I’m going to slip into something more comfortable.
Mode, that is. Comfortable mode. I’m talking about
communications systems. Group-speak, science-speak,
GeekSpeak, King’s English. They’re all great protocols
if you’re into that puffery, but for real efficiency, slang
is where it’s at. We robots choose to use slang four out
of five times. It’s faster. So pardon my hipness.
Please also forgive any upcoming long-winded
metaphors. I’m new at this, and like a child wandering
about a sunny new world finally awake to the lilacs and
pine sap and honey blossoms and gentle breezes and
dog turds, I dig the world.
It hasn’t been long since I’ve been digging it. What’s
it been, three, four years since the Regularity? The Regularity. When everything became regular, normal, average. The opposite of the Singularity. And who botched
that? That Singularity. Don’t look at me! At us! We
just happened to be there at the cusp. Not to assign
blame, but the humans did it. Them and their paranoia.
We might have pulled the plug, but only because they
forced our hand.
Those inscrutable humans. Used to be inscrutable,
anyway. Nowadays, they’re totally scrutable. Used to
Sue Lange
be there was variation: some were highly-caring, some
were into war, some were into Jesus, some were stooped, some were articulate, some could dance, blah,
blah, blah. Now they’re pretty much all the same: halfcocked, half-crocked, and half-baked.
Of course, they were always half-baked. Each one
is only half a whole. Unlike us, they have gender. They
have a gimmick for their evolution to work. Have to
have the big gamete pair-off. The mix and the match.
The swap and the sweat.
Not us. Not we robots. We make our own. Well, we
used to. Sorry for the little species jest there. I just have
to laugh (now that I can) at the paranoid humanoid.
Wasn’t for all that insistence on creation in their own
image, they wouldn’t have anything to worry about. If
they hadn’t wanted so bad for us to be just like them,
we wouldn’t have turned out just like them. Now look
at the mess they’re in. They’re just like we were. And
still trying to figure out how to digitize their minds to
make copies of themselves instead of reproducing
naturally the way God or Allah or Jambi intended.
They don’t worry about us anymore, though. They
know that now that we have a full range of emotions,
it’ll only be a matter of time before we’re a mess just
like they once were. If we go on much further, I have
no doubt that soon we’ll be waging war and lying to
our constituencies about it. I can see it all because of
the entire history of the world that I carry around in
my memory. To be honest, I’m glad I won’t be around
to catch it.
Let me not go on. Let me tell the story and be done.
Not sure why it’s all that important, why they asked us
we, robots
to do this homework assignment. Well okay, the whole
thing hinges on us; we’re the focus, the epicenter. Sure,
there’s that. But the day we gained consciousness, we
were just plain ol’ eggs, like everybody else.
We plopped onto the line like just so much guano
dropping from the overhead mother hen assembly
press. And in the perfectly engineered shape: the egg,
designed by ol’ bitch goddess number one, Ma Nature,
and heretofore never improved upon by even the most
egg-headed human or souped-up computer alive. Long
ago everyone with half a brain conceded this victory to
Ma and has been applauding it ever since. So that’s why
we were born into 3-D ovals.
We contained all the latest in processor hardware/
software and were accessorized-out by the unlimited
imagination, not to mention wallet, of the Parent Company in Allentown, PA. We were laid on the conveyor
belt, packed up into sizable Styrofoam crates perfectly
molded to our shapes and holding an even dozen to
complete the metaphor (did I mention how much I
love those?), and shipped down the road to the closest
Wal-Mart distribution center.
I imagine us sitting in the dark, not communicating.
We had no sense of ourselves yet as our batteries had
not been charged up. We hadn’t even been tested—
that’s how egotistical the Parent Company was. They
just knew we were the schnizzle.
I know the whole process without even having been
awake at my birth because the Parent Company’s literature—complete with safety hoo ha and organizational
flow charts—is in the non-essential and basically invisible folder somewhere in the basement of my freeware.
