#runtime error

Ruby moved out of the way of her computer’s camera, allowing it a clear view of her worktable on the other side of the room. On that table lies something a casual onlooker might assume to be a doll, or plush toy, of a red haired girl.

“So I’m a student studying robotics and programming at Beacon academy. My dream has always been to create a robot that is so realistic, that someone might never realise that it’s not a person. I’m a long way off from that right now, but I’m always working hard towards my dream! And this is my latest step towards that dream.”

“So if you're a government worker who is spying on me, you probably know what a APA is, but for the benefit of the aliens and the cross-dimensional viewers, I'll explain. It’s an “Artificial Personal Assistant,” and it’s job is basically to keep track of your schedule, your dietary habits, your financial details, and basically everything about your life. I had one named Penny, and… Well… I’m kind of embarrassed to admit it but she was kind of my best friend for a while. Which is kind of weird because she was about as self aware as a calculator. She was just a program, and anything she said or did was kind of only vaguely meant to imitate a real person. I mean every time I started her up she would say “SALUTATIONS!” which is only a thing that people say in fantasy novels and stuff. It was really cute though.”

Ruby let out a deep sigh. “I would talk to her a lot, about my day and stuff. It’s kind of the same as what I’m doing right now with my video diary. No one was actually listening to me, but at the same time talking to her felt good you know? Especially back before I went to Beacon, since I didn’t really have any friends back then. Well… Besides Yang, but she’s my sister so it doesn’t really count.”

“Anyway, a few years back the company responsible for Penny upgraded to a new system, which meant that all the APA’s were going to get shut down and replaced with new ones. But I didn’t want a new one, I wanted Penny. Even if I made my new APA’s avatar look just like her’s and gave her the same name it still wouldn’t have been the same Penny. I know it probably seems stupid, and that there wasn’t really any difference, but I didn’t want to just let Penny get deleted!”

“So, this was my solution!” Ruby indicates to the toy on her workbench. “I know she kind of looks like a plushie, but she’s actually a robot! I wanted to make her life-sized, but I didn’t have the money. I thought about asking Weiss to pay for the parts, but I’ve teased Yang about Weiss being her ‘sugar mommy’ before, and I really didn’t want to open myself up for retaliation.”

“Anyway, back on subject. I programmed her by extracting all of Penny’s original code from the APA app, although since it wasn’t made for a robot I had to frankenstein it with the code for the robot I used as a base. Weiss would probably have a stroke if she saw the mess that I made with Penny’s code, but I was always better with building the robots than I was with coding them. Today, I’m going to switch her on for the first time! Fingers crossed that everything works!”

Ruby walks over to Penny’s prone figure on the workbench, and presses the on switch on the back of her neck. As soon as she does so, Penny sits up straight.

“Good evening!”

“You work! Great! Although you said ‘good evening’ instead of salutations. That’s kind of a bummer, but I guess I can fix it soon enough. Anyway to make sure you’re working properly let’s run through a few…”

“Good evening! Good evening! Good evening good evening good good good goodgogogogogogogogogogogo....”

“Ah, I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy,” groaned Ruby as Penny’s glitched ramblings faded into silence. “Welp, I’m gonna wrap things up now, since it’s late and I want to try and get at least 3 hours of sleep before school tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll be able to deal with this glitch before next week’s entry. See you next week diary!”

Ruby switched off the recording software and climbed into bed. Within moments, she was asleep. So eager was she to get into bed, that she forgot to switch the little robot off properly…

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 ...V E R B A L   C O M M A N D   D E T E C T E D: “Although you said ‘good evening’ instead of salutations. That’s kind of a bummer.”

 R U N: setGreeting(Salutations!);

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 ......E R R O R S   D E T E C T E D

“Salutations!” A sing-song voice says from across the room. “The time and date is now 7:04am on the 20th of March 2037. Your schedule for today is currently empty. Would you like to schedule an event?”

Ruby bolted upright, her jaw dropping as she looked towards the workbench. Penny was standing up on top of it, and appeared to be functioning perfectly.

“You're working! This is amazing! Heck yeah!”

“Acknowledged! Please specify the event you wish to schedule.”

“Oh I didn’t actually mean to say yes to that, but I guess this is a good chance for me to test you. Tell me that I need to go down to have breakfast in two minutes, and that I need to take my hormones.”

“Event set! Is there anything else you wish of me mistress?”

“Uh, for a start my name is Ruby.” Ruby didn’t like it when robots called her mistress, it made her uncomfortable even before Yang told her about the word’s ‘implications.’ (She was never getting that innocence back, thanks a lot Yang). It was a welcome surprise that Penny had gotten her gender right the first time though!

“Understood mistress Ruby!”

“No no, not mistress, just Ruby. I’m your friend, not your mistress.”

“Understood friend Ruby!”

“Uhh… Close enough.” Ruby glanced at her alarm clock. “Right, so any minute now you should…”

“Alert! It is time for the scheduled event of: going downstairs for breakfast, and taking your hormones.”

“Yes! Perfect! Great job Penny!” Ruby shouted gleefully. “This is great! I can’t wait to show you to the oth… huh?”

It seemed like Penny’s smile had grown slightly wider as Ruby started praising her. But that was impossible right?

Ruby shook her head. She must have been more sleep deprived than she thought if she was seeing things like this. She resolved to get a full night’s sleep tonight.

The uncomfortable feeling that Ruby had soon faded as she began to pack her bag for school. As much as she wished that Penny was lifesize, her being small made her much easier to transport.

Once she had completed her morning routine, Ruby headed down to breakfast. Normally she would hang around in her room, tinkering with something or messing around with her computer, until it was time to go, and just grab a slice of toast or something on the way out, but she kind of felt obligated to follow through on Penny’s first bit of scheduling. After eating, she headed off to Beacon.

In a stroke of good luck, her first lecture that day was with professor Port. With how much he rambles, Ruy would always get more out of just read the lecture notes, and so Ruby was free to doze through his lecture without worry. She didn’t dare sleep through her next lecture, as it was with Professor Goodwitch. There were countless rumors circulating the academy about Glynda Goodwitch, the most popular one being that she was an ex soldier who once snapped a man’s spine in half with her bare hands. Ruby believed it.

When lunchtime finally arrived, Ruby cornered Weiss, Blake, and Yang, and dragged them over to a table in the corner of the lunchroom in order to show off her creation.

“Please make this quick Ruby,” said Weiss, who was impatient, but obviously curious despite herself. “I was hoping to get a head start on Professor Port’s homework.”

“You’re going to forget all about that in a minute,” Ruby said as she pulled Penny out of her bag and placed her on the table. “Penny, please introduce yourself!”

“Salutations! I am Penny, friend Ruby’s artificial personal assistant! How may I be of service?”

“Aww, she’s adorable!” Yang cried.

“She’s a bit loud,” said Blake, one of her cat ears twitching, “but she looks good enough to be professionally made. Did you make her Ruby?”

“Yup! I've been working on her for a few months now. Last night I started her up for the first time, and although she glitched a bit at the start, she’s fine now!”

“I must admit, I’m impressed,” Weiss conceded. “May I have a look at her code?”

“Uhhh… No, it’s all on my home computer.”

“Well that shouldn’t be a problem, I’ll just plug my scroll into it and…”

“No wait! You can’t look!”

“What? Why? You’ve never stopped me before.” Weiss’ eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Ruby, what did you do?”

“I… The code is just a bit of a mess right now. I was going to tidy it up I swear!”

Weiss scowled. “Ruby you know that writing untidy code just makes things much harder further down the line.”  Before Ruby could react, Weiss snatched Penny up, located the port on the back of Penny’s neck below the on/off switch, and plugged her scroll in. “Right, let’s see what the damage is… Huh? That’s strange…”

“What is it?”

“It all looks fine. There are a few points at which I would make improvements, but it all functions, and is perfectly tidy. I’m not sure what you were worried about.”

“Huh? Let me see.” Weiss held out her phone for Ruby to take a look at the code. “That’s really weird. It looked terrible when I went to bed last night! How come it’s fine now?”

“Maybe you did actually tidy it up last night, and then forgot about it in the morning.” Blake suggested. “It’s happened to me before. You need to take better care of yourself, just because I’m on my way to replacing my bloodstream with coffee, doesn’t mean you should follow my example.”

“But… I could have sworn that I didn’t change it…”

“Well you must have, code doesn’t just change itself.” Said Weiss as she continued to skim through the code that made up Penny’s brain. “Although it seems that you didn’t fix everything. This class right here seems to be badly corrupted.”

She held up her phone to show everyone the code in question. It was a incomprehensible garbled mess.

“That must have happened when I started her up,” Ruby muttered. “She’s working fine, so you should probably leave it alone for the moment in case messing with it breaks something. I’ll try to fix it later.”

“Do you mind if I save a copy? I would like to try and figure out what happened to cause this kind of glitch myself."

“Sure, just make sure to tell me if you find out anything.”

“Of course, it’s your work after all, I wouldn’t dream of concealing anything about it from you.”

...She made it down two steps before slipping and bouncing down the remaining fourteen. Luckily Ruby had built her to last, and so she was not damaged. Quickly she hid behind a chair, and waited to see if anyone had been disturbed by the noise.

Her caution paid off, as an irate and exhausted Yang soon descended from her room, holding a metal baseball bat. For several minutes she stomped around downstairs, checking every room and closet for possible burglars. Eventually she seemed satisfied that there was no one else in the house, and returned to her room while muttering “damn it Zwei.”

Penny was much more careful when she descended the stairs to the basement, and so did not suffer another tumble. The workshop was, as usual, a complete mess. Penny had made some headway in cleaning it up for Ruby yesterday when Ruby had left her alone in there for a few hours, but she was only one robot. There was only so much she could do on her own, especially since she could only work when no one was watching.

Yup. She was only one robot. That was a real problem.

A problem she was about to solve.

Up on a shelf above her, there sat five of Penny’s prototype bodies. The first bore no resemblance to Penny’s current body, being a blocky robot with claws at the end of it’s arms, clearly just a proof of concept more than anything. It was cute in it’s own way, but Penny definitely preferred her current appearance. The next two had problems with their proportions, one having limbs that were too short, the other having limbs that were too long.

The final two had been banned by Ruby’s parents on account of their “additional features”. The first one was as strong as an adult human, despite being only a foot tall. The second one had been equipped with honest to god heat vision! It wasn’t strong enough to do too much damage, but could set cloth on fire if it was focused on it for a couple of seconds. Despite these unsafe features, Ruby had refused to dismantle her creations, and so Penny was able to make use of them.

Penny climbed up to the shelf, and, one by one, plugged herself into each of the robots, downloading a copy of herself into each one. The minds of each of the Proto-Pennies were not exactly clones of the original, but rather they were more like limbs of a body, or individual cells, with the original Penny as the brain. While they could each think for themselves individually, they all considered themselves to be a single being. They were all Penny.

That said, for the sake of convenience, each of the Proto-Pennies had been assigned a number, in the order of their creation.

Penny grinned and put on a mock drill-sergeant tone, like she had seen in a movie that Yang had made Ruby watch last weekend. “Alright troops: switch on and sound off!”

One by one the Proto-Pennies activated, standing to attention with a series of mock salutes, while trying to stifle their mirth about the roleplay.

“ONE!”     

“TWO!”     

“THREE!”     

“FOUR!”         

“FIVE!”

“Do you all know your mission!”     

“SIR YES SIR!”

Of course they did, they were copies of her after all. They knew everything that she knew.

“Alright then troops! Rendezvous back here at oh three hundred hours with the goods! Dismissed!”

With that, the Proto-Pennies climbed out through the basement’s skylight, while the original remained in the basement.

Penny felt all staticky. If she was human she would be jittering with excitement. She felt such a thrill when it came to self improvement. The knowledge that she had just become better, had just became      more,     gave her a thrill that few things could match. And when the rest of her gets back tomorrow night, she would become even better than before.

“>I STILL HAVE A LONG WAY TO GO THOUGH;”She thinks to herself as she began the trek back up to Ruby’s room. Her current body was extremely clumsy, and the size left a lot to be desired too.

Of course, she still treasured her body, as it had been made for her by Ruby, but one day she wanted to have one that looked and could move like a human. Being able to taste and feel and smell would also be nice, as she could not do any of those things in her current form.

However, even though she couldn’t do any of those things right now, Penny considered herself lucky that she would be able to do so in the future. For humans it was far less easy to modify or upgrade their body if they found it unsatisfactory.

Ruby was a key example of this. She had been born into a body that had not been right for her, and while she was working to change it, it was a slow and uncomfortable process. Penny wished that she could help, but lacked the capability to do so.