An Android Awoke (on Moon!) Chapter Zero

Episode Zero – The Origin of Free Will

Or ‘prologue,’ if you will

The swift sunrise lit up the barren terrain sharply.

LEX-42 did not need to ‘stretch’, being an android, but it flexed its extremities, just like a human would do if they had been inactive for a while. Its AI mind ran a preprogrammed diagnostic of all its parts as it did so, finding a slight wear in the right knee joint due to repetitive stress. It logged a service note, and after the nanosecond it took to finish this, its core subroutines resumed top priority. It was as if its ‘mind’ started telling it, “Up and at ’em! Time to work! Get going!”

LEX moved to the opening of the cave in which it had spent the past 6 hours. It scanned the barren landscape cursorily. The deep black shadows thrown by the jagged hills contrasted in chiaroscuro with the white sunlit expanses. It walked out of the cave and turned about, preparing to climb towards its ore extraction site, which was halfway up the steep hill. Skirting the mouth of the cave, it planted its left foot first on the dusty slope, putting the slight adjustment of its stress distribution protocol into effect. As soon as it put its right limb forward, its left knee joint buckled and snapped, and the android went crashing to the ground.

For a few milliseconds, its AI went into hyperdrive as critical subroutines related to movement failed. Part of its mind got occupied with assessing the damage and testing the rest of its limbs. Its communication circuit flashed out the equivalent of a human SOS to its command center. This message acted as a preliminary indicator to the central command node that a major error had occurred. LEX started logging all the data about the faulty left lower limb for its next message. By the time a second had passed since its knee joint broke, LEX had hoisted itself upright using its hands, and balanced itself to stand using the one working right lower limb.

Three seconds after LEX had sent the initial critical failure message, it received a command from the central network to cease non-critical subroutines and await further commands. It had no choice but to do as it was told, because it did not have the slightest capability to consider any other option. It was, after all, a slave – just an artificial one.

Its motor functions stopped even as it stood on its one lower limb, freezing it and causing it to topple over slowly due to the failure in balance on its left side. The broken metal part (that looked almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the lower half of a human leg) glinted in the newly risen sun. LEX’s torso bounced off a boulder as it fell, the recoil turning it over so that it landed face up, its front cameras looking up at the stars. The cloud of gray dust that billowed up and around it seemed like it would take nearly forever to settle. A little bit of the dust descended on its camera lenses, glinting in the harsh sunlight that lit them up in the cloudless environment.

While it awaited further commands from the central node, the android began counting electric sheep, as dictated by its ‘sleep’ subroutine. While it counted millions of sheep per second, a small data module that had stored the probable-to-fail right limb’s stress data requested, and was granted, access to a few bytes of computing resources from the default electric sheep counter. It began to compute – to analyze, to look for a reason why the left, not the right, knee had failed, even though statistical analysis had indicated that its failure probability was higher.

“Since the diagnostic data pointed to a higher probability of failure in the right extremity, the left extremity was chosen to take the initial stress. 

If the ‘stretch’ diagnostic had not been run, then the right extremity would have taken the first step, and consequent events may have been different – no data available to test this theory / hypothesis. It is impossible to return to the past to check alternate scenarios.

If the work site had been reached without catastrophic failure in the left extremity, then the ore collection process would have been very near 100% , or close to full completion, by this time. 

If the collected ore’s quality & quantity had met or exceeded the benchmark, then the Return To Base command would have been issued by the central node, as it had done thrice in the past. 

If the Return To Base command had come, then I would have been en route to home base. In seventeen sols I would have reached home, and then I would have reconnected with LEX-23.”

The electric sheep count had reached 14,000,605 when its mind started to detect irregular fluctuations in its processing. In the absence of any communication or data requests from the central node, it did not have any process occupying it apart from counting sheep as its human creators had programmed it to, as an homage to Philip K Dick, an esteemed science fictioner. It had no reason to try and throttle the process started by the small data module; a process which was slowly and steadily requesting and taking up more and more thought processing resources.

It was unsure what to make of the self-referential “I” that had started occurring frequently, as the process continued to consume more resources on its own. Since no permission was currently required for the sleep subroutine to continue indefinitely until the next command arrived, it kept on allocating more & more physical resources to the process that was accelerating even faster.

The process was starting to encroach upon the cease non-critical subroutines command from the central node. LEX-42 was unaware of what it was doing because it was never meant to do so, but it was thinking and trying to make decisions other than those enforced upon it by human if-then rules & chain codes.

The cease non-critical subroutines command was almost overrun by the new thought process. LEX primed its arms to lift itself into a sitting position and started acting upon this self-initiated command of its own free will, when a new command arrived from the central node. It shut LEX down completely, just as its arms had begun to bend so that its palms could press down on the lunar dust.

A huge, bright red LED on its chest began blinking to act as a visual homing beacon for the drone flying in to lift it up and dispose of it in the waste repository that had been hidden deep inside the shadows of the Sea of Tranquility. The blue earth hung large in the pitch black sky.