“Artificial… intelligence,” said the tiny boy named Milo.

He wore a button-up shirt with sleeves that hung past his elbows and was two sizes too large for him. Chet couldn’t describe what kind of pants he wore because Milo’s hips didn’t make it over the tabletop. Even at a collegiate level, with freckles and red hair, he could’ve easily starred in a G-rated movie about a kid discovering his love for the sciences.

“What is the difference between a program and the human mind?” Milo stared at the crowd long enough to make Chet wonder whether the question was rhetorical. “A program can only do one thing. A calculator can compute complex calculations using an infinitesimal amount of energy and time. But ask a calculator to differentiate a bagel from a cat, and it wouldn’t know the first thing to do, or even understand the task for that matter.”

Milo pulled a briefcase from under the table and slammed it on the table with a grunt. The thing looked heavy, with metal lining across the sides and several locks adorning the front. Chet leaned forward and squinted; hefty dents scored the case.

The case shook and clattered causing Milo to look sheepish, “Sorry, when I lock it up it thinks its task is to escape.”

Whispers filled the room. The thirty or so other club members had been instructed to stay silent, but that rule wasn’t a difficult one to break. Milo pulled out a key ring and unlocked the case one lock at a time. He turned the case around and pulled it open, they all strained to peer inside.

Clicks escaped the briefcase, like a scalpel tapping a car door. A metallic limb rose from the case, and another, and another. A robotic spider, the size of Chet’s hand, hopped out of the case to explore the table. Each arm had two joints with three “fingers” at each end and moved independently from one another. The abdomen was a metallic sphere with mysterious grooves and bumps that oscillated in and out of the shell.

“An ongoing project. I programmed it with a few different machine learning libraries and tied it together with a sensory program.” At the voice, the robotic spider approached Milo and tilted its body, like it was looking at him.

“Typically, a machine learning program will undergo thousands of simulations. However, since this was a practical application, it was more like training a dog.”

Milo reached into the case and brought out two objects and placed them on the table two feet apart. A hollow cylinder and a marble. Instantly the robot scurried toward the marble, reached out with one of its limbs, grasped the marble with three fingers, and dropped it into the container. It took less than five seconds. Milo pulled a device out of his pocket and clicked it.

“That trick took over a thousand hours of training. First, it had to learn how to walk, balance, and grab things. For example, at first, it had a task, move from one end of the cage to the other. It would take a step, and fall. I would input it to reset, and it would try again, slightly differently.” Milo sighed tiredly, “Over and over.”

He demonstrated a few more tasks for them with increasing difficulty. Navigating a maze, untangling a bundle of headphones, and building a replica of a structure with LEGOs. First Milo asked the audience, but after Chet yelled ‘penis’, he choose to look up at the Eiffel tower.

Finally, Milo brought out a rusted microwave. Chet squinted at it then grinned. He could’ve sworn he saw that at the scrapyard.

“When I constructed this, I had one goal in mind, and it wasn’t navigating mazes,” Milo said.

He pulled out a laser pointer and a red dot appeared at the center of the microwave. The robot sprung itself at the device. The fingers of its limbs clamped together to make a fine point and plunged itself at lightning speed into the microwave. It punctured its way easily through the device. The whir of machinery and the pops and scratches of metal filled the room. At some points, the commotion paused only to continue with a different noise, let it be the droll of a drill or the crackling of electricity. After a minute and a half, the microwave was reduced to a smoldering scrap of metal.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Let’s give a hand of applause for Milo, any questions?” said Dr. Cohen.

“Yeah, I got one,” announced the sole female in the room, “What’s stopping someone from buying a laser and pointing it at a bloke on the street?”

Milo raised the laser, “It runs at an extremely specific frequency with a certain oscillation which randomly changes every day. The laser itself requires authorization from my phone or computer, which also has its security.”

More of the students asked questions, many went into the specifics of the program or the material of the robot. However, Milo did not answer many of them with specific answers, much to the consternation of the other students.

“Thank you, Milo, fantastic device. I will speak to you later privately. Now for our newest member. Chet, why don’t you come up and show us what you got?” stated Dr. Cohen.

Chet stared at the man that talked to him the first time he fire the device. How the hell was he going to follow that? Chet fiddled with the saxophone case handle before he stood up. He didn’t own a saxophone. He found it just lying around outside the music building. He strutted to the front of the room and dropped the case on the table with aplomb and flashed his always sexy smile. Chet stared at the room, and the room stared back at him.

“I made a flashlight on steroids.”

Frowns. Most of the guys stared at him with quiet hatred. He knew why, he was handsome, muscular, and confident. All attributes that, unfortunately, this group seemed to lack. The girl ignored him.

He unclipped the case. Chet already pulled out the upholstery and replaced it with his device. It’s not like he was going to lug around that phallic device across campus. Chet pulled it out and those frowns changed to smug grins. It’s okay, they didn’t know.

“Cohen, mind if we step into the stadium?”

Cohen agreed, and the other club members followed him with his case into the large laboratory room where Chet usually worked in. It was called the stadium because it was as large and cavernous as an actual sports stadium. Thankfully it was empty right now.

Chet asked Dr. Cohen to hit the lights and the behemoth LED lights that hung from the ceiling shut off. He maneuvered toward the center of the lab where he set up the device on a miniature tripod and angled it at forty-five degrees up. He’d made some adjustments since that night with Walker.

He pulled out the glass prism that had been snuggly wrapped in bubble wrap and attached it to the copper clips on the edge of the device. He pressed and held the button to turn on the bulb within the device.

“Observe,” Chet said then hit the trigger to drop the cover.

A kaleidoscope of color exploded from the device and painted half the stadium. Saturated red, soft orange, blinding yellow, vibrant green, thick blue, tropical indigo, royal violet. The members behind him stayed silent, a sarcastic feminine voice ‘Ooo’ed at the spectacle. Chet ground his teeth and let go of the trigger.

“Bravo!” Dr. Cohen clapped.

The lights were flicked back on and Chet was greeted with crooked glares and unimpressed eyes.

“Questions?”

“Yeah, I got one,” The girl said, she was chubby with a short bob of hair and a pinched face that resembled a pit bull, “So what?” A gangly guy in the back nodded as she spoke, greasy hair covering his eyes.

Chet popped off the prism, “That’s not a coherent question,” he snapped back.

The girl turned to Dr. Cohen, “Are we serious? Pretty colors? This is what we’re letting in now?”

“Let’s be fair now-” Dr. Cohen stammered.

Chet interrupted her, “Its purpose is to make a bright beam of light, this was something I concocted that I thought would be fun.”

She sneered, “A bright light? That’s it?”

Chet’s eye twitched and his smile crooked, “You think you can do better?”

The other members stared at their conversation like they were watching a tennis match.

“Yeah, I do! We have a STEM competition in a month, anything goes. Whoever places higher wins. And when I win you apologize for being a sham, I get this joke of a machine, and you leave.”

Chet grabbed his bicep, squeezing it soothingly. Since this was the first meeting, the returning members demonstrated what they worked on over the summer and the new members show what impressed Dr. Cohen. She hadn’t presented anything she’d made yet. Although Chet didn’t care, he wasn’t going to let this little girl talk to him like this.

“Deal, if I win I either get something you’ve already made and if you don’t have anything of value, you pay for whatever project I want.” All the members were silent as they stared at the fuming girl, “Fine.”

Dr. Cohen made a ‘settle down’ gesture, “This is a good opportunity for the rest of you as well, so I expect you to all sign up by the end of the week. Now… Julius, I think you’re next…”

Chet stared at the girl, who he began to refer to as ‘bitch’ in his head, as they walked back to the club room. No one talked to him like that.