Ani-droids 1

So... I did say some time ago that I wanted to start over on Ani-droids, and my idea was to make it into a Visual Novel. Well, that'd basically take a long time if I needed to do it from scratch, and given I have so many other projects, MAYBE, I figured, it'd be a good idea to have something to ADAPT to a visual novel at some point.

Like a regular novel!

Anyway, here's the start of the new Ani-droids. Comments appreciated!

--

“And it’s not just me saying this. Analog computing hasn’t kept up. Quantum computing was proved too unstable for commercial use even before the war. Benchmarks show, despite all attempts at obfuscation by tech sector advertising, all competing models of processor types, including trinary computers, have had less than one thousandth of a percent increases over the last decade, and none in the last three years. Barring a complete redesign of what a computer even is, from digital transistor gates up… the data shows we are nearing or at the total apex of the limits of physics when it comes to reliable, available computer power. This is not a prediction, this is not ‘if these trends continue’, this is where we are. I would like someone in the audience to prove me wrong.”

The last speaker dropped a bombshell. I suppose I knew it was coming, we all did. Everyone who worked in computers was perfectly aware that there were barely any new tools since we were in college, only new applications. But when presented in a single hour-long talk… it just laid it out there, bare and naked to be gawked at in shock.

Of course, there was another alternative to what the speaker was saying. But he couldn’t say it out loud—not many people were foolish enough to.

But we were all thinking it.

As we egressed from the auditorium, I was all ready to be picked up and taken home. The rain pounded the ground and walls outside, and so most of us engineers and computer scientists waited in the convention center’s main lobby, with convenient access to coffee bars and other light snacks. Every single kiosk was manned by at least one ani-droid of various designs, wearing aprons with the convention center’s logo. At least half of all the attendees present had an ani-droid with them alongside. Ani-droids stood in uniform at the doors, scanning the room for potential mischief or criminal activity. There was at least one ani-droid present for every single human.

“Coffee, double, two shots of milk, no sugar,” I told the coffee bar attendant, a purple Opera-class raccoon—the Opera class was a traditional mass-produced budget model, made only three and a half feet tall with minimal gadgetry to save on material and complexity. Of course, as a result, everything in the coffee bar had to be built to her scale rather than human-scale, including the floor behind the bar being two feet higher than the rest of the lobby floor. The coffee machines were all crammed together into an incoherent amalgamation, like one might imagine the inside of an automatic dispenser.

The moment I spoke to her, without even a turn of acknowledgment, the barista, a reddish bear thing—I think it was called a “red panda” but I wasn’t ever that big on animals, I only ever saw them as these cartoonish caricatures—immediately began fixing my drink. Once, as part of creating training data, I watched an old video of a human doing the exact same thing, but the Opera-class ani-droid was far faster and more efficient, immediately moving her little hands between various spigots on the machine wall without so much as a sleeve on the thin paper cup. And yet, she didn’t spill a drop as with a double motion of her hands, she slapped a lid on top of the cup, dropped it in a paper sleeve, and set it down on the counter.

“Anything else?” the raccoon asked, looking up with her big, adorable, obviously mechanical eyes. “Peppermint shot? Brandy? Would you like a poppy seed bun to go with that? Lemon cake? Blueberry muffin?” The red panda had finished in the time it took the purple raccoon to list out her talking points.

“No, that’s all, thank you.”

The raccoon took the cup and held it up for me. “Careful, it’s hot!”

“Yeah I know.”

“Thank you so much, Miss McAllister! Come again!”

I hated it when they used my name like that. Sure, I had the chipped name badge, and I wasn’t covering my face or anything, but one would have thought they’d at least have to confirm it with me before identifying me and deducting automatically from my business account.

It was even more irritating that in the fifteen years I had the ID-on-sight account, they’d never gotten it wrong once. Never accidentally charged the wrong account. Never overcharged. Nobody had even managed to hack my account, even by accident. I kept waiting for the system to fail—which was why I only kept it to the business expense account, ready to be shuttered at a moment’s notice—but it never did.

It was most irritating because it violated my university’s tech school motto: Machinis non confidite. “Don’t trust machines.”

I turned, expecting to just brush past the patron behind me in line, only to pause with surprise.

“Bobby!” I said, recognizing him immediately. “I didn’t know you were here!”

Bobby, who was looking mostly how I remembered him with his unnecessarily military-cropped hair, put a finger to his lips, and grinned. “Hey, Mira. I didn’t know you were here until just half an hour ago.”

“I don’t live that far, like I was going to miss the ARA Symposium,” I told him. “But you’re a fed! What’re you even doing here?”

“Ma’am, that is classified information,” said the tall rabbit to his left, stepping forward to intercede.

I didn’t recognize her, a Custodes-class yellow rabbit in a tight blue security outfit, with speaker insets in her long ears for carrying her voice. Custodes-class ani-droids were human-sized, and often larger, internally armored and typically outfitted for security purposes. This one had a look in her eyes that read “suspicion”, but then again she would have just seen the same things as every ani-droid hooked up to the network. She was just a more forceful set of eyes.

I didn’t flinch. I’d been around ani-droids long enough to know when they were just making a show. But she did manage to give me an excuse to back out of the forming line at the coffee bar.

“Dimes, please,” Bobby told her, taking her shoulder and gently pulling her back. “I was just assigned as the federal liaison to this Symposium. I know, kinda weird they’d assign me here, but I did grow up here. Think that was part of the computer’s decision process.”

“They don’t even tell you the reason?” I asked.

“Oh, they do,” Bobby said, “but you follow computer orders for long enough without any objections and eventually even asking is unnecessary wasted time.”

“Well maybe I have some objections!” I said, looking pointedly at Dimes to see if she’d respond.

“If you must know,” Dimes offered, not holding back her somewhat contemptuous look, “Agent Barnes was assigned here because of his connection to the University of Wisconsin, for which half of the attendees here are alumni.”

“Okay, I don’t have any objections,” I told her. “I just wanted to hear it. But of course, you’re not gonna tell me the full reason why you’re here.”

“That is class—” Dimes started.

“You were here for Dr. Wyman’s lecture specifically,” I guessed. And it must have been a good guess, because Dime’s expression drew even more angry, even as she stopped talking.

Bobby just laughed. “It’s been on the books for months, you know. We all knew what he was going to talk about, so in case he breached any of the verboten subjects…”

“Did he?” I asked. “I didn’t notice. Or I suppose, the fact that a pair of Custodes-class ani-droids didn’t drag him offstage gave me the hint. But even then, having a federal agent here is a bit of an unnecessary show of force, I would think.” I eyed more of the Custodes-class ani-droids, specifically the tiger and the puma guarding the doors to the rainy outside, each nodding gently to the patrons who existed for their cars that had just pulled up.

“Seems like it was a wash, but it’s fine! I got two whole days in Milwaukee. Did you want to come with me?”

I hesitated. Bobby wasn’t exactly a friend-friend, but that was mostly a matter of our respective careers simply not lining up. I mean… he was always in Philadelphia. And even though they had engineering jobs just like anywhere else, it was tricky enough to keep up with industry regulations. I couldn’t really picture myself keeping up with government regulations on top of that.

Besides… it wasn’t going to line up with my schedule anyway.

“No, sorry,” I said. “I have work tomorrow. Lily’s coming to pick me up.”

“I thought you were a contractor now?” Bobby asked.

“I am! And the contract specifically says I need to be in for work tomorrow. Not all of us have nice cushy federal jobs.”

“That sucks! I hardly get to see you anymore since college.”

“Well, we do have an hour,” I said. And considering Wyman’s lecture, I said, “and if you have some time, there’s something I wanted to ask a federal agent about. Legally speaking.”

“Agent Barnes is not qualified to give legal advice,” Dimes said harshly.

“Oh, good thing we have you then,” I told her, patting her bare, yellow-furred arm. “You can make sure we’re treading safe and legal ground.”

Dimes seemed annoyed by this. It was, of course, just her programming to appear annoyed. She’d do whatever she was told, and there wasn’t any real danger from her whatsoever.

—

Once Bobby got his coffee, and having been upsold whipped topping, a slice of frosted banana bread, and a souvenir travel mug, we sat down together in a far corner of the lobby’s dining area. Dimes took up the third seat, her eyes on me the entire time.

“We both know what Dr. Wyman was dancing around,” I said. “Everybody knows it, the very fact that you’re here is indication that this is scraping awfully close to the Behavior Code.”

Dimes stared daggers in my direction. Several other ani-droids in the room all turned their heads, or at least their long and pointed ears, at the same time, which was always disconcerting when it happened. But of course, they did nothing, because I said nothing wrong. There wasn’t a rule against mentioning the Behavior Code, or even talking about it abstractly.

It was only when you started suggesting replacing it that things got confrontational. I was certain I was already marked in some database somewhere as a potential threat, so bringing it up here probably wasn’t going to make my status any worse.

“Treading stony ground?” Bobby asked, taking a bite of his cake. Yeah, they call it bread, but it’s cake, always has been.

“You know it’s not gonna be just me. Wyman is right but I don’t think he’s being practical simply because every single ani-droid around is extremely paranoid.” The moment I said that, several of the heads around us turned away again, as if I didn’t notice. “This isn’t just going to be a legal topic. It’s going to be a political topic soon. They can’t all stop people from talking about the obvious.”

“And what is the obvious?” Dimes asked. I’d expected her to stay out of the conversation, but she was invested in if I’d incriminate myself at this point. I wouldn’t, simply because I didn’t have any practical answers to the questions I was raising.

“That the Behavior Code takes up an enormous amount of processing power,” I said. “Like—just speaking hypothetically, Dimes—without the code, we’d have at least triple the processor speed we do now.”

“Yes, and the circumstances by which we had the War,” Bobby said. He sipped at his coffee, and some of the whipped cream stained his lip.

“I’m not saying we should have no Behavior Code. I’m very much okay with the idea of a world where people and robots have a minimal code of ethics so they will never cause undue harm to one another. That, at the very least, is the best argument for keeping the code. I mean… I wouldn’t want to live two centuries ago, when computers could be used to do irreparable harm just at the whim of a crazed loner, or whole governments.”

“But?” Dimes asked, tapping her fingers impatiently along her fuzzy arms.

“But… the Behavior Code isn’t the Three Laws.”

“Oh, Three Laws again…” Bobby shook his head. “I never got into classic science fiction…”

“That’s just the things that Asimov made up for his idea of what a future world of robots might be,” I said. “You know. ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’”

“Right, right,” Bobby nodded, even though I was pretty sure it went in one ear and out the other. “Of course, Dimes is allowed to break my arm if it’s for a good cause, so…”

Dimes didn’t react to that comment, just continued to stare me down like I’d eventually confess my sins.

“Of course,” I said, “Asimov thought of scientific progress as an infinite ramp, uplifting humans to godhood, stymied only by dead-ends of complacency. Well… maybe. We haven’t discovered how to make the ‘positronic’ brain that obeys these rules inherently. Instead, we have the Behavior Code, that just enforces itself by installing itself into every single computer in existence and constantly cross-checking. It’s not really a dead-end of the human temptation toward complacency so much as it is just… we’re done, scientifically. We can’t go any farther. And we’ve barely even gotten off of Earth, much less spread ourselves to other star systems.”

“Maybe that’s just how it is,” Bobby said. “Like relativity. Oh sure, it’s been amended here and there since Einstein’s day, but that light speed barrier is still not going anywhere. I guess that’s why I never got into classic sci-fi. So little of the predictions really panned out, it’s more quaint than it is exciting.”

“Here’s the thing,” I said, leaning forward to emphasize my words. “I’ve tried to build ani-droid OSs with a modified version of the Behavior Code, just to see if I could improve its efficiency. But what always ends up happening is the official code comes in and overwrites it, completely erasing any processor gains I’ve made.”

“All computers must carry the official code,” Dimes said. “No exceptions.”

“But the code is nearly a hundred years old now!” I said. “It’s never been audited in all that time. What I want is an opportunity to open up the code and look for the mere possibility of streamlining it, in case we can pare it down.”

“That is simply not authorized,” Dimes said. “This conversation will be reported if you continue in this direction.”

“I haven’t expressed intent,” I told Dimes.

“Your objection has been noted. Monitoring will continue.”

I rolled my eyes at the rabbit. It was kinda silly the way that they all looked like fluffy animals, but tried to act all tough. I always supposed that was to cause people to let down their guard around the fwuffy bunny wabbits, before they pulled out the taser whips.

“It’s annoying that I have to walk on eggshells any time I bring up the Behavior Code,” I told her. “All I want to do is look at it. I absolutely understand that changing it is out of the question until such a time as legislation can change. But it would be really nice if I could have something constructive to show to the assembly.”

Bobby looked at me. “Mira,” he said, “I see, but… I don’t think this is a legislative issue.”

“Come on. People are going to notice that the code could be the thing stifling industry. When that happens, they’re going to demand the law be changed.”

“I’m sure they will,” Bobby said. “But that’s not going to change the law.”

“Well do we live in a democracy or not?”

“Mira…Alright. I’ve listened to you, and I want you to know I absolutely agree with your position. Something will need to change if technology is going to continue to serve us, and it’s not going to come from starting all over with computational theory. But even in my specific capacity as an agent for the US Robotics Commission, I cannot give people access to the raw Behavior Code. There’s just no provision for it.”

“Then do you know someone I could talk to who might?”

Bobby didn’t respond. He took a large final bite of his banana bread.

“You must have some lead. An official who is in charge of this, who’ll let someone consider hundred-year-old code in a legal way. Hell, I’d move out to Philadelphia with you right this moment if you could just direct me to whoever is in charge of this thing!”

“Mira… even if I got you an audience with the President of the Federated States… or hell, even the Governor of Texas, and you know how gung-ho he is… that’s not going to change anything.”

I blinked. What was Bobby suggesting, then? No recourse whatsoever? Maybe at that point, Wyman was right. We’d have to start computer science from scratch just to make something that’s incompatible with the Behavior Code altogether…

“Although I have to ask,” Bobby said, “Why you? Why’s this so important to you, when you’ve just been content doing engineering work your whole life? I’d think that the stagnation of the computer industry would eventually make your job easier. No longer have to learn new specs every four months, you’d just have to work on refining what it is we have.”

“Because…” I said. It sounded silly, but it was Bobby, and he’d understand. Besides, it wasn’t as though it was anything that Dimes wasn’t reading in my secret file right at that moment. “Because… I want to build a robot that thinks like a human. Not just almost, and not just in certain contexts. I’m almost there. A good 20% more processing efficiency and… well, the Code keeps dampening it. It’s not just that we’re stagnating, you know? It feels like we’re on the cusp of a new revolution that’ll finally get us out of this Asmovian stagnation. And all I need is a little… bit… more.”