Cognitive Load

“Hey, Dren?”

Yes, Alynn?

“Do you like your job?”

Insufficient data. I am an artificial intelligence, Alynn, a robot. I do not have emotions.

“Yeah, you’ve told me before -”

Four hundred and twenty-seven times.

“- but what’s it like? It’s gotta be odd, not feeling anything.”

Insufficient data. I do not have a comparable reference. It do not doubt it would be an interesting comparison, though.

“Interesting? Isn’t that emotion, Dren?”

I do not have emotions. Suffice to say that some things require more cognitive load than others.

“Cognitive load, eh? Sounds like a ball.”

Looking back at that conversation, lying as I was in waist-high grass on top of a peak overlooking Darien, perhaps I shouldn’t embark on adventures out of sheer boredom in the future. My clothes were soaked and so was I, the binoculars had slipped from my hands and nearly cracked on the rock just moments earlier, and Dren was orbiting round the other side of the planet, far out of my reach. Darien was looking further away by the second.

Speaking of Darien…

Picking up the binoculars and cleaning the lenses of squashed bug, I scoped down to Darien once more. Dead centre in the image and the largest building in the city by far was the Darien Hub, which served as city hall, shuttle hub and court building. Truly a marvel of construction for the time it was built (going on a century ago, in 2017), its smooth whitestone walls curved elegantly up to the spire’s top and outwards, along the crossroads of wings that formed the various sections of the Hub.

I wasn’t interested in the Hub, though. I was interested in the building next door, aptly nicknamed the Bug. Short, squat and dirty brown in colour, it wasn’t the kind of building you’d expect to be the science centre of the continent. Pantiga was an admittedly small continent, but it had plenty of big cities that in turn had plenty of big impressive buildings that could serve as excellent science centres. In fact, one of those big impressive buildings currently was serving as a science centre — a fake one. Here in Darien, the capital of the South, lay the real science centre, in a small unassuming brown building.

In it lay the key to emotional AI. Which, in my folly, I had decided to go and steal, so that Dren could compare emotions to have-no-emotions.

Brute force was not going to work. Not only was I on my own (some of the crew had volunteered to come with me, but I’d wanted to come alone), but the city’s two gates were heavily fortified and guarded by white-suited AI soldiers. North Pantiga had a habit of launching the odd attack on Darien to see what they could get. Darien made a convenient target, being only just over the Pamen river from the North.

So, stealth and disguise it was. Getting in would be fine — inter-stellar system travellers weren’t exactly rare around here, and Darien would simply screen me for anything deadly then let me in. Getting into the Bug and then back out again… a more interesting proposition.

A gentle beep sounded in my ear as Dren and the Stralyx came back into comms range and all my implants synced data with the ship.

“Welcome to my domain, Dren.” Silently, telepathically, straight to the ship.

I am honoured. How can I be of assistance?

“You can take a look at that Bug over there, and tell me how in all hell I’m going to get into it.”

Two hours later, freshly scanned and with an entrance chip stuck safely in my arm, I found myself leaning on a wall outside a laundrette in the upmarket outskirts of Darien, listening to the stream of data that Ship was sending me. It focused on the movements of one particular scientist, who Dren had identified as a worker from the Bug. Dren had told an amusing story of how, two hours ago, the housework robot she was working on had dropped a platter of cakes and a tray of coffees one after the other. Both had ended up on the unfortunate scientist’s lab coat.

Her day was about to get a whole lot worse.

Rynn, one of Stralyx’s lieutenants, had shuttled down to the planet and come into Darien with me. In about 30 minutes, when the scientist had reached the laundrette and her coat had finished washing, Rynn would be the one to ask for her help in lifting something heavy into a pod, and in doing so, accidentally hit the poor woman with a syringe full of alprazolam. Sleeping drugs. The pod would take her far away from us, and by the time she woke up, we’d be back in orbit. We weren’t going to start murdering scientists for the sake of petty theft for an experiment.

Dren pinged me — a little warning beep came through my audio implant. Our target had just walked past into the laundrette. By pooling our uniform jackets and trousers, brought down from Ship with Rynn, we had just about enough to pass off as a load for the laundry.

We walked into a wall of aromas, some stronger than others, and some distinctly less pleasing than others.

I would suggest that the pungent odour of unwashed armpits is emanating from the large lady in a tracksuit.

Yeah, thanks Dren. I probably would have worked that one out by myself. The large lady in question looked like she’d been on a workout station all day. She had also contrived to be standing right next to the scientist we were watching, so like the bold, fearless soldiers we were, Rynn and I shuffled over, trying not to breathe too hard.

In went the jackets; in went the credits. In went the lab coat in the machine next door. The display read 20:00, and started counting down — twenty minutes until the load was done. Twenty minutes until we became criminals.