The Depressed Robot

Aliyx the robot looked in the mirror. At one time he had been shiny and new but the robot that looked back was now cracked and dusty. It was a bug, he had been told, and the treatment was not optional. As he waited in the white sterile room, just one of millions arranged into a large cube, he had vague confusing memories and ideas. The previous week he had been identified as rogue by robot workers at a station on the silky solar energy fields that lined the planet's equator. This was the belt that separated the planet into the two territories. To the North it was home of the Atari, a solution of highly functional binary robot. Aliyx was third generation Atari. To the South was the unknown territory, and the source of Aliyx's recent reminiscence.

It was time for Aliyx's assessment. The door slid open revealing another cube and Aliyx passed through. In the cube was a tall thin robot with serious straight edges and menacing fixation. It was Scyther, a robot of such reputation that no worker ever dared look or could even confirm his existence. Aliyx looked at Scyther but kept his head downwards and out of the glare he could sense above him. Scyther's mid-section was embossed with an addition sign that Aliyx recognised as that of the Patch, a robot trained in repair and reassignment. Aliyx knew that there was no repair - it was always reassignment. In the tradition of the Atari, reassignment was the process of reclaiming a robot's components and melting the shell. It was the death sentence of a robot and Scyther was the executioner. Aliyx did not care. That would be sweet release from his current affliction.

It had begun two Sun revolutions past. Aliyx worked at the Replicator Project, a robot adventure in creating artificial variations through a long binary code. The main functions of the replicator were copy, mutate and delete, and the code was called DNA. None of the robot workers had the capability to question what the purpose of this DNA code was; work was just work. For many Sun revolutions Aliyx had worked just like all the other robots. Performance evaluations were consistent as the only criteria is fully functional and Aliyx had always been fully functional. That was until the day of his escape.

Earlier that day Aliyx had produced a code that contained an anomaly; not just a logical error, but a pattern that threatened all Atari. Aliyx's Code, as it was called, read: 11031415110. When the other robot workers saw this, it was not a reaction to a mystery but a single definition of an error. There is no loyalty amongst robot workers, no empathy, and so Aliyx's fault was quickly accelerated to Cirrus, the super-computer that controlled the North. The code that Aliyx created had diverted from the binary that which the Atari had created to cast-off the problem of the Greys. These were the indecisive relic parts of an evolutionary predecessor deemed weak and therefore obsolete.

To this point Aliyx had been concealing a lot about what had led him to write that code. At first Aliyx had difficulty waking from sleep mode, and when he did, would stay idle for long periods. Aliyx noticed an increasing variability in his sleep cycle. Even robots need to sleep. Continuous switching without sleep causes component degradation and a robot to become unreliable. The weekly power-up sessions also failed to be automatic and Aliyx stopped going to the fields, only doing so occasionally to permit the most basic movement. Operating on low power made Aliyx slow and this affected every obligation. No energy-no show. Then it was memory problems, even basic calculations, and this affected work. And finally came the ideas. Aliyx no longer had the robotic tendency to work and wondered why he worked at all. The simplicity of 1 or 0 was breaking down and Aliyx thought in-between, not just in numbers, but also in the sound, the colour and the shape.

This was a significant event considering the context of Aliyx's situation. It was the year 3301 and the Atari vision was to remove all but the binary leaving that stop-go, right-wrong, 1-0 place where all robots fit naturally; not that nature is an Atari concept. The North was a large planar surface with no organic life and the land was dedicated to projects that self-evolve. It was a heavily designed and controlled evolution that was fast and distinct, not slow and incremental. The third generation Atari were the most recent product of the robot advancement. It had been a long transitional process through which most sound, colour and shape had been reduced to a distinct few sets. The Atari have no feeling and so found no use for art or music. By the time of the third generation none of the robots had any connection to, or memory of, the establishment of the Atari. Consequently, history did not exist. The purpose of memory was solely functional; for work and maintenance.

Aliyx makes a manic dash to the unknown territory but is intercepted at the solar belt. It was unpassable. He was then taken to the secure cube for interrogation where he was now with Scyther. Cirrus wanted to know everything of Aliyx's activities and thoughts, though not to repair, as Aliyx knew his fate was certain. The data was collected, compiled and analysed almost instantly. Aliyx felt a slow and constant buzz inside, sometimes fabled as like that of a Greys slave robot.

Cirrus are in control. There is nothing like control than the absolute knowledge of everything and that is made simpler when everything is depleted to good or bad. Aliyx thought ‘I am bad’. Or ‘am I bad’. This was reminiscent to something now translucent through the iron curtain of Cirrus and the solar belt. For a split moment Aliyx heard ‘You are in Wonderland’. “Yes!” Aliyx exclaimed. “I’m not bad… I’m mad!” and continued “But if mad is bad, then bad is good.” Then Scyther’s addition sign on the mid-section flashed red and the assessment was complete.

As the Northern Cirrus machine continued 101110010001, a doorway opened in the geometrically perfect cube of Scyther’s surgery that occupied a portion of the dividing solar belt between Cirrus North and the unknown South. Scyther moved aside and ushered Aliyx with horizontal green flashes of the positive insignia on his chest.

Aliyx was now having thoughts and feelings more powerful than ever before. Before these were like crushing metal and the only fear a robot could ever imagine - one of those longing feelings that Cirrus had failed to suppress. But now Aliyx was exhilarant. Exhilarant, not exhilarant. He thought ‘Should I go through the door? If a door opens one should always go through. But what if one does not like what is beyond the door? And what if one cannot go back though the door?” Aliyx concluded “Such a folly is the open-door philosophy!” It also descended upon him that now he was thinking in plain English. And now he noticed that he was already on the other side of the door. Then he heard a voice - “Alex, would you like a cup of tea?”