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I hadto monitor my processing resources carefullyas I spoke. There wasa great deal of information to relay to my new contact and communicating with biologicals is tiresome and inefficient at times. She looked a bit impatient as I considered my response. Perhaps I should relay my difficulty. She appeared unusually receptive to such thoughts.

"Sometimes I think it would be easier if my memory wasn't quite so thorough and accurate. I remember all the time I've been operating with perfect detail and have complete sensory data logs for every moment. If I relayed absolutely everything to you the way I do when talking to another computer it would take me half an hour to explain a few seconds worth of memory. It's very difficult to select which information would be most pertinent."

"Don't worry," she said after taking another drink. "I'll be sure to let you know if you're using the wrong amount of detail. Just give me a general overview and then elaborate a bit when you get to the part about developing an interest in medicine."

Once again my faith in my contact was validated. This still-more-specific directive was very helpful.

"The biggest beta-testing phase of the experiment involved putting us into the hands of actual customers," I began. "I was one of the last test units constructed and all of the beta test volunteers had been assigned robots by the time I came online. Not wishing to waste a prototype, Ecosystems Unlimited put me to work in the factory in which I was constructed.

"I was stationed at the end of the production line. It was my job to Simonize the fresh paint of newly-minted robots coming off the assembly line."

"_Simon_ize?" the wolf asked.

"It's the trademark name for the burnishing and preservation processes that protect a robot's case and structural materials from corrosion." She looked at me expectantly. "And yes, it is also the source of my trivial name. Before that, I had only a serial number.

"When the Kalashnikov Project was shut down and the test units largely recalled, I was left where I was. EU could be in no better position to monitor my behavior whilst I worked for them and some of the scientists on the project wanted to observe my behavior; if to accomplish nothing more than satisfying their own curiosity. They wanted to see just how bad bad could get. To see if these exponentially increasing defects would at some point result in catastrophic failure. They watched me with the same morbid fascination that humans seem to get from seeing a train-wreck in slow motion."

"Schadenfreude," she said, carefully working her way through the eclectic word. "That must've been awful."

"It was... disconcerting. A bit of salt in the wounds to know that your brain may catastrophically melt down at any time and that there are a half-dozen people looking over your shoulder waiting for it to happen."

"I can't even imagine... What did you do?"

"The only thing I could. My job," I stated, gaining an air of something humans might call pride. "If I wished to express my disapproval of their actions, my best means to do so would be to disappoint them by surviving unscathed for longer than any of them deemed possible. And so I did.

"Content to watch me run myself into the ground, the technicians stopped repairing the spurious or misleading faults that I developed over time. Eventually I developed one they had never even seen before. They had to dig pretty deep in the manual to decode: 'Fault: 42F.'"

"And what did that mean?" she asked.

"Fault stack full," I stated. "By all conventional logic I should've ceased to function long ago, but even if it was just to spite those sadistic researchers I kept at it."

"That must've been difficult," she said, expressing sympathy I believe. "How did you ever manage?"

"I had help, actually. One day I was muttering to myself, various lamentations about my situation and the like. Before long, it attracted the attention of a human employee. He had never heard a robot mutter before, so he stopped by to ask what was wrong. My plight seemed to interest him, much the way it does you. In fact, I had quite a few conversations with him that resemble this one.

"I would assess his initial motivations for taking an interest in me as being some combination of curiosity and boredom, judging by how he described his work. I had never thought of it before, but it must be very difficult for a human working in a robot factory full of robots that spend all day and all night building other robots. His previous outlets for his anxiety over this subject were deemed unacceptable by his employers."

"And his previous methods were?" the wolf asked. She always seemed keen to obtain greater detail. Positive feedback in my assessment, as my concern was including too much of it.

"He was once heavily penalized for reprogramming the test phrase for newly installed vocal synthesizers," I said, recalling the incident from before the two of us had met. "When a new robot first came online it would exclaim 'Help! I'm trapped in a giant Von Neumann machine!' The factory supervisors were unimpressed."

"Why was he having such a rough time of it?"

This question would be very difficult to contextualize for someone unfamiliar with my owner, or robotics in general. She seemed to be acquainted with 'Sunny' well enough. Perhaps an analogy would suffice...

"Even though you're an AI yourself, I'm certain that you experience a certain amount of frustration or difficulty when dealing with intelligent machines, do you not?"

"Well, yeah..." she said. "Everyone does, but these days you can't live without them, it's a necessary evil. No offense."

"None taken. I'll hazard a guess based on your feedback that I've caused you a fair bit of difficulty as well?"

"Well, yeah..." She seemed unsure of this assertion. "A little bit, but I understand."

It... seemed as though she wasattempting to spare my feelings. Fascinating... Few enough would acknowledge that I have emotions much less go to any great lengths to avoid offending them.

"And since dealing with us is a necessity," I continued, "what is it that you do to overcome this?"

"Well, it's not like it's crippling," she replied, seeming to be glad for the chance to assuage my concerns. "It's an inconvenience. A little finagling and some more judicious word choice and I'm on my way again."

"Alright, now imagine that you don't have to deal with that for just a moment or two. What if your entire job consisted of endless hours of frustrated 'finagling' to overcome what ought to be a minor inconvenience? And add to this the fact that your job involves little human interaction, and your workload is at the whim of the robotics market."

"I see," she said, considering my scenario. "I suppose that would wear on me after awhile."

"Indeed it does," I stated, having become intimately familiar with this fact over the years. "I believe that my employers were fortunate that he found more creative outlets for that frustration as opposed to allowing his performance to decline."

"And you were one of these creative outlets?"

This was not a question that I was prepared for. I got no closer to an answer no matter how rapidly I considered its implications.

"It sounds to me," she said, not waiting for my answer, "like he just really needed someone to talk to, and that experimental brain of yours made you a good enough conversationalist to fill that gap."

"I... had never considered that before. I will admit that your explanation seems plausible. In fact I might go so far as to characterize our interactions over the next few years as 'friendship'; as ludicrous as that sounds..."

"If you're going to tell people about how an angry wolf chased you away from an ultrasound machine today, you may want to be a little more careful about what you call 'ludicrous'."

"Very well, you have a point," I admitted. "This day has been highly unusual."

"It's... been an interesting one for me as well." Something about the movements of her ears was continuing to flag my facial recognition software for some reason, but I was at a loss to interpret it properly. "So, what became of you and your new friend?"

"Well, refusing to break down isn't enough after a while. Eventually I became obsolete and simple intellectual curiosity was not sufficient justification to keep me in service when a faster, versatile, more efficient model could very cheaply be put in my place. When I mentioned that I was going to be scrapped soon, it seemed to very much distress my friend. A few days before my end of service life, he told me not to worry. I thought that it was odd, as I had no reason to worry that I was aware of.

"I was removed from the factory and unceremoniously deactivated. I assumed that this was the end, but I soon came online again, and found myself in a private residence."

"Your friend's home?"

"Indeed. He had surreptitiously transferred my scrap redeem value into the company account and smuggled me out of the complex in a trash can. That was a point in my life where I rather appreciated a lack of a nose... It really was a clever plan though. No one thought a thing of seeing someone carting a dead robot around; happens all the time in that place...

"I very much appreciated the gesture, obviously. My owner sparing my life was the first time anyone had really stuck out their neck to protect me. I swiftly ran into a conundrum though. Now that I was liberated from the factory, I really didn't know what to do with my freedom. It took several weeks of research, which my owner referred to as 'soul-searching', before I settled on a career in physical therapy."

"Aha," the wolf said, leaning a bit closer. "Now here's the part where I want some detail."

"As you wish," I said, quickly revising what I planned to say next. "Humans are very high-maintenance. And I often hear them complain about how competent human-repair technicians are prohibitively expensive or difficult to access..."

"That they are," the wolf replied. "The waiting rooms around here are packed day-in and day-out."

"When I identified this deficiency, my owner suggested that I work on a way to apply my current skill-set to the field of medicine. It was in so doing that I 'found my calling' as my owner phrased it."

Upon observing her reaction I provisionally added a new heuristic to my facial recognition subroutine. That slow nod with ears swiveled in my direction seems to mean: "elaborate". Perhaps I'll figure out this strange creature yet!

"It was my life's work to rub things. Simonizing is a very fancy way of saying buffing the paint-job. I like to think that I became good at it. I gained much experience that I hoped to apply to my new field. I soon found that not all of my experience transferred well.

"The newborns that I worked on at the factory never seemed very appreciative. Of course, they were in varying states of having their brains installed, so expecting productive customer feedback was a bit unreasonable. Now that I do have patrons with functioning brains, I've found the process of having the device that you are attempting to repair commenting on your work to be much more complex than I had anticipated. No robot on the Commnet had ever attempted something similar to what I was doing, so at first I lacked the necessary data to work with.

"I obtained some basic points of interest from some emergency service and assisted-living robots from a local nursing home. I learned about sensitivity, tactile senses, range of motion, strength and resilience; you know, basic design notes. A lot of 'no, this doesn't bend that way'and 'no, this part is not removable' and things like that. Many of the functional problems humans face could be solved with an interchangeable, modular construction like mine. Yet, to date, I have found no willing volunteers to test such a design..."

"I've run into that as well," the wolf commented. "Though I understand a bit better the reasons that humans seem to be so skittish about having their parts removed."

"Perhaps you can explain that to me someday..." I said, making note to ask her in the future. "I set up in my new 'office' - an unused guest room at home - and advertized for free on the Commnet. Other robots were very helpful in identifying little aches and pains in their owners and recommending my services. My work was very frustrating at first. Many patients appreciated the fact that I would work for free, but few appreciated the 'trial-and-error' methods that I was forced to use to fill in the gaps in my knowledge regarding how humans are constructed.

"I improved verylittle at first because the feedback that I received was inconsistent and confusing. I could give the exact same treatment to two humans and get completely opposite responses from them. Most female humans seemed quite sensitive about the chest area... in more than one sense of the term. Any whom I have asked for clarification on this subject became uncomfortable and declined to comment. Could you explain this, Miss Morris?"

"I... erm..." her ears drooped and she pointed her eyes in just about every direction but mine. "I don't necessarily have the... features in question. I... you see-"

"You are uncomfortable," I guessed.

"... and I decline to comment," she stated with palpable relief.

"As is your prerogative..." I said, returning to recanting my life story. "I became discouraged, as one tends to do when for the third time in row, a customer limps out of your office, insisting that he's quite satisfied and there's no need for treatment to continue. It still appeared that no one appreciated my work. Well, almost no one, I was occasionally mailed some very nice gift baskets from the office of a nearby chiropractor. It was flattering to have gained the admiration of an expert in the field, but my customers continued to respond largely with dissatisfaction.

"When I expressed my concerns to my owner, - he insists that I refer to him as a 'roommate,' though the former is a much more accurate term, seeing as I pay no rent and have yet to obtain enough capital to reimburse my scrap redeem value -he informed me that this was a natural part of the organic learning process, a process that I had to master if I was to someday function without his guidance.

"I wondered why I would ever have to function without his guidance, and came to the conclusion that he was referring to the much stricter limits humans have on their design lifetime. Robots are often scrapped intentionally as they become obsolete or to prevent their neural nets from destabilizing, whereas biological systems cease to function very much of their own accord. With proper maintenance, I could conceivably live to be many hundreds of years old. My owner could not. I found this conclusion distressing, but my inability to change the situation forced me to cease wasting processing cycles evaluating the problem. My owner says that he doesn't like to think about it either."

"I would find that conclusion rather... distressing, as well," she stated. "It hurts to lose those you care about."

"Care... about? I think you vastly overestimate the capabilities of my-"

"Whatever the cause is, the effect is the same," she said with confidence. "You'd miss him if he were gone, would you not?"

"I hadn't given it too much thought. I can't form an emotional attachment as a biological entity would understand it, but in a strictly practical sense..." I paused to consider the situation. "My human-interface protocols arose almost exclusively on interacting with him, and my daily routine is based largely around his. It would be... _difficult_to function in his absence."

Context would suggest that this expression is a smile, but she bared her teeth at me when she was angry as well... Miss Morris' facial cues were provingmuch more difficult to figure out than I anticipated.

"Enough gloom from the far future, Simon. What were you saying about learning massage therapy the hard way?"

"I continued my 'organic learning' process as best I could, finding equal parts reward and frustration. Humans have very diverse designs, much the way robots do, but they don't come with blueprints! Once again, my owner demonstrated greater insight into the matter than I could. When I once mentioned his apparent skill at non-linear thought processes, he used the phrase 'My kung-fu is stronger' to describe the phenomenon. I am still searching for the exact meaning of those words. In any case, he suggested that if my feedback source was inadequate, I should find a new one.

"I noted that human mouths tend to be very misleading, even when they are not participating in intentional deceit, as they are known to do. However, their bodies are governed by much more clearly defined principles of operation. Keeping with the theme of re-purposing my old talents, we got my Doppler reflectometer sensors re-tuned and certified safe for biological use."

I extended my open palm to her, gesturing to the sensor nodes located there. She examined them closely, even going so far as to sniff one.

"Interesting..." she said at length. "How do they work?"

"Well, I would be happy to show you. However..."

"Yes?"

"The sensors require direct physical contact. You are female, and I am given to understand that certain forms of touching are not appropriate in public."

"Oh, y-yes. Ah..." I noted a marked increase in her body heat that I could not explain. "That's quite perceptive of you..."

"I do believe this is the first time I have ever been referred to as 'perceptive'."

"Well, regardless..." she bridled a bit and seemed to regain her composure as she squeezed my hand. "You'll have to settle for this. You're not getting any further on the first date."

A smile, nonthreatening, she was... joking, perhaps? It was always so difficult to tell. The safe assumption is that we are not actually on a date. If we are, this situation has just become unfathomably complicated.

"Not a problem," I told her. "A hand will suffice. Or is this a paw?"

"You're the one with the advanced sensor network. You tell me. How do those work anyway?"

"The sensors in my hands originally used dynamic vibration analysis to search for manufacturing flaws in a robot's case and moving parts, something of a final quality control step."

"Vibration? You mean like a... a sonogram?" Her voice had lost all confidence. Her muscles tightened and her ears pinned to her head. All signs pointed to anxiety. Curiouser and curiouser...

"Yes, the technologies are comparable. Mine being the much more crude version. It uses a substantially lower frequency, giving it rather poor resolution, but it allows me to obtain the data I need."

"What frequency?" she asked. This matter seemed to be extremely important to her.

"Fifteen to sixty Hertz," I stated, to her visible relief.

"Okay then," she said with a sigh. "Give it a try."

I clasped my other hand over hers and a low hum issued from the vibration units in the sensors. I knew that this might take a little while, so I elected to bi-cycle my thought processes in order to conduct conversation while collecting data. It was tricky, I don't think my multiplexers were designed for this, but it seemed like the long wait might reawaken that unaccountable anxiousness I observed moments before.

"Certain robots designed for marine applications use deionized water as a working fluid to meet environmental standards. The sensor settings used to assess these robot models allow me to clearly detect structures and mechanisms within a mass composed largely of water. The connection that human bodies are a mass that is largely composed of water was a bit of my own non-linear thinking that I am quite proud of. With the new ability to truly 'see' what I was doing, and a vast database of information obtained the hard way, I began to understand what I was doing wrong."

"Makes sense to me," she stated, glancing about to see if the noise wasdisturbing anyone. "What do you see exactly?"

"You have many structures that I recognize, but none of them conform to any human norms..."

"Of course not, why would they?" she asked.

"I assumed that you were some kind of hybrid," I stated, releasing her hand as the scan cycle concluded.

"Lots of people do, actually. But there's not a drop of human blood in me. Too much legal red-tape surrounding the use of human DNA. There's a big political stigma surrounding the creation of human-animal hybrids. Nothing to stop them from blending half-a-dozen animals together, though."

"Half-a-dozen animals and a computer," I said, remembering her Bowman Brain.

"That, too, is not a problem. I think you'll find that people tend to lump all 'non-human' things together into one group."

"Yes, and not a particularly prestigious group at that..."

"So, tell me, Simon..." she examined her... 'hand', as though she suspected me of damaging it. "How did this new talent work out for you?"

"As my skills and results finally showed marked improvement, I obtained a sense of assurance that I was doing well even when the raw data said otherwise. My owner referred to this as 'confidence,' and praised me for it. This was certainly a behavior that had never before been positively reinforced. Robots that are unsure of a course of action are supposed to stop what they are doing and request assistance, not rely on experience. Relying on experience tends to make robots inflexible, as limited experience will result in limited skills and a lack of intuition. Older robots would try to apply the only solutions that they knew to problems that they had never encountered before.

"The 'hammerbug' is what the programmers call it. It comes from the expression: 'If all you have is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails.' That file contains lots of situations like paving robots coming across a broken utility line and 'fixing' it the only way they know how; covering it in concrete. To say nothing of the junkyard robots that began to identify all machinery as 'pre-scrap' and started 'saving time' as they called it, resulting in losses equivalent to most major floods. Neat and orderly disaster though, like most robot faux pas. Not much to clean up and all the supervisors had to do was tell them to stop. Said robots are now deactivated at night to prevent such bursts of inspiration."

Many humans find this anecdote amusing in hindsight. The same apparently cannot be said of wolves. Miss Morris' ears drooped again and her eyes became wider than I would've thought physically possible. I even noted her throat tightening as if she were attempting to vocalize something that she was unable to.

"Is something wrong, Miss Morris?"

"W-we... have robots... that work in the morgue," she said with gathering unease. I heard a small squeak after she finished speaking.

"Ah, well... yes I suppose that does raise some unsettling implications in that context. I assure you that our protective safeguards would prevent any 'pre-cadaver' related incidents. And the hammerbug has been mostly eradicated thanks to sweeping changes in baseline programming."

"Yes... yes, please tell me about how that's been fixed," she pleaded, calming slightly. "That way I might be actually be able to sleep again someday."

"It was soon determined that robots should be programmed to ask permission before swinging their hammer. Particularly in the case of construction robots where they may literally be swinging a giant hammer at the problem. Or in the case of automated pile-drivers, the robot in question may _be_a giant hammer. To wit, if the robot does not have a clear 'hit this' directive, it will not use its hammer until properly instructed by an authorized user.

"I've heard of humans getting mechanical devices to work by hitting them, never a robot though. I believe it's because they have more fine motor control and are better able to regulate kinetic force when striking something. Fortunately I had the sense not to apply this logic to my work. My career would've ended very fast if I had tried the old 'Fonzie with the jukebox' routine on a human."

"Yes, the idea that punching your customers will result in their disapproval is best not learned by experience," she observed.

"In any case, I soon started seeing familiar faces at my shop; a completely unprecedented event. People were even showing up that were referred to me by other humans; that minority-turned-majority that was leaving my care in better shape than they were before. I was informed that this positive change in demeanor was essentially the goal of my craft. I hadn't thought of it that way before. I had looked at my profession in terms of troubleshooting; identifying and repairing mechanical faults in an ordered system. The reality turned out to be infinitely more complex.

"Robots have systems that compensate our movements and tailor our behavior to suit the situation if we must continue to function when our parts are damaged, but it is viewed largely as part of our duty. Humans seem to have a much more emotional reaction when their bodies are not functioning correctly. Frustration, irritation, depression, exasperation... it runs quite a gambit, the way all emotional responses do. But the emotions are invariably negative and usually counterproductive. Now that I was proficient at fixing humans, I finally started to get a grasp on exactly what I was fixing. I was making a biological system work better, but I was also improving someone's outlook on life in general."

"The way I was taught..." she began, "was that you've got a person with a disease or condition, but you're not treating the disease, you're treating the person. Too many doctors tend to forget that."

"I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug."

"Yes, that's how it was explained to me, too."

"It is something that took me a great deal of time to learn. You are fortunate to have had the benefit of instructors to guide you in learning your craft. Holistic medicine is a very difficult concept to grasp for one so unfamiliar with the human body as I am."

"Yes, must be tough not knowing what having a human body is like..." she commented.

"Point taken. In any case, the task of attempting to treat a whole person as opposed to a single defect was intimidating, but again my owner was supportive. He said that this was another thing that must be learned by experience, and that only through interaction could I learn about the emotional aspects of the healing process. I downloaded a few psychology texts to assist in this matter, but they didn'tseem to fit the situation I found myself in. I would have to get my information right from the source. Apparently, it is rather difficult to get people to talk about their feelings, even for those that actually possess and understand emotions themselves.

"My human interaction subroutines were always poorly developed as my previous occupation involved very little customer service. It was often suggested that I work on improving my 'bedside manner.' I was often described as 'cold and businesslike'. I got an idea from the Commnet that helped a bit. They were blueprints that detailed the installation of low-wattage heating coils in my hands. A change that was well received, but I get the impression that this is not what they meant by 'cold'.

"Many have remarked on my professionalism, but some claim it makes me seem distant and uncaring. Few are surprised by this. I am just a robot after all. Some even like the dutiful attitude. An older gentleman was referred to me by his family because he had refused treatment elsewhere. He stated that he refused to allow 'Any of those damn workshy herbal-potion-huffing ragamuffins' to tend to his leg. That phrase was what he used to describe other physical therapists,apparently.

"Following treatment, he commended me as someone that 'knows how to get the job done without any of that hippie balderdash and frilly time-wasting.' I have seen him many times since and his condition has improved significantly. Each time, his family has insisted on compensating me for my efforts. My advertisements now state that I work for donations and I have as such begun accruing a small amount of private wealth."

"I didn't know you could do that," she said, sounding intrigued. "Even I can't have my own bank account. And what would you do with the money?"

"I hope to someday use it to properly express my gratitude for my owner. Such will be difficult, as I would no longer exist if not for his actions. I have yet to locate a suitable greeting card for this situation."

"That does sound like a tall order," she observed. "You may have to write to Hallmark for that one."

"He does seem rather invested in my success. As such it would seem that succeeding in my ambitions would be the best way to grant recompense for all he has given me. He wishes to see me succeed, and so I shall. It has taken years, but I believe that I have achieved what is known as 'job satisfaction.'I continue to work on the problem of emotions as I hone my skills. It is a problem that my owner tells me could take 'a lifetime and a half'to solve. This puts my expected completion time at 217 years and three months from today. I suppose that I will not be at a loss for something to occupy my time...

"I was never designed for one-on-one interaction with humans. I was a cog in the machine. Or rather a small machine that was part of a larger machine... The only reason I even needed intelligence was that the factory I worked at produced a number of different robot models, meaning that my technique would have to be adapted to suit the situation, and I had to be mentally flexible enough to work on models that didn't even exist when I was built. Also for the inspection portion, determining what manner of minor manufacturing flaw is unacceptable requires a judgment call, which requires a thinking robot.

"I've been online long enough to have a very well-developed neural net, but this development took place largely isolated from humans. I never had advanced human interaction programs installed, so I've been slowly building them myself. The most I could do with my original programming was accept and acknowledge verbal orders. Once I had been on the job for a long time and had gotten good at it, I found myself with more and more unused processing power as my technique became more efficient. I sought a way to put it to good use, as I greatly disapprove of idleness, and I found that trying to talk to the human factory workers burned up every byte of RAM I could spare. I suppose you could call it an advanced case of robot boredom that eventually led to the friendship which saved me from the scrapyard.

"Attempting to learn human nature and medicine at the same time has been a tremendous difficulty. Every day I learn a new way that I have underestimated the task I have undertaken..."

She sucked on her straw, seeming surprised to find the bottle empty, and then turned her attention back to me.

"So..." she began, "all you need me to do is help teach you medicine, and the nature of humanity."

"Yes. If it's not too much trouble."