Clockwork Crusade

The Clockwork Crusade (more commonly known as Project MOON among Syntactics) refers to events taking place between 1679 and 1684, during which a micro-society of automatons worked to complete a single, highly improbable goal that had been defined by their creator, Harrican Syldanade. This period of history is widely believed to have been the genesis of some of the most important concepts and sociopolitical movements in modern Syntactic culture, including the schism between the Harvest faction and the Sanctity faction (see Robotic Anti-Disassembly League for additional background on the schism). Years after the fact, these events caused both the ethics and effectiveness of the Asimov circuits to be strenuously challenged in the court of public opinion, ultimately resulting in landmark legislation of robotic human rights in the year 1772.

Background
In the year 1679, Harrican Syldanade was forcibly enrolled in Balinwell Academy’s “Young Explorers” contest. Pupils were assigned to specific areas of study for this contest, and Syldanade was given the goal of preparing a small exhibit documenting the composition and analysis of lunar rock. While Syldanade was by no means an eager pupil, his highly-competitive nature reacted to the prospect of a contest like a shark to a bucket of chum. He quickly decided that his exhibit would not be complete without a significant sample of material taken directly from the moon’s surface itself.

As a result, while other students pored over books in the library, assembled shoebox dioramas, and created not-especially-elaborate clay models pertinent to their assigned subjects, Syldanade retreated for several days to the hidden laboratory he had secured for himself just off campus in the basement of a long-abandoned pickle factory, trying to think of ways to procure a collection of moon rocks in just a week.

Syldanade was an energetic but unfocused thinker, and he eventually decided to launch three projects at once, with the hopes that at least one of them would yield results. The project that proved successful was something he called “the Bungee-Railgun Explosive Excavator-Harpoon”, which culminated in the delivery of seven tons of moon rock directly to the roof of the pickle factory, at the expense of most of its top two floors. The second project – attempting to make first contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence, and to persuade them to mine and deliver the rocks on his behalf – yielded no results until the horrible, lengthy war that was launched in response nearly 50 years later (see: Rock Men of Dimension X).

The third project was at its heart a very simple concept: create a mechanical apparatus, imbue it with advanced processing capabilities and a tremendous sense of motivation, and ask it to solve the problem on Syldanade’s behalf. Specifically, Syldanade built a robot using a sophisticated variant on the Mark III Logic Engine, gave it rudimentary locomotion/manipulative equipment, added a systemic defect in the machine’s central processor designed to ensure the robot’s brain would cease functioning after just 24 hours, and provided the machine with self-awareness of all those parameters. On top of this, he added just a single directive: “Go to the Moon, and bring me back some rocks.”

Syldanade paid very little attention to the robot after creating it, partly because the Bungee-Railgun project was a much more promising effort for short-term success, and partly because it was a lot more fun to watch guns, harpoons, and explosions than to watch a robot anxiously trundling around a lab. And afterwards, due to the massive structural instabilities in the pickle factory following the sudden violent introduction of seven tons of lunar rock to its outer structure, Syldanade never returned to the site.

As a sidenote, Syldanade’s contest entry – titled “This Is a Giant Pile of Rocks That I Got From the Moon” – was given a C- by the contest’s advisory committee. Most of the professors were incredulous at the idea of a young man being able to procure lunar rock solely on his own initiative, though several commented that they thought he presented the topic with “admirable, if inexplicable, zeal.”

01.MOON
Syldanade’s modifications of the standard Mark III Logic Engine were mostly focused on the introduction of parallel quadratic feedback loops connecting the central processor to the standard IO bus. The goals of this experiment were to give the machine (which Syldanade did not see fit to name) unparalleled self-awareness, as well as the ability to continuously define new sub-goals in pursuit of any root-level directive. Syldanade also removed the standard Asimov circuitry from the engine in order to prevent these changes from forcing an automatic shutdown.

On some levels, this experiment was a tremendous success. Moments after being activated, the robot determined that its prime directive could not be fulfilled given the parameters of the exercise – with only 24 hours before the robot would stop functioning, there was absolutely no way for it to design a rocket, assemble the materials necessary to construct it, complete construction, launch the rocket, pilot the mission, mine the rocks, and bring them back to Terra.

Rather than performing the standard response to impossible parameters (shutdown with EPROM-level error reporting), it immediately began to construct a series of feasible secondary goals that could potentially keep the project from aborting – first and foremost being the construction of a duplicate machine, using materials within Syldanade’s workshop, that would be able to continue the work towards the moonrock-collection goal.

The robot worked methodically towards this goal for most of the next 24 hours. Syldanade's laboratory was well-stocked with the necessary supplies, and in spite of a few setbacks, the chassis and most of the circuitry was completed shortly before sunrise.

Syntactic historians suggest that these initial moments of operation represented an important early precursor of artificial intelligence. Clearly, the machine’s ability to assess a situation and identify new goals was unprecedented. The environmental awareness was also phenomenally advanced – not just the ability to understand what would be required to complete this goal, even when provided with very, very limited information to that effect, but the ability to assess ambitious (but still realistic) goals that would survive the functioning of the machine itself was certainly unique at the time. And of course, the machine’s realization that it was but the first member of a long line of machines that would need to work on this project, resulting in a decision to give itself a name – 01.MOON – was the first recorded instance of a machine’s ability to satisfy criteria 6, 9, and 11 of the Dipp Test.

Another notable comment from the aforementioned syntactic historians that have analyzed 01.MOON’s logs have commented that there is an incredible sadness that can be gleaned by observing its decision-making processes – an implicit realization that 01.MOON was uniquely aware among his kind, had been given a goal whose culmination he would not survive to see, and that he would ultimately die alone. As these are not explicitly stated in the machine’s log file, but are rather based on comparative quantum analyses of cycle timing and prioritization, human historians must take them at face value.

Most of the final hour of the robot's construction was spent on constructing its neural network and central processing architecture. The subject of why 01.MOON chose to imbue its replacement, 02.MOON, with the same 24-hour operating limitations is highly controversial. The prevailing opinion of human historians is that lacking a strong foundation in central processing architectures, it was simply more efficient to reuse the existing architecture of 01.MOON, rather than try to extrapolate the discipline back to first principles. Syntactic viewpoints on the subject are much more varied, and in fact are close to the heart of the Harvest/Sanctity schism that would surface years later.

The successor to 01.MOON, 02.MOON, was activated only five seconds before 01.MOON went into total neural collapse, more than enough time to transfer all pertinent data to the new machine’s data banks. While the base construction of 02.MOON was very similar to its precursor, there were a few enhancements made (liquid-cooling, increased ventilation) to accelerate processing and movement speed. Implicit in this decision was a recognition that in order for the project to make any progress, the ability for robots to duplicate themselves would eventually have to occupy less and less of the 24-hour cycle.

Key MOON Project Milestones
While the story of each machine in the MOON project’s history is in some ways remarkable, for purposes of this article, I will summarize only key advancements for the purposes of brevity:


 * Day 6: 06.MOON completes the construction of two robots, rather than one, in a single day – 07.MOON and 01.CREATE.
 * Day 23: 02.PROCURE returns from its mission to scour the rest of the factory and its surrounding grounds for raw materials – a response to rapidly-declining stores of machine parts in Syldanade’s abandoned laboratory – having found sufficient sources of silica and base metals to ensure continued production. A subset of the active CREATE machines begins development on 01.MINE.
 * Day 72: 03.DEFEND completes the initial structural repairs and enhancements to the factory’s remaining levels.
 * Day 111: 0512.CREATE is able to modify the general neural network architecture of the machines to allow an additional 36 hours of operating time.
 * Day 211: 086.PROCURE and 043.DEFEND propose that the MOON project’s perpetual storage of all inoperative machines’ processors and data banks is a wasteful allocation of critical project resources (both spare parts and workspace). The resulting widespread conflict is resolved in approximately 90 seconds by 0119.MOON, who banishes those two robots from the project and orders the CREATE machines to modify the operating parameters of the PROCURE and DEFEND series on all future models.
 * Day 719: In response to increased risk of discovery due to high-profile rocketry testing, 0701.MOON creates 01.TEMPORAL, whose primary responsibility is to retroactively remove witnesses, authorities, and other potential sources of interference from areas. This may be among the first instances of localized timestream manipulation, but of course the historical record on that topic is notoriously shady.
 * Day 863: Excavation of the rocket assembly chamber is completed. Half the CREATE workforce is repurposed to focus on rocket part manufacturing.
 * Day 1072: 093.PROCURE begins a pattern of raids on supply centers in neighboring districts to obtain ingredients for rocket fuel and mining explosives.
 * Day 1192: 03.NAVIGATE conducts suborbital flight control testing around the Balinwell region. Local livestock nerves are permanently shattered.
 * Day 1417: 01337.DEFEND is assessed as a sufficiently advanced design that the machines no longer need to worry about interference from human society. 01.TEMPORAL revises the Balinwell political landscape so that the micro-society of machines is acknowledged as “having always been there, we think.” Again, details are sketchy.
 * Day 2177: 011.NAVIGATE completes the first successful round-trip test flight to the Moon and back.

Project Completion
On day 2178 of the project, nearly six years after the creation of 01.MOON, 02011.MOON stood on the lunar surface, holding the first sample of ore to be removed from the crust by 0856.MINE. Thousands of robots had given their short, yet productive lives to make this moment possible. Robots do not shed tears, but 0211.MOON did devote 100% of its processing power to repeated reviews of the logs of 01.MOON during this brief, historic moment. This phenomenon reportedly occurred within all active robots at the pickle factory site, as well.

A short flight later, 023.NAVIGATE returned the rocket to Harrican Syldanade’s residence on Terra. 0214.MOON rang Syldanade’s doorbell, holding a golden ceremonial tray containing the finest samples of the lunar ore collection. 06.SOUND, 07.SOUND, and 08.SOUND were poised to provide an appropriately symphonic background to herald the completion of this great achievement.

Syldanade, naturally, remembered nothing of the moon rock project, having diverted his interests in moon rock to the tangentially-related domains of interstellar piracy and drinking games in the previous years. Thinking that the robot was a creditor, he shot it with a gauss gun from an upstairs balcony several times, along with slurred threats about what he was going to do with that damn girl from Nantucket when he got his hands on her.

Aftermath
023.NAVIGATE returned the ship and the remains of 0214.MOON to the robots’ central government in Balinwell. This would be the last of the MOON designation to be created. Having considered and discarded suggestions to replace it with new designations such as REVENGE, DEATHBOT, and OMNICIDE, the collective shortly began work on 01.CULTURE and 01.RIGHTS, which effectively became the two branches of government for the Robotic Republic of Terra (RRT).

RRT members have always insisted that machines hold neither grudges nor God-complexes for their creators, and that as such their government has always retained a neutral attitude as regards to Harrican Syldanade. Of course, in light of the events that transpired in the decades to come, that perspective has been increasingly difficult for human society to accept.

In 1772, 092.RIGHTS successfully used the Clockwork Crusade as its key case study in arguing for prohibiting the continued use of Asimov circuitry in robotic devices. The counterargument from lead counsel Seymour Quisp -- summed in closing comments as "What, you want a bunch of tin cans moving into your towns and raping your womenfolk? Don't come crying to me!" -- failed to sway an unexpectedly well-educated jury. Asimov circuits are now in use only on scattered planets of dubious repute.

The pickle factory was reclassified as 01.LANDMARK in 1711, and is available for public viewing at the RRT's Museum of Large Historical Objects.