Machina Viva
Machina Viva
from the chronicles of Conrad Wechsellos
Nathaniel Hicklin
MACHINA VIVA © copyright 2010 by Nathaniel Hicklin. All rights reserved. With the exception of quoting brief passages for the purposes of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the author. This copy is for the exclusive use of the purchaser and must not be copied or distributed to others in any form whatsoever.
ISBN 978-1-61766-025-2
eBook first published 2010
Contents
Prolog
This document is an attempt to explain to you the intricacies of our culture. We thought about responding in kind to your own message, with coordinates of our location relative to local stars, standard units of measure, some musical samples, that sort of thing, but it was decided that words are a more precise means of communication.
As the official investigator for the Ikosian Mining Consortium, it is part of my duty to compile accounts of the major events in our history. For this reason, it has been put to me to assemble a chronicle of such events that may serve as an aid to understanding between our civilizations, based on the assembled testimony from any involved parties willing to aid my inquiries. For myself, however, this entire endeavor is merely academic, since as little chance as your message bore of reaching us, the chance of the reply reaching you is lower by several orders of magnitude. Furthermore, we appreciated the detail with which you attempted to describe your location, but we still haven’t the slightest idea where you are, or if you still exist, for that matter. The whole thing strikes me as sociological hubris on the cosmic scale.
Oh, well. It’s something to keep me occupied, anyway. We await your reply with eager anticipation and intense skepticism.
Yours,
Conrad Wechsellos
z. H. Erkundigungsministerium
Ikosiche Bergwerksgesellschaft
1
The building at the center of the city is much bigger than it looks. Everyone knows it reaches all the way to the top of the city, but not many appreciate that it reaches all the way to the bottom, as well.
Down below the street is where the robots are made. Some call them other things, like machine people, artificials, or even manufactured citizenry, but robots is what they are. Robots, from an old word meaning “forced labor.” This is what they are for, and any further meaning to their existence must necessarily build on the foundation of implied servitude.
There are several rooms down here, hidden behind locked doors and mazes of hallways. The largest of these rooms is the main production room, where the simple components are made: legs, arms, skulls, ribs, and other skeletal components. Also made in this room are the actuators that give motion to the robots and the pumps for circulating coolant. The sizes vary slightly, so that not every robot is exactly the same size and shape, but they are otherwise identical.
In the next room, the skins are made. They show much more variation than the bones. They come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. Some are quite small and have fur on them, because lots of people like a house pet that can provide stimulating conversation while not leaving presents on the carpet.
The next room contains sensors. Some of them are very small, like the pressure and temperature sensors that are applied to the inside of the skin like spray paint, whereas some are quite large, like the optic sensors in the eyes that can detect the difference between biological and artificial at a glance. Some people sell devices with the same capability, for those who begrudge the robots their ability to tell the difference when they themselves are unable. Of course, there are others who feel that such devices are somehow unethical, that a person should treat others equally with no regard to whether they are based on carbon or silicon. There are at least a few of these people in every civilization.
Ah, the factory machinery is coming to life. Elsewhere in the building, above the level of the street, a report has been received that a robot has ceased to function, and a new one is about to be assembled. Proper balance between humans and robots must be maintained, according to carefully calculated labor and demographic requirements, and new robots are constantly produced to replace expired specimens or in response to an increase in the human population. The central assembly computer, not itself a sentient system, has randomly generated a new member of the synthetic population, and the requisite components are being gathered. The machine selects a skin and the necessary bones to fill it. The new robot is male in appearance, approximately two meters tall, perhaps slightly less. Judging from the bones and actuators, this is clearly a being meant for heavy lifting.
Many robots find themselves in that sort of work. Manual laborers and couriers are almost exclusively artificial, due to their high physical demand. In any endeavor with primarily physical requirements, robots will be well represented. Conversely, humans find themselves employed in situations that require creativity, aesthetics, or a keen understanding of human emotion. Just as a human is unlikely to be found working in a sewage plant, a robot is unlikely to publish a book of poetry.
Now the massive assembly apparatus returns from a highly secure room, carrying with it the final piece of the robot: the higher processing unit, the robot’s consciousness. In the long, hard journey to create a sentient machine, many people tried and failed to create a computer with a true mind of its own, until a clever engineer named Stelios made a breakthrough in cognitive computing through study of the most sophisticated and complex computer in existence, the human brain. Dr. Stelios’s realization became known as Stelios’s Law of Sentient Complexity: “If the human brain were simple enough to understand, we would not be intelligent enough to understand it,” with the corollary that no sentient system can ever be intelligent enough to comprehend its own complexity. This meant that a computer could only have intelligence comparable to a human if it was not precisely known how that computer functioned. The result of this line of reasoning was a technique whereby robotic processors are grown, not built, through an intricate fractal process. The growing room is tightly sealed and controlled, and nobody biological or artificial is permitted entry to prevent the growing environment from being disturbed or contaminated.
The higher processing unit is the last component to be brought to the assembly stage. Now the robot is assembled by a long, snaking mechanical arm that inserts the various pieces into place inside the skin as a model ship is assembled within a bottle. The process takes a matter of minutes, as pieces travel into the skin and are positioned with millimeter precision. After all the joints are connected, the remaining body cavity is filled with a polymer gel that acts as synthetic viscera to give shape to the body. This is a robot built for durability, however, so extra time is spent in curing the gel to harden it and provide extra protection to the robot’s vital components.
After the assembly comes the testing. The viability of the new robot must be determined. The assembly stage moves into a controlled chamber, where the processor is activated and the robot perceives its surroundings for the first time. The first thing it sees is a screen, and lacking knowledge of how impulses from its processor are translated into physical movement, it lies limply and stares. A set of speakers arrange themselves around the robot’s head. A small air hose moves into position beneath the nose. An army of tendrils poise themselves at strategic points around the body.
Testing consists of a series of simple pyriopsychological evaluations designed to determine the robot’s positive and negative stimuli, beginning with colors and moving through more sophisticated sensations of sight, sound, smell, and touch, until a database is created of the most enjoyable or repulsive things for the individual in question. All higher processing units respond automatically in certain ways to certain stimuli, and while the states of, for lack of a better word, mind created by these responses are as alien to a human as the sense of pleasure surrounding a new pair of shoes is to a goldfish, the term “emotion” seems to fit them nicely. The development of a synthetic consciousness capable of feeling emotions was deemed by the early pioneers in the field to be vital in the creation of an artificial being that would not decide, for reasons logically sound in every way, to suffocate its employer or invoke martial law. Human beings are not logical enough creatures to comprehend all the ways in which a purely logical being can twist the simplest of instructions. This was the impetus for the establishment of the field of pyriopsychology, the study of the behavior and processes in the synthetic mind.
After testing is complete, the assembly stage carries its freshly minted citizen into a small cubbyhole. This is where the groundwork of information is laid onto the robot, the data foundation that draws the line between a functioning member of a society and a collection of hardware with a face. The processing unit’s memory centers are still fresh from the hermetically sealed oven, so the learning process moves fairly quickly. It’s mostly basic language and motor skills and familiarity with the environment, teaching the robot how to do things like recharge its power cells when it gets sleepy or apply the special lotion when movement becomes difficult. The learning also uses a series of simulated encounters with people, generated from many hundreds of conversations worth of sociological data, to teach robots the best way to deal with humans and other robots in much the same way that human children are taught how to interact, using the established positive and negative stimuli to reward the robot for correct answers and punish it for wrong ones. The process teaches robots how to be treated as intelligent and conscious beings, albeit beings who use words as though they haven’t quite learned how they work yet, like a tourist with a phrasebook.
At the end of the process, the robot steps out of the cubbyhole on its own and meets its first human, a technician who gives the robot a set of clothes and a small plastic card. At the top of the card is the robot’s number. It’s not for the robot’s own edification; it remembers its own number as a matter of course. It’s mainly so that others can match the robot to the card, in case it’s lost, usually. The main purpose of the card lies in the long rectangle across its middle. This keeps track of the length of the robot’s contract, like those big cartoon thermometers at fundraisers. The construction of robots is fairly expensive, and to offset the cost, robots are required, in essence, to pay for it themselves. From the moment they first gain employment, they must remit the bulk of their wages to the government, minus a small percentage for necessary expenses and such. It is, in very real terms, a debt to society. The card keeps track of their progress. When the bar is completely full, the debt is paid, the contract is fulfilled, and the robot may do with itself as it wishes as a fully fledged member of society.
The last service performed by the technician is a small one, but being the last, it has gained a certain amount of symbolic value. After giving the robot what it needs to get by in the world, the technician asks the robot its name.
The robot analyzes its number for potential patterns that can be used to generate its signifier. It recalls the simulated interactions to which it was subjected, searching for a significant formative event. Finally, after a second or two of pondering, it gives its answer and is ushered into the world.
The robot’s name is Frank.
2
Higher up in the building, but still slightly below street level, Dr. Philip Abrams has a private laboratory. He works as a design engineer, constantly looking for ways to improve on the various robot designs, and he’s one of the brightest sparks in the department. As a result, he is allowed to innovate at his own discretion, with whatever budget he can justify, and without any checks on what he can produce, so long as he operates within certain bounds.
He has never inquired as to the precise nature of those bounds, but he is coming very close to them.
He has been at work for a long time now, working on a new robot design. He has spent a lot of money, far more than on any previous project, but he told his superiors that the result would be worth the cost. He said that he would revolutionize the field. Now, after so many sleepless nights of work, his odyssey is nearly complete.
His laboratory contains equipment for the construction of robots, similar to the main production rooms down below, but he isn’t using any of it. No, the equipment he has been using is completely different from the ordinary molders and fabricators. He designed it all himself. Nothing like it exists anywhere else. And the odd thing about it is that it all seems so maddeningly inexact. The conventional fabrication apparatus in the corners of his lab is designed for absolute precision manufacture, but the machines he uses seem to be the opposite of precise. The bulk of the machinery consists of baths of a strangely metallic sludge. It’s anyone’s guess how a workable robot could be built this way, but Dr. Abrams swears by the method.
At the center of the room is a large bath. Dr. Abrams walks around it, checking various settings. He seems to know what he’s about, but any other engineer would be as mystified by his behavior as if he were reading tea leaves.
At one end of the room, a small square canister occupies a prominent place, like a miniature kiln. The labels on the outside imply that Dr. Abrams is growing a processing unit in here, but the other devices and cables attached to the canister bear a resemblance to the testing and instruction equipment in the main production facility. One might be led to believe that Dr. Abrams is attempting to perform the education and testing process on the processing unit before it’s installed.
As Dr. Abrams paces, a small hatch opens on the canister. The processing unit is complete. With an excited tremor in his hands, Dr. Abrams dons a pair of gloves that reach up over his elbows. He takes the processing unit and gently lowers it into the bath at the center of the room. Then, he enters some commands into a terminal, and with a deep breath, presses a button.
The strange fluid in the bath begins to churn. A nearby screen displays progress messages. It is at this point that most people would leave the room to get a beverage, but Dr. Abrams is rapt. No one has ever tried anything like this before, and he wants no part of the procedure to go unobserved.
The procedure continues for four hours.