After that, we spent the evenings watching our way through the whole box, every Chaplin movie, and when it was time for Don to test his new project, he chose to base the robot on Chaplin. He got a friend to make a crappy Chaplin-looking robot complete with bowler hat and a little mustache. Don somehow fed it with information about Chaplin’s personality, based on the movies. I’m not sure how he did it, but he spent a week alone in his room with the Chaplin box, constantly swearing and muttering. And then, finally, it was done.

Yeah, a robot. A couple moths ago, I had this roommate called Don. I’m pretty sure he also had some kind of surname, which I could never remember. Anyway, Don was some kind of programmer. More specifically, robotics. When I moved there, he was working on some project, and since we lived next to each other, he told me everything. He was extremely talkative, but except for the initial shock at his walls of text/talk, I really enjoyed it. I didn’t understand much of the high-tech talk, but basically he was designing some kind of robot software, like a brain. Apparently, real Artificial Intelligence, as in thoughts, isn’t possible, at least not with our current technology and knowledge. Don seemed to know this pretty well, so I took his word for it. What Don was trying to make was, in a way, a “fake AI”. It was designed to make it seem like the robot was actually a person, by filling it with every little bit of someone’s personality. How you program personality isn’t for me to say, but Don could apparently do it somehow. After all, it’s what he does. The robot wouldn’t actually have a personality, but if filled with enough information, it would be able to handle virtually any situation with not only a fitting answer, but fitting “emotions”.

Now you’re probably thinking something along the lines of “Charlie Chaplin is dead, what is this bullshit?”
Maybe time for some explanation.
Short version: Chaplin is a robot.

I sigh and snatch the book back. I’m not gonna do the speech about Alice not really being for kids with this guy. Especially because, technically, it is for kids.

Also because he’s an idiot. I stash the book back into my bag and retreat further into the library. 

Tick.

Tock.

Tick.

Tock.

I glared at the big black watch on the wall, but it didn’t shut up. At all.

If anything, it may have gotten a bit louder. Just to bug me.

I sighed and turned back to my book, but was interrupted again before I’d even found the place where I finished last time.