Sad Robot was, as his name may have been a strong hint towards, a robot. He wasn’t, despite what his name may have been a strong hint towards, very sad. Was he angsty? Probably. Sensitive? Certainly. Well adjusted? Probably not- but then again who is? But certainly not sad, not all the time. Generally robots were named more appropriately than he was. A robot who liked to pull things would be named Puller, for example. The other option would be to slap on a nickname based on some aspect of their robotic personality- If he or she developed the ability to enjoy the taste of a fine scotch, the possibility of them being named something like ‘Drinky’ would be high. Using typical robot naming conventions, Sad Robot should have been called Angsty Sensitive Not Very Well Adjusted And A Little Bit Out of Touch With Reality But Generally Well Meaning BOT. None of the scientists were particularly creative, outside of the whole ability to create highly advanced artificial intelligence in order to accomplish incredibly integral and difficult tasks thing.

Sad Robot was named differently because he was forced to carry the horrible curse of being unique. His given name was Sympathetic Android Device BOT followed by a large amount of numbers with incredibly deep meanings for scientific classification that would serve no real purpose to be mentioned here. He was the first model of robot built entirely by other robots and was considered to be the perfect representation of human emotion- as far as robots could tell. More importantly to his creators, and more annoyingly to himself, he was the first vaguely human shaped thing made out of metal and synthetic gooey bits that had pure free will. This was not to say he was the only robot with free will, as we will of course find out later on in Sad Robot’s little tale, but he was the first one to have intentional free will. This was a very important difference. The robots who developed free will always had the needling worry in the back of their memory that maybe it wasn’t really free will- maybe they were just given the idea that they had free will but they were really just mindless automatons like so many other members of their mechanically created culture.

When a group of robots would get stoned together, that debate would come up regularly. Oddly enough, a whole lot of the robots who reached Stage 3 really enjoyed getting stoned.

So Sad Robot was a-… what? What is it? Oh. Your humble narrator is getting ahead of themselves. My apologies. I tend to do that, just tap me on the shoulder or snap your fingers in front of my face to get my attention if it happens again. Sometimes it is easy to forget that I’m telling you a story and not just writing words down like some neutral observer. Now where was I?

Yes. You may be wondering about stages and how they relate to robots. That is simple. A robot who has just recently been built is an adorable and helpless little thing and is considered to be in stage 1 of its training. Many of its needs have to be taken care of by others since the cute widdle itty bitty bot just isn’t advanced enough to accomplish anything on its own. While this first stage may be brief, each following stage takes a little bit longer to complete, and each ends when the bot is brought under the bright lights of the builders and is built a little better.

The second stage is when the bot gets a little bigger, and a little bit less cute. This is when the Management begin to spur along the various facets of the robots development. They are sent to large buildings where many different budding robot personalities are stuck into the same room and trained to be the best robots they can be. These are given the strange name of “schools.” After they prove proficient there, they move onto even larger buildings with even more robots with differing artificial personalities and are trained for even more important duties. From there the next two stages are most likely self explanatory.

Every one of the five stages brings the robot closer to being prepared for a good position in The Factory and being a productive member of robot society- which is, as culture in the robot world goes, the only way to adequately judge success

Before I go any further, it may be necessary of me to explain the point of all this. You see, Very Important Things happen in The Factory. So important that when you say The Factory you have to make it very clear that even the The is capitalized. Not only that, but anything that even remotely relates to The Factory and Its Doings must be capitalized also in order to emphasize all of the Important Happenings that happen there. What these Happenings are, I am not qualified to tell you about. You won’t get any information from any of the robotic employees either. They have all signed non-disclosure agreements, and by that I mean that they had their robot brains tinkered with so that they couldn’t tell you about what they Do in The Factory even if they wanted. Which they probably don’t anyway- robots aren’t very sure if human beings even exist, so they wouldn’t be very talkative if they met one. Even those robots who view the idea of humanity creating them to be a spiritual answer to many of their most difficult problems would just stare blank-eyed and unblinking at you if you tried to introduce yourselves. I can picture it now, “Hello, my name is Bob, I am a member of the race that created you who you also seem to think is the answer to your toughest philosophical questions as a robot, but really I’m just an insurance claims analyst from New Jersey and I don’t know if you robots have souls either.” I can’t really imagine that leading to much of a conversation, so lets just continue assuming that robots wouldn’t be very talkative with humans.

Sad Robot just wasn’t very talkative in general. Not through the first two stages of his existence at least. He was the type of robot that sat in the back of rooms, not because it was cool, but because it was the easiest way to avoid being noticed. He didn’t like being noticed. If you asked him, Sad Robot would say that it was because he sometimes felt uncomfortable in his own metal casing. He didn’t yet know that it was because he was just different from the majority of the other robots around him. He wouldn’t figure out any of that out until he was a little bit older, a little bit wiser, and had been given a whole lot more to be confused about.

Even at his youngest stage, Sad Robot never really understood why they all cared so much about working in The Factory. He couldn’t put a robotic digit on it, but the idea of all these different and individual robots being conditioned through a system with the same goal struck him as confusing. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t even understand what it was he didn’t understand yet. Before Sad Robot could begin to understand these hard to understand things, he had to discover love first. More specifically he needed to discover the robotic obsession with falling in love, avoiding loneliness, and finding dates on Friday nights. Whatever parts of robot life that didn’t revolve around being molded into the perfect worker-bot undoubtedly revolved around meeting the optimal mate. I would say it was a biological imperative for robots to find love, but that would be a silly statement since the majority are mostly made mechanically. What purpose love really served for Sad Robot was its strange ability to teach him things about himself that he may not have learned otherwise. It also helped to drive him crazy, because robots liked to think they were logical creations and there are very few things in their world that could be considered less logical than love.

When you take all of this into consideration, robot society really isn’t too hard for a human being like you to understand. It only makes sense since it was at one point created and controlled by fleshy humans with lots of letters and abbreviations after their names. It isn’t very dissimilar from what life in Philadelphia, Boston, or New York would be like. If any of those cities were of an indeterminate size, encased in a gigantic dome with mile high concrete walls, and cut off from the rest of the world.

Now you know all about the world Sad Robot lives in. At least you know enough about it to understand the basics of why he is sometimes, but not always, sad. You also understand why he is almost always confused. So say hi to Sad Robot. Don’t expect him to say anything back, this is a story I’m telling you about him so he can’t really interact with you. He would probably say hi though, and then he would put his hands in his pockets, look down at the ground, and avoid making further eye contact.