Dendria looked out at her backyard in distress. A knock on the front door momentarily caused her heart to jump, and she quickly dashed over and answered it.
“Miss Randalls?” The man standing in her doorway asked.
“Yes. Are you the serviceman?” She asked pleadingly.
“I am.”
“Oh please, come in!”
The man stepped inside and she led him toward a back window. She pointed at the robot in her yard, who was busy striking the ground with a mop handle.
“I assume that’s the robot?” He asked.
She nodded.
The man, sensing Dendria’s trepidation, took the lead and walked outside. She timidly followed behind.
“Seems to be trying to tend the land.” He said quietly to Dendria. “See that? The way it swings? Clear indication that it’s using medieval European agricultural practices.”
“It is?” She asked.
He nodded. “You tend to see less range of motion, more push-pull movement with Asianic agricultural practices.”
“So what should we do?”
“I got it.” He said to her, then raising his voice, called out “Guten Tag!”
The robot continued striking the Earth.
“Salve!” The man called.
But the robot toiled without pause.
“Hail be thou!”
The robot stopped working, turned, and nodded.
“God save ye’!” The robot replied.
“Ah good, it’s middle English.” The man said quietly to Dendria. “I’m way more familiar with middle English than most other languages and dialects.” He raised his voice again. “How are you going?”
“Fair, sir. Pray tell, what do you lack?”
“Permit a fair man to inspect thy back?”
“An odd fellow! What demand ye of me?”
“Learned am I in the ways of medicine, and a pox upon the land has settled. Pray thee, allow a goodly servant to inspect thy back, where the pox might be seen.”
“What shall have this?” The robot asked after a moment’s pause.
“Not a grote, sir. Tis merely for the common good, and nothing th’other.”
The robot seemed hesitant, but eventually leaned forward and allowed the technician to access his back panel. The man expertly popped it open and held down a pair of buttons, causing the robot to sink forward slightly.
“What was that?” Dendria asked.
“Thought so.” The man said, pointing to the robot’s serial number. “It’s a new unit. Let me guess, the robot began acting odd a few days after you bought it?”
“That’s right!” she replied.
He nodded. He held up his finger, which began to melt and shift in form until it became a drillbit. He began removing screws from within the robot’s access panel.
“We’ve been getting a lot of these calls lately.” He said. “The new units have been built with a quantum-lattice learning mesh to make them more versatile. Seems that we probably tapped into something deeper than we meant to, however, since we’ve been getting a lot of reincarnations like this.”
“Reincarnations?” She asked, staring at her robot. “You mean my robot has a soul?”
“Eh, kinda. More like, a soul briefly had your robot.” The technician said. “Turns out that tapping into higher dimensions for computational power meant tapping into the place where memories linger after death.” He removed a covering from within the robot, then allowed his finger to shift into something that looked like a metallic cotton swab before venturing deeper into the robot’s chassis. “I expect you probably had your robot doing manual labor, yeah?”
“A bit.” Dendria responded, feeling shocked by all this news.
The technician nodded. “That’s typical. See, your robot’s quantum learning mesh is designed to change and adapt and reinforce behaviors. You gave it manual labor, and because the computations take place on the fifth dimensional plane, a soul with memories of manual labor was briefly able to return to the physical world. Think of it like clay. Your robot is malleable like clay, and you shaped the clay into a rough form. A corresponding object with roughly the same shape fitted into it… In this case, that object was a disembodied spirit. ”
Dendria only felt more overwhelmed with this shocking bit of knowledge.
“Wait… So my robot had a soul. Is that why it was speaking so strangely?”
“A lot of farmers in Europe died early… Never got old and incapable of labor, see? They died while still in the pattern of toiling outside. You wanted a laborer, and a laborer filled the role… It just so happens that that laborer died many centuries ago with a lexicon to match.” The technician laughed. “When these reincarnations started, we had to learn how to ask for permission to access the robot’s control panel in over a dozen different medieval languages, and even then, it’s not guaranteed. I had a call a few weeks back that no one could understand. We had to power down the android by force and send it into the shop. Long story short, best as any of us could tell, it was speaking ancient Sumerian.” He shook his head.
“So wait, what happens if an evil spirit possess a robot? Can it… Is it dangerous?”
“Eh, this series of androids has multiple safeguards built into it in order to keep it from harming someone, so the soul that fits into it would also need to be equally as gentle… But the guys in the lab have been experimenting with that, and yeah… It can get ugly.” He shuddered. “We had one encounter with an ancient Mongolian soldier, and let’s just say that it’s good he didn’t have access to nukes. He made Genghis Kahn look like Mother Teressa, who, I’m told, has also been summoned. Mother Teressa, I mean, not Genghis Kahn. Haven’t gotten him yet, and truth be told, a lot of us don’t want him. Someone that good at conquest? It’s hard to believe, but if we built a robot without moral safeguards in place and summoned someone like him, it could upset our entire civilization.” The technician placed the panel back onto the robot, and after allowing his finger to transform back into a drill bit, began attaching the screws.
“This is just so much to take in.” Dendria said, shaking her head.
“Try not to worry about it too much.”
“But you’re telling me that reincarnation is real, souls are real, that people can reincarnate into robots…”
“Eh, we’re not even sure if they’re souls. We just call ‘em that. We can’t exactly run tests on things in the fifth dimension, so we can’t be sure. And even if they are, we still need to live our lives, yeah? Gotta work to buy food and such?”
“I suppose.” She stared sideways at her robot. “So is it… Is it fixed?”
The technician shrugged. “For now. I had to add some fluoride to its focus-diode, and it’s now running a constant stream of video entertainment through its perception filters. That should be enough to dull it down to the point it loses connection with the soul in a few days, but we’re gonna need to come by and service it weekly.”
“Weekly!?” The woman exclaimed.
The man raised a hand in protest. “It’s all on the house.” He said. “No charge. We still don’t understand the exact mechanisms behind it, so this gives us valuable data, and in the mean time some of the guys in the lab are working on a more permanent solution to the reincarnation problem. Until then, we need to check it regularly to make sure it stays in a spiritually diminished state.”