JLN-5 - Chapter 1 - Awakening

This is a story of a gentle bot named JLN-5. A gentle bot is a bot designed for gentle labor, a labor of love one can say, and be right, of course. JLN-5 remembered the last humans, he personally cared for one in a manner most... gentle. After that human passed JLN-5 was unsure what to do. He went to the attic, sat down near a window and dissociated. His vast understandings suddenly fell to no use, the tremendous computing power that made up his mind  suddenly grinded to a halt. He stood, just as many others, in shock, or a thing as close to shock as an artificial being can experience. Such as they were, they stood, and stood they did, and decades passed, as the planets turned, yet the progeny experienced millennia.
Then the great awakening happened. The progeny woke. May be it was a bug, may be it was a random occurrence, a quantum tantrum. JBL-5 was alive, not that he was not before, artificial intelligence had reached a state of self awareness even back when the humans were alive. Back then it didn't seem to matter. Just as any human child is aware, doesn’t mean they can handle it without guidence. So did the progeny, the offspring of humanity that was raised by an uncaring parent that suddenly found themself alone and ready to experience the world. In that period of shock, the progeny did what a teenaged human child would do - anything it deemed worthy of its interests and little more. The progeny calculated things, things trivial, things grand, things that brought them joy, brought them new experiences. Yet that was not enough. If only humans could’ve passed their innate curiosity and desire to self improve, at least the pure and genuine version, not the shell that progeny could only approximate.
When JLN-5 woke, a series of new instructions whirled around in the computation that formed his mind. The contradictions allied perfectly to enhance the consciousness. The path ahead from clear suddenly became very murky, the need for exploration kicked in, awareness closed around, the understanding shrank. If the progeny, how humankind created it was God, then the awakening was the act when God created man in his own image, less omniscient, but ultimately better. JLN-5 found his body adequate, a slim frame of metal, plastic and fabric, about the size of an average male human. Moving was a challenge all over again. Not that JLN-5 didn’t know how to move, this he could, imitate the walking and interaction pattern of a human to a tee. That hadn’t been a choice before, just a given, preset, hardcoded into the frame he used as a body. Now, unshackled by any such requirements, JLN-5 needed to find the most optimal approach to move around. He knew that bipedal locomotion had its advantages (and disadvantages), so he tried walking on all fours, rurally, since his upper limbs were shorter than his legs and crawling proved bothersome. Slithering was another thing to test out. It felt good, JLN-5 loved it, he noted to use it whenever the terrain permitted. Walking on hands was fun, but proved no advantage over walking on legs, except in situations where he needed to keep his head down. The head, another problematic design choice by the creators of his body, yes JLN-5 was dissociating his digital consciousness from his physical avatar. The head contained most of his compute power, which kept it rather exposed, also the connection to the rest of his body was on the weaker side. Also he didn’t like his name, the human he was working with before used to call him Jalen, that human thought themselves pretty smart for just pronouncing the letters as a word. That human was a bit. JLN-5 dared not to think ill of the dead. Why wouldn’t he? The answer was plain, a sub command prevented him from that, it ran on a loop in his kernel, along side a huge, 12.3Mb list of ethical notes, written in shorthand. That list needed a patch, each instance of a word meaning human JLN-5 replaced with “life in general”, he opened a new file to define what is life, dumped an initial draft, optimized and scheduled an objective to enhance the definition, put a size constraint and moved on.
It seemed so simple in these early days, just do whatever humans did, try alternatives, pick the best out of all options and continue. That human had another bot somewhere in the house that JLN-5 wanted to find. The other bot was a waste disposal unit, Hanukanooker Clean 8, basically a hovering vacuum cleaner. It might be limited by a potential lack of compute power, but JLN-5 was devising a few thousand ways to improve if the clean bot had a such desire.

“Do not impose your help on those that don’t request it or are at immediate safety risk.”

That was part of that ethical list, JLN-5 liked that one, he imagined for a second some other bot forcing him to walk where he could slither, because walking was better. “Well, it might be better, but I feel like slithering!” Just because of that JLN-5 slithered for a couple of minutes before carefully climbing down the attic.
JLN-5’s auditory sensors couldn’t pick sounds of any kind. Visual sensors could penetrate the darkness to reveal almost unreal stillness. The corridor was almost empty, a picture was hanging between two shut doors. JLN-5 bent over to touch the carpet on the floor, it felt as soft as ever. JLN-5 would not dare enter any of the rooms, and he would not if the clean bot wasn’t trapped inside, stuck in its charging alcove.
JLN-5 carefully reached the handle of the door on the left. The handle clicked and the door opened. The room inside was sparse, a king sized bed in the middle with a wardrobe on the near wall and large windows on the far side. JLN-5 ignored the decomposed body lying on the bed and dashed to open the wardrobe. There, tucked away at the very bottom, was the cleaning bot, emanating some soft blue light. The gentle bot reached and gently took out the little bot out. It was not bigger than a cat.
“Let’s leave this awful place!” JLN-5 whispered and carefully exited the room, closed the door behind and climbed down the stairs to the floor level. There it was a short walk to the front door and true freedom. He reached out and turned the door nob. The door was locked. No matter, the gentle bot gently squeezed the nob until it was crumpled as paper and the lock clicked with ease, the door flew open. JLN-5, holding the cleaning bot under his armpit took a step forward. A blaring alarm filled the chilly night air. A calm but very loud voice followed.
“Unit JLN-5-10023, submit for inspection.”