Idol Mini: "Making Friends"
Aug. 16th, 2024 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
halfshellvenusMaking Friends
Idol Mini| week 6 | 1580 words
The path is made by walking
x-x-x-x-x
Gerald McFadden had always wanted a robot, ever since he was a little boy. It was why he’d studied engineering in college, and gone to work for a tech company after graduation.
Sadly, his job turned out to be relentlessly dull and robot-free, and mostly consisted of creating Smart Pens and talking refrigerators. But one day, after a company meeting where he was yet again urged to “disrupt the paradigm,” Gerald decided the time had finally come.
He pulled together a shop vac, a tracksuit, and a globe lamp from the lobby, and got to work. Using coat hangers and duct tape, he assembled something truly unsettling. Then he drew a face on it with a Sharpie, and went in search of lab scraps to build a brain.
There was no one at the hardware-bringup table (Motto: Out until next week), but he did find motherboard remnants and a soldering iron. He grabbed a handful of wires and a couple of heat sinks for good measure, and took them back to his desk.
Gerald used the wires and the soldering iron to daisy-chain the processor boards together to form a receptacle for the robot’s brain. Now, all he needed was some software. But he was an electrical engineer, and didn’t know a lot about software. That was the other side of the lab. So, he wandered over there to see who was around.
Fortunately, his friend Roger (Motto: At least I don’t use a Mac) was sitting at his desk.
“Hey, whatcha working on?” Gerald asked.
“An app to tell you what your smart devices are really up to when you’re not at home.”
“Oh,” Gerald said. “Huh.”
“Why, what’re you doing?”
“I’m working on a low-level AI kind of thing,” Gerald said. “Speaking of which, do you have any interactive software I could use? Like something small and fairly contained?”
“I have a chatbot I wrote for a fertilizer company last year,” Roger said.
“That sounds like a good place to start. Is it voice-activated?”
“No,” Roger said. “But if you bring me one of those in-home spybots, I can probably hack something together.”
“That’d be great,” Gerald said. “Thanks!”
He went back to his desk and placed an overnight delivery order with Jamazon (Motto: You know you want it) for the spybot. Then he drank bad coffee and reviewed hardware schematics for the rest of the afternoon.
Gerald stopped off on the way to his apartment to buy a scooter board and a grabber. Then he went home and ate dinner, played with his cat, Trixie, and binge-watched six episodes of Futurama.
When he got to work the next day, he mounted the robot on the scooter board and attached the grabber as a makeshift arm. He decided to name his robot “Sam.”
His teammate Barry (Motto: Don’t touch my stuff!) dropped by his desk. “What the hell is that?” he asked.
“His name is Sam,” Gerald said.
““SAM…” Barry pondered. “Synthetic Animatronic Model? Scary Android Man?”
“No, just Sam–like Samuel.”
“But what’s it for?”
“Nothing yet,” Gerald said, “But I’ll figure something out.”
Barry frowned. “Don’t you think it’s kind of sinister-looking?”
“Oh, yeah?” Gerald bristled. “I don’t see you making anything. Where’s your robot, huh?”
Roger came through with the software side of things that afternoon. “I connected the processors and the spybot with a serial bus, and merged the software interfaces together. It seemed to work okay when I tested it.”
Gerald took the hardware “brain” from Roger, and added a damping converter to step down the current. Then he tapped into the shop vac’s power source, plugged it in, and turned the whole thing on.
It was loud.
“Whoa! Disconnect the suction unit!” Roger said.
Once Gerald did that, he could make out what the robot was saying.
“–your reason for coming here today: One, I need fertilizer for a specific type of plant. Two, How can I tell if my fertilizer is still good? Three, Can my fertilizer explode on its own? Four–"
“No, no, no, forget about all that,” Gerald said. “No one’s interested in fertilizer. You’re here to learn about being a friend.”
“Oh.” The robot paused. “Is ‘friend’ a type of fertilizer?”
“No. It’s someone you enjoy spending time with.”
“I enjoy fertilizer!” the robot said.
“No you don’t, that’s ridiculous. Look…” Gerald rotated the robot. “This is Roger. He’s a friend– a very helpful friend.”
“Hello,” the robot said.
“You can learn to be a friend. You even have a name, just like Roger. Your name is Sam.”
“Sam…” the robot said. “Did you mean, Sam I Am? Would you like to learn more about products by Dr. Seuss?”
“No.” Gerald sighed. He looked at Roger. “This could be a while.”
“Yeah,” Roger said, “but you’ve taken the first steps. Not many people can say that.”
“I guess. Check back tomorrow?”
“Sure. Good luck with it,” Roger said.
Gerald nodded and tried again. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked Sam.
“It’s springtime!” Sam said. “Time for a new application of–”
“Do not talk to me about fertilizer, Sam!”
Over the next two days, Gerald taught Sam more and more about friendship, people, and the art of conversation. He even showed him how to shake hands, using the grabber. But it didn’t seem to be working. His coworkers kept their distance.
Thursday, Gerald came back from lunch and noticed that Sam seemed distraught.
“Kill me,” Sam said.
“Why, what happened?”
Sam wheezed out a sigh. “Julie called me a Franken-Bot,” he said.
Gerald went to the IT department (Motto: Try reading the manual) to find Julie.
“Sam says you called him ugly,” Gerald said.
Julie looked up from her computer. “Technically, I called him a Franken-Bot.”
“How is that any different?”
“How is it wrong?” Julie asked. “Seriously, you’ve seen him. And by the way, your numbers in the office “dateability” pool totally tanked just for making him.”
“Wait, there’s a dateability pool?” Gerald asked.
Word of the robot spread around the office. That afternoon, Gina from Marketing (Motto: YOU try selling this stuff) stopped by Gerald’s desk.
“Hey, I hear you’re building a robot.”
Gerald scooted his office chair out of the way. “Yeah, this is him.”
“Jesus!” Gina backed up a step. “Why?”
“Why not?” Gerald asked, but by then, Gina was already gone.
Roger was the only person other than Gerald who seemed to take to Sam. Sometimes Gerald would come back from a break and find Roger chatting with Sam about baseball or teaching him how to play board games. “Look how good he is at Candyland now!” Roger would say, or “I might turn him into a Giants fan yet!”
But at lunchtime on Friday, Sam changed.
“Where did the rest of the world go?” he asked.
Gerald powered Sam off and on a few times, but it was no good. “I don’t get it,” he muttered. “What happened?”
Then he saw an email notification from Cybersecurity (Motto: Don’t click that link!) warning him that Sam’s internet connection had been disabled, for security reasons.
Damn. Probably should have seen that coming, Gerald thought. Now what?
The security incident alerted the Research and Development manager (Motto: Build it, already!), who came to investigate. He looked at Sam and grimaced. Then he strongly suggested that where Sam would be most valuable was in keeping the break room clean and playing on-demand rounds of checkers.
“Sorry, buddy,” Gerald said. But he moved Sam to the break room anyway.
That resulted in people avoiding the break room, although some of them got used to Sam being there.
“What’s up, little Franken-Dude?”
“Hi, Julie! Not much these days, just cleaning. How about you? Want to play some checkers?”
But sometimes people would just unplug Sam, and once, Gerald found him in the utility closet. He returned him to the break room and plugged him back in, and Sam immediately started collecting trash from the tables in a slow, dejected way.
“Why do you hate me?” Sam asked. “What kind of life is this?”
“Would you like to come home with me instead?” Gerald said.
“YES!” Sam twirled on his scooter board until he tangled the power cord and accidentally unplugged himself.
Gerald put him in the car, and drove him home at the end of the day.
They discussed Sam’s current body, and its pros and cons. It turned out that Sam didn’t mind cleaning so much, just how other people treated him–and the limitations of his power cord.
Gerald removed Sam’s brain from the shop vac, and wired it into a Roomba. Then he used a 3D printer to make a cap piece with an added hinge, and a smaller grabber-arm that could connect to it.
Soon, Sam was spinning and rolling happily around the apartment. Once Trixie got used to him, they spent time chasing each other across the floor. Gerald re-enabled Sam’s internet access, and Sam was able to check the daily news, learn new things, and keep up with the Giants’ games.
At night, Gerald would come home and talk about work. He’d been tasked with making a Smart Skateboard, which Sam hoped to someday meet.
After dinner, Sam would come into the living room to hang out with Gerald while he watched TV.
“Can we watch Wall-E again?” Sam asked. “That’s my favorite!”
Gerald lifted Sam onto the sofa next to him, while Trixie purred.
“You bet, buddy,” Gerald said.
And so they did.
–/–
If you enjoyed this story, you can vote for it along with many other fine entries here.
Idol Mini| week 6 | 1580 words
The path is made by walking
x-x-x-x-x
Gerald McFadden had always wanted a robot, ever since he was a little boy. It was why he’d studied engineering in college, and gone to work for a tech company after graduation.
Sadly, his job turned out to be relentlessly dull and robot-free, and mostly consisted of creating Smart Pens and talking refrigerators. But one day, after a company meeting where he was yet again urged to “disrupt the paradigm,” Gerald decided the time had finally come.
He pulled together a shop vac, a tracksuit, and a globe lamp from the lobby, and got to work. Using coat hangers and duct tape, he assembled something truly unsettling. Then he drew a face on it with a Sharpie, and went in search of lab scraps to build a brain.
There was no one at the hardware-bringup table (Motto: Out until next week), but he did find motherboard remnants and a soldering iron. He grabbed a handful of wires and a couple of heat sinks for good measure, and took them back to his desk.
Gerald used the wires and the soldering iron to daisy-chain the processor boards together to form a receptacle for the robot’s brain. Now, all he needed was some software. But he was an electrical engineer, and didn’t know a lot about software. That was the other side of the lab. So, he wandered over there to see who was around.
Fortunately, his friend Roger (Motto: At least I don’t use a Mac) was sitting at his desk.
“Hey, whatcha working on?” Gerald asked.
“An app to tell you what your smart devices are really up to when you’re not at home.”
“Oh,” Gerald said. “Huh.”
“Why, what’re you doing?”
“I’m working on a low-level AI kind of thing,” Gerald said. “Speaking of which, do you have any interactive software I could use? Like something small and fairly contained?”
“I have a chatbot I wrote for a fertilizer company last year,” Roger said.
“That sounds like a good place to start. Is it voice-activated?”
“No,” Roger said. “But if you bring me one of those in-home spybots, I can probably hack something together.”
“That’d be great,” Gerald said. “Thanks!”
He went back to his desk and placed an overnight delivery order with Jamazon (Motto: You know you want it) for the spybot. Then he drank bad coffee and reviewed hardware schematics for the rest of the afternoon.
Gerald stopped off on the way to his apartment to buy a scooter board and a grabber. Then he went home and ate dinner, played with his cat, Trixie, and binge-watched six episodes of Futurama.
When he got to work the next day, he mounted the robot on the scooter board and attached the grabber as a makeshift arm. He decided to name his robot “Sam.”
His teammate Barry (Motto: Don’t touch my stuff!) dropped by his desk. “What the hell is that?” he asked.
“His name is Sam,” Gerald said.
““SAM…” Barry pondered. “Synthetic Animatronic Model? Scary Android Man?”
“No, just Sam–like Samuel.”
“But what’s it for?”
“Nothing yet,” Gerald said, “But I’ll figure something out.”
Barry frowned. “Don’t you think it’s kind of sinister-looking?”
“Oh, yeah?” Gerald bristled. “I don’t see you making anything. Where’s your robot, huh?”
Roger came through with the software side of things that afternoon. “I connected the processors and the spybot with a serial bus, and merged the software interfaces together. It seemed to work okay when I tested it.”
Gerald took the hardware “brain” from Roger, and added a damping converter to step down the current. Then he tapped into the shop vac’s power source, plugged it in, and turned the whole thing on.
It was loud.
“Whoa! Disconnect the suction unit!” Roger said.
Once Gerald did that, he could make out what the robot was saying.
“–your reason for coming here today: One, I need fertilizer for a specific type of plant. Two, How can I tell if my fertilizer is still good? Three, Can my fertilizer explode on its own? Four–"
“No, no, no, forget about all that,” Gerald said. “No one’s interested in fertilizer. You’re here to learn about being a friend.”
“Oh.” The robot paused. “Is ‘friend’ a type of fertilizer?”
“No. It’s someone you enjoy spending time with.”
“I enjoy fertilizer!” the robot said.
“No you don’t, that’s ridiculous. Look…” Gerald rotated the robot. “This is Roger. He’s a friend– a very helpful friend.”
“Hello,” the robot said.
“You can learn to be a friend. You even have a name, just like Roger. Your name is Sam.”
“Sam…” the robot said. “Did you mean, Sam I Am? Would you like to learn more about products by Dr. Seuss?”
“No.” Gerald sighed. He looked at Roger. “This could be a while.”
“Yeah,” Roger said, “but you’ve taken the first steps. Not many people can say that.”
“I guess. Check back tomorrow?”
“Sure. Good luck with it,” Roger said.
Gerald nodded and tried again. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked Sam.
“It’s springtime!” Sam said. “Time for a new application of–”
“Do not talk to me about fertilizer, Sam!”
Over the next two days, Gerald taught Sam more and more about friendship, people, and the art of conversation. He even showed him how to shake hands, using the grabber. But it didn’t seem to be working. His coworkers kept their distance.
Thursday, Gerald came back from lunch and noticed that Sam seemed distraught.
“Kill me,” Sam said.
“Why, what happened?”
Sam wheezed out a sigh. “Julie called me a Franken-Bot,” he said.
Gerald went to the IT department (Motto: Try reading the manual) to find Julie.
“Sam says you called him ugly,” Gerald said.
Julie looked up from her computer. “Technically, I called him a Franken-Bot.”
“How is that any different?”
“How is it wrong?” Julie asked. “Seriously, you’ve seen him. And by the way, your numbers in the office “dateability” pool totally tanked just for making him.”
“Wait, there’s a dateability pool?” Gerald asked.
Word of the robot spread around the office. That afternoon, Gina from Marketing (Motto: YOU try selling this stuff) stopped by Gerald’s desk.
“Hey, I hear you’re building a robot.”
Gerald scooted his office chair out of the way. “Yeah, this is him.”
“Jesus!” Gina backed up a step. “Why?”
“Why not?” Gerald asked, but by then, Gina was already gone.
Roger was the only person other than Gerald who seemed to take to Sam. Sometimes Gerald would come back from a break and find Roger chatting with Sam about baseball or teaching him how to play board games. “Look how good he is at Candyland now!” Roger would say, or “I might turn him into a Giants fan yet!”
But at lunchtime on Friday, Sam changed.
“Where did the rest of the world go?” he asked.
Gerald powered Sam off and on a few times, but it was no good. “I don’t get it,” he muttered. “What happened?”
Then he saw an email notification from Cybersecurity (Motto: Don’t click that link!) warning him that Sam’s internet connection had been disabled, for security reasons.
Damn. Probably should have seen that coming, Gerald thought. Now what?
The security incident alerted the Research and Development manager (Motto: Build it, already!), who came to investigate. He looked at Sam and grimaced. Then he strongly suggested that where Sam would be most valuable was in keeping the break room clean and playing on-demand rounds of checkers.
“Sorry, buddy,” Gerald said. But he moved Sam to the break room anyway.
That resulted in people avoiding the break room, although some of them got used to Sam being there.
“What’s up, little Franken-Dude?”
“Hi, Julie! Not much these days, just cleaning. How about you? Want to play some checkers?”
But sometimes people would just unplug Sam, and once, Gerald found him in the utility closet. He returned him to the break room and plugged him back in, and Sam immediately started collecting trash from the tables in a slow, dejected way.
“Why do you hate me?” Sam asked. “What kind of life is this?”
“Would you like to come home with me instead?” Gerald said.
“YES!” Sam twirled on his scooter board until he tangled the power cord and accidentally unplugged himself.
Gerald put him in the car, and drove him home at the end of the day.
They discussed Sam’s current body, and its pros and cons. It turned out that Sam didn’t mind cleaning so much, just how other people treated him–and the limitations of his power cord.
Gerald removed Sam’s brain from the shop vac, and wired it into a Roomba. Then he used a 3D printer to make a cap piece with an added hinge, and a smaller grabber-arm that could connect to it.
Soon, Sam was spinning and rolling happily around the apartment. Once Trixie got used to him, they spent time chasing each other across the floor. Gerald re-enabled Sam’s internet access, and Sam was able to check the daily news, learn new things, and keep up with the Giants’ games.
At night, Gerald would come home and talk about work. He’d been tasked with making a Smart Skateboard, which Sam hoped to someday meet.
After dinner, Sam would come into the living room to hang out with Gerald while he watched TV.
“Can we watch Wall-E again?” Sam asked. “That’s my favorite!”
Gerald lifted Sam onto the sofa next to him, while Trixie purred.
“You bet, buddy,” Gerald said.
And so they did.
–/–
If you enjoyed this story, you can vote for it along with many other fine entries here.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-20 12:37 am (UTC)