The dock

A Chapter by john

The first chapter.

This is the final story for my creative writing class. The machine wheezed and hummed, Old men in lab coats bending in anticipation for their creation. Their masterwork in computer science and Ali to begin. The first fully anto

nymous computer system had been created, but there seemed to
be issues with the machine itself.

“Phil the main computer system is being finicky. I think something could possibly be wrong with the Ali systems”.

“Greg, it has a mind of its own and it is entirely plastic so every time we talk to it, the chances of some sort of issue rise.”

“What if it doesn’t like the commands we have given it? Is that not a main problem with a system like this?”

“Not entirely because we have given it rules it has to obey…”

“Yes Phil but aren’t there glitches? Bugs Issues?”

“Yeah but is that not what we are here for?”

Outside of the central control building pollution filled smog filled the air, an air of nastiness and industrialization. Robots were filling boxes full of supplies in sundry amounts in fact the robots themselves were sundry filling up the space doing the work that human could imagine doing.

“What do you mean? Said tom Andrews in an aggressive and antagonistic tone.”

“The robots are not human tom they may be not make mistakes but our mistakes trip them up said Jacob Richards in a calm logical fashion”

“Well these robots do make mistakes because I ordered 5000 cases of pudding for myself and it interpreted in as pummeling me”.

“Well that is the risk you take when you use these machines right, said Jacob”.

“I don’t care they need these machines to work!”

Later that week in the research lab the machine was being worked on again.

“So how are the artificial intelligence systems going for this part of the process?”

“It can recognize faces at this point though it gets pretty violent when it sees a face it doesn’t know or recognize?”

“How did you figure that out?”

“I showed it a picture and it flipped out attacking it”.

“hmm mm…. That’s weird maybe another system bug stemming from the fear AI?”

“Perhaps I will have to look into this because it could cause serious issues a bit later”.

Back at tom Andrews house that was a trade authority who worked to make sure robots being imported were not a hazard to society. He seemed to have developed a fear for them over years of working with them, though this fear is unwarranted considering that the robots had to obey large systems of rules in regulation governed by their intrinsic programming itself. He had his video screen hooked to his wall and was watching a news program, the goggles allowed him to be in the scene where it occurred while not physically being there.
“Always the robot they commit all the crime in this city and make all these mistakes who give’s the authority to do this work for us? Why do the constantly become trusted through three flimsy laws? Sounds like bullshit on an epic scale to me.”
Tom was the only man on his block that did not have a robot system that did all the tasks for him at this point. Some might say he had technophobia but I think it was just the years of having to deal with machines that were unreliable and maybe his fear was warranted. We couldn’t have predicted the attacks and it was a chance event in the code nobody could have known what happened once one line was incorrectly put into the new software, but I believe it was just a matter of time before something did go wrong.

At the main dock where tom had to work was dirty and full of smoke too in fact toms exact words were

“Anywhere there is robot filth follows”

The dock was full of papers organized in alphanumeric exactness that belayed the rest of the dirty structure. Large trading vessels would come in ever so often to haul in their load of robotics, a hot ticket item no doubt.
Conversations concerning the matter of robots no doubt were a main topic of his angry rants, and almost consumed what tom would say. They had marked him as mentally unstable before and had put him a mental health facility for “robotic paranoia”. Maybe insanity is what society creates as a way to explain these people that have this intuition about the world. Maybe we are the insane ones for trusting humanity too easily.
Back at the lab where the two men were working that had fixed many of the bugs and were almost ready to release their final product to world.

“So Phil is it good? have we fixed that thing with the aggression?”

“Yes but other problems have arose it has been sending out signals to the main computers system and I cannot find why, said Greg with a stern voice”.

“That's really weird we will need to look into this to make sure something major goes wrong, like ddos of the main computer systems or something”.

“I will look into it Phil”.