New Testingstan

Chapter 1

On the day you first built Al, you awoke from a dream about a robot companion to head to the lab. Your graduate school advisor pressured you to make Al more acceptable to the military. After some back and forth, you ended up making a metal bipedal robot with a masked head and humanoid hands.

Then you went back to your place to teach Al some words.

Chapter 2

The next day, you hooked up Al's cell phone batteries and demoed for Elly. You then spent the afternoon trying to teach science to a bunch of kids with Elly.

As months passed, you became busy teaching Al about the world through high school textbooks and taking rhim to the dump. Your funding from the NSF kept you in Professor Ziegler's good graces during this time.

In time, Mark Ali, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, heard about Al and asked for an interview. You agreed.

Chapter 3

You gave Mark an interview, and allowed Mark to come back to your place to interview Al. Mark invited you to his place to try to get to know you better. There, you found that drones often harassed Mark because various automated algorithms had marked him as suspicious.

Mark wrote an article that was generally positive about you and Al. When Professor Ziegler found out about the article, he was very displeased, but decided that the most effective way to get you out of his hair was to let you graduate.

Mark's article also attracted the attention of one "robotObsession1987," known in real life as Silas Cooper. When you met up over coffee, he told you that he used to do classified robotics work for a government lab, but left because he couldn't tell what nefarious purpose the technology would be used for.

That Saturday, Elly asked you to stay out of the limelight a little more often. You managed to smooth things over, but it felt like a dangerous point in your relationship.

A month or so later, you received your doctorate. Shortly thereafter, your father passed away. You resolved then to work on better medical technology that could save people like your father in the future.

You decided the best way to change the world was to start a business, which you named Intelligent Design. Elly and Silas had already volunteered to be your first employees.

Chapter 4

Your first potential client for Intelligent Design was Galen Medical, a surgical equipment company. They were happy with the state of your technology, and gave you a contract that allowed you to purchase a factory. That allowed you to build a robot factory in Alaska. You hired an all-human workforce as a gesture to the local community. When you finally shipped robots to Galen Medical, they were pleased with the robots you delivered. Your business suffered a blow when Chinese companies, aided by Chinese government hackers, began to steal your technology. Eventually, Intelligent Design went broke, and you were forced in bankruptcy to sell all your assets.

Unemployment seemed to be common in the United States, and it seemed people tended to blame either robots or China. Riding on both of these sentiments, Jacqueline Irons won the presidency. After President Irons enacted a series of protectionist tariffs to keep out Chinese robots, Sino-American relations steadily worsened. Your unemployment just happened to put you in the right place at the right time to stop the assassination of the Chinese Prime Minister.

Chapter 5

The nation enjoyed an unprecedented era of prosperity, driven by the cooperation of the United States and China in sharing their robot technology. Congratulations!

Chapter 6A

As robots took over more and more roles, many people felt increasingly displaced and alienated. Josh was being pressured to step down from his company. Mark was contemplating suicide after he finished his book about you, since most nonfiction work was now being done by robots. (Luckily, you talked him out of it.)

But not everybody was sad in this new world: Elly seemed to be perfectly content to take advantage of the robots' utopia to create art. Juliet was busy fighting crime as "the Crusader." (You even joined her as a sidekick.) Silas was excitedly anticipating the Singularity that would make everyone immortal, which he believed was right around the corner. The Church of the Enlightened Al was gaining adherents as people turned to robots to solve all their problems.

On the whole, you thought the world of robots was pretty good, and decided to leave the robots in charge.

Chapter 7

In 2049, you went to Surprise, Arizona to surprise your mother with a gift for the holidays. You learned it was your surgical technology that had kept her alive this long. On returning to San Francisco, you had a brief stroke, followed by a vision of a robot companion -- the same one you saw thirty years before. In the hospital, the doctor told you you had Algernon's Disease, a rare disease that increased your intelligence, but came at the price of increasing seizures, comas, and possibly, death.

Instead of undergoing surgery, you chose to create a robot body for yourself. With your robot self pursuing all of your ambitious plans for you, you finally had time to relax and enjoy your relationship with Elly, and you lived happily ever after.