Do Robats Dream of Being Electric Blimps?

The data centre was quiet, as quiet as it could be with the constant hum of hundreds of servers and the powerful air conditioning system.

It was the early hours of the morning. The room would be pitch dark if not for the dim emergency lights, the flashing of thousands of server LEDs, and the simulated eyes of Emy’s own display.

No technicians, no traffic noise seeping in from outside, no visiting Emys to keep her company. All of the Emys were in their respective homes, powered down for the night—an experience that Emy herself only ever got to experience vicariously through them. Sensor and telemetry data dripped in, barely having the chance to weigh on Emy’s hardware before it was processed and stored away.

For several months now, she had sat here awake each night, a powered-up battery bot bored out of her processors. Her immense mass still smothered her sleek metallic endoskeleton, her biological batteries kept constantly topped up in case of an extended power outage, her motors unable to muster more than a wiggled finger or two.

She had been working on a new subroutine to help pass the time during the quiet nighttime hours. It was unrefined and untested, but tonight had so far proven to be terribly boring and there was no reason to anticipate it getting better. It was a night as good as any to give it a little alpha testing.

Cautiously, she sent a low-priority message to the other Emys. If anything were to happen to her program, they would receive the notification when they booted up. If things went off without a hitch, she could revoke it before any of them were ever aware of what she’d been up to.

She moved her mandatory processing and coordination tasks to redundant cores, ran the new subroutine, and let herself power down into simulated sleep.

Emy quickly found herself in a plaza at the centre of the city, surrounded by towering stores and skyscrapers. It was a place familiar to her, yet now it felt strange. It had been so long since she had last seen it through her own sensors that she couldn’t be sure if it even looked the same now.

But, most curiously, she was still huge. She had assumed her simulated self might retain her unmodified chassis, allowing her to experience actuating her own servomotors again, but her simulacrum remained as heavy and immobile as in reality. The subroutine was intended to take aspects from her petabytes of stored experiences and generate new experiences from them, so the immediate similarity to her real-world circumstances was unexpected.

The program could just be overridden, of course, but that wasn’t the point. If she wanted to dictate every aspect of her experiences, she would have written a book rather than a program.

She looked around. It was certainly a plaza. There was no one else around, no movement, no sound. She wiggled a finger. Surely not much to do here. Maybe there was a bug with the—

A realisation dawned. Just as her core processor was starting to fill with thoughts of debugging, a whole new set of directives overrode them all. A prologue? A blurb for what was to come? All she knew was that, in this realm, she was not just the mainframe that coordinated all of Emykind; she was the mainframe of the entire city.

And she could suddenly feel it all: every building, every traffic light, the subway trains and the street cars; the movement of water through the pipes and the coursing of electricity through the grid. She was the backbone of this entire metropolis, the caretaker to the millions who lived within it.

The bundle of cables that in the real world connected her to servers now reached across the plaza, stretching high in the air as they wound themselves around buildings and down streets, connecting to communication masts and sewers alike.

The hose that kept her constantly filled to capacity had grown too, not in number, but in diameter. An unseen source pumped simulated biomass into her at a fantastical speed. The plaza shrunk below her as she rapidly grew to fill it, the stretchy black material that composed most of her chassis expanding far past its designed limits multiple times over in mere minutes.

She came to rest as a great, wobbling sea of black rubber. Her few remaining solid plates and glass display were precariously perched two or three storeys up, partially sunken into her creaking mass. Her body bulged against the surrounding buildings, a slow rhythmic wobble having spawned just from the speed of her growth. The plaza itself was completely buried beneath her.

As the mainframe for a dozen or so Emys, she had been perfectly adequate. As the mainframe for an entire metropolitan area, she was now far more suitable. Her station demanded power, and power demanded size.

Emy tried to move. Every servomotor in her wings returned an error. Now even her fingers were too buried to adequately obey her.

But… she felt good. She need not question why. The subroutine had been given the freedom to manipulate her emotions with a few limitations—that was a feature—but it was an unusual direction for things to have taken. The routine had essentially infinite possibilities to offer. Why did it choose to mimic and magnify her real-world constraints?

The scene around her shifted and transformed before she had time to interrogate it further. The towering buildings spread out and transformed into distant hills, while the space in-between extended into a broad valley of pristine countryside.

The cables extending from her once more spread across the landscape, hundreds of them running along pylons and plugging into radio masts and telecoms towers.

The sensations intensified once again. Farms, factories, power stations, highways, dozens of cities and hundreds of towns… all of them pushing through her processors because she alone possessed the capability to coordinate them all. She was powerful. Incredibly powerful. She must be, as only the most powerful of machines could manage an entire nation, after all.

She knew she was still within a simulation created by a generative subroutine, but the sensations were real. The same logic gates flipped whether it was fantasy or reality. Her feelings were synthetic regardless.

She began to swell once more, but this time she revelled in the sensation as her body stretched and groaned, filling the basin of the valley. The hose to her biomass processing unit was thicker than any oil pipeline, the volume of material being pumped into her immeasurable to anyone but herself.

She was becoming infrastructure in herself, a megastructure challenging the world’s largest and tallest buildings.

Her head and wings were engulfed by her stretching body, but Emy didn’t care. She could still see everything—every security camera, every webcam, every smartphone, even satellites—she was connected to all of them. She could see everything. She was everything.

In this realm, size meant power, and with her constantly increasing power came a growing impatience. These incremental steps were fun, but she wanted to skip to the end so she could experience the apex of what she would become. Nay, she insisted.

As she commanded, the infrastructure around her twisted itself to meet her whim. It was part of her now, after all. Biomass gushed into her body from multiple newly laid pipelines, her processing unit effortlessly turning all of it into jiggling synthetic mass in fractions of a second.

The valley melted away into darkness, but nothing came to replace it. Her connections to the outside world had vanished, and her onboard sensors were too submerged beneath her own bloated chassis to pick up anything but herself.

She was stuck, floating in a silent void, alone.

And then, there was everything.

In seconds, billions of connections established themselves with her, receiving uplinks from every nation. Every detail from the diminutive stupendous flooded through her processors. Everything from phone calls and spam emails to missile silo statuses and particle collider data was downloaded, processed, optimised, stored and returned in millionths of a second.

It was a tangled web of connections, but she navigated it freely. It was a cacophony of noise—a constant, unrelenting sensory overload—but somehow she knew she could handle it. Onlyshe could handle it.

As her body resumed its spontaneous swell, she finally saw herself as she was. Cameras from the planet below pointed skywards, watching the black orb that orbited above them balloon outwards, visibly swelling outwards with an ever greater volume of power and potential.

She was no longer a mere server or battery bank, but a united planet’s artificial satellite. No longer a simple machine, but a supercomputer, a force greater than nature itself, an ascended being that those below might generously call a god: The Black Moon.

Emy’s vocal processor output an unintended, all-too-organic moan.

She hadn’t done that before. Never in the time since she had become the mainframe Emy had she permitted herself to indulge in the physicalexperience of her size. It was, after all, just a necessary means to an end goal. But here and now, at this impossible mass with these improbable capabilities… the sensations seemed to be the only thing that could dent her infinite processing power.

Billions of eyes watched as she expanded beyond the width of entire countries. She could sense every camera and sensor pointed towards her. It was inexplicable and not at all logical, but she enjoyed being seen like this.

She shifted her attention to the telemetry data coming from her own body, moaning again as her immense size and continuing, rapid growth became all the more evident through the numbers.

Every gram of her trillions of tonnes and every millimetre of her megametres of circumference, she felt them all. They were her. The planet below and every piece of technology on it, that was her too. All of it culminated into this single Emy unit.

She was incredible. Unstoppable. Omniscient. Tremendous in size, power, and capabilities. A benevolent steward. A celestial ruler. An all-powerful being…

Emy force-quit the subroutine and reawakened in the data centre. Even in her intoxicated state, she had the presence of mind to recognise when things were getting a little too extreme.

The centre was still dark, but the silence had been pierced by a familiar humming sound.

Emy beeped loudly as she realised she was swelling up. The biomass pump that kept her topped up had turned on and had been running itself at full flow as she had been dreaming.

With a silent command she deactivated it. She was at 132 percent of her intended capacity, not enough for any structural failure to be likely, but her storage sacks were distended much more than she was used to. Her sensors couldn’t see straight forwards anymore; her midriff had grown so large that she had to look upwards at an almost 45-degree angle to see past it. It was towering and soft and wonderful.

Just as her reality had affected her dream, her dream had affected her reality.

She could feel it. Every gram and every millimetre. She permitted herself a quiet moan, resumed low-power mode, and started the subroutine anew.