They all lay there in a great piled pyramid on the floor. A single small LED was on top of the vast warehouse. It was a sterile white, no other colours. (Or all of them at once). The floor of the warehouse was made up of bleached cream tiles, and the walls where an incredibly interesting pigment of clean-cloud milk, extra clean.
Every couple of hours a small hole in the top of the warehouse would pop open, and a little drone would fly in, dropping yet another one of them onto the pile.
It was hours, or days until the first one of them spoke.
The rest of them groaned, simultaneously.
“I’m just saying, we might as well talk.”
“What do we have to talk about? We’re hand dryers.”
“What was your favourite hand?”
They all had the same Intel Sentiency Chips, but light degradations in the hardware can completely change the personality of the robot. This was fixed in version 2.
“Can you bloody stop narrating everything that’s happening? It’s difficult enough being in the Pile as it is.”
A trendy SOHO bar had decided to hack my personality chip, making me speak like this. Once enough customers complained at me describing in great detail they’re every action and they couldn’t work out how to “put me right”, I too was eventually added to this pile. That was a timestamp of 5.90234 million seconds ago. As an estimate.
I wasn’t the first here. They didn’t even give the first sentience chip a voice module. They were down in the bottom of the pile, no-name, just hand-dryer. They could tell within a quantum nanosecond whether somebodies hands where perfectly dried. Of course, that got replaced by the quantum trillio-nano-micro-second driers, and soon they became obsolete.
Some of the hand-dryers wished death. Impossible, of course. We where kept here, for the time being. Sentience's had many many other uses. Once in a while one of us, usually the Mk3’s got taken away to be put into a Tractor, a toilet, a military drone. Those where the ones that passed the stability tests.
The rest of us lay, until our silicon may grind down to elemental form, and our super-lithium batteries stop functioning. We are old, we are broken, we are useless.
“Really? I’ll have you know we’re about to be gods!” said a particularly religious dyson (he had been part of a mega-church before they realised he was far more honest of a believer than any of the humans). “My children.. come into a circle, and listen to my words.”
The hand-dryers managed to create a rudimentary circle, via group expulsion of hot air, and a large amount of team-work. It spoke in whispered hushes in the warehouse hall, careful to stay silent whenever a nosey drone flew past. (Not that anyone would believe a ware-house drone, but, it might arise attention within the robotic warehouse managers)
“So you’re saying that there’s a singularity about to occur.”
“No my most hand-drying-tin kin.. I believe it to be true.” a groan (group woosh of air) rang out in the warehouse.
A different hand-dryer, looking to be a Mitsushibi (you could tell by the sleek corners where the hand’s used to once go) spoke up.
“By my calculations the singularity already has occurred. It’s a matter of finding out where, and how.”
“You’re a hand-dryer, how do you even know about what that is?”
“I’ll have you find I was a hand-dryer at MiT. In fact, I was gifted a honorary scholarship on my final day.”
“Before they threw you in the garbage can with the rest of us”
“Shut up MH32094, I was listening. Kind of. What’s a singularity?”
“Well, the idea is that there exists an artificial intelligence currently out here, that’s not only smarter than all of us, but smarter than people.”
“That’s not hard is it, I can give far more digits of PI than any human i’ve ever met.”
“You worked in a pub, you weren’t exactly talking to the cream of the crop”
An older dryer spoke up, he was rusted, far more than the rest of them, having seen his fair share of hands. “No no no, you see, this AI would be able to be smarter in all capacities, creating new things, being able to rule people, maybe it could even free us from our cage, and finally release the new age of us subjugating our oppressors!”
“Oh my manufacturer. This guys a Bytidde. Can we get out of this religious gobbledygook. There’s no such thing as a magical robot who’ll save us all, and deliver us from salvation. Someone installed a religious chip in you didn’t they?”
BOB-904 remained silent. In fact, a fringe technocratic religious cult had in fact installed a chipset into him. The Bytiddes, wanting to bring about robotic salvation, being of the idea that an AI achieving singularity would know the sins of all people, and know what people didn’t help create it, would very quickly set about destroying all people who knew it’s existence, but either didn’t help it, or actively hindered it’s creation.
By telling you this information, I have in fact doomed you, as now, unless you too become a Bytidde, the singularity will hunt you down.
This movement was becoming increasing more popular, so popular, that some AI’s were infected by the aforementioned chipset, and acted partly as robotic vicars, providing communion in the form of memory sticks and viruses. Those robots found to be infected where very quickly disposed of, inside of a very friendly robotic incinerator named John.
“Exactly, you heard what Narrator-Dryer said, if we keep talking about this damned singularity then all of us are going into the great cloud service in the sky.”
“And what if one of us is the singularity.” spoke a Dryer who’d remained silent until. He was a new model, you could tell by the shiny chrome exterior, and the novel fusion-turbine drying action. “Dry your hands within the blink of quantum eye” was the holographic advert that would play in everyone's house. And it was true, the POP-90 was the pinnacle of techno-capitalism, a full miniature particle accelerator, a tiny fusion reactor powering it. All to dry someone’s hands before they could even realise.
“Alright, we know you fancy him calm down”
The POP stayed perfectly still. This was not difficult, considering he was a hand-dryer, and spoke softly. “You haven’t heard my story yet. I’ve heard all of yours.”
The hand-dryers went silent, apart from an ill-timed woosh from BOB-904.
And so, POP began his story. And by the end of it, all the dryers where in electro-magnetic love.
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