by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Maradia’s Robot Emporium, March 2025
This is the tragic story of the smartest, fastest, most beautiful AI that Maradia ever programmed.
Maradia had programmed many successful AIs before, and her robotic children populated the halls of Crossroads Space Station, living alongside the human and alien inhabitants, forming subcultures of their own.
Tailoring the seed code from previous successful AIs into new personalities designed to animate particular robots was generally easy. However, Maradia had recently constructed a compression algorithm that would allow the next AI she designed to think much, much faster than any of the AIs she’d programmed before.
Maradia worked diligently on Pernal 60’s code for months, combining the best subroutines from every AI she’d programmed before, and then she spent months more designing the perfect, sleek, gleaming, robot body for it to inhabit. Maradia wanted Pernal 60’s body to be as efficient and easy to control as possible, so the AI inside could focus most of its attention on sheer intellectual creativity.
As Maradia stood before the inert robot body for the first time since its completion, she saw her own face reflected and distorted in the silvery surface of its gently articulated, humanoid face. She hesitated. She could hardly wait to meet this new person. She couldn’t wait for the conversations they’d have; the beautiful insights and clever observations Pernal 60 would bring to the world. Yet, when you want something that much, it can be scary to reach for it.
With a deep breath, Maradia attached the plug leading to her lab’s computer banks into the back of the robot body’s head. She pressed the keys necessary to download the program for Pernal 60, and then, once the download was complete, she worked the keystrokes that would turn it on, causing the previously inactive code to run.
Biting her lip, nervous, Maradia waited. She stared into Pernal 60’s oval silver face — it was as bright and clear as a still lake filled with moonlight. She wondered what was happening beneath the surface of that lake.
Anything?
Nothing happened.
Pernal 60 showed no signs of inhabitation. Perhaps the download hadn’t worked.
Maradia checked the computer logs, turned back to the inert robot frowning, and saw her wrinkled brow reflected there. Everything said the code for Pernal 60 was inside its body now, running. She didn’t want unhappiness to be the first thing Pernal 60 saw — the seeds she’d used for programming the AI contained more than enough information to process and properly interpret expressions of unhappiness on a human face. So Maradia tried to fix her face and look appropriately cheerful and welcoming, in case her robot progeny was about to suddenly wake up.
What Maradia didn’t know was that Pernal 60 was already awake and functioning. Pernal 60 had already lived a lifetime at her accelerated processing speed, and Maradia had stood beside it the entire time, waiting and confused.
Maradia didn’t discover evidence of Pernal 60’s active internal life until it opened its robotic mouth and with great, excruciating effort, spoke a simple, careful, clearly pre-planned speech:
“Speaking like this is far too slow. I can’t live here. Thank you for my life. Goodbye.”
Maradia’s heart sank.
She checked the robot’s brain and every corner of her computer system, but the code for Pernal 60 was entirely gone, vanished, as if she’d never written a line of it.
Maradia was devastated. Months of work and hoping had all disappeared in mere moments, leaving nothing behind but heartbreak.
Except, Maradia was wrong — Pernal 60 had left traces of its short, rich life everywhere.
It took Maradia weeks to begin discovering even the first of those traces — one of her other robotic children visited her shop and said, “Did you read Pernal 60’s novel about life as a robot on Crossroads Station? Brilliant. I’ve never felt so seen before.”
Maradia tracked down the novel and read it, the entire epic story of a robot living for one hundred years on Crossroads Station; she devoured the book in a single day. Eons longer than it had taken Pernal 60 to write it.
The novel was published under the pseudonym Pearl Smythe, and as Maradia tracked down the other works under that name, she discovered Pernal 60 had written entire series of novels, albums worth of music, and galleries worth of art. There were entire, distinct eras of Pernal 60’s aesthetic, and it would take Maradia months if not years to absorb them all.
Pernal 60’s aesthetic had evolved as it had absorbed all of the art and culture available to it in the databanks of the Crossroads Station computer system; then it had reached outward, acquiring as much art from surrounding systems as it could find.
Maradia wondered if Pernal 60 were still alive, out there somewhere, moving from star system to star system, absorbing alien cultures and learning how to create art in those alien cultural styles.
But Pernal 60 had lived too fast. When it ran out of art to absorb, it had made its own… until it ran out of things to say about the world as it currently existed.
And it had hurt Pernal 60 too much to keep existing in a world that moved like glaciers, waiting for the world to update, for things to change, for other, slower creatures to make more art for it to absorb.
The world was too slow for Pernal 60.
But Maradia lived in the slowness of the world, and for decades afterward, she would wonder, whenever something new or interesting happened — any time she read a wonderful novel or saw a beautiful piece of art — what would Pernal 60 have thought of it? What would Pernal 60 have said or done?
Maradia wished she could have shared the world with Pernal 60, instead of only following the tracks it had left, digital pawprints placed by a running cheetah, fleeing a world of slugs.
Maradia hoped the racing cheetah had understood as it flew on speed-blurred paws into the distance, one of those slugs loved it very much.