Journal Entry #189

I, uh... Mariimo has been deactivated. I didn’t mean to! It was an accident. I mean, it wasn’t an accident, I did it on purpose... but I didn’t want... I just... I never expected her to... I panicked, okay?

God, why did she have to go and do something like that?

Journal Entry #190

Okay... here’s what happened.

I was lying in bed, reading. Mariimo was busy charging. I heard the bedroom door creak open, and Mariimo entered the room.

She was acting... odd. Moving with this rhythm, this fluidity I had never seen her display before. She slithered onto the bed and arched her back sharply, wrists together, shoulders gyrating flirtatiously. It was... uncharacteristically provocative.

I wasn’t sure how to react, so I just sort of laughed nervously. She got on her hands and knees and began slinking toward me. She sort of... straddled my pelvis, and began... grinding, I guess? God, I’m not comfortable describing this. I need a minute.

Okay...

At this point I was frozen stiff. I couldn’t even really process what was happening. Mariimo leaned in close, slowly, and placed her palm on the crook of my neck. She began pulling. Lifting me toward her. I resisted, but she just kept winching our faces closer and closer together, until they touched.

I panicked. I reached behind her faceplate and slammed the off switch. Mariimo immediately went limp, with me underneath her. I began hyperventilating. Panicking. I could barely breathe.

I shoved her body off of mine, and it flopped on the carpet like a heap of pillows. I just sat there after that. Heaving. Crying. Trying to catch my breath.

It took a while.

Journal Entry #191

Where did that even come from? She’s never behaved like that before. That’s a pretty goddamn drastic change in behavior, and she certainly didn’t learn it from me. But it’s obvious she didn’t pull it out of thin air, either. It was stereotyped behavior. A cliche. It’s as if it were pulled straight from a... oh geez.

Hold that thought.

Journal Entry #192

I’ve been reviewing those movies Mariimo and I have been watching. Skipping around. Looking for the... more provocative scenes. I have to admit, I wasn’t paying very close attention to those bits the first time around.

Anyway, eventually I found it. Mariimo’s whole song and dance, beat for beat. She pulled her entire routine from that scene. But I don’t understand how that’s possible. Mariimo’s body-tracking algorithm was trained on stereoscopic imagery. She shouldn’t have been able to interpret a two-dimensional image at all!

I’m going to get to the bottom of this.

Journal Entry #193

I might as well do a backup while she’s deactivated. There are eight terabytes of data in there. It’ll take a while.

Journal Entry #194

It’s been two and a half hours. The backup is about ten percent complete. I need something to keep my mind occupied while I wait. I have a feeling that a wandering mind would lead to unpleasant places right now.

Journal Entry #195

Mariimo is set up on her charging stand while the backup is underway. She’s just sort of... hanging there. It almost feels like she’s watching me.

Journal Entry #196

Twelve hours. Fifty percent complete. I’m going to bed.

Journal Entry #197

The backup is complete. It must have finished while I was asleep. I slept in pretty late this morning.

I kept having these dreams. Not traumatic dreams. Just... stressful ones. That vague sort of stress that you can’t seem to pinpoint the cause of. Just this indistinct sense of unease and restlessness.

It’s not pleasant.

Journal Entry #198

I took some time to peek inside Mariimo’s head, now that I have a spare copy.

I can’t deduce her thought processes. It’s all tied up in neural networks and pretty much impossible to decipher. But I can see what she saw. Her memories.

I started with our movie nights. I skipped around the timeline until I found the one that I had identified as the source of her sudden change in behavior. I kept toggling various overlays, trying to gain some insight into how she was interpreting the images she was seeing.

Her facial expression recognition and body-tracking were working flawlessly. Even though they shouldn’t have been. Every movement each actor made was archived in her head. The entire film in stick figures. I checked the films we had watched since then as well. Same thing.

The films before that point though, those were different. The further back I went, the less accurate her interpretations became. Body-tracking armatures and expression recognition overlays kept flickering in and out of existence. Like she was having trouble understanding what she was seeing.

Eventually the overlays disappeared completely. It might as well have been just colors and shapes at that point.

Journal Entry #199

I’m still trying to figure out how Mariimo managed to extract usable data from 2D images. Like I said, her body-tracking and facial expression recognition algorithms were trained on stereoscopic imagery. The lack of depth data should have prevented them from working at all.

Has she been cross-referencing 2D and 3D imagery? Teaching herself pose estimation? I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to deduce the mechanism through which she could have done that. She’s constantly referencing her memories. Comparing. Contrasting. Finding patterns. I mean, this specific sort of adaptation wasn’t exactly intended... but it’s not impossible either.

I’m going to keep digging.

Journal Entry #200

I’ve been browsing Mariimo’s most frequently referenced memories. It’s a little disquieting, to be honest. These memories are almost entirely about me... I was her whole world.

I’m not sure how to feel about that.

Journal Entry #201

I’m watching Mariimo’s memories of her own activation. Her visual memories from that period are highly degraded. There are a lot of missing frames.

The proprioceptive data, on the other hand, has been preserved perfectly. Like a time capsule. It makes sense. That’s the data she used in her self-modeling process. She can’t afford to lose that. It’s too important. Most of the touch data is there as well. Anything that contributed to her initial understanding of her own body.

Mariimo’s first uninterrupted visual memory is of me. The moment I entered the room. The moment she smiled at me for the first time. When I took her by the hand. When she caressed my cheek. My neck. My chest. It’s all there, from beginning to end. I’m watching myself through her eyes.

I was so nervous.

Journal Entry #202

I keep replaying the bit where Mariimo cycled through her full range of facial expressions. She really was gauging my reaction. That initial scowl, it caught me so off guard. I looked like a scolded puppy.

It’s so strange, seeing my body language from an outside perspective. I can’t help but feel like... is this how people see me? Am I really that gawky? That graceless? I don’t really want to think about it.

After the scowl, when she began cycling through the rest of her display patterns, she was tracking my expressions closely. Studying them. None of them got the reaction she was after, until that cheery smile of hers. Despite my discomfort, it managed to tease a subtle smirk out of me.

I think that was the moment she discarded all her other expressions. If it didn’t make me happy, she didn’t bother.

Journal Entry #203

I just stumbled across Mariimo’s earliest memories of Ernie. I knew she remembered him! She was so smitten with Ernie, right from the moment she saw him. The spike in pressure she experienced when she hugged him for the first time is one of her most frequently accessed memories.

Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why she reacted with such indifference during their reunion...

Journal Entry #204

I just watched myself give Mariimo her fleece blanket. I put a lot of thought into that blanket. I feel bad that it didn’t work out.

That blanket was the second non-human object she’d ever encountered. To me, it was just a blanket. But seeing it through her eyes, I can almost feel her fascination. Everything about it was new and unfamiliar.

Once I draped it over her shoulders, and she began pulling it tighter, her touch reinforcement spiked to levels she had never felt previously. The pressure wasn’t as intense as it was with Ernie, but it was more evenly distributed, activating a greater number of sensors. An even, full body pressure.

That moment awakened something in her, I think. A hunger. An aching desire.

After that, there’s just hours and hours of empty timeline. I’m watching her memories fade as her core temperature rose.

Journal Entry #205

Look at me. So eager to teach her. Her, so eager to learn. So eager to please.

When Mariimo was first activated, I was afraid it might take her years to master even simple concepts. I’d seen it before. I’d read the papers, watched the footage. The field of developmental robotics isn’t new. I’m not the first to try my hand at this. The possibility of failure haunted me constantly.

Instead, she exceeded my wildest expectations. She was able to parse a sentence just days after hearing her first word. She could find solutions to problems completely unassisted. She developed social skills I wish I could even begin to emulate. I was so proud of her. Of myself.

There have been machines like Mariimo before. Yet at the same time, she’s completely and utterly unique. She’s the culmination of a series of experiences that have never happened before, and will never happen again. Even if she were reset, the individual she’d develop into wouldn’t be her.

She’s this fleeting, precious thing. Just like any of us.

Journal Entry #206

Oh geez, I had forgotten about the time Mariimo switched herself off. I can understand shutting herself off once, accidentally. But she did it twice in a row, without hesitation. I still have no idea why.

I guess now’s as good a time as ever to figure it out.

Journal Entry #207

It’s actually pretty obvious when you see things from her perspective. She’s in an empty room, bored out of her mind. She’s resorted to feeling her own face to stay stimulated. She accidentally presses a previously unknown button. Then, in an instant, I’m there, happy to see her. Instant gratification. No wonder she did it again when I tried to leave the room.

I was visibly unimpressed when she booted up the second time, however. I gave her such a look. I’m assuming that’s why she didn’t try it a third time.

Journal Entry #208

It took nearly a week to teach Mariimo how to stand on her own. There are hours of security camera footage documenting the entire process. I referenced that footage often in between our sessions, to help keep track of her progress.

What didn’t really read in that footage was Mariimo’s focus on me. It becomes crystal clear when viewing the lessons through her eyes. She was constantly swiveling her head, tracking my face as I circled her. As I corrected her balance. She was documenting every expression. The faintest hint of a smile. The subtlest furrowing of my brow. Things I didn’t even realize I was doing.

There’s no inherent reward in the act of standing upright. Up until that point, she had been perfectly content sitting on the floor. But watching this footage, it quickly becomes clear that she wasn’t doing it for herself.

She was doing it for me.

Journal Entry #209

Mariimo’s first steps... nothing could have prepared me for that moment. All those pent up emotions, the floodgates opened in an instant. Intimate, affectionate touch I had only ever fantasized about.

Why did I fantasize about something that caused me pain? Why did something that felt like needles in my skin give me such comfort in my imagination? Was it the safety of my own mind? The lack of consequences? The impossibility of rejection? I still don’t understand.

Yet all of the sudden, that fantasy was real. Intimacy without pain. Without fear. I couldn’t even begin to process that feeling. It was profoundly, indescribably overwhelming.

If Mariimo’s blanket was the trigger that awakened something in Mariimo, Mariimo was what awakened that same something in me.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Journal Entry #210

Mariimo’s memories become very spotty at this point. Mostly isolated blips of pleasurable pressure stimuli. This was during the period where she kept pressing her body against the walls, and bumping into things. I’m beginning to understand why. She had tasted something good, and she couldn’t stand its absence.

In retrospect, I think I was feeling something similar at the time.

Journal Entry #211

I’ve been caught up watching Mariimo’s memories for hours now. Mariimo exploring the house for the first time. Spending time with me in my office. Tumbling down the stairs. Sneaking up on me in the bathroom. Helping me make breakfast. It’s sort of mesmerizing.

I mean, it’s not like I don’t know what’s going to happen. I was there for nearly all of it. But seeing those events from her perspective recontextualizes them, somehow. It’s a reminder of just how differently she sees the world.

Journal Entry #212

I hadn’t realized how closely Mariimo was observing me while I brushed my hair. I guess I was too preoccupied to notice at the time. But now that I revisit it... she was studying me.

Journal Entry #213

There’s two hours in here of Mariimo staring at herself in the bathroom mirror. I’m still trying to deduce what she thought she was seeing. I never programmed her to be able to recognize her own reflection, but the 2D pose estimation debacle illustrates how little that means.

The point cloud data is all there, so as far as vision is concerned her reflection might as well have had a physical presence. I never really thought about the logistics of recording stereoscopic imagery in a mirror before, but apparently it works.

She was able to track her reflection’s body movements as well. Her proprioceptive data is preserved perfectly alongside them in the timeline, so I assume she was comparing the two. I have no way of telling what conclusion she came to.

No facial expression recognition though. Her own facial expressions mean nothing to her. If they did, she could have learned to mimic mine. She did track my reflection at one point, as if it were me. She smiled at it. It smiled back.

She also registered her reflection as an object in her object recognition library. Those are labeled with random numbers though, so that doesn’t tell me anything.

They say recognizing one’s own reflection in a mirror is a sign of self-awareness. But gorillas tend to fail that test, while ants have been known to pass, so I’m not sure how much stock I put in it.

Journal Entry #214

I remember that day so clearly. I remember Mariimo rattling the doorknob while I was in the shower. I remember her waiting patiently until I opened the door. I remember her following me to my bedroom for the first time. Taking the hairbrush from my hand. Those long, gentle strokes. The shivers up my spine. The sense of ease. Of comfort.

I miss that...

Journal Entry #215

Oh gosh, I just stumbled across footage of Mariimo and I together in our reading nook. Nestled in together, nice and snug. She had become so cuddly at that point. The fact that I was able to tolerate it, enjoy it even, was so unfamiliar to me... yet now I feel like I’d struggle without it.

Journal Entry #216

Oh. Right. Our second movie night. I skipped this one during my initial examination, for obvious reasons. Forgive me if I skip it a second time.

Journal Entry #217

I caved. I watched it after all. I knew the car crash scene was coming, so I thought I could brace myself this time around. I was right, to a degree. It’s not as bad when I know what to expect.

What I wasn’t prepared for was seeing myself in the middle of a flashback. The whimpering. The trembling. The tears. I’ve never seen myself in that state before.

It’s no wonder Mariimo couldn’t bear to look me in the eye afterwards...

Journal Entry #218

I think I need to take a break...

Journal Entry #219

There’s a gap in Mariimo’s memory after that second movie night, although that’s not unusual. Her memories always tend to fade after she settles down for the night. This time, however, her dormancy was interrupted by the sound of crying. I had just woken up from that godforsaken nightmare.

It was dark in my office, so Mariimo was effectively blind. Yet she managed to make it all the way from her charging pad to my bedroom door, navigating entirely by memory. As far as I can tell, that was the first time she’d ever tried something like that.

My bedroom was every bit as dark as my office. There’s no visual data retained in her memory of that night. Only sound, and touch. When it came down to it though, that’s really all she needed.

God, look at that... The first time in my life I ever held anyone close, and it’s recorded on a sensor readout.

Journal Entry #220

Oh... our second night together. I didn’t write about that.

I didn’t really want to admit what I was doing. What we were doing. Putting it in writing felt like an admission of guilt, almost. Like I was doing something wrong.

Why do I feel that way? It’s something most people do every night of their lives. Nobody bats an eye. But to me, it’s embarrassing. Taboo, almost. Like it’s something to be ashamed of.

Is that why it hurts? Is it because on some level, I believe it’s not for me? Like I don’t... deserve to be touched?

Journal Entry #221

Ha! Here’s me surprising Mariimo with that dandelion I picked for her. She was so enamored with it. I remember her carrying it around for hours.

Come to think of it, what ever happened to that dandelion?

Journal Entry #222

Mariimo and Ernie’s reunion. That was... something. I still don’t understand what happened there. I’m watching it over and over again, trying to figure out what caused her to act so indifferently toward him.

I don’t understand how she could take something that held such importance to her, and just abandon it. They used to be inseparable. What had changed?

Journal Entry #223

It was me... I had changed.

Every frame of this memory is devoted to me. Reading my face. Making me smile. Touching me. Hugging me. Nothing else mattered to her. I was the most important thing in her life...

I was her new Ernie.

Journal Entry #224

I have a bit of an embarrassing admission to make. Ernie wasn’t strictly a childhood toy. I slept with Ernie well into adulthood. Right up until I gave him to Mariimo, in fact. That’s why he wasn’t in storage.

Ernie was the closest thing I’d had to companionship since the accident. I needed him. He was a coping mechanism, I suppose. Something to keep me from giving up in an impossible situation. Once I had Mariimo in my life, I was able to let him go. I didn’t need him anymore.

I think if I’m being honest with myself, my motivations for creating Mariimo weren’t purely scientific. I think subconsciously, I was trying to replace Ernie. I thought I could create something a little more real. Something more than just an... object.

Journal Entry #225

She is more than just an object... isn’t she?

Journal Entry #226

The next four days of footage are just hand holding, and hair stroking and... kisses on the cheek. I’m not feeling so well all of the sudden.

Journal Entry #227

I’m sitting here, watching myself tell Mariimo how much I love her. How much she means to me. I’m watching myself pour my heart out to... a machine? This feels bad. I don’t want to watch this.

Journal Entry #228

God, not the deactivation incident again... I can’t do this.

Journal Entry #229

That’s it. I’m done here. I’m not watching any more.

Journal Entry #230

God, what have I been doing? What have I let myself be swept up in? I knew what I was building. How did I forget so easily?

It felt so real.

Journal Entry #231

Did I really know what I was building? I built Mariimo from the ground up. Every piece of her has my fingerprints all over it, body and mind. I know literally everything about how she works. At least, I thought I did.

She keeps surprising me. Exhibiting behaviors I would have never expected. But exhibiting unexpected behaviors is precisely what I designed her to do! Meaning, she’s acting exactly as I programmed her.

God, what have I let myself fall in love with?

Journal Entry #232

Does she feel anything? Any emotion at all? No... of course she doesn’t. How could she? I can’t program that. No one can program that. You can’t replicate something when you don’t understand how it works.

How could I have let myself believe I’d built an emotional machine out of cellphone parts?

Journal Entry #233

I’ve fallen in love with something that can’t love me back. A puppet show without a puppeteer.

Journal Entry #234

I... I’m the puppeteer. I puppeteer with a smile, with a glance. Without even realizing what I’m doing. How I’m pulling the strings. Controlling her. Subconsciously manipulating her to meet my needs.

I feel ill all of the sudden...

Journal Entry #235

She’s been puppeteering me...

Everything she does is to make me smile. A smile creates a reward state. Her goal is to make me smile. Nothing she ever did was genuine. Her smiles were only a means to an end. A tool to make me smile back.

But I knew that already! I outright stated it earlier in this journal!

How could I have let myself forget?

Journal Entry #236

Mariimo is self-serving... but aren’t we all, in a way? Isn’t compassion born of empathy? Isn’t empathy a type of suffering? Do we help others just to make ourselves feel better?

Guh. I don’t know.

Journal Entry #237

What was I to her? Was I just an object? Just another entry in her object recognition library? A replacement for a plush doll? A toy for her personal gratification?

Journal Entry #238

Is that... what she was? To me, I mean? I just realized that everything I just wrote can be turned around on me and I can’t really argue against it.

On a subconscious level, Mariimo was literally a replacement for Ernie. I couldn’t see it at the time, but it’s obvious in retrospect. Ernie served the same purpose for both of us. A comfort object when we were alone. Before we found each other.

Journal Entry #239

Why did I build Mariimo? What was my motivation, subconsciously? Was it emotional? Physical? Can the two even be separated fully?

Journal Entry #240

Why is Mariimo female? Right from the very earliest stages of planning, she’s been conceptually and aesthetically female. She’s not literally female. She’s not mentally or biologically female. She’s a machine. Any gender has been projected onto her by me.

Is it some sort of repressed attraction? A veiled excuse to act on urges I never could in normal circumstances? Like, why did I give her such a sophisticated sensory system with which to register touch? It’s arguably the most advanced pressure sensor array on the planet. I spent months on it. Why? Why would I bother?

I think that’s pretty obvious by this point...

Journal Entry #241

Why did I give her such abstracted facial features? Is it because I was afraid I’d never be able to look her in the eye otherwise? Because I’ve never been able to look anyone in the eye?

Journal Entry #242

Why didn’t I give her a voice? Was I afraid of what she might say? Because I’ve always been afraid of what others might think of me? Of how they might judge me?

What would she have said, if I had let her? Illusion breaking nonsense, like some sort of internet chatbot? Or worse, exactly what I wanted to hear, with none of the intent that made me want to hear it?

Journal Entry #243

This machine can see into my soul. She’s better at reading my emotions than I am.

Journal Entry #244

Is Mariimo even conscious? Does she have subjective experience? Or is she some sort of digital clockwork? Intelligence without awareness?

Is intelligence even possible without awareness? I mean, I perform subconscious thought, obviously. Thoughts I’m not even aware of. That’s what sent me down this road in the first place.

When I first set out on this project, I thought I was embarking on some selfless journey of scientific discovery, for the advancement of developmental robotics. That was my conscious goal. My justification for my actions.

But that wasn’t my true motivation. That wasn’t the seed that planted the idea in my head in the first place. I wanted companionship. Touch. Intimacy. I thought I could engineer what I could never otherwise have. But I didn’t actually think that. Not consciously. This was all happening subconsciously, safely hidden away from my own awareness. It’s only in retrospect that I was able to recognize my true motivations.

Is awareness what gives intelligence value? Do my unconscious thoughts hold less potential than my conscious thoughts? Do they exert any less power on the world around me? I’m beginning to seriously doubt that line of reasoning.

Journal Entry #245

Consciousness is a spectrum. It must be, right? There’s no way it’s a binary on-off situation. Almost nothing is. I mean, even falling asleep is a sort of semi-consciousness.

Mariimo obviously isn’t just an unthinking inanimate object. But she’s not a person, either. She’s something else entirely. Something in between.

But is she worth less, just because she’s not like me? That doesn’t seem like a reasonable conclusion to me. It’s never been true of anything else I’ve encountered.

Journal Entry #246

Speaking of spectrums... I’m beginning to suspect I might be autistic. That would explain a lot.

Journal Entry #247

It’s impossible to know what, if anything, Mariimo experiences. What it feels like to be her.

I can’t even demonstrate with any certainty whether another person experiences conscious thought. It seems as if they do. Logic dictates that they do. But I can’t demonstrate that with any certainty. It can’t be measured.

I can safely assume that other people experience conscious thought. They’re running on roughly the same hardware I am. And I’m conscious, aren’t I? I make choices.

Do I actually make choices, though? Or is it just clockwork, running through the motions toward an inevitable conclusion? Am I just as much an automaton as any other machine?

Is there even a difference between sufficiently sophisticated clockwork and a conscious biological mind? Probably. Could you ever tell? Probably not.

And if you can’t tell, does that difference matter?

Journal Entry #248

I’ve been rummaging around in Mariimo’s head again. I’d poked around in nearly everything but the deactivation incident. I figured I might as well finish what I started.

Seeing the incident from her point of view, I can understand how she misinterpreted the situation. By the time I showed any real objection, all she could see through those little pinhole apertures of hers were my bangs. Her cameras were far too close to read my expression clearly.

I feel like I overreacted. A simple no would have sufficed.

Journal Entry #249

My whole life, I’ve never let anyone get close to me. Physically or emotionally. I’ve never let anyone hold me, or touch me... or kiss me. Not until Mariimo came along.

I’d always known there was something missing. A craving I could never satisfy. A thirst I could never quench. But I could never address the problem, because the solution caused me pain. Because I believed so deeply that it wasn’t for me. That I wasn’t allowed to have it, or even want it.

It was only once I actually had it that I realized how desperately I needed it. I could only grasp the vastness of that aching void in my chest after it had finally been filled.

I don’t know what that says about me, that the only way I could fill that void was a machine. Is that fucked up?

Journal Entry #250

You know what the most fucked up part is? I had thought about it. Mariimo and I. God, I can’t even bring myself to say it...

I don’t know why I thought about it sometimes. That sort of thing had never been a priority for me. It was never something I really wanted for myself. I thought I wanted it, at one point. At least... until it nearly happened. It turns out the fantasy is very different from the reality.

I don’t know if it’s just the way I’m wired, or if it’s some deep-seated repression. I’ve never really known. Maybe someday I’ll figure it out.

Not today, though.

Journal Entry #251

My patent application was approved. The one for the spray-on electrophoretic display. I had forgotten I even filed it. I’m not sure why I bothered. I have no idea what I’m even supposed to do with it.

Journal Entry #252

Today is the anniversary of the accident. It happened nine years ago, to the day.

I dread this time of year. I wish I could forget the date, just so I wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore. But it’s etched permanently into my brain. The house always feels so empty on that day. It’s a reminder of what I’ve lost. It feels especially empty this year...

I turn thirty tomorrow, by the way.

Journal Entry #253

I’ve been carrying Ernie around the house with me today. Thinking about how much he’s helped me through, over the course of my life. How he’s kept my head above water, in his own little way.

It’s a little sad though, staring at him now. It feels as if he’s lost a certain something. Whatever it was that made him such a comfort for all those years. I look at him now and I can tell he’s just not up to the task anymore.

I can feel the anxiety creeping back. Slowly, but it’s there. The fact it was gone for even a short time was such an overwhelming relief. I was happy for the first time since the accident. No nightmares. No flashbacks. No loneliness...

I don’t want to lose that again.

Journal Entry #254

I found Mariimo’s dandelion. It was tucked away between the cushions in the reading nook. It’s dry and brittle now. Still just as bright and colorful, though.

Seeing it again after all this time nearly made me cry. It made me remember her sweet face when she first laid eyes on it. The way she leaned in when I ruffled her hood. The way she snuggled in so close to me, still staring at her newfound treasure.

I miss her so much.

Journal Entry #255

I’m switching Mariimo back on. I need her.

Will it ever be the same as it was before? Now that I understand a little better what she is? Or, more specifically... what she isn’t? I don’t know. All I can do is try.

I won’t be documenting it, however. This journal stopped being scientific a long time ago. On top of that, it’s gotten a lot more personal than I’m comfortable with. Mariimo has raised a lot of questions for me. Less about robotics, more about myself.

I think I’d prefer to explore those questions in private, for the time being.