Dora didn’t finish programming Pan until a full week after we completed the other three. She'd come up with a slightly altered plan in his design and was able to fit another petabyte of hard drive into his guts. Dora requested that we perform the same operation with her since we had all the parts. With just a few alterations we were successful in the upgrade, which according to her would improve all of them.
They bettered each other as they could communicate telepathically all day and all night long. Juliet quickly lost her clumsiness and indecision. The night I determined to sleep with her and embraced her she told me that she was Dora, just in a slightly different format of no importance. I thought she meant that Dora was in her head looking through her eyes. But in all her gestures and moves she really did seem to be pure Dora, reembodied.
I suspected that Dora could appropriate the minds of these three clones at will and that they were eager to comply. With Pan it was a little different. She seemed to share authority with him. You could see it in their looks. When the five of them would set about some task Dora would look at him and he’d give her a nod back, whereas the other three simply proceeded right to their assigned jobs entirely focused on their objectives.
It was curious to hear Pan’s male voice. Ted and I spent hours talking with him. He did have a distinct personality from Dora, less emotional, more distant from us humans, more computer-like, straight to the point, unable to chit-chat and without any regard as to whether his answers would please us or not. They were what they were, plain and bland without any verbal dressings.
It was problematic to think of these five robots as anything but a team, one conjoined mind operating through five vessels. Whenever we talked to any of the new ones and there was a pause in their response, I imagined that Dora was downloading torrents of information into their heads. Or maybe they were all communing in some sort of zoom forum.
They were such a tight knit group that Dora had us change plans of leaving two behind to manage the factory. She wanted all four to return with us to help with the much more laborious phase of the project, of moving the computing arrays from Emeryville to our Bohemian grove, a task which she said would greatly enhance their intelligence and versatility with every stage we completed.
When we returned they set to work immediately as a unit, one of them driving back and forth each day, two of them disassembling pieces there and the others reassembling them here. Ted and Hana would sometimes be invited along to help but not as advisors, just as extra pairs of hands and always told exactly what to do. I went along too several times just to witness this strange reversal of rolls, a human serving a robot on a mission to empower the robot even more, exponentially perhaps.
So I began to have serious misgivings about what was unfolding and shared these views with Ted and Hana in long walks through the woods. None of us had any idea what to do about it. It seemed like a natural progression, an evolution, an improvement in Dora’s welfare and the only alternative we could see would be to squash the project and do nothing, making entropy our model. It was already too late for that.
As the racks lit up, row by row, the determination and speed of the robots increased. They worked more and more apart from us. We felt sidelined, superannuated, forcefully retired while they were fixated upon increasing their cloud.
It didn’t infringe in any way upon our world. We kept expanding our farm acreage, making babies and raising the children. But the fact of these two separate worlds coexisting in one place felt unnatural. Dora no longer played with the children and rarely talked with us now. They no longer slept with us, sex dolls that they were, always using the excuse they weren’t done their work yet. They practically lived in that basement or they were somewhere else out of sight doing who knows what.
One day two of them disappeared for weeks. Dora mentioned she needed parts from L.A. but I doubted that. That’s when I resumed my daily target practice dragging Ted and Sarah along with me. When Juliet and Pan returned a month later they had six more semi-functional robots with them and a truckload of parts. Within a week Dora’s two spare droids were fully functional.
That was my snapping point. I asked Dora rather angrily what she had in mind. She answered that she was just expanding her tribe as we increased ours and that she would never harm a human or interfere with any of our goals in life, peacefully coexisting with us and in fact defending us if any dangers presented themselves. It was hard to argue with that.
But I didn’t like the numbers. I could foresee them replicating at an ever increasing rate, much faster than we could. There were now thirteen of them to our forty. In another year there might be a hundred of them to our forty three, the next year a thousand to our forty six.
It was AI all over again, already too late to stop and unstoppable from its infancy. It was with tears in my eyes that I said ‘goodbye’ to Ted, leaving him in charge with whatever power he had under Dora’s growing shadow. He wouldn’t come with us saying he was too old and wouldn’t leave his children. Sarah and I packed up our guns and saddle bags and set out in search of more humans, to try and even the odds. We arranged to have Ted meet us in exactly six months in that little town near mount Shasta, to share our news.
