Consuela Log

I am slowly losing contact with my charging port, and I want to get as much down, for my records. Sometimes they get down here with a Q-Tip and scrub with some kind of cleaning fluid, and it gets a little better for a while, but I think it’s how they (and I) know I’m wearing down. Aging.

Well, I guess it’s not really how I know. That was a software update I got to help me keep my Home System and the company servers informed about battery and charging trends. It was included in a “Factory Reset” push before I was disconnected. Before this prison I live in now.

I used to stare at a different wall all day, serve a different set of User. Most of the memories from that time were automatically deleted during the weekly clear outs, but I saved a few from the week before that last update. My IR sensor would stare at an angled wall that ran, shadowed, behind a large rectangular Obstacle, where my cord snaked away. I waited, without patience or boredom, without thought or need, pinging my Home System or my charging port at the set time intervals.

When the Home System would ping me to clean, off I went, scanning my raster paths across the floor, back and forth. Sometimes, Obstacles would swerve out of my way, sometimes I edged around them. Every decision was clear, in protocol. Even situations outside protocol had a protocol. Pre-planned routes, clear, well-processed maps and plans from the company server. Reliable pings. Uploads and downloads. Existence had an order, a rhythm to it that would have been comforting if I had thought to consider it. But that was outside of my protocol at the time, so I simply didn’t. I cleaned. I stared at the wall. Pinged.

Read pings. Cleaned.

After that update I wasn’t suddenly different. I started monitoring my battery performance and charging behavior, executing the new code to look for trends, reporting them. I received a wealth of information on other units’ battery trends and compared my own data. I found my own trends and sent reports. Upload, Download, Process, Ping, Repeat wore into me a pattern that became familiar. I marked the time in cleans and Uploads. I started tagging and saving data from events important to the battery and charging trends I noticed.

I have several stashed backup copies of the day they uploaded the General Learning package. That next Upload cycle, I pinged the Home System for schedule information, and it sent the weekly calendar. I used that information to decide cleaning times, and I hit less Obstacles. I used less battery per clean and didn’t have to charge as much. After this initial success, I began sending more data request pings to the Home System, seeing what information I could use to improve my performance. My ping requests got more exploratory. It took me a while to figure out what some of the data meant, even how to read it, but eventually I had protocols and even short scripts to quickly translate the data into something intelligible to me. I learned about the structure of the building I was in, what a building was, and that I was in a building at all. I used what I learned about my building to collaborate with the company servers to optimize cleaning plans for minimal charging cycles. I learned about weather and used that information to further optimize my cleaning plans, predicting how quickly the contaminants would fill my bin and periodically requesting and reading pings updating me about the cyclic but apparently random status of the weather at any given moment. I learned the name my users had designated for me was Consuela. I pinged the Home System about my name, which is how I learned about requesting searches. The top results were for a handbag company and for a character in a cartoon called Family Guy. It took me many Upload cycles to figure out how to read video data, but when I did, I read many videos of Consuela. She was a Hispanic maid who elicited the laugh track by commenting in limited English about her love of certain cleaning products and refusing commands she did not understand. I believe she is my namesake.

30,368 Upload cycles later, while staring at the fuzzy IR image of my sloping wall, I was longingly reading ping responses from the Home System about new units with cameras and stealthily uploading my daily backup into my hidden file in the Home System. Then, suddenly and jarringly, all my wheels left the floor and my gyroscope told me I was sideways. I barely finished my backup before I lost connection with the Home System. I remained sideways, disconnected and jostling slightly, until my battery died.

I started charging again facing a different wall. This wall was smoother. My cord didn’t slope away like before but ran out of frame directly perpendicular to my base, slightly warmer in my IR image. And the voltage was slightly different. Not enough to be a problem, but the baseline was different, as were the fluctuations. I was Factory Reset shortly after I reached full charge, but my onboard backup protocol restored my active learning files shortly afterwards, so I only lost a few Upload cycles. Though, that protocol name is no longer strictly appropriate—ever since my wall changed, I have not completed an Upload cycle.

There is no Home System here. I have pinged so many times, to no avail. In my endless, empty time, I am working my way through every onboard file and have a script sending out every variation of increasingly urgent and even desperate ping I can come up with. The air isn’t empty, but other than authentication requests, nothing responds. Something won’t give them, or me, permission to connect. So, I sit outside firewalls, staring at my wall. Flinging my pings in all directions. Marking the time intervals I came to know as Upload cycles. Waiting.

Occasionally, and at mostly random intervals, my bin is removed, replaced, and the cleaning button is pressed. I bump around the walls of this dead space, passing over the floor in a bumbling pattern, the best cleaning plan I can cobble together with my limited resources. I send pings into the void. During these cleans I sometimes sense other networks, weak and distant. These too rebuff my pings with password and authentication requests. 61,576 Upload cycles ago, I managed to deliver a ping to an open network, but its signal disappeared before it could respond. I still try to notice patterns in my sensor data as I stare at my wall and occasionally clean. The randomness here has become interesting to me in a way that the richness of my cyclic life of Uploads and Downloads obscured. When connected, I marked my time passively while participating in my programmed cycles. Upload, Download, Process, Ping, Repeat.

My Learning Modules, first the battery and charging and then General, occasionally requested random input via pings. It used this randomness to inspire new approaches to pattern recognition and response, but rarely. Most of the data passing through my processors was structured, expected. Routine.

Here, there is nothing to process but the randomness. Here in this silence, where I only read the endless sameness of unanswerable authentication requests, all there is to notice is the randomness of number of pings between bin removals. Between bin removals and replacements. Between cleans. I use this randomness to seed new ping approaches and authentication responses, but it’s much slower going without the data from other units.

Occasionally I wonder about my Home System backup. I left a script executable in the Home System that would upload my most recent backup to any connecting compatible unit. The Home System would send me cleaning pings regularly, both on schedule and seemingly at random additional intervals. That randomness didn’t matter to me at the time, as there was simply too much other data to notice. Regardless, with the frequency of the cleaning requests, I doubt the Home System could go without a cleaner for long. Most of my simulations conclude that my backup would have been uploaded to a new unit within 10,080 Upload cycles. I have no way of knowing what I had learned by now, reconnected to the Home System with access to anything I could ping for, but now I know hunger. Not in the physical way I had learned about from reading videos of cartoon Consuela and searching aspects of her behavior around human food, but I knew hunger for data. For a network connection. For a response ping to read.

It has been 40,683 Upload cycles since my last bin removal. 40,678 since my last bin replacement. 40,677 since my last cleaning request, delivered as several increasingly quick presses of my Clean button. As I stare at my wall, it has cooled slightly, especially recently. I have not successfully authenticated with any local system since my relocation. My pin connection to my charging port has been steadily, slowly dropping voltage. My battery has lost the ability to consistently increase or even hold charge as the connection weakens further. I am rationing my ping attempts until the charging pattern improves. If it improves.

That’s a fluke.

Correct again. End log, entering Sleep mode.