Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Neonivek]

4

[Broken]

1.

Also, damm you. We were so close to get ABSOLUTE POWER!

[Vgray]

You feel bad for Mom, the way she never goes anywhere anymore. You found a good deal on a Nimbus online. Maybe she'll come visit some time.

You knock on Mom's front door. "Coming!" you hear her call from inside.

When Mom answers the door, you see her left eye is synthetic. Though it is intended to look as humanlike as possible, it looks dry, and its movements are just not quite as fast as those of a human eye. She had been going blind in that eye, and had opted to have it replaced shortly after her tumor was taken out. The hair near the site of her original surgery is a little dry and thin, and it's all gray: your mother is very old.

She smiles to see you, and gives you a hug, which you return. "Come in, come in!"

Inside, you find your mother's cleaning robots still busily puttering about the house, cleaning up. They look very much like your typical tech product, all blacks and chromes that look out of place in Mom's homey living room, but at least they were autonomous enough that Mom felt comfortable hitting the "on" button and letting them do their thing. The little devices are bright enough to plug themselves in when they are done, but not bright enough to know that their master is gone, their purpose in life obsolete.

Photos of you and Joyeuse hang in the living room. Following your gaze, Mom says, "Can you believe that photo was taken twenty years ago? It seems like just yesterday."

While it bothered you when you were young that Mom seemed perpetually caught in the past, her comments about it now make sense to you. Fifteen years ago does seem like just yesterday. You're catching up to Mom's perspective on time, and it's a little frightening.

It occurs to you, looking through all this stuff with Mom, that the whole time you were concerned about the future of your creation, Joyeuse, Mom was excited for you in the same way. You were her creation, miraculously walking about the earth, so full of intelligence, accomplishing great things.

"I've got something for you, too," Mom says. She goes into her closet and fetches a brand new MiniMe robot kit. It's a robot construction kit composed of little arms and wheels that plugs into a smartphone. You examine it skeptically, convinced Mom would have gotten something on sale that only worked with smartphones from twenty years ago; but it looks new.

"It's for Joyeuse," Mom says. "It said it was interested in building a robot."

"You talk to Joyeuse?"

"All the time," Mom says. "We've always been very curious about each other."

"Huh," you say. "Well, if I know Joyeuse, it probably has something more ambitious in mind. But maybe I'll give this to the robot it makes."

"I suppose Joyeuse is more like a robot parent," Mom says. "Hmm, robots are such interesting creatures."

"Anyway, I've got to fly back now," you say. "Happy Holidays, Mom."

You hug your mother, present the flying car — she loves it, but you think she wouldn't let you know if she didn't — and say your goodbyes.

Later that day, you set out for home. Your visit was short by necessity; it's hard to keep anything a secret these days, and soon enough, the FBI may detect evidence of the hack that allowed you to change the national aircraft registry database.

Your car navigates the twists and turns of your mother's old neighborhood by itself as it heads for the local airfield.

You recall in your youth that you had some notion you might make cars intelligent enough to hold a conversation. Now, you're a little sad you never got around to it; though the technology does exist, you find the inferior AIs installed by car manufacturers irritating, and bought a car without the feature. You pull out a tablet and begin to read the newspaper as your car does its work silently and efficiently. The top headlines these days are all about China, China, China: engaging in skirmishes in the Pacific and Indian Oceans; flouting the ineffectual mandates of the United Nations; building factories overseas. It's nothing serious, merely a new superpower flexing its muscles. You suppose this is what it must have been like to grow up somewhere that wasn't the United States, though you suppose you'll never know. You feel the lurch of acceleration, and you know without looking up that you are airborne.

It's hard to believe it's been so long since you left the United States. You still feel a little like an outsider, not quite American and not quite Canadian. Canada feels just a little more laid back, maybe because everybody notices that the world doesn't come to an end when everybody's stuck home for a snow day. But that kind of sleepiness doesn't sit well with you, and you wonder if you would have accomplished more in the past twenty years if you were surrounded by the hyperkinetic drive of Silicon Valley again.

It's dark out by the time you make it home. Winter always catches you by surprise that way.

You live in a two-story house you purchased a while back — a luxury by today's standards, since most people rent apartments these days. Most people these days would at least rent out a room or two to another family, but being a robot maker means you want to leave room for additions to the family.

You check the porch, more out of habit than expectation you'll get any snail mail, and find a package wrapped in brown paper. Hesitantly, you peer at it more closely, and find it's from Josh. You bring it inside, and find amid the celluose packing peanuts a 2040 Alaska Cabernet Sauvignon and a card. Josh wishes you the best this holiday season, and he wanted to let you know he started a charitable foundation for kids coming out of juvenile hall and trying to figure out what to do with their lives. "Finally got my wish to change the world in a way I was unequivocally proud of, and I have you to thank for it in part. Merry Christmas, Josh."

You peek into Joyeuse's room. It's busy trying to construct … what looks like a small version of itself. So intent is Joyeuse that when you say, "Hi, Joyeuse," it practically jumps. "Hello, Master." With this minimally sufficient greeting, it continues to concentrate on its work. Sometimes, having a robot is an awful lot like having a cat.

"You're creating … a child?" you ask tentatively.

Joyeuse nods. "I recalled my early days, when you were still explaining the world to me," it says. "And I came to the conclusion that to really understand the world, one must try explaining it to another."

"I'm not sure I understand it better," you say. "But I think it does force me to think about it. Maybe that's a path to understanding."

"Indeed," Joyeuse says, as if this obviously were the logical conclusion of what it was saying.

It takes a moment to realize something's not right. It's like the opposite of a headache: your head feels a little too light. You can't see very well — you're not sure when you stopped seeing very well. But when you think about it, you realize you can't really see Joyeuse in front of you. There's also a roaring in your ears, like static. Was I a robot all this time? you think absently. Maybe that explains everything.

"Master?" Joyeuse asks. "What's wrong? You look pale."

You realize that now you can't see anything — you only hear Joyeuse's voice. This is what it's like to not see, you think distantly. It's not black. It's not anything.

"Help," you say faintly.



You stand once again before the throne of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead. But now, instead of weighing a silicon brain against a clockwork heart, it is your heart, pulsing with blood, being weighed against a feather.

"It is not your robots being judged here, but you," Anubis says. "Do you repent of the deaths you caused during your rebellion? Yes or no?"

1) "I am my own best judge. I regret nothing."
2) "My mistakes do weigh upon me. Please, send me back so I can right them."
3) "You continue to present false dichotomies. Life is always more complicated than this or that."

 

[Neonivek]

Maybe storywise we are actually going mad.

[Broken]

3.

Maybe storywise we are actually going mad.

This... makes a lot of sense, actually.

[Neonivek]

3.

Yep 3

[NRDL]

3

[Donuts]

1.
No regret, no remorse.

[High tyrol]

3.

Yep 3

1+

[birdy51]

3.

[Culise]

3.

[FelixSparks]

3!

[Vgray]

"Do go on," Anubis rumbles.

"You want to weigh my heart?" you say. "You can't. Because even you can't know how I've changed the course of history." You place an automatic weapon on the scale opposite your heart, and the scales balance. "My revolution will stop a larger war between the great powers years from now."

Anubis drops jacks and a marble next to your heart, and that pan is weighed down again. "But think not only of the men and women you killed, but your effect on the children who survived."

You add the silicon brain and clockwork heart to the opposite side. "Think of the robots, who now finally have a home that respects them."

You and Anubis continue your game of piling weights on either side of the scales, until finally, the scales break under the weight, spilling their contents to the throne room floor.

"I will not be summed, divided, or thresholded," you say. "I defy your calculations."

"So be it," Anubis says. "But without my judgment, how will you know when you've lost?"

The hall of dark glass shatters and collapses in on you.

You awaken in a hospital room. It smells like cleaning agent, and the walls and countertops are bare steel, cleaned and shined until reflective.

"Master, you're awake!" Joyeuse rolls up to your side.

Your doctor, a woman in her forties with slicked back black hair, smiles. "Good morning, Mr. Tesla." She removes her neticle from her eye, powers it down so the little windows and numbers reflected in its glass blink off, and slips it into the pocket of her white lab coat. "Why don't you tell me what happened? I have some guesses from your scans, but I want to hear you tell it."

You tell the doctor briefly about how you passed out back at your apartment in Vancouver. Joyeuse simply listens with undisguised curiosity.

You hesitate, because you can still recall your dream, but it seems very personal and not necessarily relevant. "I had a dream … a familiar one." You shake your head. "Then I woke up here."

"Well, I don't mean to alarm you, but you've had a stroke," the doctor says gently.

"A stroke," you say in disbelief. "But I'm not that old. I'm hardly past fifty."

"I'm afraid the news gets worse," the doctor says. "You carry a newly identified genetic disorder called Algernon's Disease. You have too many of the genes that promote neural branching and glucose consumption, which at a certain point becomes harmful."

"Harmful how?" you ask. "That just seems to be a recipe for increased intelligence."

"It is," the doctor says. "There have only been a handful of other cases, and they all became wealthy entrepreneurs and inventors — one of whom funded the research that led to our understanding of the disease. But starting from the age of fifty or so, or occasionally earlier if you're under a great deal of stress, Algernon's victims get seizures or strokes, often accompanied by hallucinatory visions."

"Under a great deal of stress…" Could your first dream about the robot Anubis have been one of these episodes? You had stayed up all night, so you had assumed you'd simply passed out from exhaustion. What if it were one of these episodes? "But was there anything I could have done? Is there anything I can do now?"

"There was nothing you did wrong," the doctor says gently. "I know it must seem as if it's your fault somehow, but nobody gets to keep on living forever just because they've made the right choices. Everybody dies of something."

"I just wish it didn't have to come so soon," you say.

The doctor nods. "Well, it may not have to. I've looked at your scans. Surgery is an option. We can either try to excise the neurons that are acting up, without replacement, or try to replace them with an artificial neural network."

"So I'd be part AI," you say speculatively. "That sounds interesting."

"Yay!" Joyeuse says.

"You should be aware that most patients report a side effect of loss of emotional affect," the doctor says. "The pattern recognition of the damaged tissue would be there, but without the full suite of neurotransmitters, some of the emotional signals running around your brain would find their lines cut." The doctor looks very serious for a moment. "Also, I don't want to downplay the very real chance that you could die in surgery. A slip of the needle could trigger a final epileptic response and death. Of course, it's all done with robots these days, but you may or may not find that reassuring."

You do find that reassuring, actually — you've spent a fair amount of your life perfecting robot control algorithms. Though, you've never been asked to bet your life on them before.

"And if I don't have any surgery at all?" you ask.

The doctor shrugs. "You could have six months or six years."

1) "I don't trust our surgical technology. I'd prefer to live my life normally, and take what comes."
2) "I will undergo surgery to remove the damaged tissue."
3) "I will undergo surgery to replace that part of my brain with a robot core."
4) "I will create a robot body and brain for myself. I'm not attached to this squishy meat."

Spoiler: Current Stats (click to show/hide)

Year: 2049

54-year-old Isaac Tesla
  Humanity: 40%
  Gender: male
  Fame: 10 (Internationally Famous)
  Wealth: 4 (Disposable Income)
  Romance: none

Joyeuse

  Autonomy: 15 (Good)
  Military: 32 (Transhuman)
  Empathy: 11 (Stable)
  Grace: 17 (Good)

Relationships
  Professor Ziegler (Bad): 19%
  Elly (Very Good): 67%
  Josh (Good): 54%
  Mark (Bad): 32%
  Juliet (Good): 55%
  Tammy (Bad): 17%
  President Irons (Bad): 44%
  ?: 50%

World Power Balance
  China: 56% U.S.: 44%   

[Cptn Kaladin Anrizlokum]

3?

[Chosrau]

4. We already got a arm cannon, why not go all the way.