My Life as a Robot

Just observing things.
  October 1, 2003

A new object appears in my field of vision.  It has a head with long hair on it.  It has arms.  I cannot see how many…  Now I can because it has turned.  There are two arms.  It has two legs and a torso that holds together the parts I have already named.  It has breasts.  It must be human and female.  Its breasts are larger than average for human females.

I make a step in southeasterly direction, which puts me on the course towards the female object.  The step consists of multiple component movements.  First I push off slightly with my left foot to transfer my center of gravity onto my right leg.  Almost simultaneously my left leg begins to rise slightly, bending in the hip joint.  The heel of the foot lifts off the ground, while the toes dip down, still touching the asphalt.  They give a little push which sends my center of gravity moving forward.  The movement is carried out mostly by rolling along the outer half of my weight-carrying right foot.  My left leg swings forward and simultaneously my arms move, left one forward, right one back.  I complete the step by lowering my left foot onto the ground, heel-ball-toes.  Without pausing, I proceed to execute a second step, moving my right leg this time.  The movements are identical to those that I have made with my left leg, but carried out in mirror reversal.

The female object rotates its head so that two roundish features called eyes are positioned at an angle satisfactory for the visual detection of my activities.  The rotation comprises about 14 degrees from the head's original position, bringing a composite feature called face towards the northwest.  The part of the face called mouth dilates and high-pitched sounds issue from it.  The sounds are discrete and combine into multisyllabic units called words.  The pitch of the words increases with the progress of the utterance.  Patterns of pitch change are called intonation.  The intonation of the utterance the female object has just made is inquisitive.

I continue making steps as the words are produced.  The female object reorients itself so as to face away from me and executes a series of steps in rapid succession, known as running.

Then I stop and think: spring is here but the smell of winter still hangs in the morning air and dark still reigns over the western horizon.  Dawn bleeds quietly in the east.  Hungry wind bites my cheeks with cold teeth and plays with my hair as I stand in the middle of an empty square listening to cooing pidgeons.  They sit on the roofs of low concrete buildings with crumbling facades.  Grass grows through broken asphalt, and the small puddles of water are covered with crusts of ice.  The air smells of smoke and, faintly, rotting garbage.  My hands are stuffed into coat pockets to protect them from the cold.  The spreading warmth drives needles into my frozen fingers.  I look up to the Janus sky whose one face regards the night and the other, the new day, and look silently at the floating vaporous objects, varying in color from white to dark grey, that result from the condensation of water at high altitudes and partially obstruct my current view of the atmosphere.  They are known as clouds.

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