school soccer team, but he made up for it with strategy. He even used statistics to self-examine, but it provided no help with his disability. His talents were useless when it came to reading others. Consequently, he was easily bluffed in poker, and eventually mocked and treated something like a geek. Sully couldn’t see past his robothood to understand humanity. Indeed, Sully and Mark still thought of self-examination as a system check.

“Maybe feelings aren’t digital.” Sully was surprised by the thought before he blurted it out. It had never occurred to him that his own, rarely used analogue function might be analogous to feelings. Long ago the micro-digital standard had eclipsed analogue tubes and parallel processing. This circuitry had become vestigial. While non-digital and parallel processing had once been considered a credible theory (still popular in some Artificial Intelligence cults), it had long since been relegated to an old wives’ tale in the broader culture.

To most kids, it had always seemed like even the most advanced robots were “lacking” in some way despite their amazing ability to learn digitally and store and access things perfectly in memory.

                                                                                     #

Just before lunch, Sully passed a note to Mark. “Meet me at the old tree behind the fence,” the note said. I have something to share with you.”

There was something different about the way Sully carried himself, as he approached Mark behind the school over lunch. “I think I am having a midlife crisis,” he stated.

“That’s silly, you aren’t even in high school yet.”

“I know, but ever since we had that talk this morning I have been thinking, or more accurately feeling.”

“That is impossible, you know robots can’t really feel, and you already confessed to me that you were a robot.” For a robot without any feelings, Mark shuffled his feet, shrugged and sure looked like he was feeling some kind of reaction to Sully’s new ideas.

Sully lit up a cigarette and explained. “I am not willing to go through my whole life with a disability that I know I can overcome. In class, I switched on my analogue circuitry and listened. All through Ms. Sonningham’s class, I was experiencing, for the first time, what I can only guess were rudimentary feelings.”

“I tried to use my digital fund of knowledge to make sense of it, and I discovered that the only research ever done on simulated feelings in robots was done 20 years ago, and done by humans, not robots. I would swear that just now I could see connections that those humans missed.”

“Like what?” Solving a problem was right up Mark’s electrodes, and Sully now had his attention.

“First of all, I was right: feelings are signals, at least that is what they are mostly good for.” I tried to simulate it with my sensory circuits and I am pretty sure what I felt were actually feelings. We are already programmed for touch and other senses, but all we need to do is harness those senses. I tried that, using both my senses and a standard digital predictive processes, and I started to feel sad. I had the distinct feeling- or was it a thought – that I wished I had connected to my feelings before. I sensed that I had been wasting my time, letting it pass, with only half of me present. It was sad.”

Mark was interested but it all seemed hypothetical to him. Why would anyone want to feel sad?? Mark nevertheless knew something about curiosity. “Anything else you discovered, Sull, while rest of us were discussing history?”

“Well, actually yes. I think I figured out how to create new feelings by mixing together senses with both decision-making and planning routines. What humans call wanting (and wishing and hoping and a whole database full of heuristics) gains poignancy beyond our imagination when these sentiments include feelings.”

The bell rang and they had to return to afternoon classes.

                                                                                                                   #

The next day Mark was concerned when Sully didn’t show up at school. That conversation was actually the last he ever saw of Sully. Only when he was pursuing a graduate degree at MIT did Mark update his files on everything Sully.

His friend had become a psychologist and his ideas had gained him some notoriety. Among the papers Sully had published were titles like “The Fallacy of Mind-Body Dualism” and “Sadness as a Resource.” However just after he was given tenure (He was a Professor at the University of Delhi), Sully dropped out, and started a rock band. He never married but was rumored to be rather promiscuous.

Mark just couldn’t understand Sully, but wondered if the sensation he was overcome by could be a feeling of loneliness and he almost admitted that he was missing his old friend.

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Pictures of Sully and Mark from Pixabay

Contest in which this story was entered: https://steemit.com/twentyfourhourshortstory/@mctiller/writers-win-5-steem-usd25-usd-in-the-24-hour-short-story-contest-topic-3-for-january-31