Robo Fecundus

By Bill Gallagher
1950 Words



     I walked with the robot out to the compost pile in the back yard and told it to catch flies until I said stop.  Thats one of the exercises in the very lengthy instruction book which comes with the robot, a reference to help familiarize you with the robots somewhat unbelievable abilities and strengths.  One thing the book makes clear: familiarization with this aspect of the New Technology, familiarization with this machine, is an ongoing process, and never really stops.  Its evolution.
     I watched the machine as it silently plucked flies out of the air, and I felt a chill run up my spine.  Its movements were a blur to my eyes, and it never missed.  It looked like it caught the flies by their wings.  Incredible.  The robot was releasing the flies alive, but could easily be instructed to exterminate the flies as it caught them, and it would do so with the utmost precision and efficiency. 
     With the New Technology it would be easy to create fly exterminating mechanisms on a mass scale, poisonless and for the home,  and that could be good, unless it eventually wiped out flies completely.
    I pondered that as I watched the machine. 
     A world without flies would be way worse of a stinking mess than this one already is, a world without flies would not be good.
     I then wondered, as old men sometimes do, what if I just up and croaked right here right now without telling the robot to stop?  Would it stay up all night, long after the flies had gone to roost, searching for fly movements in a futile attempt to satisfy its primary command, or would it revert after a time to secondaries?  I will look that up in the dumb things instruction book.  I guess my main concern if that scenario was to play out, how long would I have to lay there dead, collecting flies myself, before someone took notice and addressed the tawdry little situation?
     I shouldn't call the robot a dumb thing, it is only dumb now, governed by a very tightly reigned Asimovian logic, and with only a rudimentary reasoning capability during this learning phase.  Soon it will fulfill its real purpose and that machine will become Super Human.
     Soon, that robot will be me.

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     It was the year 2028 when the New Technology really kicked in.  Almost right away experiments were begun to create and use New Tech Robots as vessels in which to transplant human brains, modern mans first success in immortality.  There is a microscopic symbiosis involved which is pure genetic engineering, another vector of the New Tech, and though the process is not 100% successful it is respectably close. 
     The symbiotic buggy is a miracle drug along the lines of SIGA Pharmaceuticals novel anti-infective for mucous membranes. It extends the life of the brain radically and makes it electronically compatible with the machine.  Meanwhile, the machines brain receptacle is engineered so it is almost biological itself.
     New Tech.
     The earlier machines, the first 1000, were kind of clunky, but my machine, number 31,367, is sleek and functional, weighing in at just over 300 kilograms.
     Its a Toyota.
     I personally find the humanoid look in bad taste, those days are done, I am a machine now (Or will soon be) so make it easy to clean and repair, then let me loose.  Some people want their robots as close to human looking as possible, and even dress themselves.  All that is beside the point, imho, but to each his own.
     I once read an excellent and very thought provoking book by Greg Bear called "Queen of Angels", and in that future people could pick things like skin color, and have other real weird modifications done to their flesh.  The New Technology has kind of put us on a different track than that, yet I see some similarities.  I chose gun metal blue for the finish on my robot, and even though the majority of the body is metallicized plastic, or ceramicized plastic, a large majority of everything is still metal, especially some of the pumps and motors, and there is nothing like metal tubing to carry fluid under pressure.
     The largest problems with robot bodies have been, as you might guess, psychological.  The problems are deeply rooted in the sexual urge, and there have even been a few brain deaths caused by a real inability to put aside the procreative instinct.  Those early deaths were extreme cases, candidates are screened much more thoroughly now, and the education prior to having ones brain transplanted into a robotic body encompasses what is known to date. 
     These psychological problems stemming from sexuality are fairly common among both sexes, but men seem more affected with troublesome baggage.  Men hate to give anything up, to concede anything, and to give up what they have known all their lives concerning themselves and the opposite sex, well, one must want immortality pretty bad, thats all I can say, because robots don't have peckers.  You get over it or die big boy.  So far all the brain transplants into robots have been from old people who were very close to death already.  I myself am getting there quickly, and that factor more than anything lessens the psychological problems caused by basic sexuality.
     One early robot had a major problem every time he spoke to an attractive woman; his brain emitted some weird chemical that his robot body misinterpreted wickedly, causing him to do perfect backward somersaults.  This was extremely dangerous if the robot was in a room full of people and things.  One time his back flip caused him to fall through the ceiling of the apartment below, and its only because he hit the unoccupied kitchen table that he did not keep going through several floors.  It took awhile but that little snag was finally ironed out for the robot, and hopefully for future models who might experience the same misinterpretation.
     It is always good to give robots lots of room,  don't get too close.
     The instruction book says to remember that the whole robot, the entirety other than the human brain, is really just a capsule environment FOR the brain, and the brain will be kept alive at all costs during the event of catastrophic shutdowns or any other reason. 
     Some people/robots find sleep periods useful, even though there is no body which needs replenishment, or any other real need for sleep.  Others complain of a persistent chill which no alteration of the mechanism can dispel.  The will to live is everything to a robot, and the gathering of new experiences and informations.  There are not any real comforts, or pleasures, except the intellectual type, and yes, a lot is very hard to get used to.  Pleasure centers in the brain can be stimulated but if you are after that kind of thing it is a lot easier to obtain wirelessly, versus having your brain plopped into a metal behometh whose expected life span is ten thousand years. 
     A brain transplant into a mechanical body has to be considered the ultimate trauma, so some missed associations and other confusion are to be expected.  It is only because of the New Technology that any of this is possible anyway.  People have come very far very fast.  Is it too far too fast?  Probably not, in fact, from the looks of things, we are just playing catch up.



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     It was the year 2020 when DNA started being used extensively to back up large holdings of computer memory, because of its stability and its small size.  Four or five google data centers worth of very stable DNA micro memory could be stored in capsules the size of large vitamins. This was more than a boon.  This was evolution.
     Along with many other DNA related enlightenments it was also discovered that living DNA could easily be "Encumbered" with information DNA, that is, huge amounts of data could be stored/replicated/manipulated within living things themselves, in the background, one might say. 
     The first known discovery of ancient DNA encoding was made by an obscure student of biology, one Bernard Doucette, who had detected what seemed to be vestigial order in the DNA of some wood he was studying, and by a fluke he cracked the code (It was binary) and found himself in sole possession of some very very High Tech information.  Several of his fellow students were present in the lab that day and Bernard announced his discovery to them with the immortal words:
    "Holy fucking shit!"
     Thus began the treasure hunt of the century.  Any and all DNA was scanned for order and huge volumes of extensive and detailed information on how to build the robots and many other things came to light almost overnight.  The languages of these encodings differed greatly from ours, and were in many forms, but the order was easy to identify then decode.  They were made to be decoded, DNA was just  storage, and most importantly it was stable long term storage.  In all reality it was the new treasure, this New Technology. 
     The more ubiquitous a DNA sample, the greater chance of finding ancient technological data encoded in it.  We ourselves are virtual libraries, we are self assembling machines of biology, short term tools of evolution.  We create the next step, the immortal step, we make ourselves into better tools, and all the instructions are included in every package!



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     Many people were ecstatic about the New Technology.  Many people were not.  The religious butt heads, with their inbred harangue over god money were not happy.  Thankfully they went away quickly, like fungus under strong light.  Changes are happening so fast that it is still difficult to say which way it will go -- more and more information is being discovered daily, and that can only be good.  Some positive trends include a greatly reduced birth rate and much less alpha behavior among the more intelligent males, as if they are already trying to come to grips with a future very different from the one they inhabit now.
     So who did it and where did they go?  Who put all that high tech information in our DNA and the DNA of almost everything else on this planet?  Some of that has been discovered, but not all of it, not near all of it.  It seems we are just the latest bunch to give it a try here on Planet Earth, and there have been many before.  In order to guard against what is called "Periodic Cataclysm" any and all who discovered DNA memory added to it, as we are also doing now.  Evidence of this mind set can also be seen in the fact that most of our best drugs from times before, if not all of them, have been, sometime during the past, incorporated into plants, with tons of redundancy, as guard against catastrophic loss.  Engineering is easy to  see if you look for it.
     The last four or five worldwide civilizations that crashed and burned here were us, or a form of us.  We also had extensive holdings on all the planets we can plainly see, anywhere we could maintain an atmosphere.  Those ruins are many times still visible, but hard to see if you do not know what two or three hundred thousand years of space decay looks like.  Maybe we will find things in those ruins which will better explain this ancient junkyard we all live in.  Once I get used to my robot body thats where I am headed.  I am going into space, at least for awhile.  Plenty of time, a new way of seeing.
     As to where the early people went, no one knows yet.
     All we can say is they went away.
     Away.


Fin