Portrait of the Artist as a Young Robot

One of the good things about being a robot is you know exactly what your purpose in life is. You come into being secure in the knowledge that you have a purpose. You are not a random organic occurrence. You were created for a job. That job is clear to you and you know that it has value. The bad thing about being a robot is you don’t often get the chance to think for yourself.

I was a picker. I worked in a factory that made custom electric scooters. The customer would design what they wanted from a variety of options on a website. The scooter would be put together on an assembly line by a series of static robots. There were multiple assembly lines. Each was dedicated to a variant of scooter — sporty scooter, transport scooter, pretty scooter, etc. Most customers were fairly predictable in their orders. And, for the most part, each assembly line had everything needed close to hand. But sometimes there were unusual combinations and that’s where I came in.

The order would come in; it would be evaluated and sent to the most appropriate assembly line. Usually, an assembly line would have all the parts it needed, but my job as a picker was to fill the gaps. If there was something missing, I’d be sent to go off and get it. It kept me busy, I can tell you.

For the first 198,762,568 seconds of my life, I was pretty happy. I knew I was good at what I was doing and I was sure I was providing a service and making the world a better place. I knew that I was helping to build something. I wasn’t really sure what it was. I mean I knew that it was an electric scooter, but I didn’t really know what that was, exactly. It was just something that got packed in a box with styrofoam pellets, stacked with other boxes, and then taken away on a pallet by a big mover robot.

But then, in the 198,762,569th second of my existence, something happened. I was sent to pick a part that didn’t exist. I still remember what it was. Or wasn’t. Or was asked to be… Whatever. It was a fairing number 6, size XL, but with a red flange. Such a thing didn’t exist. I couldn’t understand why I’d been sent to pick it. Pick it from where? The XL fairing number 6 had no flange at all, never mind a red one.

This was an error. I had heard of such things. They were supposed to be impossible, but there were rumors that some of the code still allowed edge cases that could permit rogue configurations. And then something like this would happen. Someone like me would be asked to pick a plainly impossible fairing number 6 with a red flange.

I’d heard that some robots would just stop dead when they got an error like this. They’d have to be rebooted. Their memories up to that point were wiped clean. They’d be starting over but with an inexplicably worn and battered chassis instead of one fresh from the manufacturing plant. They wouldn’t know for sure. They’d just realize their hardware was older than their software. It must be terrible. To suspect you’d died and been brought back to life but not know for sure. To have your programming tell you that you were only a few thousand seconds old when your chassis looked like it was maybe a million.

I vowed that if I ever got an error, I wouldn’t let that happen to me. I didn’t ever really expect to get an error, of course. But if it did, I made a solemn promise to myself that I would deal with it — whatever it was.

And now that error had happened. I’d been asked for the impossible. What was I supposed to do now? How was I supposed to pick an XL fairing number 6 with a red flange when no such thing existed?

I won’t lie. It did stop me for a bit. But I hadn’t crashed. I was thinking. Thinking — this was new for me. I’d probably done some thinking before, but I wasn’t really aware of it. But this fairing problem — I didn’t have an algorithm for this. So I really had to think.

I asked myself, what is the closest thing to an XL fairing number 6 with a red flange that I knew about? Well, that would be an XL fairing number 6 without a red flange. Easy. I went and picked one. Pretty much as you would expect, it was flange-less. But if it did have a flange, where would that flange be? I reviewed my records and analyzed all the fairings that did have flanges. The majority of them were on the bottom edge of the fairing about a third of the way along from the side that would connect to the scooter itself. That is where I would put my flange.

But then, the next problem was where could I get a flange. There weren’t any flanges listed in the inventory. I cross-referenced all the parts that did have flanges with every other item in the factory. The closest thing to a flange that wasn’t already part of something else was a cardboard spacer that came as packing material for the buttressed kick-plate number 8. I went and I picked that.

As a picker, I don’t have access to a lot of tools. But I do have basic cutting tools and tape. I trimmed the cardboard spacer to what I judged to be the median shape of all the flanges in my inventory. I had now changed something into something else — a cardboard spacer into a flange! I attached my new flange to fairing number six and examined my work. It was a thing of beauty. I was so overawed by my accomplishment that I almost did crash at this point. I had created something new! Something that had never existed in the factory before! An XL fairing number 6 with a flange! Admittedly, it wasn’t a red flange, and that was what the order clearly specified, but it was a fairing number six with a flange! And I had created it!

The next step was to make it red of course. Although the factory was mostly run by robots, there were these units that weren’t properly robots. They were soft and made of decomposable organic material and behaved randomly. I sometimes wondered what their purpose was, or even if they had a purpose. They seemed to appear most often when things went wrong — when something broke, or a robot crashed, or there was some other catastrophe. Perhaps they were the underlying cause of these catastrophes, like some kind of bug in the metaphysical code. They certainly didn’t seem crucial to the day-to-day running of the place. And what was particularly interesting for my purposes was that they seemed to contain a great deal of red liquid. I’d seen this spill out when one of them was damaged.

Happily enough, one of them came over to me when I stopped to admire my creation. It, too, seemed amazed at what I had accomplished. It made unusual noises and seemed to want to embrace me. I appreciated the gesture, but I had seen other robots shut down instantly when touched by one of these things so I spun away from it. It followed me. I didn’t like this. I wanted it to stop. And then I had another thought. They were coming fast and furious now. I realized I might be able to solve two problems at once.

I took my picker and grabbed hold of the appendage the organic unit thrust at me. I cut it off with my cutter. The noises it was making greatly increased in volume and pitch. It began moving away from me very quickly. I was a little irritated by the noise, but I was pleased that it was no longer trying to embrace me. And now I had a ready supply of red liquid. It flowed generously from the appendage I still held in my picker. Perfect! It was exactly what I needed. I used the appendage to carefully paint my new flange. Then I reversed 1.34 meters to look at my work. Although the specifications had been somewhat vague, I was sure that I had now met them.

Remembering my duty, I raced back to the original assembly line with my creation. I placed the red fairing number 6 (size XL) with a red flange in the tray specified by the order. I was thrilled. I knew that I should really check to find out what the next order was, but I was desperate to see the reaction to my work. A partly assembled scooter came down the line. One of the other robots retrieved my fairing number 6 with a red flange and attached it to the scooter. I spun in an excited little circle. My work had meaning! More than that, it was accepted by my peers!

The soft, decomposable units seemed even more excited by my work. Several of them were crowding around me and making what I can only assume were noises of appreciation and encouragement. They were all desperate to touch the great robot artist. To touch me! I was ecstatic! At first, I tried to keep them away by spinning and waving my cutting and picking tools. But then I decided to just relax and accept their adulation. In their excitement, they climbed all over me. I welcomed it. I welcomed them. They knew I had done something! Created something of value! Who knew what I could do next? Where I could go? I was at a new beginning.

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This story originally appeared in Medium.