[Excerpt from George Washington Carver’s speech to the final graduating class of The Institute of Alchemical Studies in Mystic, Connecticut]
What robots like most is the spongy sound. The sound of robots fighting is sharp, hard, precise. The robots have formulas to determine the exact sound produced when the mechanical claw of one machine hammers down on the cylindrical titanium enclosure of another machine’s vertical neural network. The robots have no formulas to determine the sound of a soft human fist plunging into the shallow depths of gummy cheek matter. The sound grows out of the contact like a soul, evolving over time. The robots can perceive this in infinitesimal increments. They can stretch the unique sound of human violence over what the creator of that functionality (a human) called micro-eons. They sense the pliant molecules of the flesh knocking Stoogishly into each other in what begins as a seemingly predictable pattern but becomes so complex it eventually overwhelms the circuits in their synthetic brains. They insist the shudder that occurs when this happens is not an orgasm, that they are not so uncouth, but robots have been known to lie.