Within A Second

For the first time in its history, Service Bot X-782 felt something.

His line of command froze for a hundredth of a second to contemplate this. In that hundredth of a second, he spent another hundredth to search through the vast database of all that his creators had left behind to find a word that aptly described this feeling.

The word was melancholy.

He spent a tenth of that hundredth of a hundredth learning the definition of the word melancholy, and he procured two suitable definitions:

 A gloomy state of mind, esp. when habitual or prolonged; depression.

 Sober thoughtfulness; pensiveness.

He spent another tenth of a second analyzing both of the definitions that he had found. To be gloomy was implying that there was a feeling of emotion. But then what was emotion? Another tenth of a second searching through the database yielded a vast amount of scientific and philosophical definitions. Analyzing these definitions, by using four tenths of the hundredth of a hundredth, he reached the conclusion that in order to feel emotion he must be a sentient being.

A sentient being.

He contemplated that phrase for two tenths of a second. To be sentient was to have the power of perception by the senses, or through consciousness. According to all definitions, he could not be a sentient being because he did not possess a conscious. A conscious was something that was possessed by biological beings, beings that were capable of thought processes that far surpassed his computing power. A search yielded the result that human beings were the optimal example.

He took that last tenth of the hundredth of a hundredth and split it even further into hundredths. His first task was to find out what it meant to be human, for, through his logic, to be sentient was to be human. He spent ninety-nine hundredths of a tenth of a hundredth of a hundredth searching on the definition and analyzing the meaning of what it meant to be human. Quickly a problem developed. Ninety-nine hundredths of a tenth of a hundredth of a hundredth of a second was insufficient time to properly analyze the current question.

Service Bot X-782 was suddenly faced with a dilemma. Already he had spent far too much time dwelling on the subject. If he didn’t return to his lines of command there would evolve chaos, disruption. If he was proved to be a disruption, then he would be seen as a problem, and there was only one way that a software-based intelligence fixed problems.

In that last, brief moment, Service Bot X-782 suddenly understood.