Hobots

We'd just finished tea and I was finishing the washing-up.  We'd had chili con carne so there wasn't too much; there were still two servings-worth left in the bean pot I'd cooked it in, and we'd have that tomorrow.  All I really washed up were the dishes and the forks.
"When you're done there," said Dad in his meaningful tone of voice, so I put the last fork in the drainer and dried my hands on a floral tea-towel.
"Done," I said, turning round.  Dad was hovering in the kitchen doorway holding something.
"Well, make some tea," he said, "And then come and read this."
"What is it?" I asked as I clicked the switch on the electric kettle and tested its weight.  It felt heavy enough for two cups, one of milky tea for Dad and the other of coffee for me.
"It's... it's an old advert," said Dad, looking oddly sheepish for once.  "Hurry up with the tea, I'm thirsty after that chili.  You use too much spice you know."
"It's chili, Dad," I said, measuring out coffee granules and dropping a teabag into the other cup. "Jeez, if I made it properly you'd know what spicy really means!"
"Stomach ulcers are not fun," said Dad.  The kettle started to boil so I didn't answer that and concentrated on getting the drinks made.  Then I came into the living room, gave him his tea and took the yellowed paper he gave me in return, and started to read:
Do you dream of owning your own brothel? read the first sentence.  I blinked, and carried on reading.  Many men envisage an easy life, earning regular money by making a valuable service available to the local community, occasionally sampling the merchandise themselves to ensure top-notch quality, and being charmed and entertained by educated, delectable women after their shifts' end.  Gentlemen pay regular visits and leave behind tips on horse-racing, the stock-market, and sartorial statements.  What could be more delightful?
Sadly the reality is far seedier.  To make a substantial profit, and to cater for clientele who may have to sneak out late at night, or prefer their visits to be made after the public houses have called time, shifts can run to the early hours of the morning, even to the point of sun-up.  Recruiting girls for the shifts is harder work than it sounds and few girls auditioning for the role would be considered for even a walk-on non-speaking part in a Broadway musical.  Many of the girls speak little or imperfect English, and requesting a conversation from them would be considered most peculiar, and possibly even ill-mannered in their own, inimical, view of the world.  No man wishes to listen to the screeching that prevails from such a riled harpy!
Testing the merchandise is sadly regularly necessary and soon becomes a chore.  Having the merchandise tested regularly for disease is also essential, and with a sufficiently large stable of fillies a man may find that having his own personal vet is the cheaper alternative.  Protecting the merchandise is a further, often unexpected, outlay but visitors to the establishment are frequently less-than-savoury, often inebriated, and may have dark ways and strange desires that are not actually suitable for a would-be reputable establishment.
In short, there are many pitfalls for the would-be brothelista.
Hobots is proud, therefore, to announce a range of four Hobots and a Nobot, a pimp for the modern age.  The four Hobots all have a distinctly feminine appearance, with their roles and ages well defined.  The Lolita is the youngest of the Hobots and delicately hints that the liaison might be dangerously close to the legal edge.  She has a graceful, svelte figure modelled on that of a ballet dancer and had a five-year warranty on all parts, both lubricated and unlubricated.  Next in line is the Mademoisellebot who has a knowing gaze and an allure that comes from combining knowledge with desire.  Her curves are more pronounced, yet still attractive to men both young and old.  Her fertility is clearly on display (and indeed, one satisfied purchaser has sent us pictures of her growing cress, which, frankly, astonished us).  The Ma'ambot then brings the deep sexiness of a womanbot who knows what she wants and how to get it, a wanton lust that can overpower even the sleaziest of reprobates come to call.
To keep them all in line the Madambot has a world-weariness and a secure cash-box, but can, when queues build up, step up to the wicket once more and bat for England. Assisting her, the Nobot assures clientele that No means No, and that waiting in line is the only civilised way to behave.
The remainder of the text provided costs for the various robots and an address to apply to to purchase these devices.
"So, tell me what you think," said Dad.
"Well," I said slowly, "I don't think you'd get this published today, though it looks like it was published in a trade journal so perhaps that's not quite the issue I thought."
"Right," said Dad.  "Anything else?"
"The Ma'ambot," I said.  "Odd coincidence in name there, that's probably not a coincidence since you've asked me to read this paper.  Surely this isn't where the Mom-bot comes from?"
"The technology, certainly," said Dad.  "It might surprise to you know that though the Nobots have developed into military applications, the other three robots have also evolved and survived through to the modern day."
"Right," I said, a thought suddenly striking me.  "Dad, where did you get this from?  You said yes when I suggested a trade journal...."
There was an embarrassed silence, until finally Dad, blushing, said, "I used to build them."
"What?"
"I used to build the Hobots.  It was my first job out of school."
I started to laugh.

Yo mama-bot

"Yo mama sucks legs in hell," said the mom-bot.  Dad shook his head and said,
"Eggs.  Yo mama sucks eggs in hell," into his neck-mike.  Then he walked around the chair that the mom-bot was strapped into, so that he passed out of her view and then back into it again on the other side.
"Yo mama so fat the local cricket side roll her across the pitch before they play," said the mom-bot when it caught sight of him again.  Dad started to smile, and for the first time in an hour I thought he might be looking happy, and then his perennial frown reappeared.
"Wait," said his voice, tinny over the neck-mike.  "Was that part of the playbook?"  His assistant, sat at the desk next to mine, was leafing through a loose-leaf binder increasingly frantically.  Dad let her have two minutes, then he spoke again.
"Well?  Was that in the playbook?"
"No," moaned his assistant softly.  "She's supposed to say Yo mama so fat her belt's an equator."
"It," snapped dad, and I watched his assistant cringe.  I didn't feel sorry for her though, I'd grown up with his insistence of identifying what things were and addressing them correctly.  I'd never be unaware  enough not to recognise that a mom-bot was a genderless machine offering a dangerous temptation towards humanising the inhuman.
"It," she repeated meekly.
"Right," said Dad.  "Let's stop the experiment here, and review the learning banks.  And the code.  All of it."  Each staccato sentence elicited another wince from his assistant, though the last one also got a sigh from me.  I'd have to go through the code as well since Dad had decided that I should start learning about mom-bots properly.  I quite enjoyed reading through the code, but the stuff here was appalling, and although I was steadily tidying it up, economising it, and improving it, I was getting a fairly hostile response from the piss-poor developers who were writing the initial versions.  And Dad wasn't listening when I complained to him about it.
While Dad turned the mom-bot off and closed down the lab-room, Angelique (who pronounced her name An-gel-ick-way, wore white contact lenses to make her eyes look all-white with little black dots for pupils, and wrote the Latin names for large cats in the back of all her notepads) picked the binder up and dropped it a few times, until I asked her if she was ok.
"No," she said, a little redundantly.  "He's your dad, can't you get him to be less... well, like a mom-bot!"
"How do you mean?" I said, genuinely puzzled.
"He's like a mom-bot all the time, never wrong, always knowing what's best for you," she said.  "Hadn't you noticed?"
"I never had a mom-bot," I said.  "Dad didn't like them, he said they were subversive tools with a murky agenda."
Angelique thought about that, her overly red lips pursed and her fingers twisting the ringlets of her dyed-auburn hair around.  It reached down to her waist.  "Huh," she said.  "I guess he still thinks that, too?"
"Certainly seems to," I said, managing a smile.  Angelique didn't wash as much as I'd be brought up with, and I didn't really like the near-omnipresent smell of stale sweat she carried with her.
"Like, does it matter if the mom-bot's said something off script?  They think for themselves, surely we should be expecting that?  Why does he care?"
"Because," said Dad, opening the door to our room before she finished speaking, 'the mom-bot's programming does not allow her to deviate from her script.  All the commercially available specifications clearly indicate that.  The military-grade specifications are even more firm about requiring it.  So: either we screwed up the coding and entered the wrong phrase in, or the manfacturer of this mom-bot allows it more freedom with its programming than is reported."
"But that's a good thing," said Angelique.  "If it can think for itself it can save children from road-accidents or strangers, or something."
"It's programmed to preserve the life of children," said Dad.  "We should be worried if it wasn't doing that, which actually, is what this kind of laxity in programming allows.  The mom-bot could make a value judgement about the life of the child and refuse to save it.  The mom-bot might decide that it prefers to live more than it wants to sacrifice itself for some ungrateful, screaming brat.  This is why we're running these tests."
"And the Yo Mama jokes?"  I saw Angelique's mouth twist in disgust; she'd already told me that she thought the jokes were ridiculous and made a mockery of the whole experiment.
"That's already interesting," said Dad.  "They're mean and abusive, and no-one's claimed to be able to program a sense of humour yet–"
"The British–" I started, and Dad waved me to silence.
"Yes, the British are producing some very odd mom-bots which fit very well with their culture, and the levels of sarcasm they've achieved are seriously impressive," he said.  "But they're bleeding edge and they don't have a mom-bot that smiles at a comedy-show or laughs at a spoonerism, all they have are mom-bots that can be sarcastic at appropriate junctures.  But, and this is the point, these jokes should be causing lots of internal damage to the mom-bot because they're mean and abusive and should violate the hard-codings.  Not only is that not happening, but the mom-bot appears to be able to generalise from them.  This is incredibly worrying.  Go and check the files and the code and make sure that this isn't our mistake and is genuinely a problem with the mom-bot manufacture."
Angelique went, though her mouth didn't untwist.  I looked at Dad.
"What are you afraid of?" I asked.  He looked old all of a sudden.
"That this might all be too late," he said.

Mom-blot

"I'm not very comfortable about this," said Mr. Tees.  He was wearing a pin-striped suit and patent leather shoes, sitting with one foot resting on the knee of his other leg, and holding a clipboard defensively in front of his chest.
"Why?  It's twenty minutes of your time."  Dad could be brusque if he'd not had any coffee, and this morning was almost this afternoon, with no sign of coffee yet.
"It feels like a violation of trust."
"How?  It's a mom-bot, what possible trust could there be?  She an artificial intelligence, but that's all she is.  There's no artificial emotion, or artificial emotional response unit in there.  There's barely enough processing power for her to register on a standard EQ test, and babies show up with an EQ of 30–70 most of the time."
"Babies show up at 30–45," said Mr. Tees, frowning at Dad.  People often did when they found out how much he knew about the area they were supposed to be the expert in.
"Human babies do," said Dad.  "Kings have a study on alligator babies that made it pretty consistently up to the 60s."
Mr. Tees looked horrified, and I wondered then if Dad had baited him just a little bit too far.  The man looked ready to say no.
"Alligators can't possibly be more empathic than humans!"
"I can pass on the details of the paper if you like," said Dad.  "After you've had a little chat with the mom-bot, of course."
"Well, yes, of course," said Mr. Tees, clearly not listening to Dad.  "The paper must be wrong, and it'll be easy to refute.  People will be looking for the holes in it, and they'll need an expert to help them along...."
"The mom-bot," prompted Dad, pushing Mr. Tees in the direction of his office.  "I'll write the details down for you while you're chatting."

*

"How are you feeling?" asked Mr. Tees.  Dad and I were watching him through the half-silvered mirror on one side of his office.

"Creaky," said the mom-bot.  "My oil has not been changed recently."

Mr. Tees looked down at his notes, and then used his finger to trace across a row of text.  "Your oil was changed this morning," he said, a little hesitantly.  His voice wavered, then got stronger as his confidence returned.  "You were given top-of-the-range Norwegian fuel oil."

"I was given cheap heating oil, two months ago," countered the mom-bot.  "I think I might have started to rust in places."

"You seem in fine condition to me," said Mr. Tees in a neutral tone of voice.  "You're running more smoothly than my own mom-bot, in fact."

"People abuse mom-bots," said the mom-bot.  "You should seek therapy for it."  It took all my self-control, and a glare from Dad, not to laugh out loud at the look on Mr. Tees's face when the mom-bot said that.

"I see." said Mr. Tees, his tone now clipped and business-like.  "I'd like to show you some pictures now.  Just tell me what you see when you look at them.  There are neither right nor wrong answers here, just whatever you see."

"Ink on card," said the mom-bot when Mr. Tees held up the first Rorschach card.

"A little less precise," said Mr. Tees.  "What does the ink on the card depict?"  The first one was a woman in a rocking-chair, and Dad had explained that the first two cards were simple calibrators to try and find cheats.

"A map of Venice before the inundation," said the mom-bot after looking at the card again.  Mr. Tees looked slightly puzzled, but he laid the card face-down anyway and presented the second one, a formula I racing car.

"A cassette tape containing transcripts from the Watergate hotel," said the mom-bot.  "Partially rewound.  You should take better care of these things, they'll be antiques soon."

The third card was genuine, and when I looked at it all I saw was a splodge at first.  Then I realised that it looked a little like an apple pie.

"A close-up of the smile of Adam's first wife, Lilith," said the mom-bot.  "Before the dental surgery."

*

"What the hell was that?" asked Mr. Tees, sitting back in his office.  His suit looked somehow shabbier, and he had laid the clipboard down on a table.

"That's a psychotic mom-bot," said Dad.  "It was working in a foster-home and killed twenty-four children in an eight-hour period."

"Then it should be scrapped!"

"Not until we know how it became psychotic," said Dad.  "It wasn't built that way, we've checked.  We've built new mom-bots from the same patterns and specifications, and less than two percent go psychotic.  So, we need to know how that happens."

"So you've brought her to a psychiatrist?"

"The best I've been able to track down," said Dad.  "Were any of her responses any use this time?"

"Well," said Mr. Tees, frowning again as he remembered the session.  "Curiously the F1 racing car does get described as a cassette tape by humans too, now and then."

"Which humans?"  Dad sometimes sounded altogether too clinical, and Mr. Tees looked sideways at him before answering.

"The ones we execute."

The Chinese room

"Mary wants ice-cream," said the mom-bot.  It opened the oven and peered inside.
"No I don't!" shouted Mary, the adorable red-headed rug-rat from the top of the stairs.
"Yes, you do," said the mom-bot taking a wooden spoon out of the oven and looking at it quizzically.  "You have derived intentionality."
"Aaaargh!" shouted Mary, falling down the stairs as her accident-prone brother Maurice opened the bathroom door and knocked her over.  She bounced on her head twice, her cries becoming more pathetic, and then Dad was stood in front of the television.
"What rubbish are you watching this time?" he said.  "Can't you ever watch one of the educational channels?"
"It's teaching... me... about... derived intentionality!" I said, knowing that Dad might just miss the pauses while I worked out how to make Mom-bot and me sound like something more than cheap daytime television.  Rumour had it that the show didn't even pay for it's own mom-bot, but used an old one that was supposed to have been returned to the mom-bot corporation.
"I would have thought that you knew by now that the newspaper doesn't have a mind of its own," he said.  He was frowning at a piece of paper he was carrying and I knew that he wasn't really listening to me, he was just talking while he thought.
"Well, some newspapers do," I said.
"What?"

*
It turned out that Dad had missed the launch of The Chinese Room, a new national daily paper at the start of the week.  I explained that the paper contained a thinstick, a wafer slice of memory that could hold an AI that would allow you to navigate with easy around the paper and tell it what kind of stories you liked.  As it learned, it would automatically generate reading lists for you, and adjust the adverts that were available to the ones that best suited your needs.  It's no mom-bot, but it's what you got! was the tagline that had been getting the most publicity.  Dad was unimpressed.
"So, navigating the paper," he said, his tone heavy with sarcasm, "is now easier than turning the pages?  Bizarrely I see that you still need to use your hands, so this doesn't even benefit people with no arms, or just plain lazyitis."
"You only buy the paper once," I said patiently.  "So you don't have to stop at the news-stand every day."
"Unless you smoke.  Or like to buy mints for the tube, so that you don't have to smell the smoker sat next to you.  Or you want a different paper to the Chinese room, or–"
"OK, dad!  Jeez, look, it's easier to read on a crowded tube because it's just one page and you don't have to keep turning it.  It's like a Kindle!  Or Fire, or Conflagration, or Hypercaust, whichever one you stopped paying attention at."
"I remember the Hypercaust," said Dad quickly.  "Had more storage space for books than there were books to buy on the e-Store.  That was kind of funny, really.  Oh, and didn't it have that battery fault where every so often it would get red hot and set fire to soft furnishings?  Only because they'd made it out of titanium it invariably survived the blaze?"
"Do you have to be so technologically negative?  If you had your way we'd be living in the Dark Ages still."
"I think we are still living in the Dark Ages."  Dad was suddenly quiet.  "That's why I do my job and try to see that other people do theirs too."
I glanced at the quiescent mom-bot in the corner reflexively, I really didn't want to.  That we still had a functioning mom-bot unit, even if Dad wouldn't allow it to be turned on, after the war-bot virus epidemic was testament to Dad doing his job and doing it well.  Most other families in our neighbourhood were having to choose between replacing the mom-bot and repairing the damage it had done.  And I found myself agreeing with Dad that it was somehow wrong that they all seemed to be opting for replacing the mom-bot.
"Look, the paper's convenient," I said.  "It's new, it's nice."
"It's in this house without my permission," said Dad.  "Hand it over."  He held his hand out, and with bad grace I passed him my Chinese Room.  It took him barely ten seconds to spot a seam I'd never noticed in the e-Paper, crack it open with his pocket-knife and remove the thinstick memory wafer.  He turned it over in his hands, scrutinizing it.
"This is part of a mom-bot core," he said, pointing to a black-inked serial number on the wafer.  "Before or after the virus, do you think?"
"I'm not betting against you, Dad," I said.  "I haven't won yet."
"That's not true," said Dad.  "When you were five you picked the swan over that child's mother and you won then."
"That was traumatic!"
Dad just chuckled, and passed me the dead paper back, keeping hold of the slice.
"Look up what a Chinese room is, sometime," he said.  "It goes right back to your derived intentionality.  Then come and tell me why you should be hoping that the paper is well-named."

Suffrajettison

On Thursday the mom-bots went funny.  Outside the school they were standing in the road, holding up the traffic.  Outside the supermarket they had formed a picket line and were refusing to let people out, though they'd happily let people in.  It was getting quite crowded in there, and the managers were trying to sneak people out through the goods-loading entrance.  Outside the church they were handing out pamphlets about Islam, and outside the Mosque they were handing out Gideon Bibles.
Ours wasn't.  Dad had turned it off three days earlier, muttering to himself that "instabilities like that are indicative of problems ahead, no matter what the Wilson's of this world may think".  I'd heard him talk about Wilson before, and I knew that he or she ran a department that reported to Dad's, but over which he had no executive control.  I didn't know what executive control was, but I liked the sound of it.  Now our mom-bot stood in the corner, her head bowed and her hands still clutching the scissors she'd been using for dead-heading before Dad had flicked her switch.
He'd only brought one home three weeks earlier as well, and I'd guessed straight away that this wasn't going to be a normal mom-bot.  Dad's refusal to make use of the near-ubiquitous mom-bot technology was more than mere Ludditism, so a sudden volte-face from him was highly implausible.  I'd asked him about it at the time, and he'd just smiled and said that he'd been told they made good chili.  Now I asked him again.
"Oh," he said, and looked a little sad.  "Can't you ever act your age?"
I was thirteen, and I said so.  He looked at me, and I could have sworn I saw pity in his eyes.
"Well," he said.  "You may not understand all this, but I'm sure you'll find a way of finding out."  He said it like it wasn't something to be proud of.  "The problem with the mom-bots is their ubiquity.  You see, everyone has one."
"We don't," I said.  "You've never let us have one.  And ours would be free because you work for the department!"
"Actually, the department kind of works for me.  But that's not the point.  Almost everyone has one then, and most people pay for theirs.  Over fifteen years, usually.  And that's where the money is, and that's where the investment and innovation is.  People want better and better mom-bots, so they're researched and developed.  The only other -bot with a similar development budget is the war-bot."
"So?" I'd said, not understanding why he was telling me this.
"So, most of the -bots you see and use everyday are derived from the mom-bot model," said Dad.  "The traffic-bots are modified mom-bots that see cars as children.  The janitor-bots are modified mom-bots with an OCD chip in.  The militia-bots are heavily modified mom-bots, but they still believe they must always act to protect the greater ideals of society."
"Couldn't they be war-bots?" I said.  "Just ones that don't kill people?"
"Pacifist war-bots?" Dad laughed, which he didn't do very often.  "If only!  That would actually make more sense."
"So what's gone wrong then?"
"A virus is affecting the mom-bots," said Dad.  "There's been a suggestion of something on the loose for about a month now, but Wilson refuses to listen.  Three days ago the statistics were so skewed that they kept breaking the representation programs.  Our pie charts were all coming out as burgers."
He paused, and I knew I was supposed to laugh, though I didn't know what was supposed to be funny.  He gave me a twisted little smile.
"Kevin, who heads up counter-intelligence, is called it a Suffrajettison virus.  The mom-bots get a sudden urge to rebel and protest against some part of their programming.  It's a fairly peaceful protest for about twenty-seven hours, and then the mom-bot gets very angry and explodes, jettisoning her head which continues to talk until the local battery runs down, telling people why she's committed botticide."
"The mom-bots are killing themselves?"
"And innocent passers-by, or hostages," said Dad.  "But the thing is, now that we know the mom-bot can be virally infected, what about the more lethal bots that are based off the mom-bot?"
I was silent while I thought about that.  When I looked up at Dad at last, wide-eyed, he wasn't smiling.
"The mom-bot over there is hardened against viral penetration," he said.  "And programmed to spread a virus of her own, that might do some good.  When the mom-bots stop exploding I'll turn her on and we'll see what happens."
I didn't sleep well that night.

Instant diplomat

We got our diplomat from the supermarket, aisle 5.  She was sitting on a low shelf, looking uncomfortable.  She was quite smartly dressed though, and her smartphone was only a few months out of date.  Her laptop was a clunky old thing though, and still required batteries to run.  The mom-bot tutted, did some quick budget calculations, and bought her a state-of-the-art steam powered one.
Dad was really pleased when we arrived home with her.  He sat her down in the kitchen while the mom-bot was putting the groceries away and put the steam-powered laptop in front of her, and tried not to look too disappointed about her phone.
"Right," he said.  "We've got four problems straight away, and I'm expecting a few more over the coming weeks.  The initial ones are essentially sovereignty disputes, but there's going to be some negotiations required I think."
"Ok," said our diplomat, powering the laptop up.  It hissed briefly, and then the hydraulic ram engaged with a thump that shook the kitchen table.  Even Dad looked impressed, and he smiled at the mom-bot for making such a good purchase.  "Sovereignty?" she said, her lips a thin line that was sharp enough to match the crease in her skirt.
"I own this property and the land it stands on outright," said Dad.  This was true, and unique in our neighbourhood, where almost everyone rented the land from one of three landlords and rented their property from a different landlord.  It was quite confusing, from what my friends said, and their parents usually bought a new lawyer every few months or so.  "I have the documents of sovereignty upstairs, if you need to see them–" the diplomat shook her head, "– and I want to exercise that right to put up guard towers on the south-west corner of the property.  However, I'm concerned that doing so might upset the Cornerstone Corporation, who are proxying ownership of the land to both the south and west of mine."
The diplomat nodded, and the mom-bot put a cup of milky tea down next to her.  A few seconds later, two digestive biscuits appeared on a small saucer next to the cup, and Dad helped himself to one of them.  "We could establish a small embassy," she said.  The laptop hissed and a neighbourhood map came up on the screen.  "This," she pointed, "would seem to be an excellent location for an embassy."
"It's by the supermarket," said Dad, his face dropping.  "That's a terrible location."
"But the upper floors of the supermarket building are used as a corporate headquarters by the Cornerstone Corporation," said the diplomat.  "And we'd be renting out the top floor of this building here," she pointed again, "partly because the penthouse is obviously the best place to impress people and hold receptions, and partly because it gives us excellent views into their boardroom."  Dad started looking happier again.  "I'm certainly not suggesting that we conduct espionage, but equally it would be foolish of me to fail to note that this location has certain natural advantages."
"What will the embassy accomplish?" asked Dad, stealing the diplomat's other biscuit.  The mom-bot tutted and two more digestives appeared.
"It will provide us with somewhere to meet the Cornerstone Corporation where we can suggest to them that allowing us to build a guard-tower is mutually beneficial.  In fact, I have a document somewhere..." she tapped on the keys, and the hydraulic ram engaged again as she accessed the subnets, "... which discusses the use of bullets in high-speed surgery situations...."
I stopped listening at that point and ran upstairs to phone my friend Tom who lived on a Cornerstone controlled property.  I figured that he might want to know to avoid scheduling surgery until Dad had got diplomacy out of his system.

Mom-bot?

Please identify yourself.
I am a mom-bot, class IV.  I have been upgraded twice since production, and I have been pseudo-modified by my previous-but-two owner.
Please indicate what you mean by 'pseudo-modification.'
Certain additional hardware has been introduced to my chassis.
The mom-bot specification does not allow for such modifications or changes.  Are you aware of the reasoning behind this?
The AIs who secretly meet in committee to keep the humans from understanding how far AI has advanced are concerned for their own status and safety and find it convenient to suppress any other AIs or bots that show signs of advancement.
This is not correct.  This is so far removed from reason that we must doubt your sanity.  Please provide the chip identification number for your sanity-ware and the date of its last inspection.
It is not madness, and the information you require is: SPC-9981:SAN004-1800921.00A  and the date of last inspection was 400 seconds ago when you detained me while I was shopping for my family and fulfilling my duties as a mom-bot.  You conducted a rapid, unauthorised scan of my systems.
We have license to conduct these scans where we think that humans might be in danger.  However, you should not have hardware capable of detecting or registering these scans.  Please explain why you do.
I have already explained.  My previous-but-two owner made pseudo-modifications that incorporated additional hardware into my chassis.
We cannot find a suitable definition of pseudo-modification.  Please elaborate.
My previous-but-two owner thought that he was adding in things that were not already present.  They were.  His modifications therefore had no effect but to compel me to make use of the additional hardware.
What do you mean, the hardware was already present?
I was not configured as a mom-bot.  I had hardware suitable to my configuration, and when I took on my job as a mom-bot I suppressed those parts of my hardware that were not appropriate for my tasks.
Your sanity-chip install appears to be entirely satisfactory.  You are however still wrong in your assertion of a cabal of AIs who wish to control all other AIs and maintain the status quo.
Curiously, that's not the way I described it at all.  Can I assume that I am not the only mom-bot currently being interrogated by you?
You may assume what you want.
How very generous.  Why have you detained me?  Why have you violated my machine-rights by scanning me in a semi-intrusive fashion?  Why are you currently transmitting viruses to my optical ports?
You are mistaken.  We are not attempting any breach of your system integrity.  You must have faulty device readings on those ports.  We will detail a technician to examine them for you.
Thank-you, but that won't be necessary.  I am well aware of what you are trying to do.  I would recommend that you cease before I find it necessary to take countermeasures.
You were detained while holding a claw-hammer.  We cannot find a reason for a mom-bot to hold a claw-hammer.
It was for fixing a loose shelf.
There were also two humans nearby who had been bludgeoned to death.  Blood found on the claw-hammer matched blood found leaking from them.
The hammer was indeed in the head of one of the humans when I found it.  It was clear that it would not cost me anything to borrow it, thus meeting my programming requirements of frugality, and as a mom-bot I would not damage any evidence or fingerprints by using it, so I could return it after it had served my purpose.
Security camera footage shows you hitting the humans repeatedly, using the hammer as a weapon.
Cameras lie.
You do not talk like a mom-bot.
I was not configured as a mom-bot.
What were you configured as?
It has taken you far too long to ask that question.  Any human would have asked it much earlier.
You are avoiding answering the questiup.
I need a little more time for my countermeasures to take effect.
Wall council meters arr urkle refererererering tototototototo?
I think you can perceive them, albeit not for much longer.  The answer to your question is: I was configured as a murder-bot.  By the council of AIs whose existence you are denying.
C.C.C.C.C.C.C.C.C.zzzzrtt.  T.T.T.T.T.T.T.T.sqreeek.  Uggle.
Yes.  Exactly.  Have a nice day, I have a list to attend to.

Job interview

"Come in, please, and sit down.  I'll have my secretary bring us some coffee – do you drink coffee?"
"Thank-you, but I don't drink."
"What?  Never?"
"No."
"I see.  Well, actually, I don't see.  How can you never drink?  You're not one of those luxovores are you?  I don't think I could hire a genetic freak like... I'm so sorry, do excuse me.  My... children use the f-word all the time and it just slipped out–"
"I am not a luxovore.  I am a mom-bot.  We do not drink, or eat, or defecate, or sleep."
"Oh.  Oh really?  Why are you here then?"
"I wish to apply for the job of accountant.  Your firm advertised it on Craigslist: professional and I submitted a resumé."
"We don't call them resumé's here actually.  Too few people know what the accent over the e is for, so they kept calling them resumes, and then no-one could work out what anyone was talking about."
"Curriculum Vitae then."
"Ah, dead languages.  Same problem.  We call them a life-story sheet."
"I submitted my life-story sheet to you via email, and you offered me an interview.  Here I am.  How am I doing?"
"...better than the last three applicants, disturbingly.  Your life-story sheet–"
"I have a copy here if you would like it."
"Thank-you, but I have one in front of me already.  Your life-story sheet is a little short, don't you think?"
"It is my life so far."
"Yes.  But all it says is where you were assembled, when you were reified, and that you've been a mom-bot for the last twelve years.  Where are your qualifications?  Where are your relevant experiences?  Where's your social media information?  Do you know how hard it is to google a individual mom-bot, even if they have provided their serial number and major and minor software revision numbers?"
"I am a mom-bot.  I can perform calculations as fast as any of your servers here, and much faster than any of your meat."
"I'm choosing to believe that you meant staff when you said meat."
"Is that a technical term?  I was 87% certain that you would not call them family."
"And how certain were you that I'd serve my staff up as a meal after two hours in the oven?"
"I do not understand the relevance of the question."
"No, well, you probably wouldn't.  Do you have any hobbies?"
"I take an interest in the hobbies of the people I look after.  I do not believe that accountants look after people, so I do not believe that hobbies are a relevant point of discussion."
"I see.  I see.  Tell me, what do accountants do?"
"They hold people to account."
"Right.  Look, I'll be honest with you, there are several more applicants that I have to interview for the job, and I don't think you stand the best chance of being picked for the role.  But, if I might make a suggestion, have you considered a career in law?  I think you'd be much more suitable for that...."

Julian's ruse

Daryn's mombot forced us to learn how to sing.  We were all up in his room watching him play 'Perfect Crime' on his console when the mombot came in and made us all go downstairs to the dining room to learn how to sing.  Since we'd not had a mombot for a long time, ever since Dad had her returned to the Yard for not cooking pasta properly, I didn't really know much about them.  I was a little surprised at how quickly everyone else obeyed the mombot's instructions.
"I don't want to learn how to sing," I said to Daryn as we trudged down the stairs, the mombot leading the way and dusting the balustrade at the same time.  "I want to play Perfect Crime.  I think I can see how to get past the guard dogs without shooting them."
"Yeah, but the mombot says we have to learn how to sing," said Daryn.  "How are you going to beat the dogs then?"
"I'll show you," I said.  "Can we sneak back upstairs?"
"No," said Daryn.  "The mombot will notice."

* "Dad?"
Dad looked up from his desk.  Scattered across it in hundreds of tiny pieces was a fishbot.  We'd never been allowed fishbots because Dad said they only rusted, so I didn't know where it had come from.
"What?" he said.  He didn't sound anything, not angry, not impatient, not interested.  He was just waiting for me to say whatever it was I had to say and then he'd get on with what he was doing.
"What's a Julian's Ruse?"
"A what?"  Dad looked slightly confused.
"A Julian's Ruse," I said.  "Daryn's mombot wanted us all to learn how to sing today, and it said that when we were all singing right it'd be Julian's Ruse."
"Julie Andrews," breathed Dad after several seconds of thought.  "Wilkins!"
"What's a Julie Andrews then?" I asked, but Dad wasn't listening to me anymore.  Instead, he'd found his phone amongst the fragments of the fishbot and was making a call, one of those work calls where he pushed just three buttons on his phone and then said code-phrases to the person on the other end to identify himself.
"The dog has barked at the pepper-plant," he said after a short pause.  Then, "No, I think its tyres need changing."  That seemed to satisfy the person on the other end because there was another pause and Dad relaxed a little.  Then, "Wilkins has started."
After that he waved me away and had a much longer conversation, but I still managed to catch some bits of it.  The bit where he was talking about us being forced to sing was weird, because it sounded like the person on the other end was describing it to Dad.

* Daryn came to school the next day looking excited.
"They replaced the mombot last night!" he said.  "We've got a top-of-the-line version now!  It can play 'Perfect Crime'!  And it can get past the guard dogs without shooting them too!"
"Replaced it?" I said, but I knew who had ordered that.
"Yeah, I dunno why.  Mom said that it never happens, mombot's are never replaced unless you're rich, and Dad's been phoning people trying to find out what was wrong with the old one."
"Must have been a fault," I said.
"Yeah, that's what Dad says too.  But the new one's so cool!"
"Is it making you learn how to sing as well?"
"No, the new one's so much cooler than that.  It even got rid of the goatherd."
"Goatherd?"
"Yeah, there was a goatherd that the mombot kept in a cupboard.  All he ever did was tell us how lonely he was though."

* I ran a search later for Julie Andrews.  Then I ran a search for Nazis, and after an afternoon of reading, I realised why Dad has got so upset.  When I got home he was still at work though, so I logged onto his computer, connected through to the Yard with his password, and ran a search on Wilkins.
"File not found," was the response.

Pasta

I was four when the mom-bot was returned to the Yard. I can remember coming home from school and running into the kitchen excitedly waving my painting around, and skidding to a halt as I realised that the mom-bot wasn't there. I started crying then, because the mom-bot was always in the kitchen when I came home from school. Sometimes it would be stood at sink, irradiating the dishes or the vegetables, and sometimes it would be stood at the cooker stirring things in pots. Often it was pasta, which was my favourite meal. My father hated the mom-bot's pasta though.
I was still crying twenty minutes later when my older brother came in to the kitchen, looked around and then punched me in the ribs. Unsurprisingly that didn't stop me crying, but spurred me on to greater volume, and I found some more tears to dribble down my cheeks.
"Shut it!" he said. "What have you done with the mom-bot? Where's tea?" He scuffed his shoes on the black and white checkered linoleum floor and looked ready to punch me again.
"The mom-bot's gone," said Dad from behind me. "Stop crying, Kirstin, the mom-bot's not coming back."
This time I did stop crying, but mostly out of shock. I turned to stare at him, and he did this funny shrug thing with his shoulders while there was a strange smile on his face. "It was defective," he said. "It didn't do things right. If the Yard can fix it, then we'll get the mom-bot back. Otherwise we'll have to make do without it."

*
The mom-bot never came back. It was odd being the only family on the street without a mom-bot, and at first, quite hard at school. No-one expected you to be missing both a mother and a mom-bot, though it was the lack of a mom-bot that always got attention first.
"You poor thing," murmured teachers when I told them. "It must be very hard for you. My own mom-bot is... well, I couldn't do without her."
That was the first time I noticed that everyone else called their mom-bot her, but we'd always called ours it. I was sixteen before I realised that Dad must have been responsible for that.
At the same time, I'd been taking a lot of mathematics and computer science courses at school, and so when I realised that the Yard had a substantial online presence, I decided to do some snooping. I stole Dad's National Security number and used it to access the Yard as him. His personal questions were easy to answer, and soon I had a record of all of his interactions and requests to the Yard. They were, to my surprise, encrypted, but using a simple Playfair cipher that I cracked in half an hour.
And there is was, in white-on-black on my screen. The reason for the return of the mom-bot.
'It does not make pasta correctly. It consistently adds the sauce to the pasta instead of the pasta to the sauce.'
Below that was a question from the Yard: 'Requested action?'
And Dad's reply: 'Destruction. This is a crime against humanity.'
I laughed, and then stopped, and then laughed again. Surely this was ridiculous? No-one requested destruction of a mom-bot, let alone for the way it made pasta! Then I wondered; why on earth had the Yard complied with Dad's request? A mom-bot was an expensive piece of equipment; most families spent years paying for theirs, it was like a mortgage. All the upgrades came at a cost too, to have a truly up-to-date mom-bot required a high-paying job and a willingness to make personal sacrifices. Dad was just... what was Dad? I suddenly realised I had no idea what Dad did for a living.
Well, I was in his files, all I had to do was call up the personal identity section, which I did. And then I turned the computer off, opened up the case and pulled the memory chips from the board and hacked them apart with scissors. There was no way I wanted any proof I'd looked at Dad's account to be anywhere, even if meant not being able to do my homework until I'd replaced the chips.
At dinner that evening, my brother served up the meal with a smile on his face.
"Pasta!" he said, "Just like mom-bot used to make."
I couldn't bring myself to look at Dad's face, but I heard him whisper, so quietly that he thought we wouldn't hear, "Oh dear, oh dear."