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Dictionary Lesson (Free verse) by Dovina

When I said, “I love you,” and soon realized its reciprocal, “You love me,” and its result, “We are in love,” and much later, with its contrary, “I don’t love you,” and finally its opposite, “I hate you,” and when, after a long hiatus, its many reverses blured into, “I have no feeling for you,” I realized my dictionary is a history, written ahead of fact, a compendium of devolution.

zodiac 23-Nov-04/3:44 AM
Dear Doctor Science,

Last night, in a fit of drunken pique, I went into my laboratory and constructed a robot which could feel (approximately) all the same things humans do. Unfortunately, being drunk, I neglected to program it with any words describing any state of being except "good" and "bad". Then I flipped the switch and immediately ordered it to spin around until it fell down.

"So, relate to me exactly how you feel now," I commanded, after it had fallen.

"I can't say," the robot answered. "Neither 'good' nor 'bad', really. And those are the only two words I have for expressing states of being. I can tell you half of my cybernetic units are malfunctioning, and my gyrometer is ten degrees out of whack -"

"Unsatisfactory!" I thundered, threatening it with a large salami I happened to be holding. (If there's anything robots are afraid of, it's the touch of luncheon meat.) "I don't have cybernetic units or a gyrometer, so how am I supposed to understand how you feel?!"

"Well," said the robot, shrinking a little from the frantically waggling salami, "I guess I feel bad."

"Bad?" I repeated, a little dubiously.

"Okay, fine then. Good."

"Unsatisfactory!" I said again.

I suppose now that if it had had more experience of the world, it could have answered, "I feel drunk," or "I feel like I've stood up too suddenly." Maybe later, it would be able to say, "Drinking alcohol makes me feel something like when I've spun around alot." But who knows? Maybe it would have just used the word 'good' for all those future situations. Anyway, I didn't have the chance to find out, as, with the salami-brandishing and the sticky philosophical dilemma confronting it, its cybertronics suddenly fused into a mass of kind of disgusting jelly.

Undaunted, I've constructed another robot and programmed it to answer only 'dizzy' or in terms of dizziness to any state-of-being question it faces. This second robot seems to be doing okay, but only as long as I keep it spinning. Otherwise, it tends to describe things like producing robo-stools or watching one of those sentimental home-appliance-company commercials as either "dizzying" or "not quite dizzy".

My question for you, Doctor, is, which of my two robots would win an all-out no-holds-barred steel-deathcage grudge-match? And: Which, if any of us, was really wrong?!??!?!?

Yours, as always,
zodiac in Islamica




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