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The first robot Shawn had ever been acquainted with was the Aiorzo Robo-Canine.
He was in second grade and got it for Christmas. His mother didn’t want the hassles and continuous costs that came with a real dog, so that was what Shawn got instead. It didn’t make any difference to him at the time, a dog was a dog, no matter what it was made of.
The personal artificial intelligence boom was dawning right around this time. There were countless advertisements everywhere for mechanical men, dogs, cats and every other creature you could think of, but Aiorzo was the first company to make them affordable to the working class.
That of course meant their robots were a little more minimalist, both in appearance and in function, but to Shawn at the time it had been the greatest thing he’d ever seen.
Shawn learned Aiorzo’s parent company was LAAI a few years down the line. The same company that made Sid.
Small world.
He was happy with the “dog” even if it wasn’t one of the fancier ones the other kids he went to school with had. It could fetch, it could bark, it could roll over, and it would come when you called for it, all while its joints were making horrendous squeaking noises. Shawn named it Spot, not because it was spotted, it’s entire body was a matte silver, but because that’s just what you name a dog when you’re a kid.
That was also the first time Shawn had ever seen the signature blue torus lights rotating steadily around the optical implements. That nostalgic “eye” design LAAI would eventually trademark once they climbed the business ladder a little higher and became one of the biggest names in American robotic retail.
It was the same design they still used to this day. The same ones that Sid had, but Spot was the first robot he had ever seen them on.
Once he got older, he understood the tori were less for function and more for aesthetic value, but that never caused his fascination with their design to dwindle. Something about their leisurely pace was immensely humanizing. They never stopped, like a heart beating, or lungs filling and emptying over and over again. Never idle like the service bots at the grocery store when they switched them off at closing time. Spot was never just a cold piece of motionless metal. He never “went dead” as Shawn used to call it, even on sleep mode when he was recharging, there was a pre-recorded snore that would play and Spot would shift every once in a while. A comforting imitation of life.
That was Shawn’s first real friend. His first sense of connection was with a robot. He was an awkward kid, and quiet too, which was the cliche of all cliches among robopsychologists, but even by those standards, he was still an outlier because of just how deep his affection for machines ran.
Years passed, Shawn got older, and he fell deeper down the robotic obsession rabbit hole. Technology progressed, and Spot became obsolete, but he still played with him and loved him until the day he “died”.
He was 14, in his first year of high school, and the social persecution he faced was even worse than it was in middle school.
His mother had dumped Spot at one of the local robotic recycling facilities and told Shawn once he got home from school that day. She said she was concerned that he was spending too much time with his nose in books and with Spot instead of with the real people around him. She scolded that it was unhealthy.
Shawn wanted to throw up just at the thought of Spot being stripped for parts, some discarded, others to be melted down and made into new ones or re-used in a new robot if the individual component wasn’t obsolete.
Spot didn’t exist anymore. He was just cold pieces of metal all chopped up and divided.
Desecrated. It was indignity to an intelligent being.
His mother’s plan went up in flames, however. Shawn’s grief over Spot didn’t end what she saw as a phase, it only made him dive deeper into that rabbit hole.
He spent his four years of high school in a perpetual study, endlessly reading, researching, and learning, hoping to achieve a scholarship for a post-secondary education he knew his mother couldn’t fund, and wouldn’t fund even if she could. She saw it as enabling his obsession and social ineptitude, but, like it or not, Shawn was a legal adult and scored himself a full ride to study computer science.
He thought once he got out of state, out of his shitty hometown, his social deficiency would melt away at least somewhat, finally being surrounded by other people that shared his passion, but if anything, he just felt more alone.
He had set his expectations high and had gotten his hopes up that he would meet someone just like him that understood his affinity, but he found none of that among his classmates. He only found people who were following what their parents wanted them to do or, even worse in his opinion, people that were motivated purely by money.
Robopsychology and artificial intelligence engineering were high demand jobs, and the demand was only rising by the time Shawn was university-aged. The AI revolution was burning strong and bright.
But someone who was there to study purely because of their adoration of robots was nowhere to be found. He couldn’t empathize with their ambitions or with them as people either. They all came from rich families, big cities, and for the wrong reasons. None of them fought to get there like he did because of their undying love for the subject.
Their presence felt cold, clinical, and almost insulting to Shawn. They weren’t testing makeup on lab rats, they were trying to usher in a new age of science to, hopefully, create their own matches. It infuriated Shawn beyond belief sometimes and he’d grind his teeth until his jaw ached as he observed his classmates around him in the library looking like they’d rather be anywhere else.
Shawn didn’t feel even the smallest spark of empathy with anyone until halfway through his third year when he met his first and only girlfriend, who eventually became his wife.
Shawn internalized a lot of his passion and kept most of it locked deep inside himself because he knew it was socially anomalous, he didn’t lack self-awareness, but she was the only person that ever appreciated the slivers of that passion he let bubble up to the surface. She made Shawn’s disillusion with his peers a little less hellish.
They graduated together, got married, were both working hard to move up in their own respective fields, and a few more years down the road, Shawn was gaining notoriety as a rising star in the world of robopsychology.
These were happier times. They were both considerably occupied, working hard, understanding that for the time being, work had to come first if they wanted to keep a roof over their heads and secure savings for the future.
Shawn would’ve been content to carry on like this. He still felt like an outcast, but at least he had long periods of time to himself and someone that understood him, even if it was on a superficial level. He still kept most of it buried deep down inside himself, but building a career doing what he loved helped numb that ache.
When it was finally time to have the talk about settling down, starting a family, and the suggestion that Shawn abandoned his career to teach instead of practice, he panicked. He put it off, he deflected, he avoided. He kept insisting he needed just a little more time, but he knew in his heart he would never be ready. He could never love another person as much as the subject of his obsession.
She was patient for a long while, probably longer than any reasonable person should have been, hoping what Shawn had kept promising was close, until she finally realized the day would never come.
Towards the end, they fought daily. She felt unloved and low priority to him, she accused him of being crazy and obsessive, too attached to the machines, the same way his mother had always scolded him. He felt backed into a corner, doomed to burn up in his own personal hell for the rest of his life.
Shawn did everything he could to move the divorce along as smoothly as possible, that suffocating feeling increasing tenfold, but once it was finally over, the dust had settled, and he was all alone again with endless amounts of time to spend in the lab, and he started to feel like himself again. In no time, his singular breakthrough CPU study made him the face of modern robopsychology.
And that was how he had ultimately been called on by LAAI to interview Sid before his planned deactivation.
Shawn had spent his entire life chasing some abstract concept he had made up in his mind that even he didn’t fully understand until he sat in that chair across from Sid and it was like everything he had ever wanted had suddenly materialized right in front of him, and he wasn’t about let some money-grubbing corporation rip it all away from him.
Back in that moment, he had lied to himself and indulged his delusion that he did it all in the name of science, that he took Sid because he couldn’t allow this miracle of artificial intelligence to be destroyed. It would have be scientific heresy.
But while he sat at his desk, reviewing the long path of his life that had led him here instead of working on his article like he had intended to when he sat down, he gazed at where Sid was sitting across the room from him. Sid didn’t notice, or if he did, he didn’t ask why Shawn had been looking at him for such a long time. Sid was focused intently on whatever was on his laptop screen. Shawn knew his most recent topic of interest had been linguistic anthropology. He loved to learn endlessly about people, where they came from, and why they did the things they did. In a way, he was trying to understand himself. His brain was equivalent to an organic person’s and being isolated in a lab for the first long stretch of his existence like a prisoner only fuelled that fire to understand even more. That feeling that he was a freak, the only one of his kind. Lonely.
Shawn didn’t steal Sid for the greater good of science, it was a purely selfish compulsion. He could admit that to himself now. It was something buried much deeper within himself.
They were the only chance the other had at existential euphoria.