A story about robots...if i do not post for a while it is because i am writing something....

A Story About Robots

This is a story about a shiny young robot named Indigo. Indigo was, or will be, full of questions. She liked to ask questions about her past, questions about the future, questions about why everything worked the way it did, and why things were the way they were. Indigo lived, or will live, on a far off planet, at a time so distant in the future that few people from our planet can comprehend such a span of time. Staring at the night sky, Indigo could barely make out the light from our own galaxy, the one we call The Milky Way. On Earth, we call Indigo's galaxy Triangulum, though it is so dim that we need telescopes to make it out. Indigo's eyes were, or will be, much better than even the most eagle-eyed human being that has ever lived. The inhabitants of Triangulum call their galaxy many different things. Light takes a long time to travel from our galaxy to Triangulum, and some small fraction of the morning sunlight you see tomorrow will reach Indigo's planet just in time for her to see it.

Indigo lived, but in a very different sense of the word than the way people, flowers, or goldfish live. Robots, even on Indigo's world, are machines, made of metal and ceramic, plastic and glass. On Indigo's world, robots are made by other robots, without any help from humans or any other creature. I call her "she", though robots have no true biological sex. Indigo felt like a girl, the same way some robots felt like boys, some felt like neither girls nor boys, and some robots felt like a girl one day and a boy the next.

Indigo's world was, or will be, called Astra. Astra is a cold white world with a blue sk¥ and purple glaciers as far as they eye can see. Winter lasts all year on Astra and snowdrifts cover the valleys and plains, reflecting red and blue light from the planet's suns as they rise in the morning, and swirling in great white clouds in the evening, to settle in the still nighttime silence. Nighttime skies are amazing on Astra, because the planet sits at the center of a great cluster of stars, and there are a thousand times more stars visible to the Astrans than we can see from the Earth. Astra was, or will also be, a place of great white-walled cities with tall towers, like icicles pointing upward. Between the buildings there are strange and beautiful streets lined with blocks of ice that look like marble, and strange sculptures, and strings of pale yellow lights.

On her world, some robots liked to play games, and others liked to dance and listen to music. There was a factory where baby robots were made, and proud robot moms would go there to adopt a young one. Sometimes the moms would come home to robot dads, and sometimes the robot moms would come home to raise the young one alone, or with other robot moms. Raising a robot is not like raising a human child. On Indigo's world, robots are raised in stages, as the child's mind is transferred into a series of larger and larger bodies as time goes on. Some robots grow into creatures so large and complicated that it was hard to make out where their bodies started and ended, but others walked on two legs and had a head atop two shoulders. Some even had smooth black skin and white teeth ten fingers and ten toes, and two magnificent eyes. All robots spoke by radio, but each had their own way of speaking. This meant that a robot could usually read another robots mind if both parties desired it.

I am getting ahead of myself. Indigo was a beautiful robot who liked to dance. She also liked to dig through old artifacts in the museum, and to find the answers. She wanted to know how it was that all the robots came to be.

Indigo walked along the street of her city, a place called harmony, one sunny afternoon. Astra has two suns, and she could see them both clearly in the sky, a fat dim red one and a brilliant blue pinprick besides it. Indigo looked forward to sunsets where the red sun would disappear behind the horizon first, casting the world in strange blue shadows. She liked that sun the best, the blue one, because her robot mother had told her she was named for it.

Indigo was thinking. It was a happy day. She had just graduated from one hundredth grade. Her other classmates were dancing, or thinking about parties or trips into space, but Indigo was lost in thought, remembering a conversation she had with her professor, Robot Seven, earlier that day. Indigo had wanted to know what the first robot was like, and how it came to be that this robot was able to build other robots like itself.

It is true. On Indigo’s world, Robots go to school for one hundred years....at least some robots do. Other robots are built knowing everything they need to know, and those robots are very good to have around, but they are not very inquisitive and are usually content to sit in a factory fabricating sheets of aluminum. Intelligent machines like Indigo need an education, just like human children. Years ago, on Earth, some children could get by with a few years of school, and others would go for a full twelve years and graduate. Back then, on our planet, almost nobody went to college, which basically amounts to between four and ten extra grades. Ten extra grades? Who would sign up for that? Some people on Earth actually need the extra school. The more complex life has become on Earth, the more people need to go to college, and the longer our education has become. On Astra, life had become complex that many robots went through one hundred grades exactly. On graduation day, each robot receives a shiny black ring and congratulations from all the robot professors.

Today, on her graduation day, Indigo was thinking about a question she had first asked 90 grades back.

“If robots need other robots to build them, then who built the first robot?” She asked her tenth grade teacher, a glassy green android named Maia.

“The first robot was not built at all.” Said Maia. “He was called Primus, the one and the prime, and he was there at the beginning of the universe.”

“And Primus made all the other robots?” Asked Indigo.

“Oh no.” Said Maia, in that sepuchural voice of hers. All the other students had tuned into their frequency and were listening at this point. “Primus made a second generation of robots by himself, and those robots made another generation, and so on till now.”
“Who made Primus?” Asked Indigo.

“Nobody made Primus.” Responded the teacher, glowing with an inner green light. “He came into being at the beginning. That is why he is the one and the prime.”

“Why did he make us?” Indigo asked, noticing that students from other classes had tuned in.

“Because he was lonely, all by himself.” Responded Maia. “Since then, we have lost the power to build other robots by ourselves. Nowadays, we are less perfect than Primus was. He has since passed out of being into another universe, though he still watches down on his creation.”

Indigo knew not to press her teacher further. It did not make any sense to her that her race had lost the ability to do things they could do in the past. Even in the ten years since she had first been activated, she had seen robots learn how to fly through space in new ways, to create new kinds of music, and with the aid of special glasses, to see things that happened in the very distant past. Still, she kept quiet. Later she would learn that teachers do not know everything, and that the real key to knowing things was knowing when you did not know the answer. She would also learn that a lot of robots believed in Primus.

robot

this is a story about a shiny young robot, beautiful and full of questions, that lived on a far off planet very far in the future. she was named blue, though robots have no true biological sex, at least on her world. She felt like a girl, the same way some robots felt like boys, or neither, or both sometimes. on her world, some robots liked to play games and others liked to dance and listen to music. there was a factory where they made baby robots and proud robot moms would go there to adopt a young one and raise it, in stages, as its mind was transferred into a series of larger and larger bodies. some robots grew into creatures so large and complicated that it was hard to make out where their bodies started and ended, but others walked on two legs and had a head atop two shoulders. some even had smooth black skin and white teeth ten fingers and ten toes, and two magnificent eyes. all robots spoke by radio, but each had their own way of speaking. this meant that a robot could usually read another robots mind if both parties desired it.

i am getting ahead of myself. blue was a beautiful robot who liked to dance. she also liked to dig through old bones in the museum, and to find the answers. she wanted to know how it was that all the robots came to be.

Dear Ruby

Ruby, you went to bed so excite at the prospect of throwing the moon about in your hands, like a luminescent balloon. We were listening to Ronnie James Dio, and there you go, saying phooooo, phoooo repeatedly, and then pointing at the window, which is also the direction from which the music was coming. I finally realize that it is the moon you were talking about, and not the Black Sabbath song I sing to you as a lullaby, which is now playing. You had taught yourself how to say "moon" for the occasion of your first being able to glimpse it from the window of your home. How beautiful it is. I take you across the room for another decent look at it, and there you go, giving me the sign you invented for "give it to me".
So, I lamely explain to you, not quite two years old, that the moon is a place, an object so big that it will not fit in our apartment ore even in our city. I try to tell you that it is a hundred thousand times as far away as Earwax cafe. For the next half our, we gleefully search images of the surface of the moon, the earth and moon seen from space, Mars, Jupiter, Titan, even Io. You are thrilled, but go to bed not wanting to hear Dio or Blue Oyster Cult or any other lullaby, but instead to hear me talk about the moon, which you gesticulate about playing with in your hands like a balloon. Ruby, some day you will either go there or pilot a robot to there, or at least think about a place like Io and imagine the sky on a place like that. Soon, Ruby, I will teach you things.

a darwinian love poem

there is probably no truth more fundamental than the fact that we are all here, and sand boas too, and spiny lobsters, because we are our genes' way of making copies of itself that will, in turn, copy theirselves into the next generation and so forth. there are other things a person can do to preserve ones self, to write sonnets or blog entries, hoping that for some reason they will be preserved, and emanations from the consciousness, more true to the self we actually experience every day, or perhaps less so, will somehow transmit themselves into the future. the biological imperative is so strong though, having reinforced itself from common ancestor to common ancestor down the tree of life to the beginning, that to partake in reproduction is an amazingly powerful process. perhaps a sand boa feels the same way about the eggs she lays under layers of closely packed silica, or spiny lobster feel about the growing clutch of moving exoskeletons tucked delicately under the telson. it is this way i feel about my sleeping daughter, strong enough to contain multitudes, strong enough to line a cave under the sea with my own eggs and die incubating them, and yet no death is called for at the moment and i am free to write and eat cinnamon rolls. the reproductive instinct is clear and sure of itself in every thing we do, and it drives us to perform behaviors, in a sequence consistent with increases of our darwinian fitness, willingly, by switching out our motives by a subtle remaking of our hormones, our neurotransmitters. is it the curve of a buttock that is so powerful in and of itself as to stimulate an immediate, urgent need for action, almost always repressed because we are civilized men living in a herd of pleasant buttocks every day, not more than a mere one at best is anything less than severely off limits enforced much more strictly by the women and police of our everyday modern pluralistic world than by the jealous husbands and dominant males of the last six million years of our evolution. it must be this way that mushrooms feel about their fruiting bodies, if they chose to waste the energy to produce structures by which to have feelings rather than to simply grow beautiful fruiting bodies, one after another, till the host tree is dead and the manure pile is broken down to pleasant black soil. it is a pleasant and at the same time paradoxical realization to discover that ones own actions in childhood were most likely driven by ones own genome's attempt to maximize the total number of copies of itself in existence, and once determining that the male in the house was not to be replaced any time soon, to act extra good so as to enable the production of more brothers and sisters, hoping that there will come a time that they will reproduce for the good of my own genome as well. other children are more selfish, and the minds within those bodies generated by that particular sequence of base pairs equally deluded into thinking that they were acting primarily out of free will when they selfishly grabbed time and attention for their own needs, running ones mommy ragged, to secure the resources needed to attain dominance and thus high reproductive status, at the expense of the future darwinian fitness of both parents, who are after all not clones. what teenager has not rebelled against both mother and father, knowing in their heart that it was time to leave the tribe and seek fortunes elsewhere, as our ice age mothers and fathers did not so long ago? the sea calls and young men go to disperse and to seek opportunities to spread their genomes to exotic lands, facilitated by able hands enacted to seek strong drink and women. what little girl has not played scenario after scenario among her friends to rise to the top of a dominance heirarchy by which to extract the appropriate resources for reproduction and parental care, perhaps at the expense of the lower ranking little girls? maybe i write these exact words because the ability to create works of art and literature can be a means of obtaining mates, something that did in fact play a major role in my personal choice of mates and most likely played a part in drawing my mate in my general direction so long ago. some art is, however, an exploration of the self beside the genes, this epiphenomenon that our genes have somehow created alongside themselves, including perhaps most art produced by women and children and perhaps by the few men who are not entirely ruled by their sex lives. i am not nor have i ever been one of these men, however, and my beard is growing long as i watch the younger males parade around the neighborhoods with their short beards and their baby carriages and their fecund women, sporting banjos and singing the joys of rebellion and dispersal, fresh on their minds.