99.999... Robot, the Rejected Hero

Meet the lone-ranger added to the fleet of robots on clipartillustration.com! His name is 99.9.

This little robot's creation is quite a story. As you can see, he bears distinct resemblance to AO-Maru in style and form. The story is that once upon a time there was an inventor who created robots. His oldest humanoid robot creation was AO-Maru, who would serve the marketing needs of corporations all over the cyber-galaxy. One outfit, in the business of making Small Speeders for Children, approached the inventor and asked for a robot bearing the qualities of AO-Maru, but with features found from other robots around the galaxy.

The inventor went to work in his shop, creating this little robot to the specs provided. Upon bringing the robot to the Small Speeders for Children business, it was told to him that it was not quite close enough to the original specs. So the inventor went back to work, looking for and repairing design dependencies. It was 99 percent accurate, at least.

Again he took the robot to the Small Speeders for Children business, and they found more, smaller, descrepencies, so the inventor promptly went back and addressed these as well. It was 99.9 percent accurate, at least.

This time, for sure, the things addressed would finally measure up, but the previous pattern ensued, and it was back to the shop again for the inventor. The issues were corrected, and now the robot was 99.99 percent accurate, at least, but still shy of 100 percent accurate.

The final time, after yet another occurrence of this pattern (as even Douglas Adams noted, that patterns tend to repeat), the inventor realized an, um...pattern was forming. Each time the inventor would address the situation, coming closer to the ever-infinite vision of the Small Speeders for Children business, he found himself coming infinitely closer to perfection but still, that being the case, infinitely distant from it at the same time. One day the robot would be 99.99999999999999999999999999999... inaccurate. Infinitely imperfect, with an infinitely long number testifying to that.

And besides that, more changes were going to be requested not based on the original specs. So the inventor adopted this infinitely imperfect little robot as his own. His name is 99.9.

Does he have a future? Will the original Small Speeders for Children claim him one day? We shall see how the story ends.

via Posterize