Adventures in Parodyverse:  Lab Rats


    Yuki walked into Al B Harper’s lab and noticed a few things.

    Anna, dressed very casually in a style borrowed from the Psychic Samurai, was sitting patiently in a chair located in a hastily constructed roofless plexiglas booth against the back wall.  A thin wire trailed from beneath her dark blue hair, over the top of the plastic wall to a computer sitting to Al’s left.  That computer was running all of its fans noisily, and was obviously working hard.

    At the other end of the same back wall, Tandi was in a similar plexiglas booth with a chair, only dressed much more provocatively.  She too had a wire trailing over the top of the booth, connected from a mystery point under her clothing to a computer to Al B Harper’s right, which was quiet and not working terribly hard.

    Muffy Framlicker shared the lab with Al B Harper, and wasn’t too happy at all.  She wondered quietly if this time he had crossed the line entirely into mad science.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Al, what are you doing?”  Yuki asked loudly, causing the arch-scientist to jump and drop one of the two keyboards.

    Muffy secretly grinned to herself, trying to appear busy so nobody would notice.  She wished she had done that herself.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m uh--”  Al hastily rushed to collect the keyboard and the spilled key caps.  He knocked the other keyboard off its shelf as he hit his head on it.  “Ow!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“He’s collecting and analyzing data.”  Anna answered for him.  Her voice echoed in the plastic booth.

    Yuki looked at Tandi, who nodded in agreement.

    Al B Harper finally recovered his wits.  “I uh...I’m trying to document the differences in processing between these two high performance and lovely ro...I mean, artificial beings.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Did you hook up Tandi’s cord?”  Yuki asked in an almost threatening tone.  She took several guesses at where it might be connected.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“No, um...she did that herself.”  Al replied quickly.  “Anyway, I finally learned the difference between the way these two process information and stimuli.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Stimuli,”  Yuki repeated, rolling her eyes.  

    Al beamed,  “I can say that now, with Mr. Epitome gone nobody will stuff me in a locker!”

    Yuki ignored that.  “And what did you find out?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, as you can see--”  Al pointed at the overheating computer to his left.  It smelled like it was threatening to catch fire.  “Anna processes much more data at a much higher rate.  Her pattern processing design is inherently less efficient than Tandi’s more traditional linear one--”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Who are you calling linear?”  Tandi protested.  “Or traditional?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“--But,”  Al continued, ignoring Tandi, “Anna is capable of processing a far larger quantity of permutations simultaneously and in parallel--”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“English please!”  Yuki interrupted him loudly.

    Al thought a moment on how to translate.  “Anna sees all the possibilities at once.  Take, for example, a map of a maze, or in this case a maze-like building.”

    Yuki took the map from Al and looked at it.  “Yeah...?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I asked both of them to wander a simulated building this size and find an item hidden in a room...twice.  The first time, Tandi found it much faster, because she used a standard search algorithm--”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“English, Al, English!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Right right.”  Al agreed hastily.  “I mean she searched room by room, and quite efficiently.  She tried not to cross areas she already searched.  Anna, she got lost a few times and ended up looking into the same rooms a few times until she started to figure it out.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Then I asked them to search again.  Different building layout, different item location.  The second time, Anna found it much faster.  Can you guess how?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Luck?”  the purple-haired cyborg guessed.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“No.”  Al firmly replied.  “She figured out how the placement algorithm--”  He caught the frown from Yuki and quickly translated.  “It was a simulated building.  Hallie had a certain method to generating the layout and placing the item, and Anna figured it out.  She learned to read the clues, to figure out the rules, and she did it quickly.  She started to learn how Hallie thinks to solve the puzzle.”

    Yuki shrugged.  “So she’s a good detective?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A very good one.”  Al corrected her.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“So...you wasted several hours on this, and who knows how much money, when you could have just played a game of Clue with her?”

    Al B Harper blanched as he looked at the two computers around him, and then at the plexiglas booths.

    Muffy was leaning in close to her work, trying to hide the fact that she was laughing so hard her face was reddening.  She loved listening to conversations between Yuki and Al.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m out of here.”  Tandi announced.  She tossed her data cable over the top of the booth and then pushed it over with a loud crash.  Then she quietly walked out of the lab.

    Anna still sat patiently in her plastic cube.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“She’s very sweet, isn’t she?”  Yuki asked, looking directly at Anna.  “She tries so hard to be helpful, and nice, and polite.”

    Al understood the point when he looked at Anna.  The android sat perfectly straight, but her eyes looked down, like she was unfathomably sad at having been roped into this, but afraid to say anything and ruin a friendship.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s what makes her truly unique, among her kind, Al.  Not her processing power, or how she thinks.  It’s how she feels, and what she feels...that she has so many powerful and turbulent emotions that she can’t even vocalize them properly.  It’s what her designer truly intended - for her to have the purest kind of empathy, so she can learn from us.”

    When Yuki glanced over to the booth again, Anna was watching her with those unnaturally tinted blue eyes.

    Then android then disconnected the cord, grabbed one of the seams in the plastic booth, and gently raised it as she ducked underneath.  Then she lowered it gently behind her.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And she cares about your lab equipment too, apparently.”  Yuki added.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m sorry your experiment didn’t work out.”  Anna said as she approached.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh, I don’t know about that.”  Al said.  He looked at Yuki and smiled.  “I think I learned a lot today.”

    Anna smiled at Al, and then at Yuki.  “I suppose I’ll see if Hatman needs any help now.”  she said.  She then left the lab.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You know.”  Yuki said, subtly nodding in the direction of Muffy, “Maybe there’s something else you can learn from Anna.”  She then laughed and said, “See you later Al,”  and left.



-- Story written and copyrighted (C) 2009 by Jason Froikin, and may not be 
--    reprinted without permission.  
-- Yuki Shiro designed by Jason Froikin, based on designs by Masamune Shirow
--  Liu Xi Xian and the Psychic Samurai are original design by Jason Froikin
--  Lara Night is an original creation by Jason Froikin

While the writing itself is not bad, I REALLY don't like the fact that you continually try to establish all robots other than Anna has being LESS human, in the ways that they think and feel, because the entire POINT of how robots have been characterized in the Parodyverse is how much they ARE like us humans, in their thoughts and feelings. Indeed, Tandi is quite possibly the WORST robot you could have chosen for such a characterization, since her entire PERSONALITY is based on NOT being efficient or logical, and on being just as empathetic and emotional as any human. This is part of the reason why Anna doesn't work for me, as a character, since the sum total of your characterization for her amounts to, "She's more special than all the other AIs we've already seen," and again, that veers dangerously into that Mary Sue territory that we already talked about.

I'm sorry.

It *was* pulled out of the trash file. I only kept it, and months later posted it, because the "sight" gags and the dialogue with Yuki and Al was funny.

For some out-of-story info though:

Anna was designed with the same intention as Tandi (except for the sexbot part), at least as far as the ability to behave like and interact with humans. The approach to how they were designed is completely different, but they're *functionally* identical.

Tandi was likely designed by humans who observe other humans, and then set up her behavior to approximate a human's "out of the box", with some limited learning abilities to take that last step.

Anna, instead, was designed, for lack of a better comparison, like a pet dog at first. Everything she knows about humans, or fighting, she was trained in after she went active. Because of that, she has to learn at a very rapid rate, and she has to figure out patterns without really knowing it. Imagine, at her first days, sitting around her creator's lab, mute, watching people interact and speak.

The result, as I said, is *functionally* identical. They both interact with humans well. The difference is kind of ironic in a way - Anna is always overwhelmed by what's going on around her, because she's designed to absorb it all and learn from it. She has had to *learn* to ignore things she doesn't need. Tandi's operations are pretty much set, so she has no need to absorb and process that much all the time - she ignores most of it automatically.

Another ironic difference is that I believe Anna would be more prone to irrational behavior, being paralyzed by fear, or panicked. No human would intentionally design a classic robot like Tandi that way, as it could result in accidental deaths. With Anna's design, it's both a necessary side effect of the way she learns, and also the reason the project was cancelled and there's only one of her, and also the reason the government wanted her destroyed.