Date Twenty-Three - Rottomaton
Megabyte frowned, repeatedly pressing the 'advance' button on his cable remote. “Heh heh, just bear with me for a moment. It looks like we’re having some technical difficulties.” Before him, a panel of bored faculty members sat, slouching and yawning. Megabyte swallowed hard. This was not going well. Nothing had gone well since that day, but he had to make the best of it. “Dot, could you take a look at this?”
A pudgy orange unicorn trotted up and took the cable remote, squinting at it over his glasses. “I just bought this,” he muttered, scratching behind his ear. “Why wouldn’t it be working?”
The stern looking mare with the tightest bun Megabyte had ever seen checked her watch. Another member of the panel drummed his hoof on the desk, scowling.
Megabyte put his leg around Dot Matrix’s shoulder, turning him away from the lectern. “Just take it over there and see if you can figure it out!” he hissed. “If I don’t get this moving, our shot at additional funding will be in worse shape than it already is! I’ll just have to do this the old fashioned way.”
The stallion trotted to the slide projector, cycling it manually. His title slide was replaced with photograph of a snarling purple mare “Ah, there we go. As we said previously, we’ve made significant advances in artificial intelligence. Our subject—”
The stern mare gasped and adjusted her glasses, peering at the screen. “Cheerilee!”
Megabyte licked his lips nervously before attempting a smile. Like so many other things lately, the smile was a failure, collapsing into a nervous spasm. “Oh, um… do you know our subject?”
“Why, yes,” the mare said, now fully engaged. “She’s my niece.”
“Oh, you…. You don’t say.” A bead of sweat trickled down Megabyte’s forehead, falling with a loud plop to the floor. “Your niece? A-are you, um... close?”
The mare smiled, a feat which Megabyte had previously believed to be impossible. “Oh, she spends two weeks with me each summer! She’s such a sweet, caring, sensitive mare. Such a shame about her love life, though. If only—”
An elderly stallion nearby cleared his throat. “Is any of this pertinent to the task at hoof? We’re already ten minutes over the scheduled time and we haven’t even seen the presentation.”
“Of course. Forgive me,” the mare said, nodding to the aged stallion. “It was just a shock to see her, that’s all.”
Megabyte took a deep breath and tried to still his trembling hooves. “It’s, ah, quite a shock for—”
“It wasn’t plugged in!”
Megabyte brow furrowed as Dot Matrix trotted back to the lectern and slapped the cable remote back into his hoof. “Oh, ah… of course.”
One of the panel members sighed and shook her head.
“Well now that we have that sorted out,” Megabyte said, tugging at his collar, “we can move on to the results.” Pressing the cable remote’s ‘advance’ button, he nodded as Cheerilee was replaced with ruggedly handsome pegasus stallion. “This is our latest creation. We call it the D-8-R.” Megabyte grinned.
None of the panel grinned in return.
“Ah, moving on.” Megabyte pulled out a long, wooden pointer and advanced the slide. Before them, the handsome D-8-R was replaced with schematics. Megabyte tapped D-8-R’s head with his stick. “Here’s where the magic happens. Dot Matrix and I have run extensive experiments to ensure that this is the most life-like model to date. Our field tests have been extremely promising, as you—”
The stern mare leaned forward. “I’m sorry, did you say ‘field tests?’ With an unapproved AI?”
Megabyte mopped his brow with the edge of his lab coat. “Well—”
“We decided that the data was worth the risk!” Dot Matrix called from some darkened corner in the back of the room. “We hadn’t had a unit explode since version four, and unit seven was a great success until it got stuck in a gallop loop. It smashed through a couple of buildings, but we did disable it eventually.”
Megabyte trembled as the panel collectively narrowed their eyes. “Ah, thank you, Dot. I believe, we agreed that I’d be presenting, but I appreciate your input. Perhaps you could—”
The elderly stallion rose, rapping his hoof sharply on the table. “Could we please get to something substantive? I have five minutes left before my next lecture begins!”
“Yes, yes! Of course!” Grimacing, Megabyte clicked through several slides. “Here we have D-8-R approaching the subject. For this mission, we’d programmed him to call himself Hard Drive.”
The elderly pony twirled a hoof impatiently. “Yes, and?”
“Dot researched the locals thoroughly, and came up with a candidate we both thought was suitable. She seemed desper…” Megabyte winced as the stern mare’s face hardened. “I mean, she seemed, ah, attractive and really interested in having a successful date, given the various personals she’d put out in the local periodicals. It was our hope that she’d be willing to overlook any, um… strange behavior that the unit displayed.”
The stern mare closed her legs over her chest tightly. “Let me get this straight. You went looking for the saddest, loneliest mare that you could find for your experiment?”
“Yup,” Dot said from somewhere in the darkness.
“Interesting approach,” she growled.
Megabyte trembled. The room seemed to have dropped forty degrees. “We answered one of the personals and agreed to meet the subject for ice cream at the local parlor.”
“Did your model interact with the public unassisted, or were you in control?” the elderly stallion asked, arching an eyebrow.
Megabyte breathed a sigh of relief. They were finally back on track. “That’s the wonderful thing! He was operating totally independently. We were monitoring, of course, but he was self-directed!” Advancing the slide, Megabyte cleared his throat. “As you can see from the images we pulled from his databanks, the subject appears to be having a wonderful time. We’ve run these images by the psychology and physiology departments and they both agree that she is, in fact, smiling.”
“She does appear to be having a good time,” the stern mare said, her voice softening a bit.
“D-8-R has been programmed with over three thousand pleasant topics of conversation, each with hundreds of sub-branches. Wherever the conversation goes, D-8-R can handle it. He’s been designed to compliment where appropriate, laugh at even the lamest joke, and to, ah, heat things up when the time comes.”
“Well, that sounds very promising!” the elderly stallion said, adjusting his glasses as he peered at the screen. “So what happened next?”
“Ah, well… about that,” Megabyte said, scanning his notes for the best possible framing.
“He freaked out,” Dot called out. “Too much ice cream.”
The panel members frowned. “Explain please,” one called out.
“It, ah, seems that his cranial shielding wasn’t sufficient. D-8-R has been designed to flawlessly blend in with the pony populace, and as such, he can eat and dispose of the contents later, but we seem to have made an error in his consumption algorithm.” Megabyte gripped the lectern like a pony in a hurricane. He needed something solid to get him through this. “Instead of taking small sips, he found it more efficient to down his shake all at once.”
“And then he totally freaked out!” Dot said from around a mouthful of something. A paper bag crinkled, followed by more munching. “Shorted out his lust unit.”
“What?!” the stern mare said, half-rising from her chair.
“Well,” Megabyte said, making a show of polishing his glasses, “he, ah, seems to have leapt across the table and tried it initiate level three intimacy without moving through level two. We’d hard-wired a limiter in after the problems with had with version six, but the ice cream seems to have frozen—”
“What happened to my niece?!”
“Got Kiss-Tackled,” Dot called out, his mouth still full.
Megabyte massaged his temples and reminded himself to get a new research partner. “D-8-R made his move, as it were. I’d like to point out that he was having an engaging discussion about the pros and cons of the Equestrian elementary schools system before the ice cream incident. One that the subject seemed to be quite enjoying. The dialogue options were—”
“I’d like to hear more about this… What did you call it?” the elderly stallion called over his shoulder.
“A freak out.”
“Yes, what is this ‘freaking out’ business?”
Megabyte slumped, leaning against the lectern. It was all over. “He leapt up and tackled the subject, kissing her as they fell. When she tried to get away, he turned his oral suction up to maximum. At that point, several patrons intervened, and pulled them apart, but not before the subject suffered significant facial bruising.” Megabyte rested his leg on the lectern, cupping his forehead. He couldn’t look at the panel any longer. “Moments later, the short corrected itself as D-8-R’s internal cranial cavity heated up again, but moving from intimacy level three without completion of level two caused a logic error. He, ah, began clearing his memory cache and rebooting.”
“It’s hilarious when he does that! He gets all twitchy and starts talking super fast.” Dot trotted into view to demonstrate.
“At that point, the subject seems to have grown angry.” Megabyte cycled the projector again. The image before them was mostly of a purple hoof smashing whatever lens they were seeing through. “Eyewitness accounts describe near super-equine levels of strength. Apparently, she knocked D-8-R’s head clean off when sparks began shooting from its mouth. The last audio we have is the subject screaming something about curses and fate’s unholy design on her misery.”
For a moment, all was silent.
“So let me get this straight,” the stern mare growled. “You sent an experimental android into a populated area with no approval. Then it played with the heart of an innocent mare before attacking her? Is that a succinct review of the events?”
Megabyte stared down at his notes. They had seemed so promising once. “That’s not exactly the way that we see it, but it could be viewed as such. From a certain angle, I suppose.”
The elderly stallion checked his watch. “Well, we are almost out of time. What does the panel say? Those in favor for funding approval, say ‘aye’, all those opposed, say ‘nay.’”
“Aye,” the panel said as one.
Megabyte’s head snapped up. His mouth had become incredibly dry. He tried to force some words of thanks out, but he seemed to have lost control of his tongue. Finally, he settled for staring questioningly at the stern mare.
“You owe my niece an extemporary date,” she said, gathering her belongings. “Get this thing perfected.”
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Cheerilee dates a robot. Poor Cheerilee...
She can't even date a robot without something going horribly wrong. By the way, was that reference to Reboot intentional?
PFFFFTTTTTTTTAAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA
Oh god... That... This...
All my yes.
~Skeeter The Lurker
We need more dates like this
Eh, robots are prone to stuff like that. If you really want to go out with an artificial pony, you go with a ponunculus (which is my term for a ponified homunculus). At least those things are created by magic, which is something ponies are already familiar with. They don't have to fiddle with expensive technology.
Although I'm quite surprised that those guys got funding after that botched demonstration. Surprised and a little bit concerned.
Warning.. incoming date... warning... incoming date...
And here I was hoping the scientists were actually going to be heading the conspiracy of her dates. Similar to Cabin in the woods but without the basement and stupidity instead of monsters.
3954475 Yeah, sometimes I feel pretty horrible for putting Cheerilee through this. I can't help it, though. I find her predicament hilarious. Sadly hilarious!
3998588 If you mean the animated show, no. I haven't seen it, though it's been recommended to me many times.
3998636 I just gave up trying to come to grips with pony technology. The seems to lift a pre-electronics life… except for all the electronics. That's why I made Dot Matrix a unicorn. I figure that he could magically power D-8-R up like Flim and Flam did to the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000.
But I do really like the ponified homunculus!
A robot? Well, maybe with a little work a robot could become the perfect stallion for Cheerilee.
I mean, look at how good Sweetie Bot turned out.
3998655 There's still a lot of time to get to the bottom of that. A loooooooot of time...
3998633 Glad you liked it. I was a little worried about it, since it doesn't actually have much Cheerilee in it.
3998673 Consider this another recommendation then.
MEANWHILE:
"Ah dunno, sis! We jus' aksed her why she was still single, an' she's been standing there, havin an' internal monologue all week!"
"Really?! All week?"
"Not even breaks ta sleep, or gettin' any food or water into her."
"............what about on the way out?"
"Tryin' not ta think about it."
3998913 I'll re-name it "Cheerilee's Coma."
I saw the name "Dot Matrix" and this came to mind.
savernation.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/virgin-alarm.jpg?w=300&h=200
Hand or hoof?
we disabled it.
Loved it. Looking forward to more!
3999262 Oops. Thanks a million for the edits. I never do seem to fully weed them out.
Next one is… complicated. It's taking some time. Hopefully I'll have it done tomorrow. After that, yours will be up.
So much Reboot, so little time. Man, not even a robot can handle her.
Hahahaha! The Juggernaut returns!
I don't even have a gif for how much I laughed, so let me confuse you.
i.imgur.com/ZAXLs.gif
Yes.
This was brilliant! Please make it to one thousand stories... I will be so sad if this ends...
The perfect (robot) date, science's gift to lonely stallions and mares everywhere!
It's a pity that it isn't ice-cream proof.
Now, has Cheerilee's cousin told Megabyte that he needs to take Cheerilee out to dinner as compensation or has she told him to get D8R right and then give one to her for free? Inquiring minds want to know!
Reboot ftw
“Aye,” the panel said as one.
They gave him funding approval!?
Lol, I can't wait to see how you top this.
. My first thought was "Whoa Cherilee! At least make it to30 dates before you resort to that!"
Yep, new favorite date. This story just keeps getting better and better.
3999356
4000572 But I've never seen Reboot!
3999855 I guess I didn't update this for a while, did I? I've been busy writing a new story.
3999895 Not even advanced androids are immune from brain breeze.
3999906 I'm doin' my best! I love this story, so there should be plenty more to come.
4000485 He's got to get the D-8-R right. No one wants a date with Megabyte's bumbling ass.
I did think about adding a line where the stern mare wanted a model to, but I decided against it.
4001074 Absolutely! The university can see the value in a perfected dating AI. Cheerilee's romantic rampage must be stopped!
4001151 Oh, you...
4001462 Wait until you see the next one. I think people are either going to love it or hate it.
4001515
Ok
4001499 I'm just glad this is back. It always cheers me up!
At least project Sw33t13 Bot is still up and running! They've almost dealt with that squeaking glitch in her voice emitters.
But yeah, this one was brilliant.
I found some typos:
I might be wrong, but I feel like the "seems"s aren't the correct tense? Could be better with "seemed." Maybe.
"Tried it initiate" needs "it" changed to "to".
"Problems with had" needs "with" changed to "we".
"Here" should be "hear".
"Had seems do" should be "had seemed so".
Hehe, another interesting perspective! Great idea of making this one a presentation thing. Also looking forward to reading about that date with Megabyte. He'll probably be ultra-nervous the whole time.
4020650 Thanks for these. The "seems" thing is actually correct, I believe, but I fixed the other two.
I'm enjoying this collection so far! Poor Cheerilee.
Nice Reboot reference.
and now that friendship is witchcraft speech makes sense.