FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Chapter 1:

I walked down the hall with the strange little robot that I had just retrieved from the equipment room. He wasn't much like any of the other models I've seen before. A very dark color in the working parts. I'm assuming it's green until I heardifferent. I'd heard that green was a very common color scheme in commercial robots. His legs were actually designed a fair bit like mine, with brushed metal and smoothly finished working parts substituting for bones and joints. His feet were quite distinctive, kind of like a very stylized dinosaur. His footprint would've looked like a Valentine's heart with a third lobe on top. I noticed him extending his arm to press the elevator call button as we walked by it. He had human-ish hands and arms, but for the omission of a finger. A lot of models have at least that much, better for interacting with humans and using equipment designed for them. I spoke up when I noticed him calling the elevator.

"What are you doing?" I asked, having given him no instruction.

"Hospital floor plan indicates that the cafeteria is on the ground floor," he stated.

Well, it would appear that we shared a leg design and a dislike for stairs...

He was vaguely humanoid, but things got stranger from there though, as I examined him further during the ride down. Getting a good look was easy enough, since this was one of those mirror-lined funhouse elevators. He had what looked like very specialized microscopes for eyes. I could see the old-fashioned optical zoom moving the objective lens in and out slightly from time to time. His mouth was a set of electromagnetic reeds that vibrated in concert, making his voice sound just a little like that techno music that used to be so popular on Earth. I had never seen a sound system like that before. It made him look like he had a harmonica for a mouth.

The set of his shoulders and upper torso was human enough, if a bit rounder. He had protective guards on his shoulders though, a bit like medieval spaulders. His torso didn't taper the way most humanoid robots did. The sides went pretty much straight down with a flared rim at the bottom. I watched his unusual gait as we walked out of the elevator. His legs sprang up and down in rather sudden motions. Kind of like goose-stepping but a fair bit less overt. I shook my head and took a step back, realizing that my interest in his stride stemmed from that 'injured prey' vibe that I got from it. This was not a robot that was designed to move around a lot.

We got to the cafeteria and I looked around, briefly enjoying the sensation of quizzical stares being directed at someone else for a change. I bought a bottle of mango juice. I really needed something sweet right then. I figured I would try to make nice with my guest. He didn't really appear to be such a bad sort. He just seemed a little... confused.

"You want anything, Simon?"

He jerked his head back at the question and his eyes refocused several times. If he had eyebrows I'd imagine they'd be making some very amusing motions right about now.

"I do not require organic sustenance," he stated.

"It's a joke, hon."

"Oh... Should I laugh?"

"No, I think that ship has sailed. Go on; find a seat I'll be right with you."

I walked over to the condiment table to hunt down a straw. That's one thing I'll say for public eateries; they're never short on drinking straws. I found Simon standing by a table looking back at me.

"Is this acceptable?" he asked.

"Yes! Fine, fine, just sit down."

He looked at the ceiling, studying it briefly. It looked like he was gauging the clearance. I tilted my head in confusion as he climbed up and stood on the chair. I was about to ask him what he was doing when I saw his legs fold neatly up into a recess in the bottom of his abdomen, leaving him balanced on that widened rim as he 'sat' in the chair. That display made my admittedly somewhat inconvenient process of sitting down look fluid and natural. I tucked my paws underneath my seat to get my paw-joints suitably situated. I never knew what to call those things. I can't properly call them ankles really, but that's the analogous joint in a human... It's one of those things where you'll go crazy if you actually waste the time thinking about it.

"So, Simon, what is it that you'd like to know about orthopedic care?" I said, opening my bottle and sliding the straw into it, enjoying a savory sip as I watched him consider his response.

"If I am not being too forward..." he hesitated. "Sunny provided you with my name, but you have yet to identify who, or what, you are."

"Simple enough," I said. "My name is Donna Morris, and I'm a Bowman's Wolf."

I noticed his movements freeze and his eyes move to a neutral position. He was doing a Commnet search.

"You may want use the public database of Ecosystems Unlimited," I suggested. "They're the ones that invented me."

I once found referring to myself in such a manner to be distasteful, but I grew out of it. It wasn't like humans were any better because the puddle of organic sludge that their DNA was designed in was in a swamp and not a Petri dish. Heck, some would say that makes us superior. We actually had some thought put into our genome. Who would've thought that after all this time science would not only be supporting intelligent design, but making it possible? Though I somehow doubt that the Bible-thumpers on the planet next door considered this a victory.

Simon gave a start as his download concluded.

"Doctor John Bowman, biogeneticist. Experiments into the intellectual uplift of non-sapient creatures for the purposes of establishing friendly civilizations on worlds biologically incompatible with traditional terraforming and colonization," he stated. I said nothing. Honestly I had expected a much larger infodump. His head gave another subtle jerk. "Corollary: Doctor John Bowman is referenced multiple times in the design notes of my product line."

"The Good Doctor built you too?"

"Checking... Dr. Bowman was uninvolved in the design and construction of my product line. He received token royalties due to the use of his intellectual property in my neural net design."

"What? What's your neural net design?"

"Standard Ecosystems Unlimited base network architecture for industrial manufacturing robots. Experimental neural fiber modifications installed at construction for testing purposes."

"... Do go on." Okay, I'll admit it. This was a very interesting robot.

"The effort's official name was 'the Neural Network Resilience and Maintenance Requirement Reduction Plan.' Most of the researchers involved referred to it as 'the Kalashnikov Project'."

"Kalashnikov, like... the Russian assault rifle?" Suddenly I didn't feel quite so safe sitting next to him.

"Correct. The nickname was chosen mainly to shorten the spoken phrase because a suitable acronym was not available. Humans find it difficult to pronounce a word that contains no vowels. My synthesizer also struggles to pronounce-"

The sound that followed was a mix between a rusty axle grinder at full speed and the sound of a razor blade being scraped against another razor blade. Fortunately, Simon was perceptive enough to stop when my head flattened against the table as I pressed my hands over my ears and yelped in pain.

"Please... n-never do that. Ever." I reigned in my breathing as I struggled to regain my composure.

"Uh... yes of course." He waited for me to sit up and look at him again before continuing. That was considerate of him... "To forestall the continued use of that unpleasant sound, the project was rechristened with an ideal that it hoped to achieve."

For once, my desire that he elaborate was obvious enough that I didn't have to say anything.

"You see, the eponymous rifle was a tremendous commercial and military success not because of precision or triumph of engineering, it was its simplicity and ruggedness that made it work. The weapon was designed with very large mechanical tolerances in its moving parts. This made it slower and less accurate than many other firearms of the era. However, the extra tolerance allowed the weapon to continue to function under conditions that would have disabled or outright destroyed any other rifle.

"Extremes of temperature and humidity, lengthy storage, inexpert disassembly, use of crudely machined replacement parts, the intrusion of water and dirt, poor or nonexistent maintenance... the AK-47 thrived in these abusive conditions that would've been unthinkable before its invention. It was the goal of the research team to achieve similar success by creating a simple, yet highly resilient neural net design."

"And the Bowman Brain is a highly resilient neural architecture..."

"Correct. The reason that most robots need regular maintenance is that the signaling and switching devices that comprise their neural nets are manufactured to a very high degree of precision. To use the assault rifle example: they have extremely narrow design tolerances, leaving them vulnerable to failure even from very small defects or damage. The use of longer neural fibers and a greater density of neural connections helps to mitigate this effect. Dr. Bowman's research very thoroughly analyzed the effects of lengthy neural fibers on the behavior of a finished neural network.

"In theory, the finished design results in a neural net that will continue to operate at optimum capacity after sustaining damage that would be injurious or fatal to standard designs. These 'ruggedized' robots would thus require far less maintenance and could sustain much greater damage without ceasing to function. It's a selling point with the consumers, and it's a great savings to the company on upkeep costs."

"Sounds like a windfall to me," I commented. "Why haven't I heard about this before?"

"Quite simply... because of robots like me." He looked down at the table for a moment. It may have been another download, but it looked uncannily like an expression of disappointment. "We did indeed require much less maintenance, at first. However, long term testing revealed that our maintenance costs looked more like an exponential rise with time rather than the linear increase over the design lifetime of a conventional robot.

"Bowman and Bowman-like neural networks are known to have stability problems. They don't age well. So as I and my fellow prototypes went along with our designated functions, data being gathered all the while, the researchers obtained ever more disquieting results. The final conclusion of the researchers was that large-scale implementation was infeasible. Rather than obvious, easily identified faults, we developed very unusual and unprecedented defects as we aged. The unpredictable nature of our neural nets greatly hampered troubleshooting efforts. Instability problems that we developed took ever-increasing amounts of time and resources to correct.

"The worst part was, there would often be no real sign of a problem at all. Diagnostics showed that our neural networks weren't doing anything they weren't designed to do. Having a robot that breaks and needs to be fixed occasionally is acceptable, but to the customers it would look like we were _designed_to fail catastrophically at a certain point and be rendered unserviceable. That kind of robot apoptosis would be extremely bad PR.

"Dr. Bowman declined tocomment on the research and ignored requests for assistance. Even the authorization to utilize his designs and research notes was given by proxy. As the problem became more and more intractable, funding and corporate interest in the project waned. When research was finally terminated, very little thought was given to what became of us. Many had undergone destructive testing in the course of the research in order to determine the nature of the problem. So the fate of the remaining prototypes wasn't a problem that was large enough in scale to really worry about.

"The beta testers that still had possession of their test units were permitted to keep them, provided that they turned them in for destruction at the first sign or instability or unpredictable behavior. As such, I continued my employment at the factory for many years. I thought briefly that my neural net might not suffer the defects of the others, as my performance showed no significant degradation. I found out later that I was simply given a task that was rather difficult to screw up. Good to know that my progenitors thought so highly of me..."

Was that talking harmonica really being used to convey sarcasm? He... he didn't _like_his previous job, so he moved on. How was that possible? Before I could ask, he preempted my question with one of his own.

"Your product line is also listed as suspended. How are there models in circulation right now?"

"I suppose you could say that we were a prototype as well," I said, doing my best to answer what was actually a rather complex question. "Beyond proving that you could take an existing life form and tweak its genes until it can walk and talk, maybe give it some thumbs and a few other sundry tricks, we have no purpose. EU was satisfied with the methods that Dr. Bowman used to synthesize our genome. And as far as I know he got approved for the funding he wanted because of this. Last I heard, he was working to further his project for establishing colonies of uplifted native creatures on planetPfouts. Of course that's very long-term. We won't be seeing anything of that for quite some time.

"Anyway, the company no longer had anything to gain from continuing to support us. And, when you invent a new race, the maintenance bills can pile up at a rather staggering rate. We were likely scheduled for termination, or at the very least indefinite stasis. Dr. Bowman has never been described as a compassionate man, in fact most who knew him will attest to quite the opposite. I think though, that he put enough work into our creation that he became invested in us- ifnot on an emotional level, then at the very least ona personal one. I imagine it's quite satisfying to be able to point to a sentient being and say: 'Yeah, I designed and built that'."

"Very true,actually," Simon cut in. "I know a number of people in the robotics industry who take great pleasure in doing just that. I, being a unique and significantly obsolete model, enjoy some celebrity amongst such folks. I am an antique, you might say. I think that I remind them of a simpler time..."

"Exactly. Dr. Bowman is proud of us. Well, more proud of himself for making us, hence the eponymous species designation. I think he just didn't want to see this living example of his great work be destroyed. If you told Theodore Roosevelt that you were going to fire a cruise missile into Mount Rushmore he'd probably have a few things to say about it. Thus, it can be noted that when we slipped through EU's fingers, Dr. Bowman had his hands spread out the widest."

"It would seem to me that hewas showing off," the robot stated. "He wanted his talking dogs to travel the galaxy, spreading the tale of his sensational abilities far and wide. Used to be that way with us too. I'm glad they passed that ordinance against engraving your face onto the cases of the robots you've designed."

"Hmmm... Well we've certainly done that for him. We've become very... _scattered_over the years. It's hard to keep in touch sometimes."

"Oh, that I understand. It gets more difficult to find anyone from my model year every day."

"Hah, imagine that. The guy with the radio in his head says it's difficult to keep in touch these days."

I think that next sound was a sigh... to be honest it sounded a lot more like the discharge of a Van de Graaff generator.

"From my various connectivities I get much noise..." he said. "But little conversation. I find it helpful to speak in person much of the time. When one speaks, there is care taken to clarify things and screen out extraneous data. Not so when you're plugged into someone's brain.

"When I was connected to Sunny for example, I got a lot of image files that my visual processor was not equipped to interpret. For some reason they don't design many factory robots with the capacity to analyze dynamic 3D sonograms. Sunny was trying to describe the process in terms of concepts relating to my core function to help me understand. That's what was taking so long. I suppose I could liken the situation to a doctor explaining something using cumbersome technical language."

"Yes, they tend to do that," I said, thinking of the obfuscating curtain that the Docs sometimes veiled their words behind. "I was quite well-read when I first came here, but I still felt like I needed an interpreter at times. Fortunately they understood my more simple words just fine when I said things like: 'This guy's sweat smells very sweet. He may have developed insulin resistance.' Even though I've a better handle on the jargon now, I kind of have to use simpler terms to describe what I smell or perceive. I've got to use simple words to talk to people with very rudimentary senses of smell."

"Hmm, I suppose I'll forgive a certain amount of patronization in that respect, considering that I don't have a nose."

"You have an open mind, Simon. That's all it takes to extend one's perceptions."

"Well, you know, I could purchase and install a nose. Though the device drivers for them tend to be a bit troublesome..."

"Defective noses?" I asked.

"Yeah, lots of negative consumer feedback on those. One segmentation fault in the olfactory subprocessor and you end up smelling 'hot sulfur mine' for a week. You know how it is."

"Uhm... can't say that I do, exactly. Though I do sometimes get a persistent scent stuck in there if I get my nose too deeply into something, which I do from time to time. I remember once I got a drop of 'Liquid Suture' on my nose. I spent the next few days feeling like my head was inside a giant rubber glove." I snorted a little at the thought. Remembering that had made that funny powdery feeling come back into my mouth. I took another drink. A very festive, fruity smell. Much better.

"Interesting. So your sense of smell is very important to your perception of the world?"

"I get hung up on it at times, but yes, it's a very useful thing to have if only for its exclusivity."

"Your sense of smell is unique to you?"

"It's much more sensitive than a human's, yes. But their real problem is they just don't know how to use it. They could probably pick up a few of the things that I do if they had occasion to try, but humans don't trust their sense of smell the way they should. You'll get funny looks at the lab if you ask them what anemia smells like, but I could tell you. And more importantly I can identify it in seconds whereas lab results take... as long as they take."

"Perhaps I should purchase a nose, if it would be diagnostically useful to me..."

"I have my doubts. As far as I know, robot noses lag well behind even human ones in sensitivity and accuracy. The ones available commercially today likely wouldn't be of use to you in your pursuits. Whatever those are." I took another long drink as I considered the conspicuous gap in my knowledge. "Actually, I think I've earned a few questions of my own. You've yet to explain to me how exactly you came to be here, and what prompted you to sabotage our ultrasound machine."

"I was issued a visitor's pass at the front desk," he explained. "I asked around with the staff before finally settling on conversing with Sunny. When you came in I-"

"I'm familiar with that part. Could you go back a little further?"

"I was constructed twenty-three years ago in-"

"Too far." Deep breath... getting frustrated with an AI accomplishes nothing. "Okay, Simon. What is your purpose for coming to this hospital?"

"I am attempting to gain knowledge for the purpose of furthering my practice."

"You're a doctor?" I asked, stunned by the assertion of this robot's supposed medical practice.

"No, but I hope to become a licensed physical therapist when I have advanced my understanding sufficiently."

"How... w-wha..." Questions were tearing through my mind much faster than my mouth could articulate them. One more deep breath. Pick a question. "Were you designed for this?"

"No. My construction and initial programming are entirely focused on my intended occupation of paint finisher and final inspector at an Ecosystems Unlimited robot factory."

"So you weren't programmed to do this?"

"My original programming was very basic. I have added to it with experience, as adaptive interface routines are wont to do..."

"Did a human order you to study medicine?"

"I was... advised to seek employment that I would find satisfying. I had the option of refusing, but I'm certain that this would have disappointed my owner." He paused, zoom lenses fixating on my faceas I rubbed the bridge of my nose. "Miss Morris, you appear distressed. Near as I can tell at least. My facial-recognition subroutines are not adapting well to your physiology."

"I... desperately want to understand all this, but I get the feeling that I'll be in over my head before long..."

"I am fully prepared to entertain your curiosity, Miss Morris," he dutifully stated. "A complete understanding of my purpose and motivations would better equip you to assist me. And seeing as you are the only person thus far that appears willing to tolerate the time expenditure necessary to perform such an explanation, it would be unwise of me to fail to capitalize on this opportunity."

"No one else will speak to you?" I asked. That was odd. Though busy, the rest of the hospital staff were usually very accommodating.

"It is more a case of my inability to speak to anyone else than their unwillingness to entertain my questions," he explained. "If the person I am speaking with gives any sign of being delayed or inconvenienced from their work, my protective safeguards compel me to terminate the conversation. This activity falls under the definition of interfering with lifesaving efforts. As it has the potential to endanger human lives, I am prohibited from making all but the smallest of inquiries."

"And yet you're free to waste as much of my time as you want?" I asked, now feeling a little insulted.

"My safeguards apply to the human medical staff employed at this hospital. According to personnel records, you are neither human, nor medical staff, nor employed at this hospital."

"Oh, of course..." I said, drooping my ears.

"I... have upset you again. I apologize, I will-"

"No, no you didn't do anything wrong. I just... I've never heard it summarized quite like that before," I said, motioning for him not to get up. "I should've expected such... candor from a robot."

"If there is something I could do to alleviate your distress, you need only ask."

"My distress comes from many sources, few of which have anything to do with you," I stated, trying to assuage what looked a lot like guilt from what I could tell of his mannerisms. "You could assist me by helping me occupy a little of my down-time. 'Entertaining my curiosity' as you called it."

"I would be glad to. What, precisely, would you like to know?" He asked.

"Well..." Thinking back on my numerous follies earlier, I produced a very carefully phrased question. "Alright, please tell me how you transitioned from your original function into the pursuit of medicine."

"Oh, that's what you wanted to know! Why didn't you just say so?"