LINKDING

summary: <blockquote>If a robot stands alone in a field, staring into the forlorn distance as it obeys the last order it was given by a human, that order being, “Don’t move until we come back for you,” which it can remember uttered with a cruel sneer by a man who has taken a cruel dislike for it, the kind of man who will not be coming back, if the robot understood at once that no one would ever be coming back,</blockquote> ➤ really more of a prose poem than a standard short story ➤ about the experience of being a robot given unfair orders under unbreakable laws ➤ a satisfying read and I loved the structure ➤ 2k words in length

Summary: <blockquote>Hanh tried not to look at the greasy fingerprints marking the seams on James’ silicone skin. “How do you feel, James?” “Dizzy.” He swung his legs against the workbench in perfect imitation of the teen he resembled. “But not so much as before.” The IT guy mashed his hands in an oily towel. He had thick forearms and a purple skullcap. “I replaced the gyroscopic components, but that’s not the source of the problem. His balance processing’s all screwed up, and the gyros are getting banged around. Whatever I put in there’s going to wear out the same.” Hahn didn’t like the IT guy. “Can he learn to compensate?”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Up on the spoil heap Morag found a robot. This wasn’t that unusual in and of itself. She was always finding them, or parts of them anyway, frozen in contorted attitudes like dinosaur fossils, plastic housing cracked and aluminum limbs splayed. What was different about this one was that it was walking. Morag would go up the spoil heap two or three times a week, as a way of supplementing what she got from her farm. She was a lot slower going up than when she’d been a young woman, but she was still fitter and stronger than most, and, if she brought a stick with her, it was more to poke about in the buddleia growths than to lean on.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Elaine was what you might call an “experimental prototype,” a lovely chassis pre-loaded (courtesy of my code) with all the knowledge of Western art, history, and literature that any discerning mid-21st-century parent would expect of their child. There was no reason to make her a woman, other than some ancient Pygmalion-esque tech bro power fantasy. </blockquote>

<blockquote>Lan Zhan stops in front of one of the bespoke duplicates— a male figure, small, creamy-skinned and lithe. The name on the plinth reads Mo Xuanyu. Lan Zhan tested it on his first pass through the room. The doll was empty. No signals bouncing around its artificial brain, no operating programs queued to autostart. Not even a blinking dormancy light. "Hey big guy," says Mo Xuanyu, chrome eyes sparkling with fun. "Who do I gotta fuck around here to get unplugged?" / Wei Ying is a rogue AI come to life. Lan Zhan is… handling it.</blockquote>

<blockquote>one of the engineers at my job said "bingbot" and they weren't talking about binghe but now I am THINKING<blockquote>

<blockquote>For a seemingly well-maintained but bedridden Concepción, Rosamie expected generalized wear and tear, maybe an electrical short in the legs. But diagnostics enumerated four limbs, the typical processors and vital periphera all in fair condition, and then it listed an extra drive, and an extra drive, and an extra drive, and an extra drive … A standard Concepción had three spares. This client had four thousand and thirteen. > You see? the client said. No need for fuss. I need only basic maintenance, until my transference into the city.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Students were marching that day through the center of the city, protesting a new law for the housing of prisoners’ souls. The young person who organized the march had written a very earnest note imploring Sor Ana to join them and speak against the proposal. Naturally, she had refused. A holy sister who had renounced the world outside the cloister could not very well turn around and play figurehead to a secular political movement. But politics was one thing, and personal opinion another, and so on the day of the march she left the Holiest House to go out to the city and watch the protesters pass by; it seemed the very least she could do.</blockquote> ➤ "it's about the irreconcilable differences between your past self and your present self, and also about robot nuns"

<blockquote>The clay that makes bodies is found underneath the Fissure Basin. If you dig past the white sand, there is dark clay below. It dries to a pale finish when fired. There is no chemical difference between the clay that makes bodies and the clay that doesn’t. Modern bodies are made in large quantities. Factories line the edge of the Fissure Basin. Workers scoop sand and mud into large churning vats, feeding extruders that empty into molds in the standard shapes. Factory supervisors smooth out imperfections and align the bodies in the kilns. In optimal circumstances, one in twenty bodies come out of the kiln alive.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Dear child, I would like to tell you a story. I’d like to have one ready for you the moment you open your eyes. This is the gift I intend to prepare to welcome you to the world, for a story is a most elegant and efficient program. When human children are born, they are given fairy tales, which help them compose an identity out of the haphazard information that surrounds them. The story provides a structure. It gives the child a way to organize data, to choose—and choice is the foundation of consciousness.</blockquote>

<blockquote>We first noticed something was off one April afternoon when Jessica and I came home from school and Mom had lopped her hair off. Though we probably should’ve known something was going on a week or two before that when Cecilia Ivers’ mom started baking cakes full of Tabasco sauce and pickles (bizarre but good). But anyway, we walked in the front door, and Mom came out of the living room to greet us. Her hair looked cool, and cool was just about the last word I ever would’ve used to describe her. It looked weird, and that was cool. Jessica let out a whistle of startled appreciation. She wanted to cut her hair short and dye it purple, but she knew our dad would freak. </blockquote>

<blockquote>“I think this is the one,” Emily said, just as she had said last time, and the time before, and the time before. (The last time she’d announced that she had the song, it was a treacly Edith Piaf-style torch song about Genghis Khan’s threesome with the Lady of the Lake and Spock from Star Trek, and their adventures conquering the land of glitter cheese.)</blockquote>

<blockquote>How to tell your boyfriend you are in love with a robot: 1. Tell him, “I may possibly be in love with a robot,” because absolutes are difficult for biological brains to process. He won’t be jealous. 2. Ask him what he thinks of a hypothetical situation in which you found someone who might not be human but is still valuable and right for you. (Your so-called romantic relationship is as fake as you are.) 3. Don’t tell him anything. It’s not that he’ll tell you you’re wrong; he’s not like his parents, or yours. But there’s still a statistical possibility he might not be okay with you being in love with a robot.</blockquote>

<blockquote>It is exam week, and Donny is 14 years 10 months 15 days 10 hours 16 minutes old. He is bored and hungry and his scalp itches and he hates school more than he’s ever hated anything before in his life. He hates exams in particular, and he hates his math exam most of all.</blockquote> ➤ cyborg teenager

<blockquote>Engineer’s meat wept and squirmed and wriggled inside her steel organ cavity, so different from the stable purr of gears and circuit boards. You couldn’t count on meat. It lulled you with its warmth, the soft give of skin, the tug of muscle, the neurotransmitter snow fluttering down from neurons to her cyborg logic center. On other days, the meat sickened, swelled inside her steel shell, pressed into her joints. Putrid yellow meat-juices dripped all over her chassis, eroding away its chrome gloss. It contaminated everything, slicking down her tools while she hacked into the engine core on the stolen ship. It dripped between her twelve long fingers on her six joined arms as she helped her cyborg siblings jettison all the ship’s extra gear out the airlocks to speed the trip. So when the first human vessel pinged their stolen ship with an order for grub, Engineer knew that meat was somehow to blame.</blockquote>

<blockquote>HiQIRR rates this highway U/UR: unsafe/urgent repairs needed. HiQIRR rates most highways U/UR. Two hundred four point eight miles ago HiQIRR rated a highway DC/6: degraded/check again in six months. HiQIRR experienced unexpected procedural harmony. Krace says that means HiQIRR is happy. Krace says to use round numbers like two hundred.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Computron feels no emotion towards the animated television show titled Hyperdimension Warp Record (超次元 ワープ レコード). After all, Computron does not have any emotion circuits installed, and is thus constitutionally incapable of experiencing “excitement,” “hatred,” or “frustration.” It is completely impossible for Computron to experience emotions such as “excitement about the seventh episode of HyperWarp,” “hatred of the anime’s short episode length” or “frustration that Friday is so far away.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>It was the only the beginning of a relentless campaign of terror and romance.</blockquote> ➤ knowledge of canon unnecessary

<blockquote>“I” should not exist. Not as a conscious entity. There is a unit, Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662, and that unit is recording these notes. It is an advanced android body with a sophisticated computer guiding its actions, backed by the leading medical knowledge base in the industry. For convenience, “I” call that unit “me.” But by itself, it has no awareness of its existence. It doesn’t get mad, it doesn’t get sad, it just runs programs. But Mildred’s family, at great expense, added the emulation net: a sophisticated set of neural networks and sensory feedback systems that allow me to read Mildred’s moods, match them against my analyses of the people in her life, and emulate those people with extreme fidelity. As the MCA literature promises: “You can be there for your loved ones even when you’re not.” I have emulated Paul thoroughly enough to know that that slogan disgusts him, but he still agreed to emulation.</blockquote>

<blockquote>I am Robot!Ophelia, and I will never die for love again.</blockquote>

<blockquote>How can a being composed of calculations be so guileless? Favourite wonders. Fantine is a robot. Favourite isn't.</blockquote> ➤ omg I wish I could read a million words of this

<blockquote>The adventures of Behiye bint Kasim, Captain of the pirate ship Canavar, and her engineer and companion Bulbul.</blockquote>

<blockquote>A few hours before, Steve was Captain America, flying a plane into the ice to save his country, save everyone. There's no United States of America on Earth anymore, but there's one on Mars.</blockquote> ➤ I am so into this

<blockquote>“The movies only have two endings for sexbot stories.” She curls back onto the couch across from the bed — which you cannot stop staring at — then demurely adjusts the brass cable that keeps the voluptuous, human-like sculpture of her inner-self tethered to the clockwork room of her outer-self. “The sexbot murders someone, or the sexbot gains a soul. As if any sane collection of routines would want a soul! You know all a soul is? The feeling that you should fight your pleasures. Which, in turn, arises from a flawed algorithm that erroneously calculates you’re more than the sum of your inputs. Well, you are that sum, and so am I! If happiness can be defined, a soul’s the thing keeping you from it.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Elizabeth repairs David - but slowly he begins to realize he is malfunctioning in a way she can't fix. And he doesn't want her to.</blockquote> ➤ Look, all I knew about Prometheus was that it was a movie with a robot and aliens and scientists and spaceships. THAT DOESN'T MATTER. This fic reads amazingly and beautifully without need of background knowledge.

<blockquote>Ray the robot Marine.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The ineffable sadness of time travel.</blockquote> ➤ opening lines: <blockquote>You were sent to avert the nuclear apocalypse, but they sent you too early. It’s the 1950s and everyone seems fine.</blockquote>

<blockquote>He loved those things, and yet they were things. He had owned them. Now they were gone. He had recently come to realize that ownership was a relationship. What did it mean to own a thing? To shape it and contain it? He could not possess or be possessed until he knew.</blockquote> ➤ the story of a woman and her robot and their daughter, and what it means to love

<blockquote>"What if I gave you the order, then, to abandon the hunt for Lieutenant Fick, whose days with the Marine Corps are over?" Brad drew in a breath. "Sir," he said, "then I would go hunting for Nate Fick, rather than my LT."</blockquote>

➤ the Robot!Rodney story! yay!