Science Fiction: Robots & Cyborgs

By Richard S. Levine

This is a collection of four stories written by Richard S. Levine. Each story includes one or more robots or cyborgs.

In "A Floccinaucinihilipilificatious Life", Floccin wonders if he's alive. "Like Mother, Like Son" is a story about a different kind of sale. "Agent Lenore" features Galactic's virtual travel agents, and "Coded Obsession" examines Bert's OCD and his Portacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard S. Levine
• Release date: Apr 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458015082

Richard S. Levine

Richard S. Levine has been a math teacher, a software engineer, and a video games designer. Now he's busy writing speculative fiction. He has had stories published in Emerald Tales, OG's Speculative Fiction, Raygun Revival, The Fifth Di, The Lorelei Signal, and other online and print magazines. "A Comic on Phobos" received a nomination for Samsdotpublishing's James award. To learn more about Mr. Levine's writings and his award winning classic video game, "Microsurgeon", please visit his website. You can also check out my interests on Pinterest at pinterest.com/ricklev/.

Book preview

Science Fiction: Robots & Cyborgs

By Richard S. Levine

Copyright © 2011 Richard S. Levine

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The following stories were written by Richard S. Levine. Each story includes one or more robots or cyborgs. In A Floccinaucinihilipilificatious Life, Floccin wonders if he's alive. Like Mother, Like Son is a story about a different kind of sale. Agent Lenore features Galactic’s virtual travel agents, and Coded Obsession examines Bert’s OCD and his Portacy.

Contents

A Floccinaucinihilipilificatious Life

Like Mother, Like Son

Agent Lenore

Coded Obsession

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A Floccinaucinihilipilificatious Life

This story was published in OG’s Speculative Fiction, Issue #16 (Jan 2009). The first chess program I ever designed and coded used just four thousand assembly language instructions, but even with that limited complexity it made choices in its moves that I would not have predicted. I wondered what a group of little robots might choose to do if given quite a bit more intelligence.

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The millibot Floccin beeped twice when his power turned on. A single question entered his thoughts: Am I alive? His self-check module reported that Sanjay Patel had upgraded his AI to version 2.0. Security subroutines verified that the change was valid and necessary.

Floccin lifted the lens caps on his front and back infrared ranging sensors. His visioning system started to discern boundaries of halls and walls. Flash memory storage confirmed that he’d started the procedure 3,471 times before. He had no memory of this particular geo-location or how he got there.

Looking like a couple of old 35mm film rolls coupled together with rubber bands, his tiny wheels rolled forward. Built-in frontal sonar for local range finding indicated that Aucin, always equipped with an infrared thermometer unit to