-- Sorry if I wrote too much =P
Chapter 1
An icicle is an easy thing to get rid of. But three hundred frozen knives similarly connected to a four meter thick layer of sleet on the roof of a temporary steel building is another story. The curvature of the roof did exactly what it wasn't designed to do. Metal and ice don't mix. The only reason an imminent disaster wasn't about to happen is the fact that during construction eight optional support posts where added. These posts had two uses: one, prevent the ceiling from ripping apart and two, allow an anchoring point for a minimum of twenty hammocks. As I lay on the third hammock from the floor I realized how tragic it would be to die the week before I could leave.
I attempted to rest but the sound of the other occupant's laboured breathing hindered my entry into dream world. My eyes started to droop, less because I was tired but more because the cold was starting to freeze dry them. Among the sounds of fifteen respiratory systems working at max capacity was a miniature heating unit hanging in the middle of the room burning the surrounding oxygen and emitting 70% heat and 30% light. It glowed bright red, fighting a fruitless battle against the frigid air.
The red ember became beautiful.
It blossomed over my pupils and consciousness slowly melted away. A feeling of apathy washed over my mind and a playground appeared. Though, along with apathy, both desolation and vertigo were present.
It was lucid, but not quite.
There were children everywhere. They where laughing.
Orrie the Oreo!
Orrie the Oreo!
They chanted. I felt disconnected with it all, as if I were watching myself. Sympathy was the attitude, yet I knew it was happening to me. A kid around eight came up to me. He spoke a few words, none that I could understand, just inconceivable syllables. He appeared angered by my lack of understanding and raised a fist. It made contact with my jaw.
I snapped into the moment, no longer just an observer, but now an integral part. I felt the pain. Awaking in a cold sweat brought my back to reality. The sound of breathing wasn't the only thing giving me insomnia. This is the only dream I've ever had.
My stomach growled violently. I hastily reached into the pocket of my snow pants and ripped out a granola bar. A pitch black curled tendril materialized, blurred from it's proximity. I pushed the ringlet of hair out of my face as I carefully peeled open the snack. The bulkiness of my Anorak and snow pant combo was inconvenient and uncomfortable. They were light beige accompanied by matching white badges reading "Property of Fredric's Child Care Centre." By that it meant the clothes, not me.
A huge chunk of grain rolled down my esophagus. There you go, stomach. Enjoy.
I am an orphan.
Being a orphan isn't so bad. Not as the stereotypical television shows make it out to be. The orphanages aren't skid row and they aren't run by power starved dictators. They are government funded homes that care for more kids then usual. When I was four months old my father died and my mother put me into foster care. For the next sixteen years I bounced around foster families and orphanages like a super-ball. For some reason, my mother gave my original caretakers a cheque for fifteen grand for my education. So with that money, I was enrolled in the highest rated schools. I got straight A's and 100's all through my educational career.
The only problem is that when in an external school, separate from all the other orphans, kids would make fun of me. But not like the occasional unwanted nickname or possible harm done. Those kids just pelted me with taunts. Physical and mental bullying was what greeted me every weekday. When school was over I just wanted to leave.
Through some weird mess of brain patterns I developed trigger words. "Weird," "dork," "nerd," they would all close a synapse that causes a quite disconcerting impulse.
The upper half of all of my molars are torn off from the constant cringing. I could feel the nerves with my tongue. I couldn't take it anymore. People always tell me to zone them out, but that's like trying to hold up a class six snow storm with a thin metal roof.
The northwest corner of the steel building popped in like a crater, causing a nasty sound to reverberate off of every corrugation. I shuffled around in my hammock. My Anorak was causing a bit too much sweat.
I was a smart little student, but I just wanted to leave.
I could have become a lawyer when I reached age of consent. I could have walked into a think tank at the age of seventeen and gotten a job in a heartbeat. But my true love, the job I've wanted ever since I laid eyes on the MN-G4 cleaning droid, was robotics. I fought my way into a three year robotics internship instead of posterior school at thirteen. I studied electronics, programming, analog sensor to digital conversion systems and pretty much everything to do with robotics. The internship took place at a research centre specializing in thought networking and artificial instinct integration. It was called "RaNSI" for Robotics and Neural Systems Incorporated.
It was two weeks into the internship and I had finished the safety and first aid course. The research centre wasn't really doing any research, all they where doing was making robots. I guess in the dictionary of slacking off, "experimental robotics" could be classed as research. Anyway, I wasn't complaining, I had gotten what I had come for; A huge garage with all the latest parts, programmable chips and thirty highly trained technicians. My life was bliss. Starting small, I made a cute little robot drone which was designed to fetch parts around the shop. Unfortunately, the drone, which we'd named Hector, met it's demise when it attempted to lift a two tonne conveyor motor. Eventually I got to bigger things, like creating a tripedal security bot capable of facial recognition and verbal communication. It was a year after starting the internship that I realized what I really wanted to make.
Over the breathing, heating unit and bending metal, music ever so feebly made it's presence known. To be precise, electronic tones. I knew who it was. The hammock swayed and a ladder improperly fastened with twine wobbled when I blazed a trail to the floor. The metallic tones were followed by my ears. Charles, the orphanage attendant, snored loudly as I passed him as if he where a gallery security guard and I where an art thief. The idea of getting caught was absent in my mind. I need to see my son's first notes.
* * *
There are two types of robots; conceptuals and logicals. Or, less technically, robots who are aware of their surroundings and those who simply parse incoming stimuli with algorithms. Logicals are the ones which are used in the factories and as everyday helpers. Hence, they are mass produced. But the conceptuals are a bit more interesting. The conceptuals' mind works, fundamentally, the same way a human's does save a few physiological principals such as biological limitations and evolutional instincts. Conceptuals have no market value as their surrounding ethical issues are troublesome. It is hard to run something off an assembly line that has the potential to gain a personal opinion. Also, conceptuals need education as they learn the same way as people. Therefore, they are not sold, instead, must be built by an individual for private purpose.
A thin layer of ice covered the powdery snow underneath. It made a delightful popping sound when I stepped over it. Similar to how I would imagine walking on the shell of an egg would feel like. It was five minutes before sunup and light flurries danced around my vision as I rounded the corner of the building. The flurries quietly picked up and restricted vision to about eight meters.
I continued walking, following the soft, ascending sawtooth tones. As the music got louder a skinny silhouette emerged from the frosty event horizon. Something deep down inside me suddenly clicked on, after being dormant for my entire life. I felt proud. Happy. Contented. One week I thought. The black mass neared and the music became as clear as crystal. I took up harmony, humming in unison with my offspring. A warm feeling inside me was the polar opposite of the current atmospheric condition. Nature got the clue and the flurries slowed just as fast as they sped up.
He was cross legged on the ground with his back against the wall. I hovered beside him, hoping he would notice me there, but he was caught up in his brief spell of creativity. A few minutes passed until his song faded into oblivion, but I continued. He finally looked up.
I smiled.
He let out a low, but childish, giggle.
"Cold out, eh?" I remarked.
"Reading about negative fifteen degrees." He came back. His voice was a low and choppy. A synthesized speech module that I had grown fond of because of the slight monotone sound. I pulled a pair of gloves out of my pocket and promptly pulled them on.
"You should have signalled, I've always wanted to hear you make music."
"I was going to, but I was afraid Charles would hear me knocking and stop you from leaving anyway." He looked around nervously. "He's asleep right?"
"That guy's gonna need a parade to wake him up." I sat down. I could feel the frozen concrete through my snow pants.
"You look tired."
"You're right." I rubbed my face, feeling the angular contour of my visage. My head tipped back against the wall and I peered right into the tip of a malicious icicle. Actually, more like twenty icicles. "We should probably leave before those icicles fall."
"Whoa," the aperture of his lens widened as he caught a glimpse of the disaster waiting to happen, "I did not see that." He chuckled again.
We hurried away from the possible impalement to a portion of the wall that didn't have a foreboding air to it.
"So Braize, you've been doing ok out here by yourself?" I stared affectionately at him.
"I guess, there isn't anywhere else to go." He let out a fluttered sigh. I felt empathy for him. His mind may just be a neural network coded in low-level assembly, but the same could be said for mine, minus the assembly part. Braize had to stay outside because there where three kids in the orphanage who where extreme technophobes.
"Don't worry," I fell backwards and looked over at a row of warehouses. The closest stars, the binary system of Sirius along with the shadowy apparitions of the Dyson ring, rose above the horizon line in a bootless attempt to penetrate the thick layer of storm clouds, "just a week." I looked away for the foggy, cold blue ovoid light had tattooed it's likeness into my retinas.
My internship at RaNSI was over next month and by that time the remaining money left over for my education would go to me. Last count I had about 6,000 dollars left. During that time Braize and I would hang out at a local hotel until I finish the internship and apply for a job there, then I would build up enough money to buy a house or apartment. For six grand I seem pretty well off.
But then Braize brought up a disturbing point that took me by surprise.
"Orrie," he said sincerely, "what if it doesn't work out?" It turns out he was aboard the same train of thought as I was. I wobbled back up to sitting position and looked him in the eyes. Or cameras, if you're technical about it.
"What do you mean?"
He stood up, causing small ice chunks to fall off his chassis. I designed Braize to look more like an industrial humanoid robot with an entirely metal exterior in the fear of falling into uncanny valley. I did away with facial expression and relied solely on body language and the movement of his lenses. What came out of my unimaginative blueprint was a titanium skeleton of human proportion, except with purely cylindrical bones and a 'kinder surprise' shaped skull. I gave him a light red and orange paint job as an afterthought.
"I mean, what if you don't get the job? Or the hotel charges too much?" He rubbed the top of his bald head. I was at a loss. A laugh was all I could muster, but Braize would not be swayed. "Orrie, I am telling you this as a friend and a son, you need a backup plan." He could tell I wasn't getting it. "Look, apply for a job somewhere else. Just in case."
Torn. Between two options. Braize gives a great argument, but I don't know of any other robotics research agencies that aren't in tough competition with RaNSI. If I did apply in multiple locations and each party found out, I would be left out in the cold. But then again, I couldn't be sure I would even get hired, even after the internship. Two parts of my brain fought over dominance.
"Fine," I submitted, "I'll go to RoCP and apply."
"Ok, that's one issue down. Second one: what does my schooling fit into all this?" Braize crossed his arms and leaned against the wall.
"Um." I really didn't think about this. I knew that because Braize learnt the same way humans did, he would eventually need to get some sort of formal education. But because I made him the same height as me, I subconsciously assumed he had the same level of intelligence even though he is only two and a half years old. Also, it might be a tad difficult to find a school that allows AI systems as students. "I'll look into it." He was about to change the subject when I stopped him. "Hold on one sec." I pointed at his forehead.
"What?" He said.
"Public or private?" I asked. The very question I was enquired when I was in grade three.
"Does it matter?"
"Look. Public schools are underfunded but their student body is quite tolerable. When I went to Godrec Elementary I was treated by my peers with the utmost respect, but in private schools, it's the opposite."
"Um, what costs the least?"
"Public"
"Then public, I'll learn more from -"
"What are you doing outside?" Charles must have woken up, did a head count and realized I was missing. Braize pushed away from the wall at the sound of his calm yet throaty voice.
"I thought you said it would take a parade!" yelled Braize.
"I was exaggerating!" I explained for his benefit.
Charles was a kind hearted man, he always liked to give someone his point of view without angrily shooting it out. He wore a white puffy jacket that made him resemble a marshmallow.
"Orrie. You know I'm still legally in charge of you. What if something happened? Icicles are falling all over the place." He said in a near whisper that contradicted the content of his dialogue.
"I'm just talking with Braize. He just made his first song." I smiled at him. Charles rolled his eyes. "Also, I'm not sitting under any icicles. It's not like I'm gonna get hit by a car or anything."
"Still," he persisted in faux parenting, "If anything at all happens I'll be in hot water."
"Isn't hot water something you'd like to be in? It's like, negative fifteen out." I grinned foolishly.
"I'm not kidding, the orphanage director will have my neck" Charles sounded extremely concerned. The director was a short, mousy woman of her late fifties. She hardly made her presence known as she holed herself up in an office that was made just outside the orphanage, only coming out to 'check up on things' or to 'make sure we haven't died.' I didn't even know we had a director until the second month I was here. The reason Charles was so concerned about the director knowing we had departed struck me as a surprise. I thought that the old woman was just there to do taxes and budgeting, not to act as a figure of authority. Perhaps the director was more of a dictator then what I had first thought.
"Ok," I persuaded, "I'll just leave early for my internship, is that ok?"
"Well, you're gonna need to leave the premises and get my consent, which you already have. So then I guess it's ok." I could tell Charles was moderately doubtful of his decision to let me leave early.
I stood up with the help of Braize. Charles turned to walk back to the shelter. I waved at him. He saw and waved back.
"Just don't die." He said jokingly as he rounded the corner before I could reply.
"Come on," I told Braize, "let's show up at work unnecessarily early."
