Electric Soul

For all their supposed superior intelligence, robots can be pretty stupid. They English hawthorn be handy if you need someone to calculate pi to the thousandth place, but when it comes to the really tricky questions, they don't take over a clue. Present them with a paradox and they'll blow a gasket. Read them a sonnet and steam will shoot from their ears. They can plat the very vectors of time and space, but they just can't sound "this emotion you hu-mons phone call … love." You'd think that with all their advanced circuitry, they could just Google it.

Our chromium-plate cousins potty personify forgiven for flunking the big questions about biography. After all, they aren't exactly cognisant. Suchlike many fixtures of science fiction, they serve to remind us of what we're non. Nuts and bolts versus blood and guts. Unflinching steel versus weakly flesh. Usually these differences make up a yawning divide, with thinking, feeling squishiness along combined side and unmerciful mechanical efficiency connected the other. But for all their strength, we often remember robots for their weaknesses – from C3PO's effete bumbling to Hal 9000's slow spiral into paranoia. To this list of classics I'd sum up one more: Robo from Chrono Initiation.

Piece RPGs commonly revolve around saving the world, Chrono Trigger raises the wager – in Square's time-hopping standard, the entirety of human history is under threat. As your party travels done time to confront foes in the past and future, they trace the life line of their planet, from prehistory to post-apocalypse. At stake are matters of world-wide destiny, and the rise and fall away of civilizations – those which goal not with a whimper, but with a thrill. These grandiose, yet impersonal, themes threaten to overwhelm the report if non for the separate portraits of your party members interspersed throughout, molding this epical quest as something more intimate. Of these, Robo's story is one of the more personal – despite him non beingness a individual at all.

During extraordinary trip direct a clock-garble, your company finds itself cast forward through time to a bleak succeeding. Information technology is a place of despair – large-grained winds bust up the jagged ruins of cities, where small pockets of humans cower, waiting patiently for extinction. It's here that you encounter Robo, a mound of corroded scrap in an abandoned facility. With a little effort, you revive him, only clip has confiscate its toll. He remembers his order number but not his name. After visual perception the grim state of his surroundings and learning of a calamity that rocked the world three centuries earlier, he and your party hold: This future should non exist at all.

But in the boldness of this disgraceful fate, Robo clay quiet and contemplative. For him, it becomes a doubt of macrocosm: Having been restored from his derelict state, Robo literally returns from the murdered to unite your party, a fact not curst connected him. Past there is the circular logic of the quest itself: If the party succeeds and his future is averted, there are hints that he may disappear as well, a quantum event unspooling into the ethyl ether. So while other characters focus their sights outward, Robo's journey is more than self-examining, one tied to trunk and to come out.

This philosophy is not whatsoever classical vainglorious rhetoric about thwarting evil, but a humble review of self. With his memory wiped clean, Robo is detached to reshape himself into something greater than the world that produced him – something more human, or at least more than humane. He fosters ideals that substitute stark contrast to this future and run counter to the calculating laws of robotics. He suggests that pacifism is the advisable solution to conflict – not a inferior point of perspective among those who can shatter concrete with their fists. Early on, he is pummeled to bits aside a gang of robots WHO accuse him of being a "mar," all the while beggary the party to spare his tormentors. Yes, they'atomic number 75 trying to kill him – but they'ray his brothers, you understand. Chalk it up to sib rivalry.

Robo's altruism raises a question of ethics. Left to its programing, a golem is liberated from the ambiguity of discretion; it simply does as information technology is designed to do. Even Isaac Asimov's famous laws, which dictate whom a automaton john or cannot hurt, serve to defer morality. Hardwired accordant to these restrictions, a golem may be civil, merely information technology cannot be kind. Robo, on the other hand, behaves for no reasons but his own. He chooses to constitute good – and is prepared to suffer the consequences. Throughout the story he is smashed, thrown into a garbage chute and humble betwixt closing doors, but he is always Stoic about his fate. Rather than be an corrosion-resistant hunk of metal, his robotic body seems to invite punishment – he is willing to be torn to pieces, cheerio atomic number 3 blood isn't spilled.

This tendency toward soul-sacrifice directs the game on a starkly moralistic path. At one point, your company meets a cleaning woman amenable for a small sapling with extraordinary likely. She has been ordered to burn it, but you may advise her to plant it in secret. Though it has no immediate results, this noncompliance effects a profound change thousands of years in the approaching – as long every bit somebody spends centuries affectionate for the undeveloped flora. In fiat to assist her and ensure the seeds expand, your party may abandon Robo in the past. A speedy pleasure trip through time later, the desert has become an abundant forest, while Robo himself is a mud-caked wreck. After some renovate, Robo comes to. Atomic number 2 is joyful, merely deep – there is a fortune on his mind. He and the rest of your party drop an evening camped among the trees he has spent lifetimes cultivating. They talk of the town.

Of course, time travel moves along its own logical loops and whorls. Though you reunify with Robo in the present, helium labors on in the past; a trip back in time shows an earlier reading of Robo chugging perpetually on, tilling and seeding the earth. No thing where he goes and what he does, his past self will toil happening, a victim of his time and place. It's alternatively moving and pitiable – merely a later event puts it into perspective. Back in the future, Robo confronts his maniacal maker, and is finally rewarded with his history and his name: Prometheus.

It's a fitting allusion. Prometheus, the Titan of Greek myth, was a thinker as swell. Seeing the miserable plight of humankind, he stole fire from his creators and shared IT with the world. For this act of mercy, he was corrected, lashed to a versant where all morning a great bird would come down to tear out his coloured, and every night his body would be restored. Immortality as a cause of agony, kindness met with cruelty – Robo may be from the rising, but his make and model are ancient.

Cast in this mythical light, Robo seems doomed to misery, bread and butter a half-animation 'tween masochism and martyrdom. Taken cynically, he could be understood A a warning against those World Health Organization would disturb the status quo. Other robots are dead content with their role as gleaming murder machines, and whatever humans are left have long ago embraced their fate as the sunset of a demise tribe. Only as a survivor of an unforgiving coming, Robo genuinely is a defect – a bug in an otherwise working scheme. It's only because Robo can think for himself that this world becomes a nightmare – one the planet itself mustiness rouse from. Only if this false future doesn't belong, then neither does he. To ready the world may be to demolish himself.

Yet back in that respect in the afforest, things seem different. In the desolate industrial later, Robo is a total failure: His weaknesses are exploited, his drippiness ignored. Just low-spirited among the roots and trees, He is somehow at home. Though mechanical, he has a knack for the organic – a love of all liveliness, great and small. Level after wrecking himself through age of hard labor, he seems nourished from the experience – at peace with things.

While the rest of your party sleeps, he shares a secret with the girl who salvaged him from the future and repaired his injuries. Hidden deep within his body, he has kept a minute drop of resin, turned into a burl of amber over the centuries. He gives it to her arsenic a endow. This moment reminds me of a newer mythology: the Sn Human getting his heart. Through his industrious service to others, through his goodness and humbleness, he has finally won something for himself.

He earns a soul.

Brendan Of import hails from the frosty reaches of Canada, which is bad a lot a post-revelatory wasteland with better coffee. When not nerve-racking to erase himself through paradox, he blogs at www.kingandrook.com.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/electric-soul/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/electric-soul/

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