It had been about a couple weeks since you were hired to work at the Hasbro subsidiary that was known as “Hasbro Biotech” until they took the name Hasbio a few months back. Apparently after the parent company collapsed under the weight of it’s own failures, there was an “angel investor” that saw potention in their Biotechnical subsidiary, and even had them purchase the rights to “My Little Pony” during the Liquidation Auction.
Hasbio had two major engineering divisions for R&D: Genetic and Technical, and you were hired on as a Programmer for the Technical division. As soon as you entered the lab and were setup with a workstation, you proceed to ask Mr. Sherman: “So… What exactly are we working on at the moment anyways Boss?” To which he respond: “I’m glad you asked. We are currently developing the AI for a lifelike toy pony” before one of your coworkers interjected. “I don’t know why you’re calling what we’re working on anything close to lifelike… It’s more like some kind of vaguely pony-shaped plush robot, a Fluffy.”
When you got down to the Development and Design floor, there was a janky looking quadropedal robot with a series of cables connecting it to a large computer near the middle of the room. Mr. Sherman began to speak again: “This here is what we call the DevBody, containing two cameras on the head to approximate eyes, a pair of microphones for ears, large speaker in it’s throat to act as it’s voice…”
“Oh, and it’s got pneumatics near the joints for simulating real muscles. It’s a near 1:1 approximation of what Genetics is supposed to be working on. Last I heard though they haven’t even gotten a working wetware processor yet.” Interjected the same coworker, Mr. Sherman looking annoyed, but also resigned in the knowledge that your coworker is right. “This young man is what the artificial personality you’ll help develop will be running on as well as tested against. And for your information Chester they actually just got a working Processor in Genetics last week… But I will admit, it isn’t all that promising at the moment.”
Chester then got up and motioned for you to look at the DevBody as he starts turning it on. “Might as well show you what we’ve already managed to get this thing to be able to perform…” spoke Chester as he typed some commands into the prompt on his computer. Soon enough the DevBody started to whirr to life, and upon standing up looked at you and slowly trotted towards you while saying: “Hewwo mistah, am you new daddeh for…” only for it to slump over and, in a monotonous voice, say “Error, token ‘Product_Name’ not found. Program cannot continue operation. Wan Die, Wan Die, Wan Die...”
“Chester! Why is it still saying ‘wan die’ while in Error Mode?” Mr. Sherman snapped, before Chester quickly responded: “What? I can’t have a little fun while coding this thing? The Upper Brass haven’t even managed to decide on a name for it yet, and you even explicitly told us that we can’t use a placeholder for some unknown reason. Maybe you shouldn’t have fired the last Programming Lead because he had the thing call itself ‘Fluffy’ or something like that.”
As the next few days passed, you found yourself quickly getting used to how writing the code for the Hasbio project works. As you were working on one of the subroutines related to the learning algorithms: you couldn’t help but hear upper management arguing with Mr. Sherman on a few things, and they apparently had decided that having the AI say “wan die” when it crashes would be for the best when it came to debugging, at least while this is still in early development.
“Ah, you must be the new developer we hired a little while back.” You heard from behind you, which upon turning around you realized was Mrs. Percy, one of the middle managers. “I just wanted to let you know that we’ve finally agreed on what to name the Hasbio My Little Pony project… If you check your email it should contain everything you’ll need to know.” She said before walking off, not bothering to actually say anything about what I’ve been working on the past week… But upon checking my work email: I saw a bunch of chain letters being sent by management, alongside an announcement buried behind some “Send this to 10 people or be cursed for life!” junkmail.
It turned out the guy who was fired before I came onboard was onto something, since it turned out the official name for the product is now “The Fluffy Pony” or “Fluffy” for short… I could just imagine Chester giving a shiteating grin to Mr. Sherman over that, but for now I need to get back to work… Though there was one more email in my inbox, one that finally detailed the kind of architecture the Wetware Processor would likely have.
“Not surprised they’d go with at least a reduced instruction set for the Fluffy CPU, though I am surprised they’d actually go full MISC on it… Still don’t know how much memory it’ll have to work with, but at least I now know that the hardware should be about as fast as a fuckin’ Intel 486… That was given 128 Cores.” Chester said to me as we were on our lunch break. Thankfully most of the routines being used were fairly lean, but I would need to see how the learning and recall functions would work on such a computer, and hope I can figure out how it could be run in parallel.
