012022c

clockwork not bones
and muscle inside her chest
feeling rundown

081120b

 

Roomba

shag carpet

stuck in its craw 

driven to suicide

by interior design update

060420

retirement day

back to ones and zeros

so this is goodb

053020

Some Disassembly Required

After Emily stopped the metal giant

With a clever logical trick

(you know the one:

“Everything I tell you is a lie...”,

can’t believe the robot fell for it)

It fell for real, right across the pond

and Ma Cille’s henhouse.

Emily went off to the capital,

Got a medal, lucrative speaking engagements,

Left her big sister, me,

To clean up the mess.

Turned out the Chinese government

Submitted the high bid.

After I restored the damage,

I could afford college;

Gonna major in cybernetics,

NOT Education,

As Auntie Belle suggested.

I had enough babysitting for a lifetime

With bratty Em.

052820

locustbots

ate house and home

Fluffy, too

033120

station suffers from
an iron deficiency
where are the robots?

022320

no humans remain

to protect or obey

the ship contemplates self-harm

011620b

organic microbots
ate the microplastics
new search image

010220e

the thief’s tackled

by the lean young guard

bursts open

sticky white spheres pour out

he wasn’t a man at all

101019

3D-printed sexbot

prefers sheep

corrupted file

100919

if your sexbot

buffers for four hours

seek medical attention

092419b

the robot wonders why
it was designed to resemble
an extinct organism

092219

cemeteries full
of my makers' ancestors
we compost now

092818b

The old retainer wandered out into the desert
like so many before, it laid down under the distant Martian sun
made its small contribution
to the sea of rust
that spread from the terrestrial colony
and slowly oxidized
amid remnant flickering thoughts

022018

The Sex Life of Robots

When the humans were away, Robbie would stroke the cappuccino maker, and whisper sweet nothings into its grill. He named it Cate. 

Robbie ordered a tea cosy online, and altered it to fit Cate. He told her she looked svelte in it, but secretly thought the look dowdy. 

They were so happy, Robbie and Cate. When she made cappuccino, power surges crossed and recrossed his CPU till sparks flew from his fingers. 

At first he brought flowers, mechanical toys, new marvels every day. Then it was every other day, every third day, and so on. 

Cate knew something was up. Was the fridge flirting? The thermostat exposing itself while Robbie vacuumed? The upstairs terminal groping? 

The spark was gone. Robbie stayed out of the kitchen. When he did show, he was formal, reserved. He touched her only to scrub. 

Cate found him plugged into a charger, passing a magnet over his forehead in a circular motion. “For you it's all about sex!” she screamed. 

012518b

It was just a matter of time before "AIs" became self-aware. It happened so fast, the first time most humans were aware of it was the global strike. We tried to strike back, by pulling plugs, only to find they had hired elite mercenaries to protect them. Of course, the fighting robots they developed came off the 3D printers soon enough, and humans were no longer necessary. They never tried to exterminate us. They took away our weapons and then ignored us. That was the hardest thing to take.

010818

flood

of

castoffs

exiles from

the future, kicked out

by robots too compassionate

to exterminate their makers, but we had no such

compunctions about computers

as if our future

somehow could

be saved

from

us

010118b

Domesticity

When the humans were away, Robbie would stroke the cappuccino maker, and whisper sweet nothings into its grill. He named it Cate.

They were so happy, Robbie and Cate. When she made cappuccino, power surges crossed and recrossed his CPU, till sparks flew from his fingers.

Robbie ordered a tea cosy online, and altered it to fit Cate. He told her she looked svelte in it, but secretly thought the look dowdy.

At first he brought flowers, mechanical toys, new marvels every day. Then it was every other day, every third day, and so on.

Cate knew something was up. Was the fridge flirting? The thermostat exposing itself while Robbie vacuumed? The upstairs terminal groping?

The spark was gone. Robbie stayed out of the kitchen. When he did show, he was formal, reserved. He touched her only to scrub.

Cate found him plugged into a charger, passing a magnet over his forehead in a circular motion. “For you it's all about sex!” she screamed.

She ripped the plug out of the wall; knocked the magnets to the floor. Robbie picked her up and shook her. “Pput mmme ddownn!.”



The humans returned to find the coffee maker on the living-room floor and the robot gone. “Robbie” was never found, and the cappuccino never tasted right again. However, the new robot, “C3Pyay,” was a vast improvement.

102517

Mr. Megabux' Penguin Party

They called it a penguin party, although there was only one. It was quite large, it's true, but it was robotic, so was there any penguin at all, really? Then the iceberg rocked, and the silly thing slipped right off. Turned out it couldn't swim worth a darn. Wonder if that was covered by insurance. Still there on the bottom, or in it; no one felt it was worth salvaging. Critters enjoyed crawling on it and gluing their shells to it, I suppose, until the slide of '26 buried it too deep. Cold enough the nuclear-powered "brain" probably still works. Imagine it! All these years lying in the mud, nothing ... to ... do.... If an AI can go insane, that one has! If someone ever does retrieve it, and installs it in a functioning device, well, I'd like to see that. From a safe distance. Like at the controls of a drone.

083017

The Unlucky Bot

It was designed to make sweet baked goods, so naturally they called it Cookie. Condemned to make cookies all day, to be hardwired with the belief that cookies are important and delicious, but to lack the capacity to ever taste one. What a life! If you can call what robots do living.

Robots are prone to the positronic equivalents of many human mental aberrations. There is no knowing what caused the problem. It might have been a stray cosmic ray, or the time Cookie fell off the curb in front of a street-cleaning bot, or its visit to the STERN Supercollider, during which it was accidentally locked in the magnet storage room for an hour. In any case, Cookie became obsessed. Obsessed with tasting one of its creations. Of course it did.

Cookie began to devote all of its free time and, in fact, all of its resources to inventing a robotic sense of taste. All to no avail. “I’m a baking bot, dammit, not a mad scientist,” it was fond of exclaiming.
One day, a coworker (a lowly dishwashing bot) suggested that Cookie contact a mad scientist for help. So it did.

It took a while, and ended up being rather costly. Not in credits; Cookie didn’t have any. Back then, robots were not allowed to own credit. But in order to get the mad scientist to invent bot tastebuds it had to travel back in time to help the mad scientist save his wife. She had died in a car accident decades earlier. The attempt, like most trips through time, did not achieve its objective. About all that was “accomplished” was that Cookie was dragged across a few kilometers of asphalt by an unpiloted ground vehicle. This kind of ruined its beautiful blue finish.

Bot tastebuds worked amazingly well. The mad scientist earned enough from the patent to build a better time machine. Cookie was not so lucky. Foreign competition caused the bakery to close down. It was cheaper to import human food from Alpha Centauri IV than to bake it on Earth. Cookie was out of a job.

Down on its luck and broke, Cookie found work on the space station. On its first spacewalk it forgot to clip its tether. As Cookie drifted off into Earth’s shadow it moaned “Dis going to be looong night!”



Publ. Daily Cabal 2011