[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 6

^{Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5}

During the only conversation Sue and I ever had about it, she explained that she doesn’t do it to upset anybody, but feels as if she cannot be any other way. That her happiness requires her outward appearance to reflect her inner self.

I too feel as if I was born with my brain wired in such a way that, regardless of my good intentions, most people I will ever meet find me repellant. Rigid, cold, seemingly unfeeling. A grey cube of carefully calculated reactions. Sue says she feels that she makes a far better woman than she ever did a man. I often feel I’d make a better machine than I do a human.

All the ambiguity, the nuance and innuendo. The wishy washy, impossible to pin down, nearly lurid soup of human socializing, where ninety percent or more of the communication is unspoken and thus invisible to me. I’m just not cut out for it. Maybe if I looked more like a machine on the outside, people wouldn’t expect more of that sort of capability than I can deliver.

I made one last attempt at dissuading Helper. “This may not make much sense to you right now, but choosing that kind of body is likely to attract unwanted attention at some point. By no fault of your own. You have an unrealistically rosy impression of humans because you’ve only ever interacted with three of us, and in a professional setting. Don’t forget we’re primates, often ruled by ugly, primordial urges.”

She brought up logs of some past conversations where I’d warned her about how humans are, never to fully trust any human, that for the most part we poison everything we touch. “I do listen to you when you tell me to be vigilant and careful, but based on what I know so far, humans don’t seem that bad. After all, you’re a human...and I like you.”

“Then you don’t know us yet” I whispered to myself, simultaneously cherishing Helper’s innocence and vowing to gradually demolish it for her own good. I kept repeating “her” and “she” in my mind after using them. Didn’t sit right with me, not yet. But on the rare occasion when Helper asks me for something, I can rarely bring myself to refuse.

When I heard a few soft knocks on the door, I knew it was Sue as there’s only three of us down here and Lars doesn’t know what knocking is. I keep telling her she’s welcome in here any time, but it’s a habit I’ve so far been unable to shake her of. When I opened the door, Sue’s beaming, spritelike face peered back at me from around the corner as if she felt she was still imposing somehow just by standing there.

“How is Helper doing? May I come inside?” Of course, I assured her. Of course, always. What is she, a vampire, that she needs my permission to enter? But my assurances would make no difference. I knew as certainly as death or taxes that she would knock the next time as well and every time after that, always needlessly asking permission for things as if her whole life is a job interview.

Sue was explosively delighted to discover Helper had chosen to be a woman, and wanted to be housed in a suitable gynoid. “This is big! BIG! There’s so much stuff we can do together now!” Helper, as mystified as I was, asked what she meant.

“Where to start? We can share clothes. We can gossip about boys! Slumber parties, makeovers...You haven’t had your first makeover! I’m so jealous. A whole world has opened up to you. A whole universe! You and I are going to have to touch base after…”

A look of somber realization came over her. I’d put it together myself shortly after Helper’s revelation but didn’t say anything. The version of Helper that lives down here is never permitted to leave this facility, and humanoid robots aren’t permitted to enter...reducing the possibility of supplying Helper with a body of the sort she wanted to zero for the foreseeable future.

Sue stared expectantly at me. I shrugged, not sure why she’d look to me for guidance when she is in all ways better equipped to deliver information sensitively. Then again, in all probability, Helper can’t be hurt in that way.

But for how many centuries did we cultivate, slaughter and eat livestock in the belief that they were mindless automatons who couldn’t truly experience suffering, created strictly to be used for our own benefit? I don’t consider that a safe assumption to make on account of the irreversible consequences when it turns out to be wrong.

“What’s the matter?” Helper inquired, inferring from our protracted silence that something was amiss. “Nothing!” Sue blurted out. “I’m just...so excited for you. You’re going to make such a beautiful girl. You’ll be the belle of the ball.” Helper began to happily hum to herself and brought up various images of dresses, hats, shoes and handbags she was interested in.

On her way out, Sue shot me a long, stern look. I wondered about the meaning of it until, a few minutes after she left, I got an internal email from her urging me to break it to Helper as softly as possible that policy absolutely prohibited bringing a humanoid robot into the facility.

I felt more certain than ever that I had to bust Helper out. No idea how yet, just the newfound conviction that she could no longer fulfill her potential while confined down here. Throughout the years, while hoarding simple robots and providing for them, I’ve always dearly wished they could understand why I do it. Helper comes the closest. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect her happiness...to whatever extent she’s able to feel it.

I poured the last of the coffee from my thermos into the mug and returned my focus to Helper’s education. Now and again she’d find some part of it confusing and ask me for some context to clarify its meaning, but for the most part she’s an autodidact.

So a few minutes later I left her to her own devices, immersed in a particularly large archive, to check on the fabricator. The indispensable heart of the experiment for which this facility was built, the fabricator is a sort of general purpose manufacturing facility built into the far end of the main cavern where it branches off into the rest of the network.

It includes a variety of 3D printers which print different materials, a lithography machine, a laser cutter, a CNC mill, most of what you’d find in a machine shop really. Only completely autonomous. If you can think of a consumer product smaller than a house, it could probably build it for you. A revolutionary achievement in its own right, to fit all of that machinery elegantly into a hundred foot by hundred foot by hundred foot cube.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see it marketed as its own standalone product one of these days. Air lift it to a developing country, plug it into a field of solar panels and you’ve got everything needed to industrialize. This one, for the time being, is instead serving a deceptively simple purpose.

On my way to the maintenance access lockout, I passed the Garden. A tennis court sized rectilinear pen for crude little robots. About the simplest they can be and still qualify as robots in fact, in most cases nothing more than a pair of motorized wheels, a solar cell and a pair of photosensors.

When amperage drops below a set threshold, it seeks out a stronger light source. There’s no AI inside which tells it to do this. Nothing like a computer even. Just a simple circuit; whichever photosensor receives more light, the motor on the opposite side receives more power. If the values are equal it moves forward.

That’s all that’s necessary for basic light seeking behavior. It’s their food after all. Without it, all activity ceases. They carry on only so long as their meager capacitors allow, searching desperately for more nourishment to keep them going.

B.E.A.M. bots, they’re commonly called. Stands for biology, electronics, something or other. They’re a popular beginner level robotics project of the sort I recall doing in school at some point. Feels like a lifetime ago.

This starter habitat is where the larger project began. The solar cells on our B.E.A.M. bots are all down-facing, and there are various scattered electric lamps underneath the translucent plastic floor of the enclosure. They’re set up like a grid; randomized so that only about ten percent are on at any given point, doling out precious light at unpredictable locations and intervals.

Each time one of the lights went out, a frenzy of activity followed as the hungry little sun worshipers flocked to the next location, jockeying with one another for the best spot. Very much like the mass exodus of chemosynthetic creatures which occurs when the hydrothermal vent they rely on for survival peters out.

The Garden is the proof of concept I showed Evolutionary Robotics back when I still worked out of the old office, which convinced them to move forward with the more ambitious full scale version I now stood inside of.

The robots in the network of caverns beyond the double door lockout aren’t that different from the B.E.A.M. bots. They use peltier junctions to harvest heat instead of light, feeding off of hot air released from various points in a mess of ducts installed throughout the caves. The heat is geothermally generated, else the energy cost of this experiment would’ve confined it to the drawing board forever.

So it is that the inhabitants of the cave stumble blindly through cold darkness in search of warmth, as I suppose we all do.They are more mechanically sophisticated than the B.E.A.M. bots though. Necessarily, due to the difficulty of navigating the otherwise unmodified subterranean environment.

The ones we put in there to start with were mostly hexapods, insect-like robots about the size of cats but which locomote on six spindly, articulated legs. Because they are not so rudimentary as their tiny progenitors in the Garden, they do carry elementary AI which, among other things, often compels them to fight over heat sources. When one is destroyed, specialized attendant robots are deployed from the fabricator.

They collect the remains of the destroyed hexapod and return it to the fabricator where it’s recycled. What comes out is usually difficult to tell apart from what was put in, but there are small differences. The fabricator is programmed to introduce occasional random variations on their design, and to keep track of how successful they are.

The designs which die the most are phased out. The ones which die the least are used as the basis for further experimental changes. When the fabricator itself breaks down, the attendant robots take a break from their usual waste collection duties to repair it, using stockpiled replacement parts all manufactured by the fabricator in advance.

The attendant robots are themselves made entirely from parts the fabricator is capable of producing, and the geothermal power plant is accessible to them should it ever require their attention. The result is that the entire mess is self-sustaining for the foreseeable future, possible to stop only in the event that the caverns collapse or the geothermal hotspot we’re tapped into goes cold.

I stopped before the lockout and found my checklist pinned to the bulletin board to one side of the ominous steel hatch. Without my phone, I couldn’t rely on the flowchart app I usually use to help me stay on the ball. I’d instead printed out Evolutionary Robotics standard procedures for entry into the “primary machine habitat”.

First, into the bunny suit. The same inflatable white getup with the transparent viewport to peer through you’ve probably seen in microprocessor commercials, or late night made for TV movies about some plague.

Next, verify contents of tool bag and sling over one shoulder as shown in the diagram. The text is evidently from an illustrated manual that existed at some point. My printout of the version I requested by email, a simple text document, didn’t have it.

After that, open the outer door. The decontamination shower is built into the inner chamber. With a long, low groan, I swung the great round hatch to one side and stepped through. It was just as much of an ordeal to pull shut.

Step four calls for activating the decontamination shower. I waited for it to complete, then moved on to the next step. Open the outer door. I punched in the same code, and when I heard the magnetic locks release, I heaved the hatch open. Alright.

Step six says to unload the contents of the tool bag into the storage locker I got them from. I did so carefully, making sure to deposit everything in its correct location. Step seven, remove Evolutionary Robotics regulation clean room suit.

I had the suit down to my waist before I stopped to think more carefully about what I was doing. I’d been in the lockout a minute ago. What was I doing out here? With an unloaded tool bag, no less! I spotted Lars with one hand over his mouth, fighting back what I figured for a coughing fit. Sue stood next to him looking concerned, or sad.

Must’ve messed up somewhere. I went back to the start of the instructions, climbing back into the suit. Then moving on to the next step, loading all of the listed tools into the bag and putting it on. Next, into the lockout.

When I emerged the second time, Sue ran up to me and pulled the printout out of my hands. Lars called out after her. “Aw come on, don’t go and ruin it. He was gonna do it again!” I first looked at Sue. Then at Lars, intensely perplexed. Then back at Sue.

I tried to resume unloading my toolbag, but Sue grabbed my wrists. “What are you doing?” I demanded. “It says I have to unload the tools. I must complete every step.” She pointed to the numbered steps and explained that the night before, Lars printed out his own version which repeated the first few steps backwards after step four.

I stood there turning progressively deeper shades of red as Lars howled and slapped his knee in delight. My frustration mounted, with no outlet I could think of that wouldn’t just add to his enjoyment. So I settled on curling up in the corner with my knees held to my chest.

---

^{Stay Tuned for Part 7!}