Antarctic Base

 

The cold wind howled as it snaked around the modular Antarctic research base. Fortunately the structure was made for the inclement weather and only a slight creaking in the joiner segments hinted at the weather outside. It was a small thing, but it could eat away at your sanity if you were the only one around. Which Jeff was. He turned up the music, blasting it away in all the adjoining rooms to drown out the sounds of the shuddering complex.

He was alone, but only for another month. Various other programs had been cancelled or relocated and he was there to keep the lights on. Not literally of course, the building’s automation could handle most of the basic tasks, but if anything broke it was easier to fix in person. There were a few telepresence robots looking after most of the experiments. They were great at doing exactly what they were built to do, and nothing outside of that.  Their construction was fairly simple - a tablet for a head and a few cameras mounted on a thin body, with two spindly arms meant for light tasks only.  

A week ago one of the north facing labs broke a window and snow had blown in. The bots in the area could hardly manage driving through the indoor drifts, let alone repairing damage as large as the glass. Apart from that though, everything managed to run itself.

That left a lot of time to fill and Jeff was running out of ideas. He had inventoried the supplies at least three times that week and that was only because he didn’t trust the autonomous robots to properly calculate their incidental maintenance item use. The third time through he finally relented that last years programming error had been fixed and he was just being paranoid.

Without anyone present to talk him down from any particular notion he was going off on odd jaunts like that more and more often. Nothing worth a call back to the mainland and nothing harmful, yet, but there was still a month to go.

Or was it longer? He looked at the calendar again. He had skipped ahead, counting from the next shipment of goods rather than the current date. It was difficult to know what day he was really on. He was convinced that the telepresence robots were trying to prank him. Why else would they drive around with the date on screen instead of the face?

Then he remembered that he had asked for that. The blank faces were taunting him. He had been through a dozen variations. Live people looked too flat on the screen. AI faces were too smooth. 3D faces were too impersonal. Animals and cartoons weren’t serious enough. Blank faces would be better. Something that suggested people but more like a mannequin. No. He had tried that.

Or was it a dream? He asked for the blank faces while muttering ‘again?’ under his breath. The main team had been getting used to his half whispered words and didn’t think much of it. They switched remote bots to blank faces.

That was quick, he thought to himself. They must have done it before. No. That’s the default setting. It felt familiar. Then he remembered why he wanted that setting. It was what the robots looked like when the base was being built and everyone was still around. The team was too busy setting up the experiments to bother loading their images onto the display screens. Besides, they were here to converse with, so what would the robots show anyway?

With the robots on the default faces he could pretend the rest of the research team was just in the next module, ready to surprise him around the next corner. He even went so far as to put one of the rooms playback devices at head height behind him and que up a colleague’s lesser known video files. He looked at the setup and tried to improve it by rigging up a spare robot to carry around the speaker and drive around randomly. After a few minutes of the unedited playback, it almost felt like someone was in the room with him and he instinctively turned around so as not to seem rude. As soon as did so, the illusion was shattered.