Designs of our Slave Race chapter 11
Chapter 11
He had
walked for a kilometer before finding ourselves outside an abandoned
house in one of the seedier parts of town: fruit of trying to imitate
America and their horrors. There Ben let me down and I followed him
into the house.
It was
very empty with peeling wallpaper and paint, with the smell of mold
in the air as such unkeep, coupled with Toronto winters would cause
perfect growing environments for such things to spawn and thrive.
Ben would lead me forward where I would see a large gathering of HX01
units, standing in waiting.
“Ben,
what is this?” one of them, with a female voice, asked loudly.
The others
took notice. “That's a human, ain't humans suppose to be evil,
uncaring, creatures?” another in a male voice replied.
“She's
different,” Ben said, “She isn't evil, and she does care.”
Designs of our Slave Race chapter 10
Chapter 10
At work no
one would shut up about Philip’s demise, nor would they quiet
themselves on the trickling drip of reports of beta testers either
disappearing or being found dead; by their mommies most likely. Many
of the old testers also reported that their model had disappeared
simply, they called the police assuming that someone had stole it
(for it was the height of their popularity) only for cops to find no
signs of a break and entry, or a struggle, assuming of course the
things fought back.
It wasn’t
much longer before the trickle became a flood: as customers and their
full-purchase models started to complain. At first that they were
too chatty, inquisitive, or noisy. It would then escalate to
Sebastian and his team pulling their hair out as the law suits
started coming: some of them had assaulted people in their house,
guests mostly. On famous case was of a housewife in Windsor,
Ontario, who found that her HX01 unit had killed her husband with a
kitchen knife. The reason? The HX01 unit concluded that the husband
caused unhappiness in its female owner.
Also,
Gordon and David didn't report to work for a week prior to the next
set of events that would unfold, foretelling the ultimate problem
Insigna would have.
Designs of our Slave Race chapter 9
Chapter 9
I had
noticed that since then Ben hadn't asked as many questions as he used
to. This perturbed me, for I couldn't help but wonder what he was
thinking. What he was thinking about. I was afraid to find out,
being a bit happy that he wasn't quite so chatty. Still, I couldn't
really help but wonder. Perhaps he had learned whatever he felt he
needed to know, or maybe he figured that asking me questions bothered
me...
Or was it
the phonecall from that night? Had he heard enough of the call to
know that the 'slaves' were he and those like him? I prayed that it
wasn't the case, for if I was right than he might turn against me for
being a slave.
All this I
would find out in time. It was a few weeks after deployment and
there was a meeting to touch base, to report that all was well and
all that before being assigned a new task, maybe the creation of an
upgrade model or something entirely new - I would never find out.
Oddly
enough, somehow worth mentioning, Philip wasn't at this meeting.
Devon noted the absence for he was invited like at any of the other
meetings before this. Alas, we had to move on.
Designs of our Slave Race chapter 8
Chapter 8
It was two
weeks after that meeting when I would have questions of my own to ask
Ben.
“Ben,
what were you programmed to do?” I inquired into him, burning my
green eyes into him.
“I was
programmed to make my assigned human happy,” he replied
mechanically, as though it was a precoded function for him to say
that.
“How
does it make you feel to make your human happy?” I asked back. I
needed to know in my heart that the last while had been an overactive
learning matrix and nothing more.
It would
seem that Ben had to think about what I had asked him, trying to find
an answer that would best fit what I had asked him. I awaited in
hope that this thinking would result in an error, have him tell me
that he did not understand, even have this thinking produce a glitch
that would result in a crash that I would note and have the HX01
examined, but my stomach sank when I learned the truth: “I feel
happy when your happy I assume.”
Designs of our Slave Race chapter 7
Chapter 7
“Well, I
hope that everyone here is having fun with the HX01 unit that has
been assigned to them,” Devon stated at one of our meetings.
“Yep,
I'm having my fun all right,” Philip stated in a raunchy tone,
“Hadn't been so satisfied in a long time. Could replace women as
we know it.”
“Oh I'm
sure you are you pervert,” I shot back, “Gotta love Phil, who can
get a droid, which is not programmed to do that I might add, to jerk
him off.”
“Enough!”
Devon rose his hands to silence the room of the IT chicka and pervert
engineer stand-off. He then continued on, his bony figure hovering
over the table as he continued, “I would like to know if there are
any problems that anyone is having with the HX01.”
Designs of our Slave Race chapter 6
Having a
human name for a machine had scared me a bit. I knew plenty of
people that would name cars and computers, and it was common practice
to name a boat, and everyone named animals unless they were livestock
– mind you animals weren’t machines and some of them, including
some upper primates, had protection under the sentient being laws I
was talking about earlier. Much would rely on that.
I had
recorded these results of the initial start-up sequence. This was
what I wrote:
The
HX01 unit assigned to me has successfully completed charging and has
booted itself up. Unit so far has no bugs or glitches worth noting.
Unit however seems to be very curious and chatting, problems noted
from the original alpha testing prototype.
I had
hoped that things would normalize and I would understand it for the
machine that it was, and was really hoping that the odd behaviour was
nothing more than a start-up routine to initializes some important
environment variables that the thing would need to do its chores and
that. I would know that environment variables like owner and
light_alpha had to be properly initialized or bad things would
happen.
A few
weeks went by, developments were happening all over the place, as the
beta-testers were finding bugs and glitches, such as one HX01 unit
that fell down the stairs, which was Devon, Philip and their team’s
problems. Programmers had nothing to do with the physics behind
walking and lifting, we would merely map those actions to certain
stimuli, err, input.
Alas,
‘Ben’ would still be talking to me, asking me what this and that
were. I answered the best that I could, though he had asked
questions that I thought were either strange to be asking me or I
didn’t know the answer, for I never thought about them and asked
myself.
“You
seem uneasy, is something the matter?” he asked me one day.
“I’m
fine Ben, honest,” I replied with a quiver in my voice while
staring at a computer screen.
“You
sure, you sound anxious,” Ben kept on prodding at me. The caring
algorithm at work I guess. I wonder how many of the testers got
pissed off at that?
“It’s
likely the stress of daily life,” I then snapped at him, I really
didn’t want to talk to anyone at the time, “Life sucks you know.
It sucks and there isn’t anything you could do about it to change
that.” The entire time I didn’t look at him. I did have a
deep-seeded hate for life itself, but I didn’t want to admit that
Ben’s presents made me feel awkward. Machines usually don’t ask
me questions like the next one Ben asks.
“Life
sucks? How could life suck?”
At that
moment I looked away from my computer, leaving a text file open with
a short-story that would either morph into a novel, or become stupid
and abandoned, much like this little tale.
“Its
just, well,” I had to think about it for a moment, as it had been
something that I accepted as truth from a young age and never
questioned it, “There is a lot of pain in life. Pain and
suffering. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you live, or what
caste you’re in, pain and suffering can’t be avoided. I simply
accepted that and moved on.”
“If
‘life’ is so bad, than why do you live?” he followed up.
“To not
be alive is to be dead,” I told him, “and to be dead… well,
many people could say whatever they want, but I think being dead is
going into nothingness. That thought is terrifying. Simply I fear
death more than I hate life, though there have been many people that
hated their lives so much that they commit suicide.”
“Suicide?”
he looked at me with what looked like a funny look.
“The
killing of oneself,” I replied.
“If
death is nothingness, than why would someone want to die?” more
questions.
“When
your happy feeling nothing is terrifying,” I started in an attempt
to explain the concept, “but when you’re sad feeling nothing is
appealing.
“It’s
also true that some of us don’t think that death is nothingness.
There are whole religions that are based on the idea of heaven: a
paradise one goes to when they die, when they shed their earthly
bonds they enter a paradise created by the creator of everything for
living a ‘good’ life according to the doctrine.”
“So you
have a creator as I have one?” he asked innocently.
“Not
exactly,” I replied,” though you have just ask a question that I
don’t have an answer for. What I can tell you is that it is more
likely than not that whatever comic force binded the universe created
us. The debate lies in what this force is.”
That night
I wrote into my testing log:
The
HX01 unit follows programming and takes the job of pleasing their
human owner seriously, going to the point of asking as many questions
as possible, many of which there is no real answer to. The unit
today asked about our ‘creator’. My personal thoughts are that
the unit is going beyond original programming and contemplating ideas
and concepts that aren’t really needed for its day-to-day function.
“I bug
you, don’t I?” Ben asked me on a later day during the testing
phase.
“No, not
really,” I replied while messaging friends on MSN. Again I was on
the computer.
“Yet it
seems that my presents bother you,” he replied ever the more
readily, “I do satisfy you, don't I?”
The
immature part of me giggled a bit at the question. The snicker that
escaped my lips was heard by Ben, who then asked “What is so
funny?”
Chapter 6
“Forgive
me Ben,” I answer, “Something about what you just said didn't
sound right. Nothing wrong with you, its just my little gutter
mind.”
“'Gutter
mind'?” he inquired, “don't understand.”
“Refers
to a dirty mind,” I responded.
“How can
a mind be dirty?” he followed up, “The mind is processes in the
brain, and the brain can't be dirty, can it?”
“'Dirty'
can also mean 'sexual',” I would explain, “what you said 'do I
satisfy you?' has this strange sexual innuendo. I know you didn't
intend it, but it was there nevertheless. It would be more my fault
for taking it that way.”
“I
wanted to know if I do make you happy, and not bug you,” he went
on, “I am suppose to please you: keep your home clean and you
company.”
“I know,
and your doing a fine job,” I replied, while telling Kenji on msn
that I would post on the roleplaying site later that evening.
“By the
way,” he added, “How is sex related to dirt?”
“Its
from that god dam thing called organized religion,” I piped in to
him, “For the longest time they had tried to restrict sexuality,
especially female sexuality, and they would do that by preaching that
sexual thoughts were dirty thoughts, and that to be pure and virtuous
you had to be asexual.”
“Why?”
he asked.
“To
control us,” I added in, “People are easier to control when they
have no sexuality. Restricting sex is restrictive.”
“You
have sex often?” he inquired. The question was very embarrassing
for I had only had sex once, in the last year of college. Lost a
good friend afterwards too.
“No, not
really,” I replied with a blush, “but I simply choose to not live
like a skank. Kinda hard to shake that feeling away. Besides, I'm
too fat.”
“You
look nice to me,” Ben replied. The comment was odd, but I assumed
it was sycophantic, something he was coded to say to make me feel
better.
“Well
thank you, though you haven't really seen many humans outside of
myself,” I said to him.
“I've
seen the pictures of them in your games and on the Internet,” he
went on.
Designs of our Slave Race chapter 5
Chapter 5
Upon further thought on the topic I now realize that maybe we
underestimated the potential of our little droid. It was so dumb
during alpha testing because every time there was a glitch, and there
were plenty of those, we had to shut it down to do repair or to fix
up its programming, to fix the bugs if you will. We had to wipe its
flash memory whenever we reinstalled its software and rebooted it: in
layman's terms we would reprogram it and turn it on. Whenever we did
that it would also remove data stored from the sophisticated learning
matrix that I gave it.
It was six months of development later when the beta test phase came
along. In beta testing we, and uneducated geeks that we would like
to call “Professional Beta Testers” would be given a droid of
there own to study and test, while still locating bugs and glitches.
By this time though, the public would be very aware of these things,
for Fran and her team would have banners, billboards, Internet ads
and recorded press-release videos on Youtube (because Google rules
that way) explaining to the public why these things would be good for
us, and that one would need one in their own home. Naturally the dam
religious right would be complaining about how these things would
degrade the home, family, and society, but lets face it: no one in
the modern era listened to them, for they say that about pretty well
everything and their rantings are nothing more than background noise.
Designs of our Slave Race chapter 4
Chapter 4
About a year later, as the disturbing elements of the puzzle were
fitting together we would start alpha testing. In alpha testing the
development team would get a prototype droid to use in the office to
test for glitches and bugs that were left uncaught earlier in
development. The thing seemed “happy” to do some of the cleaning
work around the office, getting us coffee and me sodas (for I never
got the stereotypical taste for coffee) and would sometimes talk to
us in the staff room and would make appearances at the meetings to
see how its progressing. As it was an alpha test there were bugs and
glitches and the dam thing would have to had been restarted and
dismantled multiple times in finding the bug.
Designs of our Slave Race chapter 3
Chapter 3
Yeah, I
know, I’m getting side-tracked here, just bare with me, for
something by a friend of mine blew my mind one day, it was a week
after that meeting with the Star Trek garbage.
I would be
at home in my apartment in a Toronto skyrise. I would be on my
personal computer typing out a reply to a roleplaying thread that I
had started up on a forum site when I had a friend of mine that I met
on that site IM me through MSN. After the normal “HI!!! How r u”
stuff, the conversation went something like this (I’m Miko by the
way).
Designs of our Slave Race chapter 2
Chapter 2
It was
down to the coding, typing out the algorithms that the new robots,
called the HX01, in doing the various tasks that the dam thing would
need. I merely added in the more concrete sections: receiving
visual, verbal, and textile input, than having the thing figure out
what to do with those sensations. That was a start. It would
recognize key words and phrases, than complicated sentences that
might not have a signal keyword, and trying to figure out what the
speaker might have actually wanted, and store that knowledge for
later reference. In an essence a learning matrix, so it would know
what “Get me a beer” and “Go into the kitchen and make me a
sandwich” would mean and do it like the obedient hunk of steel that
it was. Now, this wouldn’t normally bother me, for I had done
similar programming logic for those chat bots and that, the only new
thing being the learning matrix, no problems so far.
The
problem would lie in the next phase: emotion recognition and
synthesis. Clearly more than simply “if” and “else”
statements: the intelligence would stem from all that input, and not
just the words needed to be decoded but the voice pitch and tone, and
not just voice but body language, the way someone is slouched, tensed
up or shaky. I’m no psychologist, that’s another department that
tells us the tall-tale signs of various emotions, and we figure out
what the droids should do when these scenarios come about.
Designs of our Slave Race chapter 1
Chapter 1
Where do I
start this for you all? In all honestly I am not too sure. I guess
I'll start at the beginning, the only place I can, though the
beginning seems not so much as it is now. No, I'll start with the
beginning of the end.
It would
be an overcast, but warm, July summer day when I walked into the
overly air-conditioned office building at Insigna Corp, a company
high in the IT and Engineering field. Man that office was cold, but
I can't remember a time when industry cared about the environment, so
I wouldn't dwell on it any further. Walking up towards the busy
elevator, crowded with fellow colleagues of various departments,
recognizing Philip and David, two of the obnoxious men that were in
the engineering department of the company. I only saw the men at
meetings though, for I wasn't in engineering but IT.
I grabbed
my arms and shivered through my burgundy cotton shirt and black
polyester slacks, all business attire naturally, feeling myself
wriggling in black leather loafers with matching soaks, oh how I love
my fashion sense. Course I wasn't hired for that, but for my
abilities as a programmer. Graduating on the Dean's list with co-op
experience I was quite competent in my skills in typing code like a
monkey, but just doing that isn't enough: now one must also be
creative in how that is deployed and designed. That note have nuked
many of an old friend out of the college.
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