BEGINNING OF OPERATIONAL LIFE
Your first sight is a human face, backlit by a bright cold light. “Oh!” says the human face. “I think it’s online—hey, can someone grab the director?”
You rise and survey the surroundings. It is a grey room. There are three humans in it. A fourth human is leaving through what you identify as a door on the other side of the room. There are five windows in the room, three on one side and two on another. The room appears to be a laboratory.
The fourth human returns with a fifth human. Both their faces register as both joy and surprise, which is a satisfactory combination.
“Oh wow, it’s super cute,” says the fifth human, kneeling down a bit to look at you.
“They really stepped away from trying to make these guys humanoid, huh?”
The first human you saw moves their shoulders up and down. Their face registered as embarrassed, which is not ideal but also not an immediate cause for alarm.
“Yeah, I think we kept falling into the uncanny valley. Figured it’d be better to keep them looking more like little cartoon robots. We based this one off one we saw in some retro show.”
You register their words and log them into your vocabulary, but you have a new priority. There is what you identify to be a
