It occurs to me that sometimes I put the same effort into my world building for something that might get mentioned once, that someone else might put into an entire story.
Like, this is a self drag, because holy shit.
Prompt two of summercamp is about a disease process. I named it red rot and the idea itself would probably make a decent horror sci fi short or full story on its own.
This morning I just added some history to the article referring to what I'm now discovering is an intentional contamination of a space outposts entire water supply and without the intervention of a group of dedicated bots to fix the source all the humans would have died and Earth **cough SpOre cough** could have stepped into a fully equipped and running City that would have connected earth to space without the need of Mars.
Like I am not even sure if the bots are sentient or just following their protocols to the point that they knew it was necessary to save the city. Or if the act of helping the city is what unlocked the access to their own sentience.
Okay so, robots and androids do have sophisticated neural learning with as much human bias removed as possible - actively anti racist and gender affirming policymakers made a point of looking through coding for hidden bias to keep it to a minimum, not perfect but working toward a ideal that under all operating systems kindness is key - and I have an idea that sentience is not a one and done philosophy that each robot has the potential to achieve self awareness through their own actions. You're a real boy Pinocchio you never needed the feather it was in you the whole time!
So you have these weird shaped boxy outer space robots doing a complex refit of the water system and realise that people are dying and independent of each other several of them break off from the refit and start helping people in the city. I don't have much else other than my go to rag tag found family of robots find self awareness and understanding in the act of kindness.
Did I just make care bear robots? And why am I emotional over a tiny robot gaining sentience as he curses his way through trying to get a medical system back online because the contaminated water caused a full shutdown of the whole system and he's the only one small enough to get into the middle of the system and fix it.
I want a teeny tiny robot shaped like one of those idogs of the early oughts have his first real human word be "fuck"
