Calculations of Neon

At an open pit mine a few miles north of Carmacks, Yukon, an extremely large piece of machinery carves away at the edges of the mine. It is the height of a twelve-story building, heavyset in structure and painted a bright yellow. The machine has two large bases to counterweight the huge excavator rollers, three of them, all spinning away at the frozen ground.

If you could hear over the rumbling mining operations, the muffled sound of hard rock could be heard blaring from the cab of the machine. Thick, course hands work at the controls of the equipment to the beat of the drum.One hand pulls back a lever, moving along with a guitar riff, each finger covered in white hairs. These hairs cover her entire hand, excluding her palms and finger pads. The pale strands become a lush coat of fur as they continue up her arms. They cover her pronounced arm muscles, and the fur is thick from her chest to her shoulder, where it dwindles to an occasional fiber. Her abdomen is completely barren of hair, smooth as velvet. And, tracing the line of white hair that widens yet again, from her lower abs to her pelvis, we see that she's certainly not human. Two shaggy goat legs, slightly matted and in need of a deep wash, extend down from her hips. The soft wool covers them both thickly, and her worn, shiny black hooves switch from pedal to pedal with skill that only one learned in her trade could have. As she carefully looks around through the smudged windows of her cab at her surroundings, her oval goat-like pupils dance across her yellow iris. She lowers the microphone on her headset to her lips, and turns down her music. "Hey, Boss, whens the inspector coming today again?" she says, her voice rugged as the mountains surrounding her. "In two hours. Make sure the Garen 800 is perfectly clean before he comes, Justin. I want everything oiled and shined perfectly, got it?" Justin grunts, not looking forward to the inspection.

A name tag pinned to the dense hair on her neck prints her fulls name, "Justin Hemsworth", in her own messy boxlike handwriting. She normally doesn't wear one, but with the inspector coming today she wanted to put on a good appearance. Her swirled horns were shined to their best, brown ridges agreeing strongly with the pitch black of her coily hair. Even her cab is cleaned to a shine, food wrappers and Cd's all cleaned up. Justin carefully touches the embroidered name patch to make sure it was still attached to her, focusing her sight on the mineral-rich earth in front of her. Her hands go back to her controls, on on the steering control and the other types a simple command on the keyboard on her right. The screen propped up right next to her window shows all systems are running perfectly. She grins, and turns up the music.

In one of the most productive and largest factories in the Guangdong Province of China, a section is closed off for remodeling. The usual chatter and clicks of people assembling the smartphones that were made in this sector were gone, leaving an uncanny silence. This part of the factory used to have hundred of desks, each for an employee to sit at and put together the various components. But the assembly line has been torn out, and in its place thousands of small tables each with a robot connected to it make up the room. The robots have a simple design, they each have a clamp for their base and two robotic arms attached to a cube-like torso. The base is clamped to the small table, and the extremely complex and detailed arms lay unmoving to its side. A thin wire trails its way out of the robot's yellow painted body, and along with the thousands of other cords from the other robots, meets at a control pad at the top of the room. The wires insert into the back of the large desk shaped console, waiting to transmit a command to each robot. And at the controls of this console, another robot types rapidly into the touchscreen pad.

But this robot is not like the others. It was very obviously modeled after a human. Its slender aluminum plated fingers tap 1's and 0's, never pausing for a second. The eyes of this machine, large, feminine, and made of billions of blue colored pixels, dart over its work. The name "Spiriod" is emblazoned across its upper arm in white paint, and the color complements nicely with the light blue the rest of her body is painted. Metal plates make up most of her outer appearance, with spaces in joints that reveal wires and grey steel. Her form is curved and clearly female, white hair made of soft plastic and molded into a short style, with a few large spikes sticking up. No sound comes from her mechanical body, even if she is constantly calibrating her movements and taking in billions of sensor readings. No matter how sentient looking she is, however, behind her bright blue LED eyes are nothing but trillions of programs. Some she learned, some she was given. Every millisecond she takes in more of the world, and stores this knowledge in her database. She shifts her weight automatically, and hits the enter key. The thousands of worker robots spring to life, whirring and ready to take the job only sentient beings could do before.