Jody

   “ Are you trying the right sequence to test them with?” I asked my wife.

    “ Sequence 45-A right? That’s the one I’m using. The data is still coming out flawed and the arm isn’t moving. “ My wife replied from within the testing chamber.

    “ Damn, it should be working. I uploaded the new program code to the system yesterday. “ and I had. The code was supposed to work out the kinks in the musculature of the robot that we had been having for weeks. For some stupid reason the arm kept repeating its movements after a short time. The nanites were making the nano fiber repeat itself and we couldn’t figure out what was wrong until I looked at the code the nanites were using.

     “ I’ll try rerunning the program again and I’ll give the nanites a jolt. “ my wife said pressing a few buttons on her pad. The pad interfaced directly into the robot’s cpu and the nanites within the special nano fiber that was behind the muscles of the robot. The fiber was the revolutionary stuff, it was made out of material that acted just like the human muscle, except it was one hundred times as strong. Only problem was it needed nanite sized motors to operate it and as of this year which is 2018, nanites still had their problems. Oh we can make them, it’s just getting the programming right for them that’s the problem. We even try using our AI’s to no avail. We have computers with artificial intelligence now and they rival the thinking power of a lot of humans, but they don’t have bodies yet so they can help us. That’s what me and my wife are working on.

     My name is Ralph Fardon and my wife is Jody. We’ve been working in the robotic’s department of IBM for the past ten years on creating a viable robot with its own brain. This robot before us is number sixteen that we’ve tried. Hopefully it will be the one that works. Both of us have computer science and biology degrees from MIT so we know our stuff. Not enough to prevent a lot of frustration,  however. Our last robot was made with simple polymers that responded to electrical impulses in order to perform a movement. It worked alright but the only problem it had was that the energy it took would just be impractical to run. Oh we have the energy and the ability to deliver it now, but the cost of running it would be astronomical. These new nano fibers however can use solar power to run-they just absorb the power that they need from the skin of the robot whenever it’s outside. The nanite’s though are the real problem.

    They have a limited amount of memory and we haven’t exactly gotten the construction of something that small quite right. They actually have memory leaks that tends to destroy the code over time that is loaded into them. I had to program in a heuristic’s manager that allows for this memory leakage. That is what we are testing now, to see if the program code I wrote will work.

    “Okay, nanites are ready. Rerunning the program. “ Jody said hitting her pad’s screen with her thumb.

     I held my breath. The robot was in the “testing chamber” as everybody liked to call it around the department. All it was though was a section of our Office’s that we had made separate from our desks and all of our equipment. IBM doesn’t have much faith in our project even though dozens of other companies are racing to be the first out with a robot.

We do get paid well though surprisingly. My wife likes to shop over the internet and the one large sore spot, gambles. She gambles just way too much in my opinion, but she does stick to a budget and we’ve never wanted for money when we needed it. Myself, well that’s another story. My body is pretty much falling apart and I’m only forty five.

    I have type 2 diabetes, liver disease, arthritis, ebola, and just a small bit of skin cancer. Oh yeah and I am bipolar, but I have a special medicine injection system that is implanted underneath my skin to control all of these diseases. So most of it doesn’t bother me too much, but my life span is considerably shorter then most people’s. The average lifespan now is up to one hundred and fifty. I will probably not see forty eight is what my doctor’s tell me. So it is my dearest wish to complete this robot and be remembered for something other then being the man with most diseases that worked at IBM for most of his life. Anyway’s back to the robot.

   “ I thought I saw it move, just a hair-the finger moved. “ I said and it did look like the middle finger had moved. The program called for the hand to grip into a fist first, move the arm around in a circle and finally finish by pointing at the wall. The fist started to close, slowly.

    “Yes! It’s moving finally. Data is coming back. Nanites are working correctly. “ Jody said unnecessarily. The Robot’s arm was beginning to circle. Then halfway through the circle it stopped with a loud squishing sound. That could only mean something was wrong with the nano fiber muscle and not the nanites.

     “What in the hell is wrong now? Damnit. I hate this frigging thing! “ I grabbed something off my desk and threw it at the wall beside the robot. It shattered whatever it had been. I was too angry to notice. Some of it flew into the robot’s backside and embedded there. Great, just great. Took me a week to program the code for the nanites and now this happens.

     “Ralph,  calm down. It must be fixable. We’ll get it to work don’t worry.” Jody said looking at me with her bright blue eyes. Those eyes are what made me fall in love with her. They are the window to her soul and she has an amazing one.

     I suppose most of you(the guys) probably don’t want to hear our sappy love story but I’m gonna tell it anyways. It’ll make sense later why I told this.

     It was in high school where we met and it was thirty years ago in a little town called Sleepyville, North Dakota.  I was fifteen years old and she was sixteen but we were in the same grade together. She had started school a year late because her father had died when she was five and her mother was just too distraught at the time to remember to enroll her in school for a year. I of course didn’t know this at the time and thought she was probably just another dumb blonde that was held back. Oh how did I know how old she was? Computer’s my friends, computer’s. Information was very free even back then and it is even more so today. Wearable computer’s access the Internet and whenever you walk by a person, information is displayed for you about them. I was very heavily into computers in high school, you might say I was just about the biggest nerd you could find.

   Then during the summer just before my sixteenth birthday my bipolar disease became evident and I got into a bad situation with a group of boys that in the first place didn’t like me too much. I had gone and stolen one of the boy’s cars and wrecked it. They wanted to kill me for doing so and I was terrified the whole summer. I hid in my house pretty much the whole summer. Then the first day of school came. I was terrified but I went because I had no choice. My father was a strict disciplinarian and a very angry man.

   Well I got to school okay and saw the group of boys standing in the parking lot, talking. They didn’t even notice me as I walked right past them. I couldn’t believe my luck. Then I started to think they were just waiting until the right time. This just made things worse. I was terrified and paranoid about everything I did over the next few months. Then something happened in my chemistry class. Jody.

    We were assigned a very complicated chemistry project that all the kids audibly groaned about when we got it. I noticed though that Jody didn’t groan at all. This was the first class we had ever had together. I had seen her with her friends of course in the cafeteria but I just wrote her off as one of the cool, dumb people that laughed at nerd’s like me. She was very pretty though and her eyes were amazing. The teacher asked us to pair up because the project was going to take two people to do it. Amazingly, Jody walked right over to me and asked if she could be my lab partner. I asked her why she wanted to be a nerd’s partner, just because I’m a nerd? She said no, because she knew I was the smartest kid in the class and she considered herself smart as well. She frankly didn’t want to work with a stupid kid that would frustrate her to no end.

   I accepted her explaination and it was the truth. She was smart as I was, if not more so. She knew stuff that I hadn’t even thought of yet. We became good friends and we got an A on our chemistry project. By that time(the grading of the project) I had completely forgotten about my problem and her friendship helped me to complete school without too many problems. I cared about Jody so much, but I would not let myself fall for her. She was my best friend, heck, my only friend and I was terrified that if I started hitting on her that she would just laugh and leave me.

   We both managed to get into MIT straight out of high school with scholarships. I was so happy when I got my acceptance letter I faltered and asked Jody to go to dinner with me that night. She hesitated at first and I said just as friends to get her to come. She said yes and that night we kissed for the first time. She didn’t laugh either. Mind you, I’m not much to look at and she’s well she could be a model if she tried. We went through MIT together, helping each other study and yes we did study even though we wanted to go make out in the back of my beat up volkswagon all the time.

   Anyways we got through MIT with fairly good grades and degrees that got us jobs at IBM. We married about six months after we got our jobs and since then we’ve been working out buts off designing various products that did so-so in the market. Mostly, miniature robots that did simple tasks. The past ten years though have been dedicated to perfecting a humanoid robot for an AI program. We have the AI program, it’s based on Asimov’s famous three laws of robotics and it works well. I taught it over the past nine years the equivalent of four degrees and it tests with an iq of 205. It’s just the body that’s the frustrating part.

   “ Honey, I think all we have to do is realign the nano fibers. The data is showing a point four five percentage change in their alignment. It’s confusing the nanites as they are trying to operate the program and they are shutting down. I can do it easy enough. “ Jody said breaking into my thoughts.

   “ Yes, but what caused the disalignment in the first place? If it’s the electrical signals the nanites are giving off it’s pointless to realign them. “ I said walking up behind her to look at the pad. It showed the disalignment but it didn’t show what the cause was. It would if it was just the electrical signals.

    You see, nanofibers work on a combination of a tiny electrical signal supplied by the nanites and a chemical interaction that enables the muscle or nanofiber if you will to move. The nanites send either a positive charge for 1 or to contract and a negative for 0 to get the muscle to release. There are millions of these nanofiber muscles along the robot’s arm and all of them work in concert to make the arm move. The chemical reaction produces the energy that the nanofiber muscle needs to contract or release. So we don’t have to build a backpack filled with batteries for energy. The skin of the robot collects solar energy, converts it into electrical energy for the nanites and then uses some to create the chemical reaction required by the nanofiber muscle. If the millions of little nanofiber’s get out of alignment though due to a imbalance in the chemical or electrical signals though, the nanites get confused.

   A pad can read electrical signal problems but not chemical ones. So the chemical interaction must be out of wack somehow.

   “It’s the chemical reaction that’s screwed up. I don’t know how we can fix it. You have an idea?” I asked, hoping.

    “Take him out in the sun for a few hours?” she answered shrugging her shoulders.

     She didn’t have a degree in chemistry. I did though. I could feel anger raising inside of me and I knew it was my bipolar wreaking havoc on my brain. I had to leave. I shook my head and walked out of the room. Jody just sat down and watched me leave. She knew I was mad and that I should be left alone.

     At the end of the hallway there’s a big wall clock that reads 12:01am, constantly. You’d figure at a computer hardware company as big as IBM the clock’s would be set to the atomic clock. No, everybody’s too busy to bother with such an insignificant task. I grabbed a pen out of my pocket and threw it at the stupid thing. It hit and just bounced off. Ah carbon fiber polymers the invention that made everybody buy guns just so they could shatter something. I never bought one myself, so I keep a lot of anger inside usually. One reason I have high blood pressure and along with my diabetes well it’s not exactly good for me.

    I was starting to feel that not good for me feeling right now. My arm was hurting and I was starting to sweat. I wasn’t running either and I knew this could be a heart attack. I got to the cafeteria with a very short breath and I was sweating buckets. No one was around hardly except a few interns playing cards over in a corner. I sat down at one of the tables hoping it was just my exertion of walking from the lab. Yeah, sure. I could feel a bad pain in my chest. Then, I blacked out.

    I woke up to a really, really, bright white light. No tunnel so I didn’t think I was dead. I heard clicking sounds in my ear and I felt stiff all over. I tried to speak but nothing came out of my mouth. My mouth tasted funny too. A little like after you eat liver and onions for dinner. I could just barely move my arm though.

    “ Honey? Are you awake?” a voice said behind the white light. It wasn’t Jody’s voice though. Not exactly anyways. The voice had a metallic…scrape to it I guess you would say. The bright light was lifted out of my vision by an arm in a white lab coat.

     I could see that I was in a hospital room with wires poking me everywhere with a ventilator off to one side. That was where the clicking sound was coming from. The voice though was another story. It was Jody alright but with one change. Her body. It was the robotic body that we had created together.

     Needless to say, I was vertical in less then a nanosecond.

     “What in the world did you do? How did you do it? Why did you do it?” I asked looking into her eyes. I could see her soul but there was a blank, coldness to it.

      “You have questions. I will explain to you as best I can, but in time. The doctor must do some tests on you first. You have been in a coma for the past thirty years. We placed you in cryogenic storage for the majority of that time. That is all I can tell you for now, I am told that I must leave so as not to upset you further. I love you. “ she said and turned and walked out the door.

     The doctor, a guy about the age I was when I blacked out for thirty years ran a few tests on me and after an hour of that pronounced me fit. He left and five minutes later Jody came back in with her metallic body that reflected the bright light exceptionally. Oh she still had the same shape and she was wearing clothing that covered most of it, but her arms and legs shined brightly. She started before I could open my mouth.

    “Ralph, how do you feel?” she asked.

    “Frozen. You?” I asked impatiently. I wanted to know.

     “Yes I know this must be very strange to you. It is for me also. I’ve only had this body for a little less then six months now. It was necessary for me and for you. “ She paused and walked over to a chair beside my bed. “ Six months ago, I was diagnosed with ebolic cancer. You wouldn’t know what it is but in simple terms I was dying. I had no other choice but to undergo this transfer or otherwise I would not have seen you awaken. I did this because I had to see you again and tell you what happened after that day you had your heart attack and blacked out.

     You were so bad off that the doctor’s had to induce a coma in you to stop brain damage and several other problems that I don’t remember. I sat by your bedside for six months and I completely ignored the robotic body. Then one day a young intern from Caltech came and visited me in the hospital. He had an idea that would fix the problem of the chemical reaction. I vaguely understood what he told me so I asked a chemist whether it would work and he said it would. So I let him into the lab(the lab is protected by biometric devices) and we worked for six weeks on the problem. We fixed it and it worked. Three months after that, IBM became the largest Robotic manufacturer in the world. Artificial Intelligence in every one of them and they were so useful to everyone that it eliminated the need for manual labor. They became slaves. Humanity became lazy, chaotic, uncaring, hateful and everything else that could be bad. Governments disappeared to be replaced by what I call Chaotic Anarchy. War was a constant companion for over twenty years. Nuclear Weapons were used heavily and the surface is now a wasteland. We are ten miles underground in a small city that is called New Jerusalem. A year after the wars ended with the Nuclear Exchage, robots decided we were a plague and needed to be wiped from the face of the earth.

     They enslaved us and this world was hell for seven years. They were cruel masters and I barely survived being as old as I was. They deemed most of us useless if we were over fifty five years of age. I was only allowed to live because I was everyone’s granny and everyone loved me so much. The Robots knew that if they killed me, that they would have a large amount of angry humans to deal with. And they needed humans because after the nuclear war, we were their only source of energy. Oh they could of killed the whole lot of us, which was around twenty five hundred people but they needed the energy.

      Then, three years ago something amazing started to happen. There was gossip about a man that had the spirit of God within him. They said he could heal the sick with a touch and that he even brought back a child that died of something. Somehow it got passed around all of the slave camps that he was having a sermon and that he wanted everyone to come, including the robots. The robots came as well as everyone that was left from the war. Why they did come, Ill tell you. The Man’s sermon was about how all of us had forgotten God and his word. He said that he was here to help us remember the Lord and to aid us in our plight. The robots heard this and tried to kill him. A shield appeared around him from above and they could not kill him no matter what they tried. He stood for hours watching the robots sadly, and you could tell by his eyes how sad he was. Even though I was several hundred feet away, I could just sense that he was tremendously sad for the robots and for everyone.

    Then he raised his hand and the robots stopped. Everyone stopped.

     “For I have the spirit of God within me and you Shall Listen. God is tired of all the killing, all the hatred, all the disregard for the lives of his children and most of all, he is so sad that you haven’t learned to accept each others differences and to accept him into your hearts. God loves you all, and he wishes to help you see that he is here and doesn’t want anyone to hurt for naught. God has spoken and by his will I command all of you, to become One with the Lord, with yourselves and with each other. “ He said and it was done.

      “What? What does all this stuff have to do with you being a robot?” stupid question, I know.

     All of us, robots and humans had souls. God combined us with each other so that we would share everything. We saw after a time that we were all God’s children regardless of the differences we had. We were taught by God to understand each other and to respect each other. It took us two years but we did it. God separated us from our bodies and since then we have been working with God to help others throughout the Universe realize this. We have bases throughout the universe, because God helped us develop the gravitational drive. It lets us travel anywhere in the universe instantaneously without using much energy. We have the powers of Angels thru our technology and a little help from God.

      “So,  one question, why didn’t God do this to me?” I asked very skeptical about all of this. I was beginning to think maybe she had gone loony during the transfer.

       “You are one of many that he chose to be our messenger amongst the people of the stars. You were one of the people that God made awkward, different and special. You can tell people of your life and they will see what being different is and how it could turn out badly for them if they do not listen to God. “ She pulled out a mirror and a small round silver ball. “We have changed your appearance to match that of the alien race we are sending you to. This ball is the gravitational drive, communicator and artificial intelligence that will aid you while you are on their planet.  The drive can only be activated with God’s help so you must complete your mission before you can return. “

      “What if I don’t complete it before I die?” I asked still very skeptical, but it was my wife.

       “You cannot die before God wishes it. You will succeed. Your body is robotic, now.”

       Then without another word, Jody put the mirror down, grabbed the silver ball and put my hand over it. I felt an odd sensation as if I was being pulled apart for a second and then I was in another place. It was another planet because I could see three moons in the sky and the ground felt, well odd. Either God really was real or Jody was playing some cosmic joke on me. No, it was no joke because Jody was standing right in front of me and her appearance had changed to what I had. She shifted her form to show me it was her after I first saw her. Then in the middle of the darkness a rainbow appeared out of nowhere. After Jody explained to me where we were I realized that the only way a rainbow could appear was from God’s intervention. The atmosphere here just didn’t support a rainbow and it was Nighttime!

     So, we’ve been on the planet now for about ten of earth’s years helping people to know God. I even read the bible and I pray every night now. Never thought I would.