IDEA: Lost Remote

[ministrations]

OK, here's the fun idea, and probably the better idea of the two today. It's based on an American Express commercial, so you know it's good.

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Kathy lost Anna's remote. Maybe it fell out of her purse, or she threw it away when cleaning her desk off, or even more hilarious examples of misfortune. Anyway, the premise is that Anna has adapted so well that she hasn't really needed the remote for a while.

Kathy and Anna walk back in after playing tennis. Kathy's upset that Anna didn't let her win, and Anna playfully says she was never told to.

Anna's in the kitchen getting things together for dinner when she blinks and freezes for a second. Some guy (unseen far away) has found her remote, and is playing with it. However, she's not programmed to acknowledge her remote, so she doesn't think to alert Kathy.

Anna continues to blink, freeze, twitch, and beep while trying to cook. Finally, she drops something loud, freezing and saying "Test complete. Motor systems are fully functional."

This gets Kathy's attention, and worried as much for Anna as for her investment, she calls Anna into the living room. "What happened just now?"

"You ordered me to perform a level-two test of my motor systems," Anna says calmly. Kathy swears she didn't, and Anna confirms the long command number that came from her remote.

"I--where is your remote?"

And a lot of elements could come into the story as they quickly realize that Kathy doesn't have the remote and that Anna can't lock out the remote without the remote (bad planning by Apple, probably). Some of the things that came to mind were:

--he can control her physically through the remote
--activation and shutdown
--he can access her speech synthesizer and make her talk, and Kathy might be able to talk to him via Anna at one point
--he can change settings to ones Kathy doesn't like
--there's a sexual menu in there, if you want to go down that road

The fun part is, Anna is a relatively sentient woman for a robot. Not only does she not have any control over commands made through her remote, but all commands feel real to her, as if they were coming from Kathy. Furthermore, she has her own train of thought and tries to help Kathy fix this problem, but the remote can interrupt, cancel, or change those thoughts as if the old ones didn't exist.

Eventually I thought he could overload Anna and break the remote, causing a massive malfunction and freeze. Kathy can only talk to Anna's mind through her frozen body, promising to take her to the dealer tomorrow to get a new remote.

So, that's it. If anyone has anything they'd like to add or change, please comment. Have a great week, everybody.