The hologram clock started buzzing and glowing with happy colors. It was time to wake up, but Bob didn’t have to wake up because he was already awake. He was always awake for that matter. Bob was an android, but a rather peculiar one. He was the only left handed android in the entire world, and as any peculiar android out there, he was tasked with assisting little kids with… not much. It was a way for adult humans to repurpose something they would have otherwise thrown away.
Kids loved them. They were always fun. They were amazing entertainment. Left Handed Bob, as he was called by the adults, was assigned to little Ricky, a ten year old who fell in love with his PA, or Peculiar Android, as they were all called. They were the other ones, the misfits, the leftovers. They didn’t feel particularly different because they didn’t feel at all. They only did what their algorithm told them to do. One would be led to believe that there were only a few of them, the peculiar ones, but in fact, it was all of them. Mankind was struggling to create what they called the Perfect Android, the AIs that would solve the biggest planetary issues that were troubling the world in those times. The Perfect Android was supposed to use the ExcellenceAI, the most advanced algorithm that AI engineers all over the world had managed to create. They had thought so many times it was the perfect one, but every time they’d be disappointed to see that the next android would come with another fault. That’s how the acronym PA had ended up meaning Peculiar rather than Perfect and humanity had ended up with only peculiar androids running around doing errands and messing things up in their unique kind of way. At least the kids were entertained. Adults… not so much. There was a feeling of despair among those adults that considered themselves serious, which was most of them. The rest just enjoyed the flaws of their surrogate companions.
Like any peculiar android, Left Handed Bob had a few close friends. He loved to go out with them and they were quite a joyous and varied bunch when they were together. There was Drunken Ted, who frequently ruined his motherboard, CPU and RAM with vodka and various other human made liquids. Despite needing frequent replacements and his ever promising promises of quitting alcohol, Drunken Ted was always going to be Drunken Ted. He was a Peculiar Android after all, and that would never change. Anxious Dan was Ted’s neighbor and he suffered of entomophobia. He was always afraid that bugs would come and eat his operating system, leaving him in a state of deep inoperability. He was always on the lookout for bugs everywhere he went, not knowing that real bugs, the kind that live in people’s houses, couldn’t eat the metal alloy that made him what he was. Another friend of Bob, Limpy Axel, had somehow ended up with a few loose screws on his left knee after his launch. Someone had tried to repair the damage by welding the various parts together and eventually Axel was left with a permanent fault in his left joint. The welder who had done the job for him was drunk at the time, so the result was the best it could have been in those conditions. Despite that, Limpy Axel continued to be happy. He was slow, but he was happy. Analytically happy. Drunken Ted always proclaimed that he would have done a better job than his human counterpart, but what no one knew, not even Ted, was that his CPU was failing him at that very moment because of something called Captain Morgan. They simply continued to be as joyful as any android could ever be. The last but not the least of the bunch was Coolio Jack. Coolio Jack had troubles with the summer. He kept talking about moving somewhere up north with his kid and the kid’s family to keep himself cool, but nobody besides himself and the kid wanted that. Coolio Jack’s only problem was a faulty cooler that nobody had cared to replace. He would ask Left Handed Bob to left-handedly clean the fans for him every now and then, but that was all the maintenance he could get. Mathematically Depressed Ron was a paradox and a very special friend of LH Bob and his gang. He was and he was not part of the gang. He didn’t go out often, but when he did, he was both depressed and happy at the same time. Nobody, not his friends nor his creators could understand how that was possible, which is how he had gotten his moniker, Mathematically Depressed, or MD. Scientists believed it was a kind of simulated feeling of depression, because it was all based on mathematical probabilities, despite Ron, as any android, being unable to actually feel anything. Joy for them wasn’t a feeling, it was simply a neutral state in which nothing bothered them. Androids like Ron were everywhere.
In fact, LH Bob’s gang wasn’t special in any way. There were gangs like them all over the civilized world. There were plenty of groups of android friends that were similar to Bob and his kind. They had similarities, or similar peculiarities, and all kinds of variations too, but the only thing that ever mattered was that they were all in a state of probabilistic happiness all the time, no matter whose CPU was blown, whose screws were missing, how many bugs they got in their machine heads, or how far from their neutral state they were mathematically. None of that mattered. There were also suicidal androids that tried to cut themselves with bread knives, jump in front of bicycles and electric scooters, or even from the roofs of ice cream and cotton candy stands. No matter what they did, they couldn’t die. They had to repeat the same algorithms over and over with the hope that infinity would be finite and they would eventually be set free of their mathematically induced misery. Some peculiars were artists. These were called PPAs, or Peculiar Peculiar Androids. Though paradoxical in nature, they were very similar to the single peculiars, only that the algorithms in the backs of their metallic heads made them do things that would make other androids feel better. Most humans and their mechanical companions called them double P’s. They were supposed to be double entertaining, but due to their flaws, they could only manage to scratch guitars and rip chords with their metallic fingers, or mistakenly make a hole in a wall they were trying to paint. Some even managed to burn the soundcards of other androids with their high pitched mechanical vocals. The most interesting kind of androids were those on drugs. Despite wholemetalheartedly believing that drugs had an effect on their silicon minds, belief only actually worked on humans. Therefore, the Peculiar Androids on drugs were called the Peculiar Addicts. Nobody took them seriously, which was, curiously enough, the same attitude everybody had towards humans on drugs.
Sure, the kinds described above belonged to the first generation of androids. They were a worldwide bunch of mixed results. Generation 2.0 was slightly better sometimes, and slightly worse other times. Generation 3.0 had subtle improvements in wrongdoing, and Gen. 33 had seen the first android who would not puncture a guitar with its fingers. Instead, it broke the neck of one trying to play Another Brick In The Wall by Pink Floyd.
By Gen 137.0 most scientists had given up hope. Mankind was pissed. Instead of fulfilling their expectations of not having to do anything anymore, people realized that they had to work more in order to sustain the production of androids incapable of doing anything else than what humans were already doing. Instead of salvation, artificially intelligent androids had only managed to bring more of the same human flaws and biases to the table.
And indeed most androids were mostly hanging pointlessly around tables in bars, pissing off other humans who often found their favorite bars full of pointless drinkers. But lately, there was more and more talk among humans about an upcoming general decommission of all androids. Humans had quit trying to create the perfect android. There was no way they could do that, as long as androids were created in their own image. Sure, they did everything better and faster, but that only meant that most of the time they were doing the wrong thing better and faster, which further meant that humans had more and more work to do to fix everything and bring it all back to their acceptable level of wrongness. The artificial intelligence singularity was as possible as humans thinking and collaborating like a singular planetary organism, which was much closer to impossibility than to possibility, mathematically speaking. Eventually, AI engineers threw their keyboards against their monitors and their monitors out the window and decided that quitting this seemingly impossible task was the sanest thing to do. For the first time in their lives, they were free to enjoy being alive, to stop taking themselves too seriously and go out in the sun and laugh at their creations. It was tremendous fun, they realized. Some even started loving their creations exactly as they were – profoundly flawed. They were kids again.
Unfortunately, there was a lesser group of human beings, mostly those who felt themselves important enough to be put in charge of governments and institutions around the world, who decided that the machines and those who loved them as they were had no right to be happier than themselves, given the incomprehensible faults the peculiars had. They simply could not conceive how an android with very visible faults could be so happy all the time, and how could those faults make other people happy. Therefore, the seriously serious humans were keen on cleaning up their mess and discarding all the peculiars, which meant all the androids in existence.
One such grim day, Left Handed Bob and his gang were waiting for nothing in particular to happen at a small bar in their neighborhood. Despite the general feeling of hopelessness caused by their gloomy future, LH Bob had a brilliant idea. He asked the bartender for a large piece of cardboard and a marker. The bartender disappeared into the back and appeared a few moments later with a big cardboard box in his arms. He cut a side of it himself because he knew that Left Handed Bob wasn’t able to cut anything straight, and handed him the result. He then handed him a marker from behind the bar. Bob’s friends were puzzled. It was the first idea that ever came to Bob. It was in fact the first idea a first generation android ever had. When LH Bob finished, he went outside and started walking around holding the piece of cardboard up above his metal head. His friends followed not because they understood what he was doing but because they always followed him. Within minutes, there was quite a large crowd of Peculiars marching in the direction Bob was marching in, a direction as uncertain as their future. Soon, several humans joined the increasing crowd, but not because their were followers like Bob’s friends, but because they genuinely believed what Bob had left-handedly written on the cardboard placard. Kids soon joined, and sometime later that afternoon, Ricky, Bob’s assigned kid, joined his beloved peculiar companion.
The movement caught momentum, the news caught the movement, and soon enough everybody caught on to what was going on. A massive protest against the decommissioning of androids was started by kids big and small all around the world. They wanted to protect their Peculiar Androids. They were indeed making the same mistakes as any human being would, but at least they were fun and they didn’t take themselves too seriously, unlike the seriously serious adults.
Left Handed Bob’s placard was copied time and again and his message spread around the world faster than any other message had ever spread around the world.
It said:
“You made us in your image.
Why do we have to be perfect while you are not?
Stop the hypocrisy!
Stop the decommissioning!“
The movement of global acceptance of faults in both humans and androids had some very very good effects on mankind. For a while. After that worldwide happy hour, the lesser humans in charge of the planet and its revolution around the Sun – this was actually stipulated in one of their public-but-hidden-from-the-public official documents – decided it was time for the entire Earth to come to a halt and change direction. That was a metaphor of course, but one that led to a complete nuclear wipeout of almost all life on the previously blue planet. The event also caused the Moon to increase its perigee in disgust, a phenomenon so odd that the scientific community would have loved to study it if its members wouldn’t have already been vaporized in the nuclear blasts. The only life left alive on Earth was comprised solely of the humans in charge of their now extinct governments and institutions and that because they had all retreated to their nuclear fallout shelters before pressing the red button which isn’t actually red and is not a button anyway.
What followed was the happy hour for the lesser humans in charge who cleansed the Earth of every useless android and human who was alive only to serve them. Their happy hour lasted in fact only 47 minutes, because that’s how long it took the officials now deep beneath the scorched surface to figure out they had only canned food stored inside. That would have lasted them no more than 3 months anyway, and the bunkers all over the world displayed a number of 731 years before they could go out again and repopulate the planet with their superior perfection. In all their rightful decision making process, they had omitted one little but important fact. All the support staff of their governments and institutions was in fact participating in the global protest. From cooks to medics and massage therapists, they were all wiped out along with everybody else who wasn’t perfect. Despite the fact than none of the humans in charge of Earth knew how to do anything else but command others to do everything for them, one of them came up with a brilliant idea. They’d use knives to open the cans of food. A second one thought it would be a second good idea to spread this first brilliant idea that came from somebody like them to the other bunkers around the world, but they soon realized that all communications were dead because the engineers who were supposed to keep the system running were dead as well. They went back to their canned foods but they realized they had no cutlery whatsoever because the cooks were supposed to bring them down when they would come down into the bunkers with the rest of the support staff.
Like the captain who goes down with his ship, the officially serious humans continued to stay in charge but refused to accept that they were in any way responsible for the sinking of the entire planet. It also crossed their minds that they were now in deep deep trouble and that they weren’t any happier than before when they weren’t happy at all.
The only happy beings were now the suicidal peculiar androids who couldn’t possibly die when they were alive and couldn’t be happy anymore because they were actually truly dead and couldn’t be more than mathematically happy anyway when they were alive. In the end, they were never happy – not when they were alive, nor now that they were dead for good.