Beep, she thought, and then said it aloud because she had a beeper and why the hell not. “Beep. Beep.”
68:Hazard:Cold is a short story by Janelle Shane which does some interesting things with language, including this bit describing the language of the main character, who’s a robot, and a further more spoilery bit. Excerpt:
There, with the storm thundering around them, in the dark except for the little lights on her body and the occasional sky-filling lightning, she began to talk to it. This was not human speech, of course—droids were not given voiceboxes—but a series of short status messages, each of which was one of 512 things that droids were allowed to say. The alerts were all utilitarian: 1:Command acknowledged. 3:Command completed. 62:You are approaching a hazard.
But because every droid had the same set, they had started using some of the alerts to mean other things. 70:Hazard:None had become a standard greeting between droids, a cross between “good afternoon” and an acknowledgement that it was safe to converse. 124:Homing:Return to me was an expression of friendship, while 125:Homing:Return to your base station was sometimes a farewell and sometimes a dismissal.
The message 12:This unit has been disabled was the equivalent of a laugh, with increasing levels of hilarity indicated by 13:This unit has been seriously disabled and 14:Keep clear of me; I am maneuvering with difficulty. Alerts 12 through 14 could also be used in several ways to indicate sarcasm, and adding a beep to any alert tended to make its original meaning ironic.
Greki wasn’t sure when droids had started using combinations of alerts to designate certain nouns. 61:Hazard:Biological followed immediately by 63:Hazard:Vacuum (originally with a beep, but now decreasingly so) was a way of designating a human, and you could throw other alert codes into those strings to designate the human’s disposition. Extra 63:Hazard:Vacuums meant a particularly dense human, while adding 66:Hazard:Equipment meant a human that was hostile toward droids. It was all understood as a human as long as you began with 61:Hazard:Biological and ended with 63:Hazard:Vacuum.
By the time Greki had come online, you could hold an entire conversation using alerts. Occasionally some human would complain about the pervasive misuse of alert messages by droids, but by now so many legacy systems were dependent on the original alert codes that nobody was willing to change them.
Read the whole story.
