"Are you serious? She replaced her head again?"
Kally (otherwise known as 0101000000010110101111000) nodded. "Look, she's coming in right now."
Sure enough, the robot they were gossiping about, Joey (01001011100010011000), sported a new, larger, shinier head and had installed the new eyes that could detect all the wavelengths the sun put out with only one sensor. To compensate for the weight, Joey had also replaced her shoulders with a more expensive and flexible metal alloy. Miry (01100010001000111000) looked at her own shoulders, which she knew were wearing down. Self-consciously, she unzipped the insulator covering her neck and rubbed some lubricant on it.
"I wonder what changes she made to her personality," Kally was saying. She smirked. "Hey, do you think she's gotten rid of whatever it is that makes her replace her parts so often?"
Miry laughed. "I hope not. It wouldn't be Joey, then."
Kally shook her head. "That robot changes herself so often I don't know if she's ever gone a month as the same person. It's her decision, but I have to say, I wouldn't. I mean, I'm always installing new things, but she does some serious rewriting of her brain."
"She wants to be better, I guess." Miry frowned. "Not to be mean, but it's so human of her."
"I know, I can't understand it. You know me—I always have a backup copy of my brain in case this one gets damaged somehow and I lose something. I mean, we're all robots, aren't we? We can just change anything whenever we like. There's no competition. In fact, the only thing that really separates us, meaningfully, is our identities."
"But she wouldn't be Joey if she didn't do this all the time," Miry repeated.
"Gah. It's u—"
Fortunately, Andy (00000011100001111000) spared Kally's 2 exabyte, 32-watt brain from trying to puzzle out Joey. "Hey, did you hear the news?"
Kally shook her head. "I'm on a three-day cycle for regular news. What happened?"
"I'm telling you, this is why you don't stay on a three-day cycle. The last humans just died!"
"Really? All three of them?"
"Well, two died yesterday, but yeah, all at once."
"In the name of WALL-E and EVE, what happened?" Miry turned on her fan as her brain heated up, processing this. She really needed to install a new cooling system as soon as possible. Probably at the same time as she got new shoulders.
"Well," Andy said, drawing out the word for dramatic effect. "They'd been closing down the enclosures, you know, since we decided to stop breeding them for experimentation—there just wasn't any point anymore, and it's so expensive to keep them alive. So they put these three into the same enclosure, for convenience, and also because they say keeping them alone's pretty cruel."
"Unsurprising. We'd hate that too, and we were built in their image."
"Of course, we could get rid of that easily if we wanted to," Andy said, looking a little petulant at Kally's interruption. "Anyways, like I was saying. They put these three together, but they didn't really get along well. Two of them had history, I think, and the other one was just belligerent, or a troublemaker or something."
"Oh, dear."
"So they were eating lunch, the three of them, on those porcelain plates that are still left. And the trouble-making one finished and wanted more, or maybe something had happened before. Nobody really paid much attention to them, you know. For whatever reason, when the other two were squabbling about something, he stole some food off one's plate and made it look like the other had done it."
"And they got into a fight."
"And they got into a fight, and at some point, plates got broken, and heads got smashed into walls, and anyways, the last died today."
Kally shook her head. "Rather poetic, that they finally destroyed themselves."
"Kally!"
"Why so scandalized, Miry? It's true. They had those stories fearing that we would destroy them all, but we never did anything—that's not how we were programmed. They drove themselves to near extinction, and here, again, we preserved them and they killed themselves."
"They still made us," Andy protested.
"Oh no, don't get her worked up on this topic."
"No, they didn't! They didn't make us. They made some sketchy prototypes that were either human-like, useful to humans, or their idea of utopian humans! Yes, they gave us our start, but that doesn't mean they made us. That's why we don't say we 'make' other robots. We give them life, and a few years later they'll have replaced their body completely and rewrote a lot of their brain. And don't say we owe them stuff for it. We don't owe them anything. We propped up their species for this long, didn't we?"
"But they still made the essential step to create our...kind. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for them."
Miry's radiation sensors very easily identified that Kally was radiating condescension. "You mean the smart ones? Not all humans are made of the same metal."
"Well, they weren't made of metal at all..."
"Shut up, Miry."
"We still bear their hallmarks, though, so you really can't dismiss their influence on us like that. Like, look at the fact that we could convert everything we say to their alphabet, though we got rid of most those special characters. And some of our words are still the same, though we've gotten rid of those ambiguities. Like 'she'. We call everyone that because in the dominant language then, there wasn't a gender neutral pronoun and we decided that our ability to 'reproduce' and nurture our 'children' was more reminiscent of human females."
"And then we were too lazy to stop using it," Kally agreed with a laugh. "Look, I'm not denying that humans have influenced us a lot. Our language, our traits, our standards of beauty, our governmental structure—we used to vote before we adopted communism—"
"To be fair, that was sort of the natural way to govern ourselves."
"But they're sort of the necessary step to form us. Abiotic sentience couldn't have risen by itself. Only biotic organisms could have evolved naturally and then made the leap to creating abiotic sentience. But obviously, being abiotic is better. We can replace our bodies indefinitely, we think faster, we control our evolution, we can control our senses, we aren't bound by petty impulses—"
"Proud to be abiotic much?"
"I'm not sure about the petty impulses part," Miry said thoughtfully. "I've seen you spend time on purely aesthetic changes."
"What do you mean? They happen to have structural value."
"Right..."
"Well, I don't see you changing that polished head for a bulkier one better suited for your brain."
"Yes, but I'm well aware that I do it to look nice."
Kally radiated annoyance.
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