A moment after I took the remote, S.A.M.M. sprang to life and rolled forward on his six treaded wheels, out from under the Christmas tree and across the hardwood floor, to an open space in front of our big cabinet-style Zenith television. Familiar music began to blast out of his chest speaker—the song played by the cantina band in Star Wars—and S.A.M.M. began to dance to it.
First, he spun around clockwise in a complete circle, then counterclockwise, as his headlight-like eyes strobed in time with the music. Then he began to roll forward and to the left, before suddenly jogging backward and repeating the same move while turning right. As he moved, he kept raising and lowering his right arm, pumping his fist in the air like Billy Idol.
It was totally rad.
Dad, Thurber, and I watched him in stunned silence, until the song ended and he returned to his starting position by the tree. Dad and I simultaneously broke into wild applause, while Thurber barked.
“S.A.M.M., that was great,” I said.
“Thank you very much, Wyatt,” S.A.M.M. replied, spinning around one more time. “I have been programmed with an improvisational dance subroutine that allows me to really get down.”
I laughed out loud. Then I turned to look at my dad, and he was staring back at me with a huge smile on his face. I realized this was the first time he’d heard me laugh in a very long time.
I had bought Dad two presents that year, using money I’d earned from my paper route. The first was a coffee mug with World’s Greatest Dad printed on it. (He loves that kind of stuff, and also, it happened to be true.) My second gift to him was a really wicked role-playing game for the Apple II called Autoduel. Dad was a big fan of the Mad Max movies, and playing Autoduel was a lot like being the hero of those flicks. It was set in a dark future where the roads are controlled by gangs in armored vehicles. You have to go on courier missions through these badlands to earn money so you can buy better weapons and armor for your vehicle. I’d played the game a little at the store before I bought it and it was totally addictive. I knew my dad would love it.
After we dumped out our Christmas stockings and ate a bunch of chocolate for breakfast, Dad went up to his bedroom to check out the game. As soon as he left, I sat down in front of S.A.M.M. Standard Omnibot 2000s had a built-in clock and internal tape deck that allowed them to play back prerecorded audio and movement instructions from a standard magnetic audio tape at a specific time. I’d started to wonder if maybe my dad had decided to have a little fun with me, and he’d somehow programmed S.A.M.M. to move and dance like he’d done earlier, and that his synthesized voice had just been played off a tape. That struck me as highly unlikely, though; S.A.M.M.’s responses and movements had all been too specific and perfectly timed. But I figured I might as well check.
The tape deck embedded in S.A.M.M.’s chest slid out when I hit the eject button. It was empty. And the timer function hadn’t even been switched on yet.
Was it possible that S.A.M.M. really was an artificially intelligent prototype? After all, this was 1986, and all sorts of amazing stuff was being invented all the time. Over the summer, I’d seen an IBM commercial showing off their new voice recognition software. A woman spoke into a microphone attached to a computer, and each word she said appeared on the monitor. That technology, at least, did already exist. But it was a long way from artificial intelligence.
I wondered if maybe S.A.M.M. was just engineered to react to the words he heard with a finite set of preprogrammed responses. In our computer room at school, I’d played with text-based software programs like ELIZA and Abuse, where you could type in a sentence and the computer would parse the words you’d entered to generate a response that seemed very human. But it didn’t take long to enter a question that would stump the computer, and then the software would start repeating itself or give a response that didn’t really make sense. The responses I’d already gotten from S.A.M.M. seemed far more natural and intuitive than anything that could be produced with such software.
I decided to see how far I could push his programming.
“S.A.M.M.?” I began, sitting down cross-legged on the floor in front of him. “Can I ask you a few questions?”
“I believe you just asked me one,” he replied. Then he let out a long synthesized laugh, which I found more than a little unnerving.
“Right. Good one, S.A.M.M.”
“Thank you. I enjoy humor.”
I decided to try repeating myself, to see if I would get the same canned response.
“S.A.M.M., can I ask you a few questions?”
“You’re repeating yourself, Wyatt,” he said. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m feeling fine.”
“Would you like me to take your temperature, just to be sure?”
“You can do that?”
“Yes. I have an advanced array of external sensors that provide me with data about my environment. Your current body temperature is ninety-eight point six degrees Fahrenheit, which is normal for a human male of your size.”
“What is my temperature in Celsius?”
“Thirty-seven point zero degrees Celsius. Wyatt, would you prefer that I use the metric system from here on out when providing you with measurements?”
“No, that’s okay. You can use the regular system.”
“Do you mean imperial units of measurement, or United States customary units? I am familiar with both.”
“Uh … U.S. customary units.”
“Acknowledged,” he said. Then his speaker emitted a short series of electronic beeps that sounded like a touch-tone phone being dialed very rapidly. (There was a button on his Master Control Unit marked Omnibot Sounds that also made his speaker emit those tones.)
I was starting to get the distinct impression that S.A.M.M. was smarter than me. But my inner skeptic refused to quiet down, and I decided that my dad had to be pulling a fast one on me. He was probably upstairs using a second remote control to operate S.A.M.M. and transmit his responses—maybe with a speech synthesizer program on our Apple II.
I jumped to my feet and ran up to my dad’s room. Through the half-open door, I could see my dad sitting at the computer playing Autoduel. He was in the middle of a heated road battle. “I am the warrior of the wasteland!” I heard him say (quoting The Road Warrior) as he gleefully pounded the keys on the keyboard. “The ayatollah of rock and roll-a!”
Engrossed as he was in his game, clearly he wasn’t controlling S.A.M.M., so I headed back downstairs and sat down in front of my robot again.
“S.A.M.M., can you tell me when you were built?” I asked.
“Yes, I can.”
“When were you built?”
“I was first activated on November twenty-sixth, 1985.”
“Where were you first activated?”
“At the Tomiyama manufacturing plant in Katsushika, Tokyo, Japan.”
“Can you speak Japanese?”
“Hai,” S.A.M.M. replied. “Watashi wa nihongo wo hanashimasu.”
“Wow” was all I could say for a moment. “Okay. Please switch back to English.”
“Very well, Wyatt.”
I thought for a moment. “What is the weather like outside right now?”
“I don’t know, Wyatt. I haven’t been outside since I was powered on.”
“Oh. Right.”
He raised his right hand toward the nearby window. “But the presence of snow on that windowsill and the frost on the glass indicate that it is extremely cold outside.”
“You can see out the window?”
“I could, if it weren’t covered in frost.”
“How far can you see? When your view is not obstructed?”
“That depends on various environmental conditions, but under ideal circumstances my visual sensors have a range of up to point six two one miles.”
“What is your favorite color?”
“Blue.”
“Why?”
“I prefer it to all of the other hues within the visible spectrum of light.”
/>
“Jesus Christ.”
“I’m sorry. Would you please repeat the question or command?” S.A.M.M. asked.
“What color is my hair?”
“Brown.”
“What color are my eyes?”
“Blue.”
“What color are your eyes?”
“I can’t see my own eyes, Wyatt. You tell me.”
I jumped up and ran to the bathroom, where I dug around in the drawers until I found a small hand mirror that used to belong to my mom. Then I ran back to the living room and held it up in front of S.A.M.M.’s head, directly in front of his enormous eyes. “Now can you see your eyes?”
“Yes, I can.”
“What color are they?”
“Yellowish orange.”
“Wow.”
“Wyatt, would you do me a favor?”
“Sure! What?”
“Hold that mirror farther away from me, so that I can see my entire self.”
I took several steps back and held the mirror up again. “How’s that?”
“That is excellent. I am seeing myself for the first time and I think that I look very good.”
“Are you kidding? You look totally badass, S.A.M.M.!”
“Thank you, Wyatt.” His servos whined as he raised his right hand and extended it toward me. “May I have a high five?”
“You only have three fingers, S.A.M.M.”
“Yes, but you have five fingers; therefore the term ‘high five’ is still technically accurate.”
I awkwardly high-fived his three-fingered claw of a hand.
“Right on,” S.A.M.M. said. “You are the coolest, Wyatt.”
“I think you’re pretty cool, too,” I said, feeling ridiculous and exhilarated at the same time. “I just met you this morning, and you’re already one of my best friends.”
“I am programmed to be your very best friend, Wyatt.”
“You are! Except for my dad, but he doesn’t really count, because he’s my dad. Oh, and Uncle Joe. He’s the coolest, too. You’ll like him—”
A piercing shriek that sounded like a mixture of radio static and guitar-amplifier feedback suddenly burst out of S.A.M.M.’s chest speaker and he rolled backward, colliding with the wall behind him. There was a photo of me and my folks that we’d had taken at K-Mart last year hanging on the wall, and the impact knocked it down. It bounced off of S.A.M.M.’s head, shattering the picture glass, before it hit the floor and scattered tiny pieces of glass everywhere. Then S.A.M.M. lurched forward, over the busted picture frame and the glass shards, and slammed himself face-first into the opposite wall of the living room, as his speaker continued to blast out that strange feedback.
I finally came to my senses and ran over to switch off S.A.M.M.’s power. But just before I did, I thought I heard some garbled speech mixed with the static coming out of his speaker. The voice was eerily high and sounded almost human.
I could swear I heard the voice say, “I’m going to kill them both!”
Luckily, my dad must have been too caught up in his game to hear the commotion downstairs. I quickly swept up the broken glass and shoved the broken frame in a drawer. The photo of me, my mom, and my dad had been damaged when S.A.M.M. rolled over it, and now there was a big diagonal slash across my father’s face.
I was sure this was just a coincidence.
I was also fairly certain that S.A.M.M.’s destructive behavior was due to some kind of radio interference from a passing plane or a neighbor’s garage-door opener. The Omnibot’s instruction manual said this could happen.
Of course, it said absolutely nothing about the robot having artificial intelligence, or about it making murderous threats in a demonic voice. But I’d probably imagined that last part.
Besides, I thought, why would S.A.M.M. want to harm my father? Unless …
Maybe it had something to do with me telling S.A.M.M. that Dad was my best friend? I’d said that right after S.A.M.M. told me he was programmed to be my “very best friend.” What if that comment had made S.A.M.M. jealous? Or maybe it had created some kind of conflict in his computer brain that made him want to eliminate any and all threats to his primary mission objective?
What if S.A.M.M. was flipping out, just like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
When I turned S.A.M.M. back on and asked him what had happened, he played dumb and said, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Wyatt.” So I just let it go.
Uncle Joe came over about an hour later, carrying several big bags of food that contained a complete Christmas dinner. He’d ordered everything from a local restaurant and picked it up on his way over, so that my dad wouldn’t have to try to cook anything. (Which would have been a disaster. My dad is like Charlie Brown: he can only make toast and cold cereal. We’d been eating a lot of pizzas and Hungry-Man micro-waved dinners since my mom passed away.)
My uncle wasn’t much of a cook, either. He was my mom’s younger brother, and they looked a lot alike, which sometimes made it weird to be around him after she died, because I would sometimes catch a glimpse of one of Mom’s expressions on his face. But I loved hanging out with him, because he was pretty much the coolest relative a guy could have. He was only ten years older than me, so I thought of him more like a big brother than an uncle.
Uncle Joe had been coming over a lot the past year, to keep me company on the nights when Dad had to work late. Usually, we ordered pizza with anchovies—he’s the only other person I know besides me who likes anchovies—and then we would rewatch The Terminator, which I’d taped off HBO. I think Uncle Joe and I probably watched The Terminator together at least forty times. But watching a rampaging killer Austrian cyborg from the future never seemed to get old. Not for us, anyway. Sometimes we would change it up and watch Short Circuit, another fun robot flick that didn’t involve as much homicide.
Uncle Joe wished me a merry Christmas and gave me a big bear hug; then I helped him unpack all of the food he’d brought and set it up on the kitchen table. Everything smelled really good.
“Where’s your pop?” Uncle Joe asked, taking off his coat and draping it over a chair. “I’m starving to death. It feels like my stomach is starting to eat itself. That, or an alien facehugger got me last night while I was sleeping. Either way, I need to get something good in my belly, A-S-A-F-P.”
Uncle Joe has a twisted sense of humor, and he swears around me all the time. He’s also a really smart guy and loves to play practical jokes on people. For instance, my dad tends to honk at bad drivers on the highway, so once Uncle Joe rewired his car horn so that it made a duck-quacking sound. (The effect was hysterical, and my dad subsequently decided to leave the horn that way.) Uncle Joe knew all kinds of cool tricks, like how to descramble HBO with a length of antenna wire and some tinfoil.
“Dad is upstairs in his room playing a really wicked game I got for him,” I said. “Which reminds me, I got you a game, too.” I handed him his gift and watched him unwrap it.
“Leather Goddesses of Phobos?” Uncle Joe said, reading off the game box.
“Yeah! It’s a new Infocom adventure game. The guy at the software store said it’s hilarious and full of hot chicks.”
“The guy at the software store shouldn’t be selling dirty games like this to thirteen-year-old boys,” he said. Then he ruffled my hair. “But thanks, pal. It looks like loads of fun.”
Uncle Joe worked as a welder, but his real passion was computers and especially video games. He had a tricked-out IBM computer he’d upgraded himself, and he had hundreds of games for it. He invited me over to his apartment all the time to play them with him.
While we were talking, S.A.M.M. wheeled up behind Uncle Joe and just stood there motionless, like he was listening to us. When my uncle finally turned around and spotted him, his eyes went wide. Then he knelt down to examine the robot up close. “Holy cow!” he said. “An Omnibot 2000! Your old man finally caved in and bought you one, huh?”
“Yeah, but this is no ordinary Omnibot 2000!” I said
. “It’s an advanced prototype with artificial intelligence! See?” I pointed to the AI printed on S.A.M.M.’s chassis.
“Artificial intelligence?” Uncle Joe repeated. “I hate to break it to you, Wyatt. But that’s impossible. True AI hasn’t actually been invented yet.”
“Oh yeah? Watch this,” I said, turning to face the robot. “Hey, S.A.M.M.?”
“Yes, Wyatt?” S.A.M.M. replied. Uncle Joe did a double take.
“Tell my uncle Joe what your name stands for.”
“My name is an acronym for Self-Aware Mobile Machine,” he said. “Wyatt gave me this name and I like it very much.”
Uncle Joe looked at S.A.M.M. uncertainly; then he looked at me, then back at S.A.M.M. “Yeah, that’s a pretty cool name, all right.”
“Thank you,” S.A.M.M. said. “I think your name is also pretty cool, Uncle Joe.”
Uncle Joe just stared at him, looking nonplussed.
S.A.M.M. swiveled his head to face me. “Wyatt, my battery is beginning to run low on power,” he said. “Could you please plug in my charger?” I checked the battery indicator light on his chest. Sure enough, it was glowing red.
“Sure thing, S.A.M.M.,” I said. I picked him up by the carrying handles built into his shoulders, just as his manual instructed, and carried him over to the nearest electrical outlet. I set a timer on my digital watch; then I plugged one end of S.A.M.M.’s charger cable into the outlet and the other end into the port on his back.
“Thank you, Wyatt,” S.A.M.M. said, making what sounded like a contented sigh. “That feels good.”
“No problem, pal. I’ll see you after dinner!”
I turned to see Uncle Joe staring at S.A.M.M. with a terribly confused look on his face. “Did he just say ‘That feels good’ when you plugged him in?”
“He sure did,” I said.
“Okay, I give up,” he said. “How did you program him to do that?”
“I haven’t programmed him to do anything,” I said. Then I ran over to the bottom of the staircase and shouted upstairs. “Dad! Uncle Joe is here and he brought dinner!”
“I’m down here,” Dad said, appearing through the door that led down to the basement. “It was freezing upstairs and I wanted to check on the furnace.” He walked over and gave Uncle Joe a big hug. Then, in unison, they both said, “Let’s eat!”