Transcripts from the Designer’s Convention**

Good evening…[some untranslatable words here, probably as the team addresses various members of the audience]…We can’t thank you enough for your patience. We know it’s been a long day and we are all very eager to get outside and play shuffleboard. Also, we would like to express our sincerest gratitude to the Board for, at the last minute, allowing us to enter this honorable competition.

Let’s not keep you in suspense. Here is our submission. We call it the human machine. Yes, well, we didn’t expect any applause. But let me explain. Unlike our fine competitors, our submission – still a miracle of design – is also horribly flawed, inefficient and imperfect.

No doubt you have already noted that it is covered, encased, in this soft squishy skin. But there is a good reason. Now wait. Hold on. Give me three minutes and it will all make sense.

This machine, this human machine, much like an over-heated computer, needs to shut down for about 7 hours. And this will last the human machine about 16 or 17 hours. This machine buys its waking time with about half as much down – or sleep – time. That’s altogether inefficient. Yes, for the entire time of its operation. In fact, perhaps a little more, as it ages.

This machine also needs to breathe. All of the time. About 20 breaths per minute. Here, let me show you the insides on the monitor. This internal device here, called the lungs, requires a large and constant intake of oxygen. Unfortunately it also takes in carbon dioxide which the machine can’t use or process so that the carbon dioxide must be quickly and promptly expelled. Also, there is no way to store up oxygen and if you cut off entirely the oxygen supply, the machine will be irreparably broken in about 6 or 7 minutes. We were working on an advanced design that would allow the machine to store up larger amounts of oxygen, but we discontinued that research as out of scope.

I know we are young. But we are not crackpots. This is not a design flaw. It is a flaw by design. You will understand.

This device here is called the heart. See it thump there. In this model, the Pole Series [ed: likely an adult male], the heart needs to beat about 70 times a minute. Yes, I know, that’s quite a bit. The heart pushes this fluid, blood, around the body constantly. This fluid, the blood, cycles around the entire unit delivering oxygen. Old, stale blood comes in to these chambers, gets renewed, and gets sent back out again. When the heart stops, the brain will die in about 4 minutes.

And this bit here, this grey gelatinous mass, is the brain. It is where intelligence and information is stored. It is also what controls the entire unit. How it works remains a bit of a mystery, and is our intellectual property, and while we have built it quite large – you know, just in case – it is still rather unclear how much of the brain works at any one time. A lot less than you might think. We can’t quite work out how to get the machine to use more of it more of the time. But the unit seems to make out quite well using, say about 10% of the thing at a time. Now I said this is where information is stored, and it is, and fairly well, but not nearly perfectly. Information gets in – there can be no question. But not automatically. And even when it gets in there, it often gets lost. Sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently. Information is maintained much like on a computer with a really lousy and deep file structure. Older information gets appended or, more likely, deprecated, and sometimes archived beyond recovery.

This opening here, called the mouth, is really quite clever in design, fulfilling a number of requirements. First it is the primary instrument for inhalation or gathering oxygen. It is also used for speaking or communicating. And finally, it is where fuel or food goes in. Food goes in here, is processed in something called the stomach and comes out here. Let me just turn this thing around. We thought it was quite smart that solid waste comes out behind. You might notice that the unit is nearly entirely forward looking. The face looks and communicates forward. The limbs work better forwards than backwards. But solid waste, which is unpleasant and useless for almost everything, comes out behind. Actually, the body filters, absorbs, and uses very little of the fuel. It takes as many of the nutrients as it can and then excretes, in volume anyway, almost all of what was input or ingested.

Fluids similarly, go in the mouth, and come out here. Liquid waste, which is less offensive and troublesome but equally as useless, comes out the front. This device here actually doubles as liquid waste removal and as a reproductive unit. Yes, this machine can actually recreate itself with another unit. We would only need to design a handful of prototypes to create a bastion of fully functioning machines. Let me explain. There are two models of this machine. The lab technicians have dubbed them the Hole Series and, shown here, the Pole Series. Essentially, each unit is intrinsically designed to be incomplete, to search out a compatible unit from the other series in order to reproduce. However this process, reproduction, doesn’t always take and it may take a few goes.

Most exciting of all, we have also designed this unit to feel pleasure and pain not just in response to physical stimuli but also to something we’re calling hazy, or emotional, stimuli for which we haven’t thoroughly investigated scope or ramifications.

Are there more self-sufficient machines? Certainly. You have already seen many today. And you are quite right to question what recommends our designs over all of our fine competitors.

We believe the answer is simple. These units will be motivated by their own imperfections and needs. We contend that their need to rest, to eat, to breathe, to seek out companionship, to seek out mates, to balance feelings of pleasure and pain, as well as, we imagine, their need to attempt to resolve altogether unanswerable questions, will motivate and challenge them much more than self-sufficiency ever could.

And no doubt this will provide us with potentially years of entertainment. We thank the Board for their time and look forward to the results of this adjudication. If you have any questions, we have brought a number of informative and amusing pamphlets. Thank you.

** This transcript was stamped at the bottom with: “Approved for Immediate Production”. Beside the space for “Funds for Further Research and Development:” is a symbol that has been the subject of much academic investigation. The leading school of thought suggests that the symbol probably stands for zero. The principal opposition suggests that it is more likely the modern day equivalent of $1 for legal reasons, in which case it was probably used to subsidize the entrance fee to this competition.

SS