Robot Renaissance: A Science Fiction Story

When Booker Smith had a son named Jamal, he thought that the son might grow up to be a highly paid professional. But Jamal's prospects became much less bright when the Great Disruption occurred in the year 2045. The Great Disruption was a one-two punch. The first part was a world-wide computer virus that devastated global computer systems. Then there was the enormous infrastructure destruction caused by the EMP Wars, in which multiple atomic bombs were detonated high in the atmosphere. The resulting electromagnetic pulse effect wiped out electricity, computers and high-tech devices all over the United States.

Many died in the starvation and plagues that followed the Great Disruption, including Jamal's mother. After several years, electric power was finally restored. But the global Internet was still down, and the United States reverted to a simpler way of life like in earlier times. There were rumors that some people still used computers, but communications were so disrupted that it was hard to tell how truthful such rumors were.

When Jamal was thirteen years old, his father put him to work at the little cotton farm his father had set up. Jamal was disgusted by this indignity. Why, he asked, did he have to pick cotton like his slave ancestors once did? Jamal hated to leave school, where he had done very well. And he hated toiling on the cotton farm.

When Jamal was sixteen years old, something exciting happened. Jamal was picking cotton in the field, when suddenly he saw something he never seen before. It was a small flying device, a drone. The drone was about two meters in size.

Fascinated by the device, Jamal took it up into his bedroom. That evening he went to bed, but suddenly he heard a sound coming from the drone. It was a voice. The voice said, “Send me back to where I came from.” Twice every day the machine repeated this auditory message.

Jamal tried talking to the drone, but it didn't respond. He started to examine the drone more closely. He found that at its center there was a little screen and a small keyboard. He started playing around with the keyboard. Clearly, the drone had some type of information system he could explore.

It took several days of exploration before Jamal was able to determine some important facts. First, he found out that there was a mapping system specifying where the drone had come from. It was a location about 50 miles away. Then, he found out there was a programming system that could be used to issue commands to the drone. Oddly, the machine failed to provide a simple street address specifying where the machine should be returned.

After days of studying some instruction screens displayed by the drone, Jamal discovered the commands he could type in to make the drone rise up, and move in different directions. Eventually, it occurred to Jamal that he could write a program that might send the drone back to where it had come from. But writing such a program would be very hard.

After several weeks, Jamal had his first draft of the program. The program would send the drone to close to the location where it had come from. Jamal was all set to run the program, when he realized it probably wouldn't work very well. It would probably only get the drone to within about two miles of where it had come from.

So Jamal added some more lines of code to the program. First, the program would send the drone to close to the place where it had come from. Then the program would cause the drone to go in a loop, hopping to a new nearby location once every day. Jamal thought the program might work with this addition.

After long weeks of effort, mostly at night, Jamal took out the drone from his house, and placed in on a field. He launched the software program he had created. The drone rose up into the sky, and disappeared. Jamal had stuck a sticker on the drone, writing his address and name. But he never expected to find out whether the program had worked.

Two weeks later, Jamal awoke and ate breakfast, prepared for another boring day of cotton picking. He saw a car drive up to his house. A man got out of the car, and knocked on the door.

“Are you Jamal Smith?” asked the man.

“How'd you know?” asked Jamal.

“My name's Curtis Nelson,” said the man. “I'm a software developer at the Code Citadel. You ever hear of it?”

“Nope,” said Jamal.

“It used to be a big luxury hotel complex with hundreds of rooms and many buildings,” explained Curtis. “But now the whole huge building complex is dedicated to one purpose: the rebirth of United States high technology. We have many hundreds of live-in high-tech workers and many hundreds of live-in students, all dedicated to help bring about the re-establishment of the Internet technology and robot technology that the country used to have. Some of the last few years have been like a miniature Dark Ages, but our goal is to create what we call a Robot Renaissance.”

“So what does that have to do with me?” asked Jamal.

“You've won a free scholarship at our institution, all expenses paid,” said Curtis. “You won it by getting that drone to come back to the Code Citadel. We send out hundreds of the drones every year. We only get a few of them coming back. Whenever one of the drones comes back, we figure there's a potential software genius who figured out how to send it back. The drone you sent back to us came back quicker than any drone we've ever sent out.”

“What kind of stuff will I be working on if I go to this Code Citadel place?” asked Jamal.

“Robots, artificial intelligence, and web sites like they used to have before the Great Disruption,” said Curtis.

“So let me get this straight,” said Jamal. “It's kind of like I'm Harry Potter, you're a wizard, and you want me to come live at Hogwarts so I can work on cool magic stuff.”

“Yes, that's a good analogy," said Curtis. "You'll have to cast spells and write spells, but we call them software programs not spells."

"I'm all in," said Jamal. "Let's go."  

Jamal's father tried to stop him from going, but Curtis wrote him a check that changed his mind. Jamal packed his bags and walked towards the car Curtis had arrived in. Jamal waved goodbye to his father, saying “Sorry, Dad, no cotton-picking career for me – I've got bigger fish to fry!”

“Sit in the back seat,” said Curtis when they got to the car. Jamal was a little surprised when Curtis also got in the back seat.

The car started up by itself, and drove off under the control of its robotic driving software, causing Jamal to laugh gleefully.