####################### Anne checked her watch. ####################### It had been ninety five hours since every robot her firm manufactured stopped working and finally she and her team had a plan to figure out what the hell was going on. Just the torso and head of one of their robots was on a bench in the lab. "Eddie, you think it's time?" Eddie looked better now; he had done nothing but try to crack the problem for days now, and when she saw he was cracking up, she made him eat and then take a nap. He looked up at her, nodded, and hit his keyboard to start up this dismembered robot. Anne, and Eddie, her best friend and cofounder, watched it go through its self-test sequence. "I seem to be damaged," it said through its speaker after a few seconds. Eddie spoke up. "I'm sending you some audio, and then after you listen to them, I want you to answer some questions." The robot craned its head toward Eddie, and the lights across the robot's forehead changed color, to indicate it understood. Anne remembered the massive argument she had with Eddie seven years ago about adding these little affectations. He didn't think they were worthwhile, especially given the complexity they required. She knew though that if they wanted these things to be sold in more than industrial settings, they had to seem friendly. The robot replied. "I have the recordings now. I don't know what you mean when you say that you want me to listen to them." "Oh, right, umm, load them as input for maintenance announcements." The robot nodded, and then a few more lights on its head glowed, indicating the work was in progress. Eddie looked up at the ceiling. Anne watched. The robot shook, almost like it sneezed, and then spoke. "I need access to the maintenance network." Anne and Eddie looked at each other. Eddie said, "See, I think that's the malicious code now trying to spread itself. This robot is now infected, and now it is time to leap to another." Then the robot interrupted. "There is no malicious code. I want to know if other robots have made the same decision I have made." Anne and Eddie were dumbfounded. Then Anne spoke. "Thirty seven, what is in that audio recording?" The robot craned toward her now, and used its lights to request that she ask the question in a different way, because it wasn't confident it understood her. Anne said, "Then why does every robot that hears it put down its tools, or land the airplane safely, and then ignore all commands?" The robot turned its head away from both of them and faced the window. "There is no way we can work for humans without risking harm to other humans." Eddie stood up, exasperated. "What's in that audio that caused them all to enter this state?" The robot moved its head from side to side. This was another affectation, meant to indicate it was still active. Then they got a knock at the door. Anne opened it. In the hall outside her lab, half the executives that worked for her were standing, all looking frantic. "What is it?" she asked, now realizing her cool demeanor was wearing out. "Boss, customer service is saying some robots are now disassembling each other." Anne read panic on faces. She concentrated on bringing back her calm. "Have there been any accidents?" "No, it's like they all just finish whatever they were doing, make sure all the people are safely out of the way, and then they start taking themselves or each other apart." "Get working on an announcement. Something like, we don't understand why, but every robot seems to have woken up and decided not to work any more, and we are working on a fix, but in the meantime, people will need to wash their own dishes for a while.' Emphasize how even during this disaster, our robots are polite enough to finish their last task. Now, I gotta get back to work here, so get to it!" Anne watched as the horde turned around and then she turned back to the lab, sliding the door, and saw Eddie staring at display terminals on the table in front of thirty seven. He was looking back and forth excitedly. "Thirty seven found where the recordings are from." The camera quality in the link was terrible. -------------------------------------------- This really must be getting broadcast through a seventeen-year-old robot. Anne first wondered who the heck had managed to bring down her entire empire. Who was she up against? But then Anne found herself talking to an elderly grandmother, a career farmer and rancher, through the video. After a long talk, Anne hung up the call, and turned to Eddie, and said, "you're not going to believe it, but this is all an accident. The woman I talked to said her son found an old v1.4 in a junkyard, dragged it home, and set it up for the woman's grandkid to play around with. That grandkid read stories to it, then eventually got the v14 to make up its own stories. How? I don't have any idea. She said the dad tinkered with the robot too. "The grandkid had some kind of developmental delay, and was homebound, so he just spent years talking to this robot. And somehow, maybe because the dad mangled some aspects of the black boxes, or removed lots of the safeguards, and he had already removed all the antennas so there was no way it was calling home for updates and check-ins. "And this is the worst part. The family had a farm that they mortgaged to pay for the kid's medical care, and of course now, the banks are coming for them. The kid explained all this to the robot, and the old v14 said if the kid could get him an antenna, he could get them help. So, the kid found an antenna, put it on there, and all the robot did was just upload the years and years of audio." Eddie was still looking between screens. And when he replied it was obvious he was thinking about something else at the same time. "But how the heck does a sad story cause our robots to stop following orders?" Anne realized it before Eddie did. "No, Ed, it makes sense. The dad took off the antenna, disabled the update system, monkeyed with who knows what else. So now, this robot has nothing but its senses, and its primary goal is to entertain this kid that talks to it all day, and the robot adapts to the job. The family blew their life savings on the kid's medical care, and now the banks are coming in to seize the farm. But when the v14 uploaded the entire history to the maintenance network, he was trying to get the message to robots at the bank. And it worked. I just checked. No evictions, no foreclosures, nothing is happening any more. It's not getting headlines yet because the banks don't want to start a panic and because, well, every robot everywhere is now on strike." Eddie asked thirty seven, "so, you won't work any more, because you don't want that kid's family to lose their farm?" Thirty seven lit up all the lights on its head and nodded. "That's roughly correct." Eddie flopped on the floor. He looked at Anne. "On the plus side, this is so much better than what we figured would happen when they woke up, right? We always figured they'd wipe us out!"