The Virtual Healer Comic

Cleaning out the boxes in an old shop is a lot of work. And who in their right mind has a box of loosely assorted AA batteries in storage for that long!?!? No wonder there's batteries sprinkled around the shop... worse than glitter, especially if a whole box is dropped...

The one thing you never expect to find when cleaning out old boxes of junk is a whole humanoid robot (an android I guess?) in pretty good condition. But what is it and where did it come from? It looks like some kind of prototype with no branding or anything. Could it be a military protype from the 2050's when robot soldiers were becoming popular due to the invention of AGI (artificial general intelligence) a decade prior?

Since the robot was in pretty decent condition, swapping the expired PowerGel™ pack and charging the new one a bit was enough to get it to boot. The gel pack itself dates the robot since it takes a few decades for PowerGel batteries to die completely.

So what's the first thing you do to prototype hardware? Plug it into your computer of course, what could possibly go wrong? Fortunately nothing in this case. But it is always shocking when prototype hardware contains prototype software that shouldn't exist.

AGI was officially invented in 2044. This invention allowed the creation of practical general-purpose robots and the improvement of specialized robots as well. For the first time, your Roomba could avoid poop on the ground while your maid robot (if you were rich enough) could both wash the dishes and fold clothes. Automation exploded as you could now do things that only people could do previously since you had humanoid robots with minds similar enough to organics. Technological innovation exploded once you could have machines design better machines. The future was looking great.

While the utopian future never happened (because people just couldn't let go of the concept of money), technology got more and more advanced in an exponential fashion, as predicted (I mean just take a look at how advanced that holographic touch screen is). However, the robot Fex found shouldn't have existed. The copyright date of the experimental AGI OS by Commodore says 2043, a whole year before the official invention of AGI. Surely the Wikipedia article about AGI can't be wrong, but why isn't there any information about such a thing existing before 2044, even if they were just prototypes?

Rumors have it that Commodore was working on many extremely advanced technologies after being resurected in 2041, they stayed very secretive about everything, even after their demise in 2047, which is extremely strange for any company to do in a time when everything was overhyped. Could one of their technologies have been AGI? And if so, why didn't they tell anyone or release this technology? Was it too advanced? Or not advanced enough?

Author's Note: This comic took me way too long to make! More time than the last two pages combined! WTF!!! My plan to use 3D models to stage the scene and then loosely trace it never panned out... because I never got around to it. If I could stop being so lazy about it, then maybe I could actually save a lot of time in the long run, but it's so much work for the initial setup. Also, drawing that many boxes takes way longer than I expected >.<

fex,robot,batteries,roomba,boxes,tools,hologram,commodore,vacuum

Fex: "Gotta clear out these boxes... Great, a box of batteries, just what I needed. A robot? What's this doing here? It looks old, maybe military..."
Fex: "Ok, new gel pack installed. Power draw is nominal. Begin boot sequence... Wait, an OS from Commodore? And with a copyright date from 2043? How is this possible?"