Tag: robots

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Cows with Guns – Day 198 – Jason

Jason gave me cows with guns.

Now this really was difficult because it already has such a strong structure/story built into it. I tried to describe the tone of it in my head- I came up with two words “silly” and “epic”. So I came up with something silly and epic that built on the original story (I really don’t want to tamper with that masterpiece). 

There was hardly any skerrik of humans left when we started the fight. It was hard to convince people to throw away their robotic enhancements. They thought then enhancements would help us fight the bots, but instead our enemy could read exactly how we were going to fight.

I was at a loss, the resistance was losing. Finally I found a song on a usb and uploaded it to our network. We didn’t speak english then, only binary. I didn’t know what they were saying, but it sounded rousing and people liked it. It reminded them of their human history.

They ripped out their enhancements and began to fight. The bots couldn’t anticipate us anymore, we smashed them.

When the war was over, there was a big language revival. Linguists started piecing back together old languages like English. They translated our battle song, it was a comedy song about cows with guns. Most people were outraged that they fought for such silliness, but I was happy. That was the most gloriously human mistake I’d ever heard.

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Homebots – Day 169 – James’ stickering

Today worked out in the warehouse at the back of my office, where I met James. We were fixing tags on garments that had been printed wrong by putting stickers on over them. There were hundreds of thousands of tags to fix. He told me stickers annoyed him, which inspired this story. 

Every Homebot has a kind system and a good temperament chip, or so says the box. Jim knows better though, he works in the warehouse fixing all the bot’s emotional systems that malfunction before they hit the shops. The bots often threw tantrums before he fixed them, but soon they were kind and placid as a Homebot should be. Jim was happy in the warehouse away from most people. People scared him, people judged him. As long as he fixed the bots consistently, he’d be left alone to his own devices in the warehouse. But one day a bot threw a spanner in his works. The bot acted just like him.

“That’s okay, I knew I wasn’t good enough,” it said when he told it he needed to make system adjustments.

They talked for much too long, and at the end, Jim still hadn’t changed his systems. Instead he put it back in the box.

“You are good enough, just as you are, Homebot #4000,” he said.