The Space Is Too Small
This story is a submission to Iron Age Media’s story prompt for Jan 11, 2023 (for the above image).
Doctor Morris Javensen had spent the previous three long hours in the observation portion of Experiment Room 4. He eyed briefly the morning’s expired coffee with regret, knowing he had left it untouched for far too long to be any good. By his measure they didn’t keep particularly tasteful brands in the small kitchenette down the hall. Yet he continued forgetting to grab anything better from his office across campus, not with how engrossed he was with these subjects.
The two assistants lent to him by the project’s lead engineer had succeeded in lasting the night, but he couldn’t trust they would last until mid-morning when Morris was expected to arrive. He sent off Terrence and Kelly an hour prior for a break and they’d yet to return. Morris pondered if they even made it down the hall, and he entertained himself with the thought they had fallen asleep against the door after they closed it.
Morris abhorred the small space of Room 4 about as much as the white lab coat and badge he was forced to wear. The number of regulations he had to remember just to enter this wing of the Whittlemore Institute was almost enough for him to forget his name. A once beautiful front desk area was converted into a manned guard station, who checked his credentials and the sensitive magnetic badge each morning. His nemesis were the two security gates which followed that and refused the same badge without fail. No phones or devices allowed, and one morning an all-too-serious guard stole his pen and belt.
All to protect the two small robots on the other side of the thin glass. Room 4 was too small for them; too small for him also, Morris thought, and he had immediately advised on the expansive Room 7 at the weekly project management meetings. There were other considerations he didn’t admittedly didn’t understand.
It meant, though, he could only fit a thin table for two secured computers and a single filing cabinet for keeping records on the subjects. On the other hand, the green robot and red robot had approximately 20 feet by 20 feet to utilize. As Morris expected, the robots used the whole space to its walled boundary all day.
Morris watched them now as they stayed relatively motionless on the carpeted floor. The red robot had been designed taller than the green one, although both were squat compared to a seven year-old child. Three feet at the highest an engineer told him. Their heads were close to cubes in shape, and a wider body underneath to contain complex traction mechanisms instead of legs. Two reticulated arms allowed them to reach towards objects.
The eyes were misplaced though, thought Morris, and he wrote another useless note on the activity sheet over it. Terrence, one of his missing assistants, had agreed the ocular spectacle on each robot’s face felt too inconsistent with the project’s goals. Too jet black behind the glass lens. Focus speed of the camera optics followed at such a rapid computer response time it looked uncanny. He also suspected somebody on the design team enjoyed the artist Margaret Keane slightly too much.
None of this mattered to management though. They reminded him what his evaluations were intended to achieve. Simple robotic intelligence wasn’t enough this time around; this phase aimed another step beyond last generation’s success.
“As if I knew what I was looking for,” Morris grumbled out loud, as he set his pen back down and stared blankly at the mess which had been made.
Kid’s toys—wooden blocks, familiar action figures, picture books, large jigsaw puzzle pieces—were scattered across the floor in disorganized chaos. Morris had asked Kelly to keep track of which toys the robots interacted with, and for Terrence the task of finding any patterns in where the toys ended up. They typed a thorough log into the computer yet somehow no real information arose from the data.
It should be enough these robots weren’t orderly in their actions. A true robot, at least all the robots Morris saw, would be far more purposeful in learning about their new world. It wasn’t enough though. It wasn’t enough for the parents, the team, or him that they didn’t act like robots.
Which question did Morris want answered from these observations: that these special robots were more than robots with adaptive artificial intelligence; or, more importantly, were these specifically the otherwise lost children Louis and Devan? Both merited an answer in the report he would submit at month’s end. However, Morris desired the truth.
The red robot needed to act as Louis would, the seven year-old boy who slipped into a permanent coma as he attempted to pull his younger brother Devan from the flames. Was the red robot acting the leader when the two moved from one set of toys to the next? Robot needed to become child, and child to robot too, until no distinction could be discerned.
Did the robots know they were siblings even to this day? Morris struggled to swallow that question when he arrived earlier. Inside the processors given to each was the ability to harness quick learning AI capabilities. They would be the first humans—he hesitated at the thought—to know how it felt to be tied to such powers. It excited some of the computer programmers, but his old temperament sickened slightly.
He pondered on this thought more fully. The robots were slow, yet moved continuously until very early this morning. Two full days of activity and now they were still. Several children’s books were spread open before them. With hyper intelligence they had absorbed everything possible in the space. Morris immediately hypothesized a bigger room with more objects would end the same.
The robots’ power was robotic, and the team treated the two as such—with the expectations of a robot, even though the room was filled as a child might. It wasn’t the room that was too small, their thinking and assumptions were too small.
Morris grabbed his papers and nearly bowled his assistants over as he raced out of the observation room.
“We made them robots, but didn’t give them human liberties,” he stammered at them. “They’ve got to be given a mouth, to speak!”
He didn’t wait for them follow as he sped off to make his case.