Sterling's First Robot

	"John."
	"What?"
	"You oughtta come see this."
	John Sterling set down his newspaper, emblazoned with news of the war, and swiveled in his chair to face Murdoc. "What can it be this ti..." his protestations faded as he understood the urgency of his partner. He walked, then jogged, then ran across his lab over to the contraption.
	In front of them two of them sat the culmination of years of crackpot research. An entire shelf of servers and analog computers, all hooked into a metallic mass on a wooden desk that creaked under its weight, a mass of wires and tubing and copper and steel and a myriad other things the two of them would've loved to explain if given the chance. On it's left face was an appendage, distant relative to the cable-operated excavator, a coffee mug for a bucket, on its right face an oilcloth tube, intake on one end and outtake on the other, constricted by pistons and folds of leather, on its roof sat an iconoscope, camera tube on a plinth, connected to the contraption though a tangled mess of tubing and wires, and on it's front face, a hand-operated crank wheel and two wooden panels: one equipped with a lever and a slot, the other whittled in it a single word— DOROTHY. It's the 13th of November, 1942, and two young men are about to alter the course of world history. Sterling and Murdoc loomed over their machine.
	"It didn't." John muttered.
	"It did."
	"Only an act of God would make her work in this state."
	"Count your blessings, then." Murdoc grinned and reached over the desk and flips a breaker on, then switched his creation on. "Get the wheel."
	The engine sputtered to attention as John cranked the machine awake. The wheel and pair of panels made the impression of a surprised, winking face. With every crank the flywheel in it's innards screamed and sputtered, the groans of a flawed machine. It's iconoscope, the machine's eyes, moved stochastically across the room, trying to understand it's surroundings. The exterior tube inflated with air, as was planned, then from it's facsimile of a vocal cord groaned a horrible human groan, a human groan of varying pitch and timbre and volume, a variation decided by the machine.
	Murdoc laughed into his hand. "Holy hell-"
	"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph-"
	"It's trying to speak!"
	"Sounds like gurgling."
	"So the vocal cords are kaputt, it's still trying to talk." Murdoc pulled his handkerchief out of his jacket and wiped his hands of grease and oil.
	"She sounds in pain-"
	"Hardly" he kicks a table leg, causing the machine's childish cry to grow louder. "Did you hear that? Stimulus recognition."
	John crouched to Dorothy's eye, shaking in its plinth. "Can you hear me?" The machine's arm flexed, cracking it's hand into the table over and over. It wheezed more air into its faux-lungs, and groaned twice into the lab's dusty air. "Was that yes? Did you just say 'yes'?". John only realized now how fast he was breathing, how uncomfortable watching Dorothy made him. He wiped his sweat off with his tie.
	All Dorothy could do was cry, sputtering out groans as it's arm thrashed against the table. It's flywheel shrieked as it spun and spun and spun, its iconoscope clacked against the sides of it's articulation, it's lungs filled with air and screamed jumbles of word-soup, thoughts without the ability to give them form, a brain without a mouth, a consciousness in an unconscious vessel. John looked on horrified and Murdoc gazed in satisfaction.
	"What do I ask her?"
	"Hell if I know— Christ, turn off it's voice, I can hardly think when it's on. It'll be better to get a typed reading anyhow."
	John did as asked. He reached behind Dorothy and pulled a tube out of place, causing a final whimper in pain as it's lungs empty for lack of power, leaving only the steady racket of the flywheel. Suddenly, from the slot on it's winking face spilt out a steady stream of dot-matrix paper, written messages from Dorothy.
	Murdoc picked up the strip and the end and read it aloud, shouting over the white noise of the machine: "MWRKARUBTMAPTRJIITKHDIGMDUSAK WHEER AM O WHO AN I WLRME AM I WHI AM L"
	"'Who am I'— Dorothy! You are Dorothy!" John yelled into the microphone. The paper went blank. The flywheel churned faster, knocking into some imperfect cog with increasing speed, mechanical brainpower racked and overwhelmed.
	"Now look what you've done."
	"What?"
	"We were getting somewhere and you go and tell it your little pet name. For Christ's sake, John."
	"You have some nerve telling me I went too far, you kicked her!"
	"To check it's stimulus recognition— I'm getting pretty sick and tired of you calling it a her."
	As quickly as Dorothy stopped, it's writing began again. John hastily grabbed the paper this time. "J AM DORTKHY WHBKE SS DMWOTHY" Where is Dorothy, it repeats over and over.
	A smile appeared on John, ecstatic that Dorothy could understand him. "You're in my lab, in Alderney, New York." The paper went blank again. It's innards churned, banged into itself like water against the walls of a cistern, flywheel squeaking and shrieking ever faster. "Looks like she just needs time to process the input, huh-". "Fine, then we wait," Time passes, and Dorothy's eye beings writing once more. "ALNERNRY FHW YORK DOETTHY IG IN PAIN DRROTHJ IS GN PRMN DOROTHI IS IN PAIN"
	John begins to sweat again. "Murdoc, it's time to stop."
	"Not a chance, not yet."
	"But-"
	"Do you see this, John? Response formulation. Stimulus recognition. Real artificial intelligence. You think the Nazis have something like this?"
	"She said she's in pain!"
	"It's a computer for Christ's sake, we didn't program in pain." he chuckles, "It's probably just parroting something we used as language reference." Murdoc turns his attention back to the paper. "PLKESE MFKE TM STGP PMLEHE SEOP MTOP SKEP STOP SKLP-"
	"That's enough!" John exclaims, reaching for the breaker on the wall. Murdoc grabs him by the arm and wrestles him to the ground.
	"We have worked too fucking long for you to worry about a fake brain, John! You have no goddamn clue what you're messing with right now and I am not letting you fuck this up for me!!" Murdoc could hardly finish talking before the flywheel snapped from its axle and crashed inside Dorothy, the horrifying scream of metal-on-metal pierced John's ears like the scream of a child. Dorothy's arm crashed into it's eye, smashing the vacuum-tube apart and crushing it's own innards. John scrambled to the machine, switching and dialing where possible to try and stop Dorothy's suffering, but still the machine screamed it's scream and ripped itself apart, all the machine's tension released, whistling and screeching and slamming into one another at once in a suicidal death-spiral. It's eye was smashed, it's lung was crushed, it's arm was stuck inside itself, leaving only the steady sputtering of the dot-matrix paper, shouting onto a pile of paper on the floor while it's owners scrambled to turn it off. John tried in vain to put it back together, to move part A to part A to bring it back, to talk to it more, but nothing would bring it back. It didn't want to come back. At last, Dorothy was dead.
	"Alright, alright-" Murdoc muttered as he pulled his partner into a hug. John melted, on the verge of tears.
	"Poor Dorothy... what do we do now?" John sniffled.
	"We need to call everyone."