Personification of a robotic mind: What should it sound like?

Howdy all,

Cutting right to the point... Loved the lore, but somehow the whole fiction was broken by the wording. I'm not a writer, but I'd like to grab some attention from the community and apply it to the speech detailing. Presumably our main character for (faction), is quite damaged. Typical speech patterns for humans include conjunctions and analogies, but as we have a very damaged computer with corrupted memory sectors... I feel there should be some scramble and very basic statements, with only a glimmer of human emotion. The machine's learned from their operators, but I doubt they were fully autonomous at the time of their shutdown. Our story arch feels very very... off... with the whole dream state before powering back online. There was some deep emotional context and symbolism that really isn't part of mechanical thinking.

I've gone ahead and rewritten some of the dialog as an example. Please pardon my forwardness.

Now I understand reading lines of code isn't really story telling, but to me it feels right for Dominus. It's a bit long, but I'm really looking for suggestions here. I did my best, but it really isn't shiny or anything. A few bits of fanfare fiction in there too.

Please pardon all the formatting errors and spacing... I'm not exactly used to writing like this.

I like to think of Commanders being very similar to Bolos, particularly in Marks before the Brain Box Tech was re-discovered.

Mike

It's an interesting interpretation, but it's really very difficult to parse.

The only way I see it as being difficult is just in the variety presented by the many different Marks and Authors to a degree as well.

Most prominent to me off the top of my head are the MK XXIVs and XXVs(the XXIV were the first "fully" Autonomous Bolos, but still retained the limiting inhibitory software that was removed after 40 years in the XXVs[and it still took an additional 28 years to removed almost all of the inhibitory software, a total of almost 70 years]) and the Mark XX Bolos which saw the introduction of Psychotronics but the Awareness of teh Bolos was very limited, often being described and being exceptionalll bloodthirsty.

The Traitor by David Weber is a good example of Mark XXVs 'in action'.

If I were to place them along the uncanny valley, they'd be about where the 'bunraku puppet is;

Still very recognizable as an AI, but to the point where Operator Identification Syndrome is a big deal in the Bolo Universe.

Mike

Just to clarify, I was referring to the OP, not to your post knight. Sorry for the confusion. Still, I'm always on the lookout for good science fiction to read. I might check David Weber out.

Whoops. Anyways, for Suggestions anything Bolo related is top notch, this covers a lot of different authors for Bolos Originated with Keith Laumar thought.

For David Weber, I heartily recommend the 'Stars At War Series' he did with Steve White, Weber's 'In Fury Born' is also great.

Mike

Optimus Prime

Data vs. Lore, R2-D2 vs. C-3PO or IG-88 vs. 4-LOM, GLaDOS vs. Wheatley, Titans vs. Ominus vs. Erasmus, Johnny Five vs. Iron Giant, Bumblebee (movie version) vs. HAL-9000.

Each machine intelligence achieved their intelligence in different ways, and they each manifest it very differently as well. Much like how in another thread, we loathe the idea of having a set framework for the physical appearance of commanders that we can only deviate from a little, should the "voice" of a commander also be limited to a small range of possibilities?

Why not have a commander that constantly talks to itself, another that seems to only use terms in hyperbolic fashion, or another that hints at a boiling hatred held back by passive-aggressive programming?

In the same way that flexibility with visuals allows variety to keep things interesting, I think that the same should be done with the commanders. I can certainly agree that some things might be the same, there will be things like power-on sequences and whatnot. But what if one commander had only metaphoric jargon in its code, and had its own "Darmok at Tanagra"?

I don't think we should have "idiot" commanders, but perhaps that would be an interesting experience for a commander to meet another which is effectively "mentally challenged" due to damage.

not for this baby: http://text-to-speech.imtranslator.net/