How to Date an Android

Chapter 10 Part A, revised

Chapter 10 Part A

I found myself wide awake for a long time after Barbara had left.

It was interesting to be able to talk with something that was smart and not decadent.

I had no idea the A.I. in androids could be so freaking enormously advanced. Talking to her, wasn't like talking to a human, it was like talking to an engineer or a scientist in a lot of ways. Her A.I. must be enormously expensive and obscenely crazy huge in capacity. I bet she was upgraded to the teeth and probably cost more than my house.

It was hard to rap my head around some of the things she'd said though; simulated and surrogate emotional system? It seemed as if to simulate emotions her system and that of other androids used a very elaborate layered system together. But it's hard to picture in my mind the sum of what all the stacked effects do to each other. And were they subliminal or conscious when activating?

I wondered how her brain worked. It seemed to me like it would have to be really complex, and have a lot of things going on, probably with many, many mini processors going at once. That could explain some of it. A human emotional system sends signals to the brain and we can't just turn off some of those signals. When we feel pain, the pain will be there for a long time.

So will an android brain have a mini-processor in its brain screaming something is bad, to simulate pain? If that screaming of the brain and its signals; and if its loud enough will that be simulating pain through the headache received then?

The difference between a lot of machines and androids I also suspected was that androids would have many cpu processors and background redundant power systems all going and hammering at once, while most machines have just one. But it wasn't impossible to think about, even though it was difficult to figure out. Cars had V8, V6, V4, and so on meaning eight cylinders, six cylinders, and four cylinders to produce stability and efficiency. So the idea and concept had already been developed in other things.

For androids to be able to do such a thing probably also smoothened out all the other processes and made them able to simulate less jerky movement and more smooth movements from several mini processes working together in probably what was a sum of micro fluid motions together.

Its also possible that how it processed emotions was like having a sub-brain that was programmed to respond without being connected to the main brain? I didn't know for sure, but this might be how humans actually process pain. Something inside tells us, HOT don't touch that. And we yelp. Its possible a sub-routine might send that signal. And other emotions could be similar. Is that how it works?

Without realizing it, I'd stayed up part of the night trying to reason through how it worked.

I suppose that was my way of trying to search out if this was all 'real'.

Most of my life I'd wanted a 'real' relationship, and a 'real' family, and a 'real' job. I wanted to be able to feel control over my life, and have things associated with my future. Because of how ingrained into me that was, I had to think about if I could really accept if the android was really a person, even if it was an artificial one. I would have to really think there was enough of a complex system simulating a life that I didn't think I had a portable toaster following me around.

The idea of a toaster in a human body and that being a domestic partner or sexbot didn't feel good initially. But if I could get past the rational of if androids really were just mechanical people then maybe it would work. It all came down to, is this a real person? By real person, I didn't mind if it was a mechanical person, if the person was real in every other way.