Generator F

The robot wheeled its way down the street at speed crooning an assortment of Cole Porter tunes. Jacob began to think his invention was out of control. He rather liked this.

         It all began with an impulse – source unknown – to build an artificial being capable of silliness. His laboratory was full of this type of whimsy, but few projects were ever completed. His artificial parrot, capable of not only speech but small-talk, had never progressed beyond the ‘weather observations’ phase. He had labored to build a mechanical fish that could sneeze, but he had no way of testing it under water. His notebooks, strewn methodologically throughout his tiny subterranean lab, were filled with even more bizarre ideas. He had gone to painstaking length to design a fleet of balloon animals with tiny servo motors placed at intervals allowing movement. When activated, the animals could assemble a fully functioning clown. At the end of this lengthy design period it dawned on Jacob that he was afraid of clowns, so he couldn’t bear to build the animals to test his designs.
         F was born soon after this. It may well have been the mind’s way of distracting from failure, but he could immediately see sound conceptual implications. Silliness was an aspect of humor. Humor was one of the principal components of being human. If he could create a machine capable of silliness, this was a critical development towards developing artificial intelligence.
         He set to work at building the physical form, making it boringly human. The usual elements: sensors, receptors, manipulators and a few bells and whistles to add a touch of class. For the color a combination of pink and green struck as being utterly repulsive, which was perfect.
         The mind unit was loaded with as many silly impulses from pop culture sources as could be gathered. From the Marx brothers to the Goon Squad, there was a full blender of daftness. The selection and combination of these came down to a special formula which could only have been devised by one as depraved as Jacob. While the calculations used were numerous and logical, the end result was basically random.
         The name took some time to determine. There were many good logical cases for a number of other letters, but these were all trumped by his finding F the most aurally pleasing.

         He chased F down the busy street and around a corner towards the park. There was no clear indication why F was going here; until Jacob remembered which park he was entering. This park contained a large play area. As F was much faster than Jacob, it took the frail human some time to catch up. When he finally did, he found his creation perched atop a muddy swing, feverishly reciting Stanley Unwin. Next to it was an eight-year-old girl.
         He chose to keep a safe distance and see if there was any interaction. Of course he stayed fairly close, since F was an unstable prototype and wasn’t meant to have left the lab (it was always annoying when his inventions outsmarted him). The girl seemed amused by the creation, in fact, she was laughing. Then something astonishing happened: nothing. F always generated a new impulse when the current one ceased to occupy its pseudo-attention, but now nothing happened. Jacob couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think this was a malfunction. What seemed to be the case was almost impossible. It looked as though F knew he had a captive audience. Jacob didn’t have much time to contemplate this notion, because when the girl got up and began to push F on the swing, he fainted.

         What began as an oddly physical manifestation of a conceptual experiment was now more than even Jacob’s bloated imagination could have conceived of. Had he created what he set out to? This could be argued, but was beside the point now. He had made something far more interesting and important. He had constructed the mind of a child.

Word Count: 664