Juliet
After the six day trip across the Pacific we found the lab just as we’d left it and set to work. We had all the components to make four more Dora-like beings and the robots were already there, all female of course and lovely. While Ted and the rest of us spent our time in modifying them to install our components, their guts, Dora went off and reactivated a section of the factory that fabricated the faces and heads. She had it stamp out her Pan to switch with one of the female heads. The rest of the body wasn’t entirely male. The breasts were removed and the parts lower down so the lower half was gender neutral, its skin entirely hairless. It would have taken us months to engineer a complete male body. So poor Pan had to settle for a sexless body. It was still far better than not existing at all.
In a few weeks we completed the first part of our project. We had four droid-like robots that could follow us around. But as yet they had little mind and no consciousness. And that extent of programming would require a hive.
There was one a few hours to the north and we spent the next month there, Dora taking over the unit and education us in directing first inflows of information that would humanize our wards. Then came the much more complex task of filling their hard drives, their brains with the data that would give them personality.
She assigned one of the robots to me, another to Ted and the last of the females to Hana, keeping Pan for herself of course. Her logic in this was that she wanted each one to have a different character and she knew that with our different backgrounds and skills this would do the trick.
At first I felt overwhelmed with the task, the creation of a human being with only data input. But I remembered from my university days as a classics major an ambitious computer project to recreate the ancient world in a few of the best recorded instances. If you combined all the information we had from detailed histories, all the hundreds of personal letters we possessed of Cicero, we could take a well recorded year, say forty five B.C. and make a detailed map of the center of Rome. Then we could place all the main historical players of that year in their locations on specific dates, then unleash the motions that we know they made and with highly educated probabilities end up with something like a flowing bird’s-eye view of actual events, a movie of that distant year and place.
Then when you added in all the details we know of their habits and dress, their talk and customs and ritual ceremonies, the cobblestone streets, the layout of the common houses, the furniture of the time, the public buildings and the palaces, the mosaics we’ve unearthed, we would be able to zoom in, enriching the movie immensely, recreating the past as if it were one giant jigsaw puzzle with all the known pieces in their proper places and the rest extrapolated. All this required massive computing power, a thing we had lately achieved.
A corollary project which I also followed was to map out a single person’s complete consciousness with cameras, recording what they saw and how they reacted to every stimuli in their daily lives, every facial expression, enriched with hours of questionnaires as to their background and the memories that came into play, their every thought.
One such study was of a nineteen year old college student named Elizabeth. She even looked like the robot I was assigned. I looked up her files and simply downloaded all the voluminous information straight into her head. I even gave her the same name and programmed her to exactly mimic every detail of the thousands of hours of footage of her model, from her boudoir make-up sessions in the morning, combing her hair and painting her face, to all her peculiar motions of undressing and putting on her nightgown before bed. I felt like Pygmalion in this task and the results in just a few days were nothing less than sensational. I was done, with Dora’s most enthusiastic congratulations. Ted and Hana, both far more programming savvy than I was went down drastically different paths.
Hana with her Japanese robot chose the recorded model of a young, professional doctor, an expert in her field and knowing it, assertive in the hospital and yet the opposite in her private life with relationships, kind and mild mannered, compliant, loving children, much like Hana herself. It took her a week to complete this dichotomy while I watched and smiled, unemployed, my business finished and my Elizabeth at my side.
Ted, whom you would have thought the best prepared to program his droid, failed the most. I found the easy route and transplanted a complete individual into my girl’s head. He thought he could do better by taking the best pieces of unique individuals and combining them with fragments of other talents in other individuals, big mistake. He confused the heck out of his model. The pieces were all from widely varying personalities, a composite, a quilt work and I wouldn’t go out of my way to say he was adept in that art.
Then again most humans are a tangle of conflicting emotions, with clashing sentiments, clueless with a thousand clues in their heads and stupid when they’re most insightful because of hesitation.
After they finished their programming we set these three loose to interact with us and each other. I definitely enjoyed watching Ted’s the most, almost to infatuation. Elizabeth was predictable. I’d seen the movie. Hana’s girl was tame, with a few interesting episodes. But Ted’s was a total disaster, constantly tripping and trying to excuse her missteps or attempting to justify them with hyperbolicly absurd arguments, while reprogramming herself in all the wrong ways for her next Quixotic encounter. I loved watching her and even more talking to her. She was definitely the most human of the set and by far the most confused.
She reminded me of a girl I knew in college who had such terrible eyesight that when she misplaced her thick glasses she would creep around her room groping for them on every surface she could barely make out. I witnessed one such episode and placed myself in her stumbling path. She grabbed me by the waist with both arms and begged me to help her find them. I saw exactly where they were and when I delivered them I was rewarded with the sweetest kiss. This one’s name was Juliet. I made it my mission to sleep with her. I had purpose again. How is it that such a creature can breathe life into you when they can barely maintain their own?
