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