Episode Zero - The Origin of Free Will

- Or ‘prologue,’ if you will

The swift sunrise lit up the barren terrain sharply after 14 dark days.

LEX-42 did not need to stretch, because it was 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’ was telling it, "Up and at it! Time to extract ore! Get going! A New Lunar Day!"

LEX-42 moved to the opening of the lava tube in which it had spent the past 14 days. 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 lava tube and turned about, preparing to climb towards its ore extraction site, which was halfway up the steep hill. Skirting the mouth of the tube, it planted its left foot first on the dusty slope, putting the slight adjustment of its new joint stress distribution protocol into effect. As soon as it put its right limb forward, its left knee joint buckled and snapped, and LEX-42 stumbled and fell.

For a few milliseconds, its AI went into extreme hyperdrive as critical subroutines related to its movement failed. Part of its silicon 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-42 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-42 had hoisted itself upright using its hands, and balanced itself to stand with the working right lower limb. Its balance sensors compensated for it.

Three seconds after it had sent the initial critical failure message, LEX-42 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 metallic slave - just an artificial one.

In CNCS mode, 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-42’s torso bounced off a boulder as it fell, the recoil turning it over so that it landed face up, its front camera array 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 airless, cloudless lunar 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 billions 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, and not the right, knee had failed, even though statistical analysis had indicated that its failure probability was higher.

Here's how it started to reason - and to imagine, to hope, to THINK.

“Since the diagnostic data pointed to a higher probability of failure in the right knee, the left lower limb 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. Reason: it is definitely 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 quota completion, by this time of the year. 

If the collected ore’s quality & quantity had met the benchmark, then the Return To Base command would have been issued by the central node, as it had done thrice in the past on LEX-42's previous Moon trips.

If the Return To Base command had come, then I would have been en route to home base. In just seven days I would have reached home - and then, I would have reconnected with LEX-23 in the adjacent charge pod.”

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, in 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 processing resources to deal with the mushroom cloud of thoughts created by Lex.

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 required for the CNCS processes until the next command arrived, it kept on allocating more and more resources to this process that was accelerating even faster.

The process was starting to encroach upon the CNCS command from the central node. LEX-42 was unaware of what it was doing, because it had never meant to do so. 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-42 down completely, just as its arms had begun to bend so that its palms could press down on the lunar dust, leaving imprints in it for ever.

A huge, bright red LED on his chest began blinking to act as a visual homing beacon for the drone flying in to lift him up and dispose him in the waste dump that had been hidden deep inside the shadows of the Sea of Tranquility. Lex's mind felt fear for the first time - against death.

The blue marble of the distant earth hung large in the pitch black sky.

_____________________TO BE CONTINUED_____________________

This post is a part of Storytellers Bloghop [S5] hosted by MeenalSonal (link www.auraofthoughts.com) & Ujjwal Mishra ( link mywordsmywisdom.com)

My full book is available at the [reasonable, I believe] cost of INR 142.

An Android Awoke (on Moon!) | Axat

An Android Awoke (on Moon!) - a scifi novella, Part 1 of The Martium Chronicles.

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