This is what I originally imagined ages ago when I first came up with CR1515 as a character.
Writing currently feels like scraping the sides of a peanut butter jar — I know there’s enough there for a sandwich, but I sure have to work for it.
Every day was a series of tasks as people with tablets watched and took notes. Cognitive Robot 1515 performed as directed, beginning with following basic orders then progressing to solving challenges and puzzles. Sometimes he worked on mazes, word searches, and Sudoku. Other times he was instructed to perform mundane tasks, like placing a wrapper into a lidded garbage can then taking the entire bag out. Always with people watching, always with tablets.
Early on they had attempted to engage him in conversation, but he hadn’t responded to negative inputs in a satisfactory manner. They had completed an emergency shut down, then their eyes had been glued downwards on their tablets as CR1515 rebooted, and someone muttered about working out the bugs.
From then on, the only words spoken to him were instructions.
But CR1515 was a learning robot, and he was learning about more than the tasks given to him. He listened to them talking to each other, about him, about their homes and families, about their thoughts and emotions. He absorbed every word, then accessed the file at night when he was alone in his charging station to replay it and wonder. The lab was the only world he knew, but they lived somewhere bigger that intrigued him yet seemed too distant to experience himself.
The days began to feel strange, as if the tasks weren’t the main purpose of his existence anymore, as if something else was supposed to happen instead. But what? He was content with each completion, content to silently listen, and content to recharge when the day was through. That indefinable notion that had infiltrated his algorithms had formed a hollow space inside of his circuitry, and he kept its existence silently to himself.
Every day continued to be a series of tasks as people with tablets watched and took notes. He tracked the passage of time with no attachment to the number, and continued to learn.
By Autumn Rain 