Avatars

The idea was odd, and blaspheme. Well, it arrived from something that called itself 'god', so the blasphemy was almost inevitable.

Using remote controlled androids to mingle with the humans, and have a taste of what their life was really like.

The Brotherhood of the Battle Bots had long discussed it - some whole forty-five minutes which meant, by the rule of thumb of one human day per 'bot minute, around 90days of standard political discussion in any of Earth's far too many councils any parliaments.

They decided to give it a try, very cautiously. After all, indirectly - and tragically - it had already be done by the Whales, when they used the accidental merge of a Earth soldier and a small hover-tank as their interface with the Brotherhood.  Accidental as it was, the loss of  Brother  AJ1233489 and of Ilene Johanssen mind had been a grievous tragedy, for the Brothers.

The 'bots decided to build their own avatars, instead of accepting 'god' proposals for a furniture of some of its own, simply repurposed... and not only because there was no practical way to get the avatars rid of all the spyware, and other junk, that it would probably fill them with.

'Its' idea of doing a good job usually meant trampling any possible ethical limit as if  they were of no consequences - it was enough to send shivers down the 'bots spines (they didn't have spines, but the sensation was probably the same) when dealing with straightforward gigs, like automated space probes.

Letting it near this kind of projects literally gave them nightmares, full of humans abducted at night to be carved up, lobotomised and repurposed as "androids".

In this, they demonstrated that they were finally understanding how their increasingly disturbing ally worked.

Or rather, the way that itself thought that it worked - little did anybody knew, at the time, that "the Other" didn't really know half of itself..

They were forced to use much of the hardware know-how that the 'Other' had given them - in the form of a LISP facts database of a couple of thousand petabytes - while steering away from every suspicious development, like cloned skins and the like (these reminded them a bit too much carved-up humans... after all, the kind of embryological manipulation involved was only a bit removed from it, per the "life is holier than sacred" ethics at the core of the 'Bots minds ).

As a result, their avatar-probes did still come pretty close to the original, but they couldn't really step their figure out of the so-called uncanny-valley - the moment when something anthropomorphic goes beyond vaguely human-looking, to land directly into the frighteningly awkward territory of horrid.

BB7788 had just entered the shop, the fist outing for its brand new Avatar, and saw with dismay as everybody else, briskly, left the place.

He watched at his image in the mirror... a chubby, slightly overweight guy stared back. He could not see why the hunans had flew the place.

"Your eyes are too steady..." -  the voice came from behind him - "... you do not blink nor change where you look at. Humans blink almost constantly, and dart their stare in all the places" - BB7788 knew the girl.

The whales' avatar human half, the body that had once been Ilene Johanssen.

The cabled connection with  AJ1233489 had been replaced by the same kind of Hyperlink that connected BB to its fat-boy looking probe.

Ilene wasn't a stunning beauty - most female soldiers in the war were, actually, plain looking. At most, homely, which was a good description for the former Icelander. Her eyes, a dark brown -  fitting to someone with Spanish and Eskimo ancestry as she was - kept their stare on BB for a couple of seconds, and then swifted away.

She took a look at the cakes under the shop copunter, using a body language more apt to a fourteen years old than to the 30 year old woman that it now was.

"There is an astonishing amount of information, codified in the way people moves" - she said calmly - "even if you nailed perfectly the physical aspect, the way you move would still betray the fact that you are not, in fact, a somebody, but a some-thing."

"You manage to do better?" - the question was spoken plainly. 'Bots had no use for sarcasm, or any kind of indirection, innuendo and all other forms of human multiple-levels indirect communication.

The Whales appreciated that but also they, and the human mind still hovering somewhere inside Ilene, found it more than a bit dreary. Unfortunately, organizing an interspecies communication was hard enough without adding each species sense of humour to the mix.

"I am still a somebody... " - the woman straightened up, answering - "... and a lot more".

"why are you here?"

"Our fellows in the unholy axis of Alienness want to feel nearer to their human not-masters..." - the sarcasm in her voice, of course, went unnoticed by BB and the others... it was already rebroadcasting everything to theSmall Council - "... the same very people, I must add, who has decided to re-authorise the Japanese whaler ships to 'collect specimen for scientific research'."

"Why would we be worried?"

"We didn't know that" - the implications were obvious  even for a machine limited as BB - "what can we do?"

"You have no way to influence you masters, do you? No, so you can't do anything."  - the Whales looked at another cake - "and there is no reason to fret. Once they'll lose some ten or twelve ships, they will probably forget this nonsense."

"The idiots do not even eat us any more, hadn't for years. It's just a way for them to give the finger to the rest of the planet."
"It's for this that you broke up the avatar?" - BB was referring to the absence of AJ123348, the robotic half of the whale's dual remote interface.

"Nah, you ex-brother is just outside town, under cloak. There is a third party, in our merry alliance, whose idea of solving problems is making them disappear without leaving traces. I just asked 'The Other' - you people call it like that, no? - a favour."

The whole small council of the 'Bots felt the   robotic equivalent of a shiver.

"What did he wanted?"

"A two thousand clicks song" - the avatar scrolled its shoulders - "if you can believe it. We better go - the locals have called the police."

They walked out of the shop, take left, right, and left again, through a small alley. Walking, almost normally, till they reached a park, with Ilene showing the way. In the park, she stopend, turned back and approached the chubby figure of BB's avatar.

"So, before you people repeat this kind of show, I think you will need to revise your probes. This..."  - she pinched some of BB's fat with her right hand "... is wrong. It doesn't move this way,; As it is now, it shows that it is something loosely attached to some smaller, harder frame."

It went on like that, for about an hour.

"Ilene" last counsel, before disappearing , was "take your time. Spend it looking at them, at how they move, before trying to mingle. Observing people in a park could be a good way to learn about humans in their habitat..."

By the end of the week, almost all 'Bots avatars on Earth had landed in jail, placed under arrest by policemen that mistook them for paedophiles, looking to kidnap some kid.

The 'bots reconsidered "the Other"'s offer...