True Robotics
Our biggest problem was that we were too humanocentric, a bias reinforced over the ages by artists striving for physical ideals. From the earliest crude cave-wall renderings up to the hyper-realistic digital reproductions, we sought the perfect form. But we never realized how much we were limiting ourselves. The suppositions that a perfect human consisted of mostly binary biological features, a mirrored phenotype with two of everything: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two sets of teeth, two limbs, upper and lower. Everything in symmetry, everything fleshly.
It wasn't until Professor Kilmanto, that genius of the nu-school of cybernetics, began her twisted experiments that pushed us out of our collective comfort zones. Multifaceted eyes, like insects. Rows of mandible-claw appendages, draped down the sides of segmented torsos, more akin to insects than anything that had ever walked upright and called itself sapient. But through her dangerous and relentless efforts we would become something more.
If it were not readily apparent to even the lay-person versed in the basics of anthropology, we were a species of survivalists, designed to pass through each epoch and bring something new to the table for the following generations, something that would help us live longer, achieve greater.
Who could have imagined the beautiful mechanical chimera that human beings would become? Had we known, we would have recoiled in horror.
But that had always been the way with us, a society of beings who had been led to believe that beauty was merely skin deep…
First draft: 140530
Published: 230204