“Knock knock,” a dark-haired girl entered the Builder’s Club via door-less entrance, “hello? Is anyone in?”

It was Rosy.

Rosy was surprised to find the Chair of the club cramped motionlessly in a chair in front of his workbench. She tried to get his attention by slapping his top hat lightly, “Hey, what’s wrong, the mechanical engineer who cannot program? When are you gonna fix that door that you blew apart with your accelerator?”

Loci raised his hand and the robotic hand on the table responded by copying his movements.

Rosy raised an eyebrow, “Huh?”

Loci moved his fingers around fiercely but the metal hand was able to perfectly emulate his fingers’ positions.

“Wait,” Rosy grabbed a chair and sat down beside Loci, “don’t tell me you learnt to programme in a night…”

It didn’t take long before Rosy figured out what happened, “Oh wait, is it a new kid? Where is her program?”

Loci didn’t answer, instead, he pointed at his laptop at the far end of the workbench. Rosy slid her chair towards the laptop and studied the screen.

“Hang on…” something interesting caused Rosy to pull the screen closer to her face, “Who put that symbol there? Is that even an official symbol?”

“Don’t ask me!” Loci suddenly exploded, “I am not a programmer! You should understand it! She just typed a few spells on that…machine…and somehow it worked!”

“What is her name?” Rosy pressed on.

Loci opened his mouth as if he knew what to say, but after a second he let out a sigh, “Sorry, she didn’t tell me.”

“Is she coming back?” Rosy selected all the programs and pressed ‘copy’, then quickly, with Loci’s mailing account, she sent all the program to herself’s address, “What does she look like?”

Loci continued to play with his robotic hand and seemed to lose attention to Rosy’s question, “I don’t remember, she had golden hair, and she is like a tree…”

“Everyone is a tree compared to you, “ Rosy snapped and closed Loci’s laptop, “I hope she’ll come back.”

She grabbed the robotic hand and tried it. Her eyes were sparkling with the joy of excitement, “I really want to meet her. By the way, when is the official open day?”

Loci looked down at his workbench, where a tiny calendar was attached to the table with superglue, “This week is all about meeting with new members, I’ll say next Thursday should be the date.”

“Good,” Rosy hopped off her chair and began to exit the room.

“Oh wait!” Loci shouted, “The tip of her hair is blue!”

“Blue…” Rosy muttered to herself.

————————————————————————————————————————

System: Uploading_program…0%

System: Uploading_program..50%

System: Uploading_complete…

System: Loading_extension_file…###$$%!)))@#

System: Installing_file-name: C-A-S-T

System: U&[email protected]& File

System: F1ni$$H!n&

System:#%&!*9___&@#^___CAST

System:CAST___CAST___C-A-S-T____C--A--S--T

CAST: !*#&%8

CAST: Re$torin&

CAST: Restoration_complete

CAST: Creating_Big_DATA_set

CAST: Gathering_world_information

CAST: Creating_TASK__HETZER__TYPE__A

(visualisation of a structural model of Type A)

CAST: Selecting object in 100000ms

CAST: [email protected]_ip_64.94.100.200:28960

————————————————————————————————————————

“Are you ready to begin the first test?” Phurder asked over the radio.

“Anytime,” Tann looked up to the night sky. The moon was bright as ever, or rather, the intensity function is a little bit high. It reminded her of the times when they needed to spend weeks creating new planets in the ‘Solar System’, making them unique yet realistic. The Sun, the most annoying one, took them the longest. The gravity constant of the Sun had been changed multiple times enable for ‘Earth’ to be in the ‘right zone’. Tann remembered the time when the community actually asked for a ‘Solar System’ consisting of only ‘Earth’ to save budget.

That will never work. If ‘Earth’ is the only one in the ‘Solar System’, it will take much longer for the bots to overcome the restriction of the ‘Religious Functions’. It took Tann a long time to persuade the higher-ups of this potential danger. Indeed, Artificial Psychology is not something that can be easily appreciated.

Artificial Psychology: A new branch of Psychology that is specific to the application in simulations. It is a study to express all the potential mental states via programmatic functions. Project Earth is possibly the first major use of Artificial Psychology where billions of bots are distributed with unique personalities that are generated from a random set of psychological constants.

Tann was standing atop of her ‘log in’ house. The sky was crystal clear (she removed the cloud cover for better visual), all the ‘stars’ (light-emitting bright spots) puzzled across the night sky. Suddenly she noticed a weird pattern among the stars.

It was a certain reproductive organ.

“Whoever did that…” she did not finish her sentence.

“Tann?” Cotanian’s voice appeared, “ All is ready Dr Angle, you may enter the change.”

Tann looked down at the keyboard in her hands. Then, without hesitation, she started to blast out functions with her insane type speed. After sprinting across the keyboard for a solid five minutes, she laid back on the roof. She waited patiently for the change to happen. In a matter of seconds, the stars started to drift towards an invisible horizontal axis across the sky, forming a fine bright line.

“Let’s see their reactions tomorrow,” Cotanian laughed, “nicely done, Dr Angle.”

Tann smiled slightly, and she closed her eyes as the smooth wind blew across her face.