Eschewing the Upgrade Path

by Mary E. Lowd

Originally published in Maradia’s Robot Emporium, March 2025

“The one that looks like a forest from one angle but a nebula from another angle, and either way it’s goddamned beautiful and somehow full of teardrops? That takes more than mere hardwiring.”

KL-2 was designed to paint murals.  That was all.  The clunky little robot rolled through the corridors of Crossroads Station on treads that could have been more efficient, scanning walls with sensors that could have been more precise, looking for blank wall spaces that could use embellishment, and then it filled them with artistic scenes, designed to appeal to the multitudinous alien species who lived on the station.   KL-2 was an expert at knowing what kinds of colors and designs would look most pleasing to various species’ eyes. Continue reading “Eschewing the Upgrade Path”

Echoes of an Accelerated Life

by Mary E. Lowd

Originally published in Maradia’s Robot Emporium, March 2025

“But Pernal 60 had lived too fast. When it ran out of art to absorb, it had made its own… until it ran out of things to say about the world as it currently existed.”

This is the tragic story of the smartest, fastest, most beautiful AI that Maradia ever programmed.

Maradia had programmed many successful AIs before, and her robotic children populated the halls of Crossroads Space Station, living alongside the human and alien inhabitants, forming subcultures of their own.

Tailoring the seed code from previous successful AIs into new personalities designed to animate particular robots was generally easy.  However, Maradia had recently constructed a compression algorithm that would allow the next AI she designed to think much, much faster than any of the AIs she’d programmed before. Continue reading “Echoes of an Accelerated Life”

A Robot Joins Robotics Club

by Mary E. Lowd

Originally published in Maradia’s Robot Emporium, March 2025

“Fix the hateful robot by bleaching zir brain, rewriting zir algorithms, they’d say. They’d never think to fix the hate inside themselves.”

Rariel 77 surveyed the digital catalogue of zir bodies.  Zhe had built dozens of them, ranging from tiny insect-like drones to fully humanoid figures.  Zir creator, Maradia, insisted that none of the other AIs she’d programmed had ever developed a fascination for building, collecting, and swapping bodies like they were clothes before.  Most of them chose one body they liked best and settled into it, melding AI brain to mechanical body, becoming a single being.  (Though, apparently, a couple of them went through a dinosaur-obsession phase first, much like human children.) Continue reading “A Robot Joins Robotics Club”

Shipshape Relationship

by Mary E. Lowd

Originally published in Maradia’s Robot Emporium, March 2025

“Her whole life had changed that day, and she didn’t want to go back to what her life had been like before a spaceship had fallen in love with her.”

Addie stood in Maradia’s Robot Emporium, staring at the wall of mechanical parts and trying to look like she was shopping.  She wasn’t.  The Seabreeze Sinewave didn’t need any repairs — at least, not the kind you could fix with spare parts.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” Maradia asked, “Or just pretend to be fascinated by servo-motors all afternoon?”

Addie turned to find the roboticist watching her.  Maradia had looked so absorbed in her work when Addie came in, she hadn’t realized the roboticist had noticed her at all. Continue reading “Shipshape Relationship”

French, Borgen, Severance, The Rain, and AI

My 17-year-old has been learning French and practices by trying to repeat lines in things we watch, translated into French.

Right now, we’re watching Lord of the Rings… so he keeps repeating the name Frodo when characters say it… but in a French accent. Continue reading “French, Borgen, Severance, The Rain, and AI”