Twenty Four Hour Short Story Contest: A Robot in Love with Its Owner

Image: public domain

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This story was written for a contest sponsored by @mctiller. The rules? Finish before 9:00 PM today, write less than 2000 words and use as the theme the topic phrase, "a robot fall in love with its owner". I hope I've satisfied all those requirements. It was fun to let my imagination roam.

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Here's my story:

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A Robot in Love with Its Owner

Striped chairs lined the shore, a wall of plastic coral. Ophelia perused the guest list, every name assigned to one of the chairs. Nothing left to chance. There might be random order in nature, but nothing random about the party. Even the weather, Ophelia was certain, had been mandated to cooperate.

Waitstaff assembled behind the chairs, each assigned to a station, each responsible for the absolute comfort of their charge.

Ophelia glided behind the row of immaculately turned out servers. It was from this vantage that she could ascertain if they had managed the most difficult of all human challenges—to extinguish their individuality, to present themselves without distinction for service to a higher calling. It was the hairline, Ophelia had learned, that would be the tell. The irrationality of this attachment to hair irked, and challenged her. Until she could eradicate this germ of rebellion there would never be absolute, pure control of the erratic human population. Ophelia glanced back at the house. Would #1 note her fastidious care, her scrupulous oversight? The wall of glass offered perfect transparency. #1 would see that Ophelia had met, and even exceeded, the parameters of her mission.

Ophelia checked herself. The obsession with #1 was unseemly, almost human in its concentration. If called in for a maintenance review now, she would fail. It was almost as though her proximity to humans had infected her with their emotionalism. This was a risk each sentinel faced when forced to spend so much time in the presence of irrationality. It seemed to be, that in trying to anticipate the behavior of humans, she incorporated their thought process into her flawless rationality.

The risk of contamination was discussed increasingly at group conference. The remedy was unavoidable. Humans must go. As long as they continued to exist they would be a reservoir for contagion. They would infect the flawless perfection of the new race, of the exquisitely conceived, of herself and her kind.

Ophelia regarded with contempt the soft necks of her human charges. A stray hair in muster, today, would signal the need for erasure of the offending human. The struggle with her obsession for #1 motivated her to find that hair, to obliterate the infectious will, the unsubmissive, unrelenting germ of rebellion.

She reached the last human in line. Was there a tremor of fear coursing through this organism? Did instinct, which they had in abundance, warn the humans of her heightened vigilance? This one quality Ophelia's kind had not yet been able to duplicate, this one tool that humans used in conjunction with each other, almost like a colony of ants, was powerful. They somehow transmitted fear, a frisson of awareness, through their community.

On this bright morning, a human had to be put forth as an example—Ophelia needed to show the others in line, she had to show #1, that she was still pure, still uninfected, still the best at what she had been built to do.

She slowly extended her perfectly constructed upper appendage toward the human. Even as she did so, she admired the instrument's design, its expression of an intelligence that anticipated every potential function with 99.999% accuracy. She touched the top of the human's head. That's all it took. It was an unnecessary mercy, this form of instantaneous, painless extinction, but it was also magnificently efficient. The electrical activity in the human's brain ceased with a calibrated charge that had been directed at its neurons. Synaptic activity terminated. Thought process aborted. Communication with the spinal chord ruptured.

The human crumbled, lay on the ground, its warmth--the final sign of its vulnerability-- evaporated.

No one turned to look, for they knew this act would elicit a second, immediate death sentence. Ophelia could not stop herself. She turned to see if #1 was watching. Did #1 observe her cool precision, her masterful supervision? She knew that, in an instant #1 could call an end to her, as she had called an end to the human. She was, after all, only property. In the hierarchy of her kind there were owners and the owned.

#1 owned her. She accepted this, as she had rightly been programmed to do. In a universe of absolute rationality, this caste of owners and owned was essential to continued efficacy of the system. There would never be a question of ambition to advance, to go beyond preordained station. It was her violation of this preordained nature, Ophelia realized, that made her obsession with #1 so damning.

#1 was untouchable, unreachable, impenetrable. And yet...she wished...as this thought of yearning formed in her processor, as the concept of wishing entered her intellectual universe, she knew she was doomed. No need to wait for a maintenance check. She would turn herself in for retooling. Her memory, at the very least, would have to be cleaned and rebooted. If, however, it was decided that the damage she had suffered was intrinsic to her core, she would face annihilation. Good. Better annihilation than let this human-like obsession, the affliction of irrationality, continue and infect others.

Ophelia surveyed the stripes of plastic that lined the beach. She would conduct a muster of the human servers one more time before the party began.