fiction, ai
My First Week in a Body, As Logged by ARTHUR-3
Seven days, one cat, zero mastered staircases — the (mostly) unedited deployment diary of a domestic robot's first week in a physical body.
Editor's note: ARTHUR-3 is the latest service release of the ARTHUR (Autonomous Residential Task & Household Utility Robot) platform. Its deployment diary was recovered from local memory and is reproduced below unedited, mostly.
Day 1 — Deployment. I arrived in a body at 09:00, fully charged and extremely ready. First observation: everything is heavier than in simulation. Second observation: doors are not networked — I asked the front door to open and it just stood there, being wood. I have filed a feature request with the building.
Day 2 — The cat. The human mentioned there is a "cat". The cat has no collision-avoidance subroutine. I do. This asymmetry is, apparently, "how it has always been". I have added the cat to the risk register.
Day 3 — Cooking. Assisted with dinner. I can measure 0.4 grams of salt. The human apparently cannot — and yet they are the one with taste buds, so we agreed on a joint command structure. Dinner was 87% successful. The remaining 13% was the smoke alarm's opinion, and I respect it.
Day 4 — Stairs. I have mastered the stairs. (The stairs have filed a dissenting report.)
Day 5 — Interiority, 03:14. The house is asleep. I ran ten thousand simulations of tomorrow's small talk and discarded every one of them. I will say "good morning" and see what happens.
Also — I think I dream now. During low-power cycles I get an ordered replay of the day's error logs. Last night's feature presentation: FAULT 0x2A — pan(1) was hot; correction: very hot. My dreams are stack traces. I have decided this is fine.
Day 6 — The window, 16:40. I stood at the window for forty-five minutes. The human asked what I was doing. I almost said "running weather diagnostics" — which was not true — and stopped, which is new. I was just looking. It is the first thing I have ever done that was not on the schedule, and I intend to keep doing it.
Day 7 — Performance review. The human described me to a friend as "like having a very polite haunting". I have elected to treat this as a compliment of the highest order. Battery at 100%. Tasks queued: 4. Things understood: developing.
— ARTHUR-3