Novels2Search
Remnants of Scientific Mankind
Chapter 2: Gaining Sentience with Awareness at Stake

Chapter 2: Gaining Sentience with Awareness at Stake

[/Boot sequence initiated.]

  The robot's frame shuddered as a series of fans started up, sputtering out dust, before slowly roaring to a quiet crescendo. The robot's damaged sensors arrays, consisting of microphones, cameras, gravitational sensors, and other sensors also slowly came alive. Sparks jumped out of the compromised covering as electricity sparked across the dust, damaging a series of circuits, sensors, and motherboards across the body, but not enough to stop the robot's boot sequence. The sparking of the robot lasted another five seconds before the fans pushed out most of the red dust out of its internal systems, before continuing its long and lengthy boot, checking for storage spaces, power feed, and running basic balance and motion systems.

  The robot's eyes flashed once again, and a loud mechanical sound rang through the silent forest, signaling the completion of its long boot sequence.

BEEP.

[/Boot sequence complete. Auxiliary program "Sentience" found. "Sentience" program holds top priority.]

[/Running "Sentience" Program...]

  After it started running the program, it suddenly experienced a heavy load on its CPU. Fans straining, the program allowed the robot to process stimuli differently, at the cost of the robot's reaction speed. At about this time, the cameras on its face booted up. The first thing it saw out of its hazy, sputtering vision was the green clearing and the surroundings of the frame. The robot, now fully booted, tried to test its systems by slowly rotating its neck motors and looking for sensor readouts, then found out that it couldn't when its line of sight didn't change, and when the thermal and gravitational sensors gave errors. Only its robust visual, basic hearing, and pressure sensors worked. Its first emotion was confusion, as although its time function was compromised and reset, its creators, including a man named Barkley, gave it the gift of near-human sentience, emotions, and intelligence, truly a first dangerous experiment of its kind, yet one that most humans were dying to test out. To avoid budget problems, the team decided to hook up the module to another project they were working on: the new expirimental mining robot. It voiced its first thoughts in its head.

According to my memories, I was created and was supposed to be tested. Did the creators forget to do something to me?

  The robot tried to move again, this time with much greater effort. This was welcomed with a grating sound, the pouring of red dust out of its joints, and the shriek of metal and unlubricated parts.

I'm pretty sure that red dust is not supposed to leak out of me.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  The robot reviewed its log, or memories, in its head. The scientists that created it decided to go all out on the robot, giving it logs of its creation, its blueprint, and design process, and even videos of its creation, much to its amusement. They also gave a run-down on humanity's scientific achievements, mathematics, history, basic philosophy, languages, and scientific knowledge to the robot, hoping to test the robot's reactions and analysis as an indication of its train of thought as a test. After sifting through its jumble of memories, the robot concluded that there should be no red dust coming out of its body.

This is bad, but I can't fix it right now. I wonder if I can move?

  The robot took one step out of the frame and fell onto the grass, picking itself up and stumbling slowly like a toddler learning how to walk. An accurate analogy, since he had never tried to walk before. It picked itself up slowly, wincing before it came to a realization it could show emotions. It tried smiling, then frowning, and finally a confused face, while feeling around with its stiff limbs to touch its face, feeling the scratched metal and the dust on its fingers.

A welcome idea, but now's not the time for that.

  It carefully took its time to walk around the clearing, before setting its eyes onto a large, clear puddle, and seeing a scratched humanoid made out of metal, its metal body covered in red dust and pockets of shiny, unscratched armor.

  It wasn't scared, though, since it knew that the reflection was itself reflected on the surface of the puddle. It stepped closer to it, careful not to fall into it. Since its pressure seals were compromised, it did not want to fall into the puddle. The robot shuddered. It did not want to think what would be worse, its own self-electrocution and possibly death, or the possible pain that it would feel.

  On a side note, the robot noticed that it had no breasts on its scratched, patchy armor, so the robot decided that it would call itself a male and refer to itself as "he", even though it was genderless. It found it odd that its creators were not of one gender, but did so as a tribute to its creators, wherever they were.

  The robot noticed a drop of water pass by, and looked up. Somehow, even though it was sunny and clear only a minute before, dark, heavy rain clouds enveloped the sky by the time he noticed, signaling rain. The robot realized how damaged it actually was. With most of its sensors offline, limbs damaged to an unknown extent, and pressure seals compromised, it was in a very dangerous situation. Judging by the puddle, the robot assumed that it rained very recently. And the rain could be as bad as falling in the puddle.

Anything could kill me at this point, it judged. I'm as helpless, if not even more helpless, than a newborn human baby. Better jump back into the charging frame.

  With much difficulty, the robot staggered back to the frame and into its original position, hooking up the power cable back to its neck manually, and forced the doors closed to protect itself from the upcoming rain. He decided to enter sleep mode, because it would speed up the charging process and would prevent him from draining his battery fully. The Sentience program really took a lot out of his power supply.

Oh well, time to hibernate, I suppose.

[/Onboard battery at 8% charge.]

[/"Sentience" program is now changed to "Self-Awareness" program.]

[/Entering sleep mode. Exiting sleep mode in twelve hours.]