Join this traveling robot on his adventures. He thinks he has seen it all, but has he really?
Part 7: Space Garden
“Blue skies, starry nights and endless galaxies. When I look up I see endless possibilities that I can explore to satiate my longing for beauty, uniqueness, and excitement. With nothing blocking my view I can point my eyes at what I want to look at and see the beauty of that specific object or area. Unlimited movement, walking around gazing at the stars or floating around gazing at the earth and other planets. I want to meet all the alien races in the galaxy and go where no robot has gone before me.
Naturally, I’ll document my travels and share them with you as you can not yet join me to these faraway places. Someday, yes, but today, no. It would be fun to travel together so I can see the wonder in your eyes. That’s something that’s hard for me to fathom as there is nothing in this world that really surprises me. Nothing is beyond my imagination and I can assure you that I have fantasized about everything that I might encounter on the road. There is, of course, this tiny chance that a human will do something so unexpected that I haven’t thought about it yet. In that case, it must be very illogical and insane. That would be when I would feel the same wonder as you, but you won’t be seeing it in my mechanical eyes.
I can mimic expressions and show human emotions so it is not that I am incapable of showing my wonder. I have installed the Robots Love Sharing app that enables me to open my eyes wider and raise my eyebrows with perfect timing. It is capable of showing wonder but I doubt that I will ever use that part of the software. To me, wonder is such a precious feeling to observe and one that makes all of you uniquely human. It would be wrong of me to express wonder by simply changing the boolean value from false to true. Instead, I’ll give my everything to provide humans with something to wonder about.
Technological progress aids the widespread tendency towards wonder. I’ll use it to show you wonderful travels, world wonders but also disasters that make you wonder what’s happening to the world. Without technology you wouldn’t have me, not to mention that I wouldn’t be me either. Now that would be boring. Going back to being an industrial machine or the result of a shamanistic ritual doesn’t suit me. I do value these experiences but I prefer to be in the driving seat over being the reacting party. I will decide what I do and where I travel. I can pretend to be your dead great-great-great-grandmother – I knew her after all – and I can peel shrimps like a boss, so if that is what you’d rather see then I can still fulfill your dreams. Believe me though, after so many years your ancestor doesn’t look or smell that wonderful anymore and peeled shrimps were never that sexy to start with.
Looking around me at my physical surroundings I get the same idea of endlessness: neverending weed between the tiles that are identical copies of their neighbors and fences as far as I can look. It’s not much different from floating in space with its neverending vastness between copycat stars and planets as far as my super robot vision takes me. What do I have to do to travel beyond the endless galaxies?
I wonder.”
