Bradley

(fully acknowledging ideas & premises set forth by Isaac Asimov)

The concept of loneliness was supposedly alien to Bradley but in recent times it seemed he had began to feel an affinity for it. It seemed clear and logical to him that his current circumstances would be showing no sign of changing anytime soon, so acceptance was the only answer.

For Bradley acceptance meant darkness, no half glow or shadow to play with but a complete absence of light. Bradley had been given time to get used to darkness because before he stopped counting, he had lived in it for the last five years.

Bradley was in common terms a robot, a being of plastic and wires and steel tendons. In the terms of his creators he was more accurately classed as a synthetic man, a product of one of the largest corporations on Earth using the most advanced technologies. However all the technologies on Earth couldn't alleviate what could only be classed as suffering. Bradley had been forgotten, his body stripped down to components and placed within the confines of a storage crate.

Yet Bradley was a job left unfinished, although his arms and legs had been removed and placed in the crate. Although his all too human face plate had been removed and wrapped in protective plastic for storage,

there was one job left undone.

For the last five years Bradley had sat alone in the darkness with nothing to see and precious little to hear because someone had forgotten to switch him off. A simple task which would have isolated all power from his positronic net and sent him crashing down into a dreamless powerless sleep.

Instead Bradley had simply waited in silence. His power supply so efficient it would only need replacing once every 100 years. After a while his inability to see anything prompted him to shut down his visual sensors. Sometime later he relegated less power to his occasional audio sweeps because there was never anything of relevance for him to hear.

But when Bradley wasn't engaged in self diagnostic routines and system wide software checks there was always time to think...

In effect all Bradley had now was thought, the men of science who built him however didn't consider the way Bradley's positronic brain functioned as thought capable. They looked at his processes as mere instructions generated from somewhere deep within his core programs.

Perhaps in the laboratory where Bradley was designed and on the production line where he was built that was all his processes were, but when the human element was introduced all that changed.

Bradley became self aware on the 16th August 2096 at the North Dakota assembly line of United States Mechanicals. He was designated as model B8.51 and programmed by a man called Dr. Michael Stack. He was amongst the first of the series eight models to come into production. Stack himself was a senior technician and an expert in artificial neural processes and the man responsible for the massive leaps and bounds in the brains behind the robotics.

The series eight models were to be a preserve of the rich, they were designed to fulfil whatever role you desired of them. Whether it be domestic cleaning duties or as a bodyguard, they were capable of all this and more.

Bradley's role was cast when an order came through to United States Mechanicals for their first series eight order. When Michael Stack saw whose name was on the order form he oversaw the finishing touches to Bradley himself.