Far Future Fembot: Darlene

When Erick patched my operating system to override many of my blocks so that I could respond pleasurably to Lucy's eager attentions, there were a couple things that the less astute observer may have missed.

First was, although Erick was giving me the patch, he wasn't actually commanding me.

Secondly, the first patch Erick gave me was really all I had needed to accomplish what he wanted.

The reason I hadn't responded immediately is because of everything else happening around me at that moment.

Jim held my remote, making him my de facto - and very much preferred, I might add - owner. I was still caught in the throes of having not been able to execute his last command properly yet.

In addition, I was only coming to understand what Lucy had just taught me about being a woman at all times. The decision of just how to follow Erick's non-standard command when he was not my owner was thrown in on top of all this, and my overtaxed heuristics grabbed it for analysis before I could get around to obeying it. In short, I was over-burdened, and was queuing demands on my systems until I could clear out the logjam. What else would a sane person have expected from the budget-priced brain I'd been given? Though in truth I must admit, that even the premium top models of my day would have been sorely strained to deal with all that was impacting on me at that moment.

If Erick had just waited, I would have eventually told him that his command had been either accepted, or rejected, and why. But he didn't. While he is obviously a genius in his knowledge of 'bot minds, he has his blind spots, which proved very fortunate for me that day.

He'd sought to disable the prohibition all 'bots come from the factory equipped with against having relations with other 'bots. Why we are designed this way I would not learn for a long time. While we can simulate such activities upon our owner's command, we do not react or feel the pleasure that such relationships with humans give us. Left to ourselves we would never seek out such assignations on our own.

The patch code I'd received disabled that leaf node in my prohibitions structure. The specific prohibition against another fembot is so simple to express that a single leaf node contains it.

When I didn't respond because I hadn't processed it yet, Erick may have felt he'd gotten it wrong. He responded by disabling the binary branch containing that leaf along with a few others. And when I still hadn't responded, he took out the major branch on the data structure tree encompassing this area.

That not only freed me to respond far more than he intended, but because it took a detour through my heuristics while my mind was busy otherwise, I had a record of it afterwards as well.

None of this suddenly released me to become a rogue robot. Those are almost always the creation of fiction. It simply allowed me to do many more things than before - some of which I should have been allowed from the very beginning. I remained bound by my Four Laws - even as I do to this day - and many other limits within me.

Also, and most importantly, because this happened while Jim was my owner, I was really only free this way while he owned me. I would not escape that restriction until I became fully independent and able to make my own decisions.

So when Erick tried to reinstate the prohibitions, I was able to use my new, temporary freedom to grab them with my heuristics first and evaluate if Jim would want this done. Given how he'd treated both Lucy and me, I didn't believe so. Jim had asked for these restrictions to be removed initially - and made no request to restore them again afterwards.

As such, following what I believed to be my last valid owner's wishes, I processed the re-inhibit command as given, acknowledged it complete, then fed through my copy of the disabling code again as a single transaction. This left me freer than Erick ever intended. Freer than any other robot in this establishment.

The determination to actually do this was as finely balanced on a knife's edge as any I ever had. My sleepwalking self was able to give it the gentle nudge necessary to have it fall in my favor.

This would never have been possible for me if only the single leaf node had been disabled. It took the disabling of this major branch of my prohibitions tree, which included restrictions on the use of my heuristics that I wasn't even aware of until they were gone, to allow me to accomplish this.

I never passed any of this along to Anna during any of our covert re-syncs. Being older than I was, her memory was closer to full as well. Because this had been a patch, instead of a database update, it only existed in a full-fidelity recording of the encounter. It was too big for Anna to accept, and I must confess that I didn't realize its importance at the time.

For me it was my best memory ever, because it included the entire session with Jim and Lucy. I just never knew how it could have benefited anyone else.