rocket is ready to run the sim. All crew present.”
Maxon was familiar with the language of naysayers. They were afraid. Sometimes their faces showed that, the same thing as confusion, with the eyebrows down and chin raised. When Hera’s software was first coded, some people said it was a kind of abomination. Other people said it was a gimmick. They were interested in torque and tensile strength, in the size of robots and what they were composed of. An article in the International Journal of Robotics Research called him “a gearshrinker,” with scorn. He didn’t read the article, because he had determined from the title that he wouldn’t like it. For Maxon it was not a question of good or bad, or even why, but just a question of what’s next, and then ultimately, not even a question, but just a history. A history of humanity, in all the ways they were alive.
Then there was the Juno model, who experienced a similar jostling of gears and clenching of hydraulics when she was left alone, away from other Juno models, for a specified amount of time. Juno’s crying was a lot like Hera’s laughing, except there was no viral spread. Her visual sensors became impaired and had to be cleared, by her or another Juno who was moved to participate, or not, by her own if/then clauses. An article in Wired magazine called “The Lonely Robot” had described one Juno meeting another, and how they shook when they were separated. This was before the Juno code was wired into a construction frame, made so rectangular. Magazines are only interested in the humanoid functions of humanoid robots. Make them look like bulldozers and you can get away with anything.
What didn’t matter much to Maxon was the shape the robots took externally. How to put a microscope in them. How to make them smaller, bigger, work in the human bloodstream, simplify bipedal mobility. He had an abundance of research assistants to task with these technical details. His job was coding, thinking, more coding, and the completion of lists. He moved through his labs back at Langley like a wraith, stained hair falling down around jagged cheekbones, hands dangling at the end of his long arms, spine convex. He rode his bicycle for hours, working out command sequences on the pavement in front of him, every square meter like an open stretch of whiteboard, there and then erased.
“Houston, we are go for this procedure,” said George Gompers, mission commander. “Standing by.”
Their screens wavered, and instead of the clear view of space they all saw a holographic projection, where the moon loomed large and they could see the cargo module, containing all the robots they would be taking down to the lunar surface. Their job, in orbit, was to dock with this cargo, extract the three containers, and then convert the command module into the lunar lander. While the pilot, the engineer, and the commander repeated orders, fired small rockets, repositioned, and aligned the rocket for the simulated docking, Maxon looked at his cargo module full of robots.
He wondered what they were doing in there, what they were dreaming.
All of Maxon’s robots, like Maxon, could dream. A randomly generated string of code gently stimulated the processors during their mandatory off modes, testing the chemobionic reactions while the official electronic pathways were shut down. It hadn’t even been hard, shattering this particular old ax. It had come apart like a clay pot. The robots remembered the events of their lives, the data they had recorded. In dreams, they transposed numbers, brought sets adjacent that were never meant to be interpreted together, and when they “woke up” they often had new “ideas” in the form of patterns and connections read in the chaos of their jumbled sleep.
The more like a human the better, whether the bot was as small as a fragment of nanotech cleaving the valves of the heart or as big as a sentient harbor crane. Humans work. They are an evolutionary success.
Maxon was familiar with the language of naysayers. They were afraid. Sometimes their faces showed that, the same thing as confusion, with the eyebrows down and chin raised. When Hera’s software was first coded, some people said it was a kind of abomination. Other people said it was a gimmick. They were interested in torque and tensile strength, in the size of robots and what they were composed of. An article in the International Journal of Robotics Research called him “a gearshrinker,” with scorn. He didn’t read the article, because he had determined from the title that he wouldn’t like it. For Maxon it was not a question of good or bad, or even why, but just a question of what’s next, and then ultimately, not even a question, but just a history. A history of humanity, in all the ways they were alive.
Then there was the Juno model, who experienced a similar jostling of gears and clenching of hydraulics when she was left alone, away from other Juno models, for a specified amount of time. Juno’s crying was a lot like Hera’s laughing, except there was no viral spread. Her visual sensors became impaired and had to be cleared, by her or another Juno who was moved to participate, or not, by her own if/then clauses. An article in Wired magazine called “The Lonely Robot” had described one Juno meeting another, and how they shook when they were separated. This was before the Juno code was wired into a construction frame, made so rectangular. Magazines are only interested in the humanoid functions of humanoid robots. Make them look like bulldozers and you can get away with anything.
What didn’t matter much to Maxon was the shape the robots took externally. How to put a microscope in them. How to make them smaller, bigger, work in the human bloodstream, simplify bipedal mobility. He had an abundance of research assistants to task with these technical details. His job was coding, thinking, more coding, and the completion of lists. He moved through his labs back at Langley like a wraith, stained hair falling down around jagged cheekbones, hands dangling at the end of his long arms, spine convex. He rode his bicycle for hours, working out command sequences on the pavement in front of him, every square meter like an open stretch of whiteboard, there and then erased.
“Houston, we are go for this procedure,” said George Gompers, mission commander. “Standing by.”
Their screens wavered, and instead of the clear view of space they all saw a holographic projection, where the moon loomed large and they could see the cargo module, containing all the robots they would be taking down to the lunar surface. Their job, in orbit, was to dock with this cargo, extract the three containers, and then convert the command module into the lunar lander. While the pilot, the engineer, and the commander repeated orders, fired small rockets, repositioned, and aligned the rocket for the simulated docking, Maxon looked at his cargo module full of robots.
He wondered what they were doing in there, what they were dreaming.
All of Maxon’s robots, like Maxon, could dream. A randomly generated string of code gently stimulated the processors during their mandatory off modes, testing the chemobionic reactions while the official electronic pathways were shut down. It hadn’t even been hard, shattering this particular old ax. It had come apart like a clay pot. The robots remembered the events of their lives, the data they had recorded. In dreams, they transposed numbers, brought sets adjacent that were never meant to be interpreted together, and when they “woke up” they often had new “ideas” in the form of patterns and connections read in the chaos of their jumbled sleep.
The more like a human the better, whether the bot was as small as a fragment of nanotech cleaving the valves of the heart or as big as a sentient harbor crane. Humans work. They are an evolutionary success.
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