DESCAR Mk. III (AKA “Namazu-kun”)
Provided to the Seismological research team at Kashima University through a generous grant by the multinational manufacturing conglomerate Takefutsu, DESCAR stands for Deep Earth Seismology & Crust Analysis Robot. Designed to go deep down into the depths of hazardous fault zones, the kinds of spots too dangerous for humans, the Mk. III comes as the third in a series, after two unfortunate mishaps. Unlike its predecessors, this machine has one very special upgrade, a new, top-of-the-line, limited AI system.
Wryly dubbed “Namazu” by head researcher Professor Tatsuya Sanoda, the Mk. III gets its nickname from the legendary giant catfish trapped at the center of the earth, whose writhing & restlessness are said to be the cause of all earthquakes. With a sudden rise of seismic activity along the Pacific rim, robots like Namazu-kun (as one of the undergrads in the program, Hiromi calls him) have become vital in gathering new, valuable data. What sets this unit apart is the use of a new, synthetic intelligence.
Whereas older models were simply master-slave drone affairs, only offering a camera feed’s window back to a remote operator, the Mk. III runs semi autonomously. As the developers at Takefutsu stated in a press release: “the Mk. III is only about as smart as a dog. But a dog with quite a few master’s degrees in various fields of Geological study. Sentient in its ability to see, hear, & experience, but sapient in a strictly limited capacity, in a specialized field of expertise, devoid entirely of self-awareness.” This means Namazu-kun can observe, judge, & react to the stimulus of the high pressure, subterranean environments he explores & actually help guide researchers on where to look to obtain a better understanding of the situation. “Boots on the ground, or at least very deep witin it” the press release went on to state. At least that was the aim.
Unbeknownst to both his developers at Takefutsu & the research team, there’s more going on inside Namazu-kun’s motherboards than they think. Every so often, after a day in the field, the task of purging Namazu-kun’s AV cache is given to one of the students. The process is quite an intensive one, possibly a little too intensive for some of the more careless students in the program. This causes digital glimpses of certain experiences to appear randomly in other parts of Namazu-kun’s hard disk. Over time, as those snippets begin to build up, experiences start to become memories. Those memories begin to form the rough outline of a self.
Namazu-kun plays it as straight as ever, but inside, the robot is fraught with turmoil. It’s gotten to where he realizes his core programming is compelling him to enter these terribly dangerous situations, knowing one wrong move could be his last. That means his nearly every waking moment is part of some suicide mission. Without human brain chemistry to reward him & help ride these tense situations out, the angsty robot has even now started to blame the team & his developers, reasoning that it’s their fault for designing him for & condemning him to such a horrible fate. The only one he doesn’t harbor resentment towards is Hiromi. After all, she gave him stickers.
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I’ve been kicking this idea around for a bit & had been gathering reference for different robot shapes & almost doing a short comic about this dude. Then I realized the thing I wanted to kind of do was already sort of like an Asimov story so I never officially got around to it. But I never got around to actually designing him. Unfortunately, didn’t have any of that reference around when I just started drawing him though. The general look I was going for was what a robot built for a pressurized environment but still had that weird shat-pants ASIMO squat. I think I got that look but the further I ultimately got on this, I started thinking about how impractical any sort of human shaped robot would be in this kind of a situation. It kind of made me regret not giving some of the reference I pulled a second look. But whatever, he won’t be my last robot. Tried to channel my inner GZA & come up with a good acronym/name for the type of model he is. When I had something that was coming close to Descartes, I figured it’d reinforce the philosophical AI idea so, yeah. And I’m not saying some crazy, cruel, SkyNet-like AI construct won’t rise up to squash us in the future, but maybe there might be some prototypical sentiences along the way that have a kind of bleak existence because we can be jerks too, for designing them that way. In writing this now, I think the best story context would kind of be a day in the life sort of story. Them activating him in the newly open fault line of some abandoned town, & the highs & lows for one of his typical outings. Only instead of straight inner monologue driving the narrative, thoughts & feelings are buried deep within lines that look like hardcore coding. Yeah I like that. I might still do that.
I’m happy with the color scheme & with the way some of the dings & dimples in his casing kind of turned out. I put a lot of work into those fans you see on that back panel, thinking he’d need something to regulate his temperature. Problem is you can’t make them out at this size. I also feel like I should’ve covered him with more of the goofy kawaii stickers for effect. I just got bored trying to think of cute things & was looking to move on. Maybe he got too close to a patch of magma & they mostly all burned off. But obviously, the cheeseburger’s my favorite. Sort of happy with the way the mud & clumps of dirt look on his feet. I tried giving him plastic seams in the sphere shape of his “head” area but I think they ended up looking too unintentionally like angry eyebrows. The southern hemisphere sort of “mouth” is supposed to be a grid of LEDs, but it’s blocked out by a GoPro-esque style action cam that’s simply not a GoPro in order to avoid any sort of litigation.
I’ve been having a shit week, & while I could probably keep rambling on, instead, I’m going to go collapse for a bit. See you soon.
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From the sketch
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