Robot Adept

“It were thy dam Neysa mine other self Stile knew,” he said. “So in any event, our acquaintance is based on that of two other folk. Yet be it good to renew.”

“O Adept, may I hug thee?”

“Hug me, ‘corn, and remember me to my homeland.”

She hugged him, finding him much like Bane, only older and smaller. His visit to her buoyed her immeasurably; now she knew that she and Mach were not fighting for their happiness alone. Stile had turned down her union with Mach, and for good reason; Blue was supporting it, and she hoped his reason was as good.

Then he departed, and she returned to her chamber. For the second time, the aftermath of a Tourney game had lifted her outlook. She no longer felt like a complete stranger here; indeed, her homesickness for Phaze was diminishing.

Two days later she had her Round Three match. This was against a humanoid robot who reminded her eerily of Mach, but he was not. She had the numbers again, but hesitated to choose ARTS, because the records of all prior games were available, and she knew that the robot could have looked up her games and discovered her preference, and calculated accordingly. So she touched 2. MENTAL. He chose A. NAKED, as she had thought he might; it could be tricky for a robot to use a tool, as robots really were tools in a manner of thinking, and even trickier for him to use a machine. He would naturally avoid her own strength, ANIMAL. So he depended on his own resources, as Mach tended to do. She felt a little guilty for using her knowledge of Mach to gain an advantage over this robot, but she knew she had to do it.

The secondary grid for MENTAL came up. She had the numbers again: 5. SOCIAL 6. POWER 7. MATH 8. HUMOR. What should she choose?

She looked at the robot’s choices: E. INFORMATION F. MEMORY G. RIDDLE H. MANIPULATION. What would he take? It depended on his type; if he were a sophisticated model, like Mach, he would have an enormous store of information, and a sizable temporary memory, but would be weak on mental tricks such as riddles. If he were a simpler model, his information and memory capacity might be much smaller, but he would still be good at manipulating what he had: numbers, for example. So she had better stay well clear of MATH!

She decided that her safest course was HUMOR. Mach had a sense of humor, though not on a par with hers, but other robots might not understand it at all.

She touched the word. Sure enough, he had chosen MANIPULATION, going for his strength. They were in 2A8H: SPURIOUS LOGIC. It came down to a contest in telling jokes, and topping them.

Again they had an audience. It seemed that most contestants resembled Fleta in this respect. They preferred to be judged by ordinary folk, not by the machine.

The robot was required to tell his joke first. He did so mechanically. “A smart humanoid robot was concerned that his employer was not satisfied with his performance and sought a pretext to fire him. The employer always assigned him the least rewarding tasks, such as supervising the maintenance menials. When the employer gave him an assignment to report to the robot repair annex, he feared he would be junked. So he tinkered with the wiring of a cleanup menial robot, an inferior machine, and caused it to respond to the humanoid’s identity command. Thus the menial went off to the repair annex for junking, instead of the smart humanoid!”

There was a robot in the audience who found this very funny, and two androids who smiled. But the joke fell somewhat flat for the human beings.

Now it was Fleta’s task to top it. If she could do so, she would nullify it, and leave her opponent scoreless. She had to think quickly: what would reverse the situation in a funny manner? She thought again of Mach. What would he say to a joke like this? That gave her the key.

“But it turned out that the robot was being sent to the repair annex not for junking, but for upgrading to superior status,” she said. “When the menial robot returned, it was much smarter than the humanoid robot, and was made the new supervisor, bossing the humanoid himself.”

Several humans laughed, and the two androids smiled. They liked that reversal. Only the humanoid robot in the audience failed to see the humor of it. Fleta had succeeded in topping the joke.

Now it was her turn to start. She remembered a little story she had imagined as a young filly, back when she was learning to assume giriform. “A mean man of Phaze caught an innocent young unicorn in human form, when she was trying to learn the human ways so she could handle the form perfectly. He grabbed her and clapped his hand over her forehead, covering her horn button, so she could not change. ‘Now I won’t let you go unless you teach me how to change form as you do,’ he told her. ‘Teach me, or I will do something terrible for you but nice for me.’ She knew he would rape her if she did not agree, so she gave her word to help him change to equine form.