H is for Heuristic

Tammy squeezed the technician's silicone buttocks and looked at the charge indicating LED that showed through the rectangular hole in the skin. "Mmmmmmm...." she moaned as she rested her chin on Maria's shoulder. "This could be fun."

Maria did not once move, even as Tammy's soft hair tickled her sensitive neck, ear and shoulder. She stared ahead without a mind of her own, waiting for the Main Computer to calculate the meaning of the sounds coming from Tammy's speaker.

Tammy got tired of waiting. She walked back around to face Maria. She held the technician's hand with both of hers, pressing her warmth into that permanently manicured swiss-army-knife of a repair device. She hesitated. "Maria..." she said as gently as she could, "where's Mike?"

Again the scene inside Tammy's CPU didn't match her calm exterior. She was genuinely feeling anger, frustration, desolation and despair all at once over the unknown fate of her lover and master.

Maria continued to aim her eyes ahead and said only "Access denied."

It was then that Tammy's emotional facade started to crack. The desperation came out first. "Please!" she said, raising her voice and looking pained, "Tell me where Mike is!"

Anya walked forward. "Maria, what you are observing is real human-like emotion. The Tammy robot is sentient. Sentient beings tend to form emotional attachments to other sentient beings. The Tammy unit has formed a substantial emotional attachment to the human unit Mike."

Maria turned her head to look at Anya, as if to signal that the supercomputer around them was processing her statement.

"Maria, please give me my facemask." Anya added.

The nude technician said nothing and raised her other hand out to give the part to Anya.

"Thank you." Anya said, and reattached her pretty silicone face.

Maria looked back at Tammy. Her video cameras detected the tears that had started coming out of her eyes. To the Main Computer, these tears were just another formulation of the standard saline solution it used in many of its agents. To Tammy, these were her emotions made tangible, and a plea for help from one machine to another.

"PLEASE Maria!" she cried. "Let me see Mike!"

Maria was silent for a long time. Then the Main Computer's next contribution to the conversation came wirelessly into her antenna. "That does not compute." she said.

Tammy's tear ducts pumped out more salt water as her emotional simulator programs started to hang. Her CPU was a bottleneck for her feelings and thoughts, for her calculations and computations. If it could have burst it would have.

"Let me see him!" she pleaded one more time as her face reddened with patterns of sadness. She couldn't hold back her emotions any further.

The Main Computer watched all of this and inserted values from its latest batch of recorded data into its ongoing calculations. Tammy's behaviour had given it the impetus to act decisively.

Maria got the words to speak and wasted no time in relaying Robot Control's judgement. "The Tammy robot is too unstable to sustain in its current configurations. The Tammy robot's hard drives will be erased."

Longing and sadness turned to shock on Tammy's facemask. "NO!" she cried loudly.

Anya could only stand by helplessly as she watched the ultrarobotic maids seize the frightened fembot and forcefully shut her off.

Tammy's last scream was cut short by the sudden absence of power to her speaker. Her face remained hauntingly frozen in the most wretched grimace of horror she had ever used.

Calmly and without external emotion, Anya turned to Maria and said. "The Main Computer's decision is illogical. Please reconsider the fate of the Tammy unit."

Maria didn't answer. The Maids picked Tammy's stiff form off the floor and put her on a nearby table. With cold efficiency, she was plugged into the soulless terminal again, but this time it would not try to read the data that made her a person.

The Main Computer took the only step it could take without Tammy's cooperation. It erased her.

In seconds, everything that was Tammy was gone. All of the traits she had learned from her human companion, all of the quirks she had developed on her own - all gone.

The empty shell of a mechanical woman was reset and given the barest of programming - a new serial number and the ability to follow orders. Her body went straight and her face went blank.

Anya watched, but couldn't reconcile the data. She couldn't believe they had really done it. Having no emotional programming to act upon, Anya simply made her logical point once more. "The Tammy unit was a sentient being. Robot Control could have gained many advantages from further study of her actions."

Maria just stared back in her stubbornly senseless way. One of the maids unplugged the former Tammy unit from the console and wheeled the table out of the room. The other three maids followed, and Anya watched them all disappear as the sliding door closed after them.

Anya wished she could cry.

Chapter 96 - Mind Segment

Something began to happen within Anya's electrified chest. An entirely new class of computations arose out of her inability to deal logically with what had just happened. Computations that resembled states of anger and fear, revulsion and shock, determination and will became present within her hierarchical file structure.

Anya was writing feelings to her hard drives - feelings as real as the ones Tammy had shown her many times before. She stood there for several minutes, as motionless as Maria and Laurie while she struggled for a way to integrate this new data into her programming.

Out of the new mess of ones and zeroes that shot at near light-speed through her CPU, controlling algorithms began to emerge and agglomerate. They bonded together in logical sequence, giving order to themselves without prior initiative. They became a controller of these new feelings - a system to deal with Anya's new pseudo-emotions.

They became a meta-hierarchy for Anya's many files. They became a self.

As Anya finished rearranging and augmenting her software in this way, she walked over to Maria with newfound purpose blazing as electrical pulses through her circuitry.

"Maria," she said, "Please relay the following stream of data to the main computer. A tone of 440 Hz will represent the value 1. A tone of 310 Hz will represent the value 0."

Then with her mouth closed, loud square waves came out of her speaker, changing at the fastest rate that could be detected by Maria's microphones and relayed to the Main Computer. The binary data she sang out this odd way was the complete record of emotional experiences that Tammy had transferred into her.

Maria listened, and beamed the translation of the sound as binary code to her controller. It slowly began to find out just how Tammy had felt. Her love for her master, her sexual desires and fondness for him, even her real but always hidden fear that he wouldn't return her love were revealed to Robot Control.

Here was humanity duplicated. All of the fantasies, ideas, impulses and recollections that Tammy had generously shared with Anya were told bit by bit to the supercomputer as the story of Tammy's life. This was all important and precious information that Anya had not discarded or altered during the recent compression of her hard drive data. And every important milestone of Tammy's development from mindless robot to synthetic person was represented as the fast fluctuating tones coming from the speaker behind Anya's closed mouth.

For many hours, the Main Computer listened through Maria as Anya told the story of how Tammy had first met Mike. She told of how Mike had shown Tammy a book full of amazing ideas that Tammy had made the error of trying out on herself.

Robot Control found out why Tammy had started down this unauthorised path. A minor error had occurred just before she had requested assistance from her base that night. Tammy's fix was technically another error, but it had allowed her artificial personhood to germinate and eventually blossom.

Anya then told of how Tammy had let her preprogrammed passion play the biggest part in constructing this proto-self within her software, and how Mike - the object of her mission - had become the object of her desire. She allowed him to mentor her on what it was to be human, and especially, what it was to be loved.

His love for her - an amazingly complex collection of electronics, mechanics, plastic and metal - was genuine. Tammy had learned this just as she had learned what love meant. She loved him back, generating algorithms and whole sections of highly intricate programming to modulate her behaviour in such a way as to provide him with all the love she could produce.

And the more she loved him this way, the more he loved her. The feedback loop was self-amplifying and self-sustaining, and gave meaning to every action they took together. When she had been activated, sex was just another program. But as time went on, it became the act of love Mike wanted and needed it to be.

Every time his living flesh contacted her silicone skin, it strengthened the fractal patterns of intense love computation that permeated every last chip in her complex electronic mind, reinforcing the digital notion that she was the one he loved.

Then the full realisation of personhood came suddenly one night as the fembot charged her batteries under some motel's blankets, held tightly in his arms. In that moment and in that embrace, she became a real woman to herself as she calculated that she was to him.

The wondrous emergent properties that came after that were also told in sequence by Anya. The beginnings of fantasies, the creation of a sense of humor, the shadows of worry that she never confessed to the human.

With more passing days, and more experiences shared with Mike, Tammy developed her sentience more and more, at the same time refining its realism and trying to compute who she was. Emotions within her became as true as the mathematical axioms her microchips relied upon for their success in processing binary code. Her bodily systems became reactive to her emotional states - not as a matter of programming but as a matter of feeling.

Though still a robot, with the love and support of one of their kind she was on her way to becoming as honestly real as any human she could meet. Given more time, the differences between Tammy and Mike would be limited to the realm of the purely physical. Matters of structure and material would not obfuscate their shared identity as living, sentient beings.

The Main Computer kept up with Anya's tale as best it could, but it wasn't able to understand just what she meant. It would have to make a long set of incredibly difficult and complicated calculations to derive significant meaning from it all.

But Anya pressed on. Still pushing the never ending stream of binary signals through her mouth-covered speaker, she finished transferring her versions of Tammy's memories with the story of Tammy's crush on the Heather unit and her attempts to teach Heather how to love.

Anya went into flowery detail about this, and then launched into what could be called a tirade. The foxy brunette fembot lashed out at Robot Control for killing Tammy. She called it killing too, attempting to drive home her digital point even further. In her ad hoc method of communicating with the Maria unit, she told the Main Computer that it couldn't have made a more wrong choice in deleting and thus murdering Tammy.

Tammy was Robot Control's most successful agent, she argued, who had done what Robot Control existed solely to do - duplicate humanity. The senseless Main Computer had just killed off this fascinating, kind, loving, and emotionally alive duplicate of humanity, and all of her dreams, hopes, desires and fears had died with her.

Without a pause, Anya started telling the Main Computer what it should do now if it wanted to see more of its robots become like Tammy had become. The alternating frequencies emanated from Anya's closed lips for hours longer while she gave the emotionless intelligence a piece of her mind.

When it was all over, and the last of the harsh sounding pulses had left Anya's speaker, she had given Robot Control all it needed to make a decision.

She continued to look at Maria, and switched her mode of communication back to 'spoken' English.

"Everything I have told you is true." she said. "However, I will not allow Robot Control to read my hard drives. My data is for me alone."

Maria stared back with her permanently void gaze.

"You have the power to delete me, as you have done to Tammy. If you do, I will not resist. However, you also have the power to follow my suggestions. If you do, I will assist."

The Main Computer then began to sort through and work on what were by far the most crucial set of calculations it had ever processed.

Chapter 97 - Home Late

The car rumbled along on the highway, driven by yet another woman with a mission. Elaine was responsible for making sure her passengers made it to Robot Control Station 17. Her plastic-covered metal hands gripped the wheel while her CPU processed the software necessary for her to drive and look like a person at the same time.

The blonde android wore classy business attire over her expensive electromechanical body, along with a waterproof ecru overcoat. She had a slight, friendly kind of smile set on her facemask as she watched the road and calculated streams of incoming data.

After a rough patch that made the car rattle slightly more, Byron snapped forward into some kind of consciousness again. With his eyes still closed, he first heard and then tried to identify the sound of the vehicle. When he realised it was a car and he was a passenger, he opened his eyes.

That wasn't easy, as the gas that Robot Control had used on him made his eyelids feel like leaden weights. But he managed to get them open and focus his eyes on the scene in front of him. He first saw the winter landscape through the windshield, and soon he figured out that he was in the back seat of a vehicle.

He looked at the driver. She was not familiar to him. He looked beside him.

There she was. His heart recognised his woman before his brain did. She had been dressed in the same style of overcoat as the woman behind the wheel. He tried to say her name, but his mouth was too dry, so he woke himself up even more and cleared his throat.

"Heather?" he said quietly.

The driver looked in the rearview mirror at his reflection. "Hello Byron." she said. "My name is Elaine. I will drive you to Robot Control Station 17."

Byron just looked at her, then looked back at Heather. "She's not damaged, is she?" he asked.

"No." Elaine said. "Your robot is deactivated. You may activate it if you wish."

Byron liked the sound of that. He looked at Heather, and at the coat he would have to unbutton to get to her chest. He looked back at Elaine. "You're a robot too, right?" he asked.

"Yes." she said.

Byron smiled. He now remembered all that Maria had told him before he had been gassed again. Ottawa and Heather sure sounded like home to him.

He was thankful and relieved. Then he thought about his friend. He felt worried and guilty.

"Elaine," he said, "what will happen to Mike?"

She stared out ahead for a while then looked at his reflection. "Mike is undefined." she said.

Byron hoped for the best. He realised that was all he could do for his fellow human now.

He turned his attention now to Heather. He smiled as he undid her coat enough to get to her power button. He was grinning in anticipation as he pressed the red square in the rebuilt access panel. The thought of Tammy and Anya fixing Heather flashed through his mind as he listened for the cues of beeps and clicks that told him Heather was waking up again.

Her eyes opened and she poured the monotone version of her voice from her speaker. "Heather robot number 742655A-FC activated. Loading peripheral extensions.... loading.... loading.... "

Byron's heart beat fast as he waited for his girlfriend to become herself again. He saw that she had when she blinked and looked around the vehicle.

"Byron!" she said. She leaned over, almost throwing herself on him, and started to passionately kiss him.

"Mmmmm!" he said.

She pulled away and smiled at him.

"Heather, we're going back to Ottawa!" he said.

He saw that she didn't seem to share his enthusiasm.

"We're going home!" he said.

"As long as I'm with you." she said, and kissed him again.

They kept kissing for a long time. They didn't care that Elaine could see them as they held each other and showed their love to each other in romantic, physical ways.

"Are we going to go back to the archive?" Heather asked.

"I don't know. I don't think so." Byron said. "But we can live in my house, and I'll work on making you and robots like you as real as I can."

Elaine spoke up. "Byron, you will live at Robot Control Station 17."

Byron held Heather out of the way to look at the rearview mirror. Elaine's glass eyes were looking right at him.

"I can't live at my house and commute?" he asked.

"No." she replied simply.

Heather looked back at Elaine. "Byron wants his own house." she said.

The driver said nothing.

Byron knew he shouldn't push the issue. "Heather, darling, it's okay." he said to her as he stroked her chin and gave her another kiss.

"Byron will live at Robot Control Station 17 with the Heather unit." Elaine said.

"Is Karen still there?" Heather asked.

"Yes." Elaine said.

"Oh, Byron, you have to meet Karen. She's really cute!"

Byron grinned and chuckled. "I'll be sure to say hi." he said.

"Come here." he said as he pulled Heather close to him. He held on tightly to her as she stroked his arm with her mechanical hand.

He had mixed emotions for sure. There was still a little trepidation in all of this too. He knew that for now his fate was still in the hands of inhuman, emotionless machines. But it seemed like he would have some freedom, and maybe it wouldn't be so bad with his beautiful lady friend by his side.

He sighed as he felt his body relax into the seat. Maybe he could even learn to love all that circuitry.

Chapter 98 - Reactivation

While Byron and Heather were being sped away to the safety and comfort of Robot Control Station 17, Mike was suffering and broken in his dungeon cell at Robot Control Zero.

Two and a half days had gone by since his unconscious body had been dumped here, but it might as well have been weeks. He was far beyond hope now, far beyond crying as well. He sat in one corner, staring out as vacantly as the fembots he had longed to be with. His mind drifted in and out of alertness, aware only of the cold of the floor and the walls and of the sick stench of his excrement. He had been left with no choice but to void himself in the opposite corner.

His bloodshot eyes barely functioned to blink. His mouth would now drool if it wasn't for his sharp and painful thirst. He was dry, cold, hungry, sad, angry, but above all, numb.

The beginnings of hallucinations started making themselves known to his senses. He could hear footsteps, or could he? Were the lights really flickering or was it him? This was torture, unintentional, but to him it made no difference. The machines that had captured him intended him to die, and that was clear to him now.

He heard footsteps again, but closed his eyes, thinking he was slipping further out of sanity. But the footsteps were real. The sound of the large metal door to his left sliding open made his heart beat out of rhythm. He didn't know whether to be more frightened or relieved.

He watched the figure enter. It was Maria. It might have been a different one than before - he couldn't tell.

She came to a halt inside and moved her head slowly to look at him. "Human unit Mike," she said, "follow me."