A la Node

Mr Duck came by her name honestly enough, despite being neither a Mr. nor a duck. The Owner had a child, who, at around three years of age, appeared several times in the yard and took an intense interest in its new denizens. This was in the early days, before Mr Duck had become the large matronly Rhode Island Red hen she was now. The child chose the names of Mr Duck, Pig, Charming, and Creepy Cat the rooster, and would not be budged by any of the wheedling logic the Owner had put forth in protest.

Mr. Duck and the other chickens lived in a little fenced yard next to the short and poorly painted red camper trailer that her Owner lived in. One might be excused for mistaking her yard for part of the neighboring property, a sprawling acreage of fences and pens enclosing chickens, sheep, goats and assorted other farmyard animals, but in fact this little yard and it’s adjoining little patch of gravel were the property, perhaps the only property, of the Owner.

The chicks had become chickens in that increasingly disheveled patch of grass and dirt, and the child who had named them seemed to have left their lives as abruptly as it had entered.

On the warm summer day that the robot chicken minder appeared in their coop, Mr. Duck had spent two days wandering about the yard, eating grass seed and small insects, but with no food in the metal food dish and no water in the metal water can. She hadn’t seen the owner in several days, but it had only been two since the food and water had run out. This happened now and again, and the chickens did well enough most of the time, unless it was too hot and dry for worms, or too cold and frosty for insects. So she was excited when the Owner came in, raked all the dirty straw out of the coop, put new straw in, filled up the food and water cans, and stood proudly over them all as they ate and scratched through their new fragrant bedding.

Later that day, when Mr Duck got the urge to go sit in the nesting box, she found the robot chicken minder there. It was smooth and shiny silver, it’s shape was amorphous and stretchy. It took the shape of a little caricature of a man, and stood in the corner of the nesting box. It may have been  watching her, though it did not seem to have eyes.

She stared intently at it. It was not a mouse, and did not really seem to be another chicken. It could, just maybe, be a snake. She pecked at it experimentally, and cawed a warning. It was hard, cold, and inert, and she immediately dismissed it from her mind. It was just another of many things the Owner left lying about that could not be eaten, but also were not enemies.

She settled herself into the box to wait for the egg. There were already two eggs in the box, and they felt good under her, and not for the first time she felt the mild urge to just sit there, keeping them warm.

When her egg was out, she stood up and turned out of the box, and then back to it, looking inside. There were three eggs there. The hard brown shells called out to her, and as she did nearly every time she saw an egg, she yielded to the urge to peck it open. She had learned some time ago, far longer than her tiny memory could recall, that the eggs were filled with food and that pecking them open was a profitable action. The owner would find on his increasingly irregular checks of the nesting box that half the eggs had been pecked apart, and would yell frighteningly at Mr Duck and the other chickens in the yard. Mr. Duck made no mental connection at all between the broken eggs and the yelling, but kept a careful distance when the Owner was in the yard, and continued to peck at the eggs.

This time, a strange and shocking thing happened: as her beak started its lightning-fast descent onto her target, a rounded silver hand met it half way and smacked her head aside painfully. She was so startled that her squawking continued well out into the yard, where the green grass and a passing moth eventually pushed the entire incident out of her mind.

The robot chicken minder considered the action against its vague programming. It was a toy, really, one of multitudes now produced with the little globs of programmable putty that had made computing so terribly cheap. The Owner had bought it for the child that never seemed to be around his red trailer anymore, but the child had a better one already, and so he had decided to see if it could solve his egg problem. He felt if he could solve the egg problem, life might take a turn for the better.

The concept was simple. The thinking goo inside was an amorphous blob of synthetic neurons, and cost about as much as toothpaste to produce. You connected some sensors wherever you wanted, and some motors, and you moved the motors in response to some stimulus fed to the sensors. The neurons would make connections, and after a few repetitions, the little brain would make that motion all by itself whenever it got that stimulus. It was a pretty simple process for the factory to squeeze the bare minimum of putty into a little toy robot and program it with a few basic tricks and an English dictionary so that it could make connections between spoken words and actions.

The robot chicken minder looked at the three intact eggs in the nesting box and compared this outcome to its instructions: “Don’t let the little bitches break the eggs,” the Owner has said. It had been shown a whole egg, and broken eggs, and after a few mock attacks on the whole egg with a butter knife, the little robot was deemed ready to stand guard. It had also been told “Just protect the fucking eggs,” and “Take care of those damn ovicidal birds for me,” but these seemed superfluous at the moment. The eggs looked safe, and so the robot chicken minder settled into the corner to wait for the next threat.

A few hours later, Mr. Duck came into the nesting box and stopped when she saw the little robot. She eyed it carefully, and the eyed the three eggs carefully, and then the robot again. The robot watched her. When she tried to peck at an egg, it slapped her beak away, and watched her flee back out of the box and into the yard. It reviewed instructions. “Bird” was in the dictionary, but the definition contained no information that would allow him to identify a bird by site. However, “eggs” connected to “chicken” and “chicken” connected to “bird”. A new neural pathway was made – the instruction “Take care of the damn ovicidal birds” implied also protecting the animals that produced the eggs. Now it simply had to identify where the eggs were coming from.

On the day that Mr Duck found a mouse in the yard and pecked it to death, there was also a disturbance at the Owner’s trailer. There had been a loud rhythmic thump emanating from it for a while, and then shrill moaning, accompanied by a regular rocking motion that caused it to scrape loudly against the wire fence. Mr Duck and the other chickens migrated to the far side of the yard, where they watched as the car pulled up behind the trailer. These large moving things seemed to Mr. Duck to be some form of giant chicken, with brilliantly colored plumage. People seemed to ride around in them, but her mental image of the situation simply wasn’t big enough to encompass that part of the mystery.

Another human got out of the car and went to the door of the trailer, which was on the opposite side, out of view of the chickens. They listened without comprehension, but with the vague hope that human voices presaged fresh food.

There was knocking. Then:

“Hey, get the hell out, can’t you see the sign? If the trailer’s rock’n don’t come knock’n!”

Drunken laughter.

“Sir, I’m your attorney, I am obligated to come knocking -”

“Fuck off! I can’t pay for you anyway, bitch already has everything. Tell’m to come put me in jail, I fucking don’t care anymore. Let a man get drunk why dontcha.”

“Sir, I need you to sign -”

“I SAID GET THE FUCK OUT!”

The man got back into the giant chicken and it moved quietly away. No fresh food seemed to be forthcoming, and the trailer now seemed quiescent, so the chickens meanders back the dirt patch in front of the coop.

On the day that the chickens came out of their coop to find that the big red trailer was gone, Mr Duck peered into the nesting box at the growing pile of uncollected eggs. She wanted to peck one. The silver thing was not there, but weeks of trying and having her beak slapped away had finally begun to make connections in her mind. Still, there were eggs, right in front of her, and there had not been food in the metal can for a while now.

She pecked, and immediately felt herself assaulted from behind. The robot chicken minder had followed her, and with a frantic windmilling of its arms, had plowed into her tail feathers. The broken egg forgotten, she flapped to the perch over the nesting boxes and squawked down at the thing. It ignored her.

It walked in its stretchy-jerky way into the nesting box and stood still in front of the eggs. It seemed to reach some conclusion, and very slowly bent over and took one of the eggs between its hands. It lifted the egg, but then just stood there, as if at a complete loss for what to do with it. Mr. Duck took the opportunity to jump down from the perch and flee into the yard.

On the day of the terrible thunder, the robot chicken minder was carrying eggs out of the coop, and secreting them carefully in a  pile of straw it had built for this purpose in the corner most protected from the weather. There were eight eggs in the box, and it had decided that the precarious pile was not a safe or protected situation. Since learning that it could pick the eggs up and move them, it had gone on a spree of picking things up and moving them. Eggs had been re-arranged in the coop, a little plastic shovel had found itself balanced on one of the perches, and in a startling discovery, the cabinet door under the nesting boxes sprang open when pulled. There were large bags of something inside.

When all of the eggs had been moved to safety, it watched Mr. Duck go into the nesting box. For a long time she sat there, clucking occasionally, and when she finally left, the robot chicken minder saw that there was another egg in the box. One of its arms began to rotate slowly, apparently of its own accord. It now knew where the eggs were coming from.

On the day that the neighbors took the sheep out of the adjoining yard, led them into a truck and left, Mr. Duck decided that she would sit on the egg she had just laid for a while longer. In fact, she wanted to stay there all day.

The robot chicken minder had been spending a lot of time watching the chickens. It seemed clear now that its job was to watch over them, and by observing them, it was learning a lot. For instance: the chickens constantly pecked at things. Many leaves had fallen from nearby trees, and the chickens seemed to find many things to peck at by kicking them aside and scratching around underneath. One day it had realised that they were picking things up with their beaks and consuming them. It remembered watching, long ago, as the chickens had consumed small bits out of the metal can in their coop. This seemed to be an important activity of chickens, and so it was an activity that should be facilitated.

It tried first with small pebbles. Dropped onto the ground in front of the chickens, the pebbles drew immediate attention, but the chickens merely pecked, and did not consume the pebbles. It soon became a game, one small object after another, tossed down to see if the chickens would consume them. Eventually it had identified 23 distinct items the chickens would consume. This pile included the small pellets from the bags from inside the cabinet.

The chickens now came jogging over when the robot chicken minder seemed about to toss something, except for Mr. Duck, who still eyed the silver robot with suspicion, and would only come to investigate the ground after it had moved away.

On the first day of snow, Mr. Duck  saw a man stumble up the gravel drive. It didn’t seem to be the Owner. It stumbled into the fence and seeing the chickens inside began making horrible noises. It staggered around to the gate, using the fence as support, but once inside the yard, it simply fell over and did not move again.

The robot chicken minder circled it several times, watching carefully for danger. The body seemed inert, and the chickens were inclined to avoid it anyway, so it returned to the task of taking little pellets from the bags int he cabinets and placing them in the metal feed can. This took a long time, but it seemed to make the chickens very happy, and their enthusiasm had become its measure of a job well done.

On the day that thunder rumbled very loudly and the sky lit up with strange lights, the robot chicken minder was watching the chickens pick flies and maggots from the body in the yard. They seemed to like the bugs quite a lot, and consumed less of the little pellets from the cabinet. The robot chicken minder noted this information with something very like satisfaction. It had calculated how many of the little pellets the chickens would eat and compared this with the probable content of the bags, and knew that the bags would not last much longer. It did not feel the cold, but it noted that there was very little in the yard for the chickens to eat aside from the pellets. The multitude of little worms and insects around the body were a valuable asset.

Many days later, a large bird attacked Mr. Duck from out of the grey morning sky. She was pecking unenthusiastically near the body, which seemed to harbor very few flies or maggots now, when the bird streaked out of air and grabbed at Mr. Duck’s back. Mr. Duck was no pushover. She twisted under the assault and pecked hard at her attacker. The other chickens scatted in a panic, screaming alarm.

The robot chicken minder jogged as fast it could towards the chaos of feathers and blood, but did not have the speed of a panicked chicken. The hawk was too small to fly away with its prize, but big enough to do damage – it seemed to realize its mistake, but couldn’t get back into the air now. The other chickens had rallied by the time the minder arrived, and closed in around the hawk to peck at it, flapping back with dramatic flourishes of wings when it tried to retaliate. It was outmatched, and now there was a strange silver creature grabbing its leg, squeezing and twisting at it painfully.

The hawk’s large sharp beak made no mark on the silver robot, but the robot didn’t seem to be able to do any damage of its own. It simply held on, too heavy for the hawk to lift and too persistent for the hawk to disengage. The chickens took full advantage, pecking and retreating, until the hawk was mess of blood and twisted feathers. After a while, it stopped moving. Mr. Duck limped away to the coop.

The robot chicken minder examined the bloody injuries on Mr. Ducks wing and neck with incomprehension. Nothing in i’s neural net connected with this. Mr. Duck huddled in the straw and pecked at it when it drew too close. Eventually, there was nothing else to do but leave her alone.

The next day, the robot chicken minder brought pellets from the cabinet and dropped them carefully in front of Mr. Duck.

The day after that, it rained, and most of the snow disappeared. There appeared in the sky a strange formation of flying silver objects, which disappeared again over the hills. All that day there was thunder and the ground shook gently. the robot chicken minder brought more pellets to Mr. Duck, and also an old can, which it filled with water from a puddle.

That night, the sky flashed with strange colors, and the thunder seemed louder. The chickens slept fitfully in the coop, and the robot chicken minder stood next to Mr. Duck until the sun returned.

On the day that Mr. Duck took a few careful steps out into the yard, the robot chicken minder saw a very large silver man-shaped figure in the distance, walking across the old wheat fields to the south. If the robot chicken minder had ever encountered a mirror, it would have found the figure strikingly familiar. It watched as the huge thing was attacked by small flying objects that swarmed around its head like bees. The battle moved out of site beyond the trees, but screaming and booming sounds continued for a very long time.

Mr. Duck seemed oblivious to the sounds. She limped over to the robot, which tossed several pellets of food onto the ground in front of her.

On the day the thunder stopped for good, Mr. Duck pulled a long plump worm from the ground. Green things were appearing everywhere, and the chickens plucked fresh new grass from  t he ground wherever they found it. Creepy Cat the rooster seems excited, and seemed intent on spreading his enthusiasm to all the hens in the yard.

On the day that flowers seemed to pop up everywhere at once, Mr. Duck laid an egg, and decided to sit there on it for a while. She didn’t leave it all day, and when she stepped out to peck at the pile of seeds the little robot had gathered in the coop, she returned to her egg quickly. She got up periodically to nudge it. The first time she did this, the robot chicken minder nearly smacked her on the beak – but something held it for a split second – and then it saw that she was not murdering it after all.

Three weeks later, the robot chicken minder watched Mr. Duck stand up off of her egg and nudge it. She looked at it in confusion, and the robot saw that the egg seemed to be moving very slightly of its own accord. A tiny hole appeared, followed by a large fracture in  he smooth shell. The chicken minder rushed to the egg to prevent this catastrophe – and was brought up short by what was clearly a tiny beak pecking from inside the egg. It and Mr. Duck watched the hatching with what seemed a shared fascination. The robot chicken minder’s arm began to rotate slowly.

Mr. Duck was not the only prospective mother in the chicken yard. While she had monopolized the nesting box, other hens had laid their eggs wherever convenient, but only Pig seemed to have had the brooding instinct, though her egg never hatched.

The robot chicken minder was frantic with new connections. It has pent the winter tending to its wards, gathering seeds, metering out food pellets and studying the birds with uninterrupted focus. It seemed to have learned everything it needed to take care of the birds, but this new development was totally unexpected. It gathered extra food for Mr. Duck for no particular reason, and then began examining the stockpile of old eggs, searching for possible new chicks. It then fussed around the new chick, bringing food and water and studying its every tiny confused reaction to the world.

On the day the robot chicken minder figured out how to open the gate and allow the chickens to forage outside of the yard, there were three new young chickens in the yard.

On the day the snow started again, the robot chicken minder found a building nearby that it could enter, and which contained many bags of grain and food pellets.

On the day Mr. Duck hatched her third chick, the robot chicken minder surveyed the small yard and the overgrown land beyond. Chickens pecked away where once sheep had pastured.

On the day Mr. Duck died, the robot chicken minder caught a young hen pecking experimentally at an egg in the old nesting box that only the older hens used now. It gently but firmly smacked her beak away from the egg.

Mr Duck was huddled in the same spot she had taken to after the hawk attack. She hadn’t perched the previous night, after a couple of awkward attempts, she simply gave up and sat down instead. The robot chicken minder watched her put her head down and stop moving. It watched her for a very long time. The sun went down, then came back up again. In the bright spring sunshine, the robot chicken minder walked out of the coop and went about its work. Hundreds of chickens needed watching.
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Our Children, or, Mr Duck and the Robot Chicken Minder by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.