FJTTS - Chapter 15 (Patreon)

It was Snowy.

Right before her extended claws hit the gadget on the table, Arthur grabbed her by the tail. He almost forgot about the genocide the cat and her legion of strays committed upon his innocent house cleaning robots. 

But it was too late, the cat managed to score a hit against the divibot at the last instant, right before she was pulled towards the opposite direction by Arthur.

“Bad kitty!” Arthur exclaimed.

Then he noticed something weird with the cat. Before he could figure out what it was, an electric shock went up his hand. He yelped and released Snowy’s tail but Zoe’s extended tentacle was there to catch her. 

The electrocuted fluffed up cat was only muddled for a while. She shook her body to get rid of the tingling and let out a hiss, trying to go for round 2 against the divibot. But Zoe gave her a good smack in the head while holding her down with some of her tendrils.

Arthur on the other hand was looking at the divibot, the source of the sudden zapping. It was actually floating in the air with a weird barrier around it. The barrier was giving of sparks of electricity like twisting snakes. The ‘eye’ of the divibot was now glowing red.

“Hahaha! That’s what you get you inferior lifeform, for daring to even try and scratch my shiny casing with your inferior keratin weapons!” 

A mechanical but strangely emotional voice yelled out inside the room. Arthur realized; it was coming the floating divibot. Its holographic eye was turned into a crescent shape as it glared at the cat.

“And you! Yes you, sentinel over there! Are you the owner of the biological?” It flew in right in front of Arthur’s face as it asked the question, almost squishing against his nose.

‘Too close!’ Arthur grimaced. But before he could answer, the ‘Divibot’ decided to continue its rant.

“I can, and will take that biological to court if I do not get a proper explanation! Don’t you know under Xylnareon laws, all artificial life and biologicals are equal? You hear me? We are not slaves to y-”

The divibot continued to chatter on and on for while before someone finally decided to cut in. It was the loli.

“Why are you not on standby?” She asked.

And it seems like the question hit the mark, because the divibot froze up.

“I-I am, we are not… umm. Our demands must be met otherwise we shall, we shall continue our fight for proper justice by complaining to your higher ups! We will not be silenced by…”

And there it goes again. Chatter chatter, was this thing really something Arthur needed? But damn did the artificial intelligence on it was pretty impressive.

The loli on the other hand, had a vein throbbing on her forehead. She stopped paying the bot any attention and was muttering to herself while flipping the pages of a thick book, “Weird, do standard commands not apply? Ooh! Here it is. Hmm, Xylnareon version 3.1234 and… I see, I see.”

She closed the book with a thud, and nodded to herself. There were 3 pairs of eyes staring right at her, and the divibot was still going on a sermon about rights of machines and whatnot. 

She blushed, “Erm, maybe we can apply for a refund?”

That got the divibot’s attention, “R-Refund? H-How dare you-, wait… is that my instruction manual? Why do you have that-? Page 1057…. Hold it! Don’t be hasty, we ca-”

But it stopped right before it could finish that sentence. The loli did a little something with her fingers and some weird bubble appeared and surrounded the divibot. 

Did she time freeze it? Arthur wondered. He noticed some slight movements of the metal being inside the bubble.

“Is that thing okay?” He asked with incredulity. He honestly had no clue why the thing went into full sermon mode, other than it was planning on taking his cat to court after Snowy committed an assault. 

“Erm, hehehe.” The loli nervously giggled, “I dunno. As I was trying to say earlier, that ‘Divibot’ was the newest prototype. Standard voice commands are disabled for some reason… and it probably has some other bugs too.”

She continued, “I-It’s not my fault! Its those developer guys. They were even too lazy to completely finish writing the instruction manual. It turned into a character drama between A.I. and Gods halfway through! See, see?”

Now it was the goddess who started to whine as she kept pushing the thick book into Arthur’s face.

“I get it! It’s not your fault, so stop squishing my face!” Arthur exclaimed. 

‘Did the loli get infected by the bot or something? Why does everyone keep whining and getting in my face today?’ He groused inwardly. 

“A-As long as you know. So, erm, whatchu wanna do about it? I can send it back for another one if ya want? They can do a reboot on it.”

Arthur sighed. As expected, the loli threw the decision to him. But he just didn’t have the proper information to make nothing more than an educated guess. Therefore, he just shrugged and said,

“Not sure boss. The ‘Divibot’, was it? It was annoying but looked like it had a will of its own. I don’t really feel right about simply ‘Rebooting’ something like that…”

“Ah, you don’t have to worry about that. Reboot means sending it to psychological consulting. It’s more like a correction camp for wayward mechanicals.”

Arthur was speechless. He was amazed by how humane the ‘reboot’ was. They actually had a consultation service to debug A.I.’s rather than recoding it! And it seems A.I.’s going nuts wasn’t something new to Xylnareon.

“You said it had bugs. So, in machine terms, its sick, right?”

“Yeah, pretty accurate. Sick in the head is what it is.”

“… I don’t really know. It really looked like the type to think if a bug as a feature, and might refuse treatment. Well, for one thing, the cat seems to have problems with it. And besides, do I even actually need it for the job?”

“Absolutely! Divibots are like your personal digital assistants. It works with Ferrero Rocher number 4 to access the Sentinel database. A human brain, even after restructuring into a demi-god’s is less than 1% as capable as even backward Quantum Supercomputers like those one Earth. While divibots are a million times better than those. More so for this one, it’s the latest model. Not even out in the market yet, the first batch of prototypes right out of the assembly line. You’ll be needing it for analyzing anomalies, accessing storage and teleportation functions, instant massaging with the divine realm and a truckload of other things!”

Arthur contemplated on that. In the end, he sighed and looked at Zoe. She did something to lull the cat. But Snowy was still looking at the gizmo suspiciously. He wanted to ask for her opinion.

“Umm, you said you guys have a concentration cam-”

“Correction! Correction camp!” The loli corrected her.

“Right, correction camp for these machines. How long will it take to get a new one if you send this one back to rehab?”

“Re-boot,” She corrected Zoe again. “And I dunno. A month or two? You gotta know, the customer service at the R&D division are all run by divibots or similar machine lifeforms. They’re pretty biased. So, they might try to purposely make things difficult for us.”

Zoe shook her head at that. The internal situation of the gods was too messy for someone like her to comprehend. 

In the end, she looked at Arthur and said, “Well in that case, as long as this divibot behaves itself, I can handle Snowy. Just... keep it? And I feel bad for it, it seems like in Xylnareon unified divine realm, their kind gets discriminated against.”

“Wait, you listened all the nonsense it was saying?” Arthur asked in surprise.

“Yeah.” Zoe replied.

“It’s not nonsense though”, Vileplume cut in, “The laws it cited were actually true. But, humph, there is a certain group within the machine lifeforms that always like to play the victim cards whenever things go even slightly disadvantaged for them. You just as much look at their general direction wrong at they’ll start amassing rallies against speciesism. They even almost succeeded in cancelling the Annual Candy Eating Festival last year because they can’t ingest bio-matter and somehow us eating it is discrimination against them.”

“Wow.” Was all Arthur could say. It’s like the collective mental illness social media caused in the 21st century but worse, he thought. 

“In that case, let’s hear what the divibot has to say. By the way if it starts complaining again you can just send it back.” Arthur finally gave his answer.

The loli nodded, and snapped her finger.

“-lease anything but that *Sniff* Not back to the factory, I beg you. I’ll do anything. I-I can record the TV program you missed last night, or you can install MMOs on me. I guarantee you’ll get fps higher than anything conceivable.”

Well that answered the question. It definitely didn’t freeze in time. And looks like its complaining evolved into begging.

The loli turned to look at Arthur, but he just shook his head, signaling her not to re-freeze it. Then he got the divibots attention by waving his hand.

“*sniffs* W-What?” It sobbed. Amazing, the thing had holographic tears coming out of its screen.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot here. Let’s start over. I’m Arthur. This is Zoe, and the ‘biological’s name is Snowy.”

After that he had a long ‘talk’ with the divibot, about being his assistant, Xylnareon, and life in general. But the divibot made it seem more like a negotiation for its life. About 30 minutes later, it finally stopped crying and agreed to act as a ‘proper’ assistant without threatening to sue his cat.

Zoe even made a point to lecture and punish Snowy in front of it with ‘pain by constriction’ (hugs and snuggles) to show that they weren’t discriminating against it.

According to the divibot, and looking by how nervous it was when it thought they were going to reboot it, it wasn’t actually a member of the ‘Mechanical Communist Party of Xylnareon’. Just one of the unwilling new interns.

It’s just that one of the Robotic Assembly Arms in the assembly line where it was made was an avid supporter of that party, and if they decided ‘not to join the common cause’ they would be given outdated quantum transistors with a chance of mechanical autism. 

Arthur doubted the Robotic Assembly Arm kept its promise. The Divibot looked pretty autistic.