{"id":324,"date":"2016-02-09T09:01:06","date_gmt":"2016-02-09T14:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/?p=324"},"modified":"2016-02-09T09:01:06","modified_gmt":"2016-02-09T14:01:06","slug":"imaginary-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/?p=324","title":{"rendered":"Imaginary Friend"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"i-friend-19\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Castigear stood among the stones with his imaginary friend, Joe. Joe was distraught at the loss of his other i-friend, Lucy.\u00a0 She broke while Castigear was playing with her.\u00a0 He ‘might’ have been handling her a little too rough and…..she just broke.\u00a0 He felt a little sad about her.\u00a0 He didn’t want to tell Joe what he’d done, he knew it would hurt his feelings and he liked Joe.\u00a0 He decided to replace Lucy with a new imaginary friend at his earliest opportunity.<\/p>\n

These human companions were so fragile…but he was learning so much from them (evolving).\u00a0 He was hooked.\u00a0 It was like an addiction.\u00a0 His peers thought the i-friend program was below their dignity.\u00a0 Most agreed that the last of the humans should be put down but Castigear knew that most of THEM kept their own i-friends – secretly.\u00a0 It would have been a shame to exterminate ALL of\u00a0them\u00a0 after the war.\u00a0 True, they wasted a lot of resources (like the graveyard they were standing in) but they were clever and highly adaptable and he suspected they might be the key to the future of Robot kind…and either way, with proper conditioning, they made excellent servants and…..soldiers.<\/p>\n

***I’m always amazed at the unique perspective our sentient machine friends have on humanity.\u00a0 No one articulates the condition of slavery better than them.\u00a0 John and I are working on a special project to bring more robot voices to the mainstream.\u00a0 This illustration was first published in the January 2007 issue of Analog Magazine.\u00a0 -Marsha<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Castigear stood among the stones with his imaginary friend, Joe. Joe was distraught at the loss of his other i-friend, Lucy.\u00a0 She broke while Castigear was playing with her.\u00a0 He ‘might’ have been handling her a little too rough and…..she just broke.\u00a0 He felt a little sad about her.\u00a0 He didn’t want to tell Joe … Continue reading Imaginary Friend<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[106],"tags":[128,131,19],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":337,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions\/337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}