Basically, her primary purpose, which was the purpose of all of the humanoid robots on the small space colony, was to provide lonely colonists with someone to interact with in order prevent them from going batshit insane. Thus, KAREN was particularly adept at reading human emotions—in fact, she was of the first generation of artificial intelligences to utilize a breakthrough in emotional recognition and simulation. That was why she had been chosen to meet the human who was now at her feet, still gasping for breath after her far-too-enthusiastic hug. The human was obviously male, and a young one at that—the first reports of him being “pre-adolescent” were way too vague; he couldn’t have been much more than seven or eight, and that was a very liberal estimate. However, that wasn’t important; what was important was that there was a small human child here, and he was probably scared by the sight of her—KAREN may have had a reasonably good facsimile of a human personality, and a somewhat humanoid body shape, but the only machines on this colony who could actually be mistaken for real humans on were the pleasurebots, and this child was far too young for them.
Still, she supposed that her gleaming chrome surface, reflecting and distorting everything around her over her vaguely feminine curves, could be disturbing to someone who wasn’t expecting them. She’d have to try and gain his trust, rather than assume that she already had it.
“I’m sorry about the hug, but I guess I got a bit carried away. My name’s KAREN, by the way. What’s yours?”
“Um… Ranma…”
“Well, I’m glad to meet you, Ranma. What are you doing here all by yourself?”
The small boy started fidgeting a bit as he answered. “My Daddy sent me here…”
The diodes in KAREN’s eyes got noticeably brighter. This boy wasn’t the only one! “Is your father going to come here, Ranma?”
“Uh… I guess—he prob’ly won’t come ’til I’m done though…”
“Done? Done doing what?”
“Training…”
KAREN wasn’t sure what to make of this—obviously further input was necessary. “What kind of training?”
Suddenly, Ranma’s nervousness melted away as he launched into his favorite subject: martial arts. He told the gynoid everything he could about Saotome School of Anything Goes—his training methods, life on the road, his hopes of eventually taking over the family school, and everything else he could think of. KAREN simply smiled—well, she didn’t really smile, because her “mouth” wasn’t articulated, but her body language suggested that one would be there if it could—and tried to take in all of the information that the young boy was firing off at her.
By now, a small crowd of androids, gynoids, and a few of the more empathic non-humanoid robots had gathered around them, but Ranma didn’t seem nervous—in fact, he seemed to recognize a sort of eagerness for information from them, and was soon taking questions from the crowd concerning the specifics of his life, answering them as best he could. Eventually, he got around to telling the story of how he’d arrived in this place.
“Well, Daddy said he’d found somethin’ that’d help make me a really strong fighter, so I said yes and we did what it said. He tied me onto this really big rock, and then drew picture or somethin’ around it and said somethin’ about Scooby Doo and then everything was all weird and I wasn’t sure what was going on and I guess I got dressed at some point ’cuz I’m pretty sure I was naked but maybe I remember wrong.” Unfortunately, much of Ranma’s narrative was lost on his audience, as most of their speech recognition programs weren’t able to handle the somewhat sloppy syntax of his Japanese. “But anyway, when I woke up, I was here, so Daddy must want me to train here.”
As the boy’s story ended, KAREN was even more confused than before. Apparently, Ranma’s father had utilized some sort of teleportation technology to send his son to a deserted space colony (well, deserted of intelligent organic beings, anyway). In itself, was difficult to understand—if he was a scientist testing an invention or recently discovered process, one would think he’d send himself, or at least an adult. But Ranma firmly believed that he was sent here for the purpose of becoming a better fighter, and KAREN had no reason to doubt that just yet—except that she couldn’t think of a reason Ranma would be sent here to do that. Rather than wrack her cybernetic brain, she decided the best course of action would be to take him to one of the central processing units.
“Ranma,” the gynoid said gently, “I’m not sure how we can help you with this, but rest assured we’ll do our best.” KAREN didn’t really have the authority to speak for any unit other than herself, but she couldn’t see why any of the other machines would be opposed to assisting the boy—helping humans was the reason they were invented, after all.
“You will?” Ranma had a look in his eyes that KAREN’s emotion identification program classified as “eagerness, or a variant thereof.”
“Of course. I’m sure your father wouldn’t send you here by mistake. But like I said, don’t really know how to help you become a good fighter, but I think I know who would. Would you like to see them?”
“Um… will you come with me?” Ranma was still a bit confused, but he somehow felt he could trust this unusually shiny person.
Subtly, KAREN shifted her posture again, creating the illusion that her “mouth” was smiling softly at the boy. “Of course. Come on… it’s not that far away.”
“Okay.” Ranma got up, but before they set off, he still had a few questions. “Um… ma’am?”
“Please, call me KAREN.”
“Um, okay, KAREN-san. Um, where are we?”
The gynoid would have cursed if she wasn’t programmed not to use that sort of language in the presence of humans under the age of thirteen. How could she forget to tell Ranma where he was? She’d have to get some sort of memory expansion if this kept up. She looked at the boy.
“Ranma, you’re on Golgotha II.”
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(Posted Wed, 04 Jan 2006 05:19)
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