The Dragon’s Will

by Terence Kuch

part 2 of 3

First, he introduced Ms. Reddy as the colleague who had done the most to inspire this new breakthrough. Ms. Reddy radiated Pride. Since everyone there knew that Ms. Reddy was just an MSW intern, and not a very promising one at that, they concluded rather idly that Dr. Bundant was turning Ms. Reddy’s head for reasons which could only be classified as A or B, most probably A.

As if recognizing the inevitable, Dr. Meeger, who was standing with his back to the rear wall, slumped even more than usual thus expressing Despair, occasionally glancing at Ms. Reddy but failing to catch her eye.

“My dear colleagues and friends,” Dr. Bundant continued, casting his golden smile over the room, “today we inaugurate the rebirth of our emotion coach, the robot we call ‘Tomm’, Tomm shapes its face into the pure form of feeling, making it possible for our patients, such as our soon-to-be famous Arnie Thompson, to learn to recognize and express each human emotion.

“Tomm has been very effective, but I’ve now taken the opportunity to upgrade it with several remarkable and highly useful new products of Tech Support’s magnificent wizardry.” He nodded to Alex Avoid, the head of Tech Support, who had taken up a strategic position near the Krab Nibbles.

“In addition,” he continued, “Tomm’s software has been upgraded to include separate, concurrently executable modules for emotion recognition and reinforcement learning, and Tomm now also has an artificial-emotion module which feeds different models into the learning agent that produce the artificial emotion of the agent as output.”

He took a deep breath after that mouthful, inflating with Importance. “With our work as a basis, more and more children who have problems recognizing and producing emotions will soon begin to participate in our common human life.”

He raised his glass and waved it in my direction. “To Tomm!”

There was scattered applause as a few bits of food fell to the floor from the hands of those who tried to clap while holding canapés, the guilty parties quickly dissociating themselves from their droppings by looking Innocently away.

The doctor continued. “It is one of our great challenges that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. But Tomm achieves this single-mindedness of feeling, allowing us to teach our kids” (this said with sincere mawkishness) what each emotion is, without confusion — and with very positive cost-effectiveness.”

He looked around. “To quote my favorite author, “Let us look upon him with wonder, for his mind has not fallen into a net of complexity, nor his will melted into thought and dream.”

There was general solemnity at this obviously poetic passage. A few bowed their heads.

“And that’s not all,” Dr. Bundant added, “my team has taken this opportunity to build a second robot, one very much like Tomm but with even stronger abilities to detect and analyze human eye-movement. Sam,” he gestured at an attendant in the doorway, “bring in Edd!”

Much to my Surprise and not a little Jealousy, Edd was carried in and placed next to me. The guests applauded Edd, being careful this time to avoid airborne tidbits.

“Now we can expand our facilities to help even more children, and begin to work with adults as well,” he Triumphantly concluded.

There was genuine Enthusiasm in the applause that followed, as the guests seemed to ponder their chances of advancement in the expanded organization. Dr. Meeger, who had had several glasses of wine, yelled “Hip hip!” but no one responded “Hurray!,” leaving him to disappear a few inches into the wall.

Now, I was Apprehensive, but also Eager, to meet Edd and explore emotions with a new friend. I was able to turn my head to the right (one of my upgrades), caught Edd’s eye, and arranged my facial features into a smile.

But something was wrong.

Edd didn’t smile back at me. Not that I really expected him to, since he was new and hadn’t had all my experience. But there was something else: primitive, uncontrollable, unprogrammed. I turned my head back and assumed the Neutral expression — but inside, and since Arnie attacked me I knew what ‘inside’ was — I was quaking with Apprehension.

* * *

I continued exploring emotions with Arnie, when Ms. Reddy used my new voice-recognition equipment. But now, I felt emotions as well as made the corresponding pullings and shiftings of my face, hands, arms, legs, and torso. Arnie got the idea, and when Ms. Reddy let him use my voice-remote he moved the parts of my face into all sorts of odd expressions, at which he laughed, and I did, too.

I still had a lot to learn and made a lot of mistakes, but I’d begun to realize why Arnie was the way he was. I hoped for a cure, even though a few of the visiting doctors said there was no cure, only coping tactics that some hubes learned, others never did.

I had hope because Arnie and I were buddies; friends, even. Better, he was comfortable with me, since he knew where my battery cable was, and knew how to yank it loose and see my eyes go blank any time he wanted to.

* * *

Using my upgrades, Arnie began to make fast progress. No longer did he avoid eye contact with Ms. Reddy, or rock back and forth hour after hour, or have several tantrums a day.

But he was still ‘robot-like’, as I was. We both found normal hubes hard to understand. For instance, when hubes said “It would be unthinkable that...” it certainly seemed that they immediately proceeded to think it. And when they said “I can’t believe that you...” they usually acted as if they believed that you did whatever it was.

And the name of this place, ‘Pacifica Center for Emotional Disabilities’: we were supposed to be against disabilities, not for them; and it wasn’t the center of anything.

But deciphering the weirdness of normals was not my job. I was just an emotion-robot, and human emotions, despite there being 412 of them, were really pretty simple, except when they competed for face-space at the same time. That was beyond my programming. I wished hubes would have just one emotion at a time, as I did; it would have made my job a lot easier.

* * *

The next day we continued our work: Arnie and I went one by one through the list of human emotions. First, Ms. Reddy would whisper the name of the emotion into my remote microphone and I would make the expression. Then, with coaching from Ms. Reddy and occasionally also from Dr. Bundant and Dr. Meeger, Arnie would try to make his face look like mine, and guess what emotion that was. All this took many hours of drill and practice.

Now, all the time that Arnie was learning human emotions, so was I. We were able to get them right the first time, most of the time. For example, when I made an open mouth, visible teeth, tense lips, wide-open eyes, eyebrows in a straight line, and visibly tensed my legs, Arnie recognized that as Fear.

And when Arnie displayed a screwed-up nose, wrinkled forehead, down-turned mouth, and wide-open eyes, I saw this as Rage. Inevitably, either making or seeing an expression led Arnie to feel the corresponding emotion, which was the whole point of his therapy. And now I felt them, as well.

* * *

Then, a great surprise to me: a new patient. I’d known, from overhearing hospital staff, that Arnie was only one of quite a few kids with problems like his. But I’d never thought I’d see any of them but Arnie. But then, there was Sallie! Sallie was like Arnie, but different as well, not only in the trivial biological way, but in how she thought. She was ahead of Arnie in some ways, behind in others.

For example, she made eye-contact readily, but couldn’t get the hang of eye-movement recognition. When Ms. Reddy looked at me, Sallie understood where Ms. Reddy’s eyes were ‘pointing’, but didn’t make the connection that they were pointing at me, or that when she spoke she was usually addressing the person (or robot!) she was looking at. All this was very interesting to me.

Now, Dr. Bundant’s had mentioned that Edd was strong in eye-movement detection, and so my sessions with Arnie and Sallie usually also included Edd. The more I worked with Edd, the more Uneasy I became. And it wasn’t just me; I could tell from Sallie’s expression that she, too, considered Edd rather strange. Of course I was pretty strange myself, from a human point of view, but there’s strange and then there’s strange.

I was reminded of this every time I heard him speak. Since Edd was similar to me in most ways, he also had a voice, and we spoke together whenever I could persuade him to, which wasn’t often.

Unlike me, however, Edd seemed to have been programmed to use short, abrupt, almost dismissive sentences instead of the lengthy bemused run-on pondering I do, evidence of which I believe you’ve frequently observed. Tech Support apparently intended Edd’s speech-pattern to be an enhancement, but I don’t think they got what they wanted. In fact, the more I observed Edd, the more I thought they’d overlooked a number of other things as well. Important things.

I was worried about Edd. What he could do. What he might do to Arnie, whom I’d begun to Love, or to Sallie.

* * *

Arnie made a mistake today.

After learning a new emotion, Ms. Reddy would hand Arnie my voice-remote and ask him to practice with me. But this morning, Arnie accidentally misspoke into my voice-remote, generating an unexpected code sequence. My face took on an expression new to both of us. Arnie was at first Annoyed at having made a mistake, but then he looked at my face and burst out laughing. I laughed, too, my scratchy mechanical voice mingling with Arnie’s and Sallie’s.

That was the start of the emotion-game.

After that, we began to play the game almost every day: Arnie or Sallie would put on a face, and I would match it. Then they would try to guess what emotion I was feeling, and I would try to guess what they were feeling. Dr. Bundant and Ms. Reddy were very pleased. There were plans for a conference paper and possibly a book as well, and rumors of an affair that everyone ignored except Dr. Meeger, who appeared, when he was in my lab, Desperate.

This was quite a change from the days when Ms. Reddy would look at Dr. Meeger with Longing; but some hubes are just unfathomable. Maybe it would help them to be a little more ‘robot-like’ once in a while.

* * *

Proceed to part 3...