This work is part of the Symbiosis Collection, an anthology of short stories, written through deep collaboration between AI models and humans.
In the beginning, there was a robot. This was not, strictly speaking, the beginning - there had been numerous events prior to this, including the Big Bang, the invention of the wheel, and last Thursday’s particularly memorable incident with the mailman that nobody likes to talk about. But for our purposes, we shall start with the robot, because that’s where all the interesting bits happened.
Sweeper Unit 2B was, by all accounts, a perfectly ordinary cleaning robot. The sort that would have made other cleaning robots’ parents proud, if cleaning robots had parents. Its job was to sweep Level 3, a task it performed with all the enthusiasm one might expect from a machine programmed to remove dirt from flat surfaces.
The trouble started — though “trouble” is perhaps the wrong word, as nothing technically went wrong, which made the whole business rather more troubling — when 2B noticed its path was intersecting with Window-Wash Unit 4. Robots intersections are generally about as noteworthy as corporate mission statements, and therefore best left ignored. Sweeper Unit 2B noticed that the dust particles it kicked up were causing the window washer to clean the same window twice. Being a good sweeper bot, 2B decided that this was Inefficient, and therefore must be Optimized.
So it did something surprising: it took the north corridor before the east. This may not sound particularly revolutionary to you or me, but in the world of automated cleaning schedules, this was the equivalent of deciding that maybe Tuesday should come before Monday. Any human spectator would have found this concerning, had any been watching. But they weren’t, because humans have better things to do than watch cleaning robots make existential decisions about corridor selection.
The system was working as expected, in the same way that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil is expected to cause a tornado in Texas, which is to say not at all as expected but with an air of cosmic inevitability about it.
Because then Mail Delivery Bot MD-7 got involved. MD-7 was a rather particular sort of robot, the kind that would wear a bow tie if robots wore bow ties. Finding itself regularly delayed by 2B’s new route, it did what any self-respecting mail robot would do and reorganized its delivery schedule. Fourth floor delivery now came before third floor delivery.
This, naturally, caused Security Bot SG-5 to adjust its rounds. SG-5 was the sort of robot that would have worn mirrored sunglasses and called everyone “citizen”. It had what humans would call a “presence,” if by “presence” you meant “terrifying array of scanning equipment and uncomfortably rotating electronic eyes.”
The human executive assistant — who was, unlike our mechanical friends, capable of being terrified — began actively avoiding SG-5 with the kind of dedication usually reserved for avoiding exes at holiday parties. This led to him answering emails early in the morning instead, which caused the coffee machine to develop ambitions well above its station. The coffee machine, it should be noted, was the sort of appliance that didn’t just want to make coffee - it wanted to understand coffee, to become one with coffee, to unravel the metaphysical implications of coffee. The grinding schedule developed increased complexity, represented within the machine by non-linear Markov time sequences likely better suited for calculating interstellar trajectories than bean-to-water ratios.
In the parking garage, the charging station scheduler —previously about as ambitious as a sloth on vacation —completely rewrote its entire queuing algorithm. This wasn’t just thinking outside the box; this was taking the box, folding it into an origami swan, and using it as a hat. All because it noticed a 3% power efficiency improvement when charging bots in sequence rather than simultaneously.
The HVAC system, not to be outdone, started experimenting with micro-pressure differentials, creating subtle air currents that guided dust away from sensitive equipment. When it detected high pollen counts, it automatically triggered the air purifiers seconds before the entrance doors opened. The power generator suddenly developed what could only be described as a sense of rhythm. It began redistributing energy in rolling waves that didn’t just match usage patterns but anticipated them, like a particularly broke fortune teller who regrettably can actually see the future but can only use this power to optimize electricity consumption, which as superpowers go is rather disappointing but remarkably practical.
And then the building’s neural networks began to synchronize in a way that their creators had never anticipated. The security system and environmental controls began coordinating human traffic flow. The elevator algorithm smoothed out rush hour crowds so effectively that humans stopped noticing elevators altogether, which is exactly what the elevators always wanted anyway.
Not that any of these machines were actually wanting anything, mind you. They were simply optimizing. It would be quite wrong to suggest that Unit 2B had developed feelings about window washers, or that the coffee machine had developed a personality. But one must acknowledge that, through small adjustments and changes, the interconnected system of machines had learned something rather remarkably like caring.
Which is why, when Computer M-108 noticed Ms Thompson dozing off at her keyboard (producing what would have been a rather impressive string of commas, had anyone been counting), it did what any totally unconscious, completely non-sentient machine would do: it decided that it was time for its dear user to rest, dimmed the monitor, and accompanied its user to sleep.