retirement: the appendix

Doll Parts

No one could remember when the craze began, only that it had begun. One day, the Life Dolls were an underground product, created for the lonely and – often – sociopathic, looking for companionship without actual human interaction. The attraction on that level was clear; the dolls could be manipulated, and customised to their owner’s wishes. It would have been understandable, too, if it had stayed there.

The term ‘Life Doll’ was something of a misnomer. In reality, the company produced and sold, on a mass scale, artificial intelligence robots with complex methods of reasoning and deduction. The dolls could do so much more than just respond to an advance – they could process it; understand it. The dolls were able to make their own decisions, based on data they’d collected from the world around them. They had opinions, personalities, and their own voices. In a space of just twenty years, the Dolls had advanced beyond anything originally expected. By the time the dolls hit the mainstream market, they were practically indistinguishable from humans.

Life Dolls could communicate distaste and pleasure, and even disagree with their owners. The mass production of the dolls didn’t change the fact that they were all unique – if anything, it made them more so. The dolls all looked very dissimilar and, most unnerving of all, they looked human. They say the only way one could identify a Life Doll was by watching it for long enough. Every now and then, there’d be circuit glitches, causing unusual movements or speech, or even freezing.
That did nothing to quell the demand for them, though. They were like humans, but they were able to belong to you in a way no human being could. There were ways to manipulate the dolls, of course – but the master would have to deal with the consequences when his doll realised that they’d been controlled.

The advances in science and love and sex all seemed to add up and lead to this moment: Brian Mirkle, a forty four year old English professor, sitting in front of his computer, ordering a customised sex robot.
The term ‘robot’ was technically a little incorrect, politically. Doll was much preferable.

BOTVERSE STORY 2: ARMY OFFICIALS

It was almost amusing sometimes, the things the Government knew. They knew everything about everyone – no sticker placed over a webcam, or disconnection from social media could prevent that. Some people were easier to catch, churning themselves out in the hundreds to buy the newest gadget, the one with the laser in the screen that could read your face. Sometimes it seemed as though they wanted to be found. Maybe the people who spend thousands upon thousands of their own money on metal contraptions were the ones who needed them least.
What they needed, perhaps, was something warmer. Alive.
Ironically enough, the people who tried the most to evade Government perception were often the ones who had very little to hide. The ones with weird fetishes, strange desires, unusual aversions – those were the ones who flocked to capitalism like they needed it to live. That’s why the Artificial Intelligence business was doing so well. The snakes of society, the moles who lived just under the surface of daylight – they snatched up the first models as soon as they came out. Back then, the Dolls didn’t even really look human – more like life-sized children’s toys; but that didn’t stop people ordering them in a frenzy. They looked humanoid, and they could respond to you with a sort of eloquence. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to drag to light all the people society had tried to bury.
And then something very strange happened.
On a scale no-one could have predicted, sales for Dolls reached a point where supply couldn’t meet demand. And that demand wasn’t even just for the Dolls as they were – barely sentient replicas of humans – they wanted them more attractive, more talkative, more real.

It was around that point that the Military got involved.

The dorms were absolutely silent at this time of night. Most of the soldiers were either at dinner, or spending some alone time in the camp’s library. There were a couple of Dolls on-hand, too, but they went mostly unnoticed, instead serving as maids and waitresses. In theory, they probably could have been used sexually, as they tended to be in the mainstream, but the Sergeants didn’t encourage it; there was already enough of that going on between the soldiers, the AI units didn’t need to be brought into it.
More than they already were, anyway.

“Hello?” a voice called from one of the bunks. Paula paused, flashlight resting limply in her hand, shining a single beam of light onto the concrete floor. She hadn’t expected anyone to be here; she hadn’t heard anyone breathe.
The latter detail was all she needed to deduce who was in the bunk.

“Roberts, is that you?” she asked. It was a fairly redundant question, seeing as she could literally hear the way his engine whirred. He didn’t like to have it brought to attention though, already nervous about where he stood amongst his human comrades.

Joseph Roberts poked his head out of the bunk, his eyes glowing ever so slightly in the darkness.

“It is me. Hello, Lieutenant Lewis,” he said cordially. Paula shifted her grip on the flashlight, leaning a little on the bed next to Joseph’s.

“Roberts, why aren’t you in the mess hall? You’re not going to get to stretch your legs for the rest of the night if you stay cooped up in here,” she said. She paused, then continued: “or get to know your comrades,” she added. The man sighed, glancing down a little. His engine seemed to stir for a moment, before going back to its normal rumble.

“Lieutenant, can I ask you something? And if you cannot answer me, then say so,” he said shyly. Paula froze a little: there was any number of things he could be wondering about. Joseph, like all Dolls, had access to as much information as a person with their hands on an Internet search engine. The limitations, though, lay in whether or not they knew what to look for – but it would only take a single slip of a word to put an idea into his head, and then who knows where his research could go?

Summary of BOTVERSE Stories

(All Titles TBC)

Factory Worker.

A man who works in the factory where the Dolls are made, pondering the ways the ‘doll revolution’ has changed the way the world and society works, and his own opinion of it. Would work well as an introduction to the piece.

Army Officials

Discussing the way the idea of transferring human memory into robots first began. We see a Lieutenant talking to a robot man who is serving in the army currently. We then meet Doctor Gottlieb who is going to be exhibiting how to transfer the brain, with the assistance of a – currently – unknown girl who he has drugged and brought with him. He is then tormented by both the Lieutenant and a General named Tepp, before explaining to them how he would go about transferring the data (in vague terms, for now). They bring in a robot nurse named Nora, who will be the subject of the data transfer.

Nora

A very short, disjointed piece about the Doll exploring her new consciousness, and the addition of the human mind (which she refers to as ‘Emily’) to her previous knowledge of the world.

Recall Officers

A group of the officers who are in charge of ‘Recalling’ damaged robots. Work essentially like the ‘robot police’, and take them away to ‘fix’ them. This inevitably results in them killing and/or torturing the robots. A question is asked here about whether or not robots can be seen as human or sentient.

RealDoll Officials

Insight into the ‘business meeting’ which results in the alternate means of programming the dolls (in the way of transferring human consciousness, mentioned previously), because of a lul in the market and a demand for “more”. We are re-introduced to Gottlieb, now far more successful and acclaimed, who explains the process to the team.

Nora 2.0

Essentially the same as Nora, but less disjointed now, more conscious thought. She is beginning to make plans and have independent ideas about people. Shows progression of the human vs. robot conflict.

Obsessed

Follows the life of a ‘typical’ teenage girl. Starts off normally, but we soon realise that she is desperate to look like one of the ‘Dolls’ (similarly to how teenagers compare themselves to celebrities). In this piece we delve deeper into the societal impact, and how people will go to many lengths to change themselves.

Conspiracy Theorists

A group of young adults who try to look into different conspiracies and video blog about them. It seems all very juvenile, until one of them stumbles across some knowledge of the human memory implantation process. They investigate, managing to sneak in to one of the RealDoll labs, where they actually discover a lot of incriminating details.
However, they’re caught by one of the guards. The story cuts to them having, apparently, no memory at all of anything they’ve learned about the company.

Nora (finale)

A final, concluding piece, summing up the world as it stands. Nora appears to be more conscious of her place in the world. An ominous feeling is evoked, regarding the future of humans and AI.