Name: Yesterday
Age: He was commissioned and activated 12 years ago in earth years, but he is modelled after a person in their mid to late 20s.
Birthday: January 1st
Gender: Male
Category: Citizen
Appearance Description:
Yesterday is a bit of an oddball to look at. He was modelled after what the species thought a beautiful human would look like… based on their understanding of aesthetics, not earth’s.
He has short, messy white hair that falls around his jaw in choppy waves. It’s borderline transparent, as if it were made of tiny, semi-opaque fibers and funny enough, if a person shines a light down directly above his head the strands will transfer the light and the tips will glow. Bioluminescence is a desirable human trait, right? His eyes glow a soft violet; they literally give off a light very similar to a dim nightlight and can easily be spotted in the dark. During the day it’s less noticeable, though people would definitely think it’s odd that they’re oddly bright?
He isn’t very tall, either. He stands at only 5’6” with a very thin, wiry build that’s often covered up by many layers of clothing. Because he doesn’t produce body heat, he doesn’t mind at all and actually prefers being out in heavy coats and scarves no matter how hot it is. He likes to cover up because he quickly realized that his skin doesn’t exactly feel human; it’s a little stiff and cool to the touch, almost slippery in texture because his creators exaggerated the whole ‘smooth skin’ part. Even his hands are covered all the time, and he wears a hood or a mask to obscure his face and his oddly glowing eyes.
Speaking of his more robotic parts, despite the advanced technology of the civilization that created him, he isn’t completely accurate. The species that created him only made him through observation of the human species, not any direct contact. There’s a large panel over the left side of his chest where his heart is supposed to be; pulling it open would reveal various ports and slots used for the transfer of information. A large panel that takes up most of his back is to access all hard drives and mechanical parts that keep him running. There’s another slot right under his chin, and one hidden just under the hairline on the back of his neck. Yesterday also has two small piercings in a row just underneath the right side of his lip, though they’re actually a microphone and temperature sensor.
All in all, he is a very reasonable facsimile of a human, but everything about him is quite uncanny valley and it doesn’t take much to see through the ruse.
Personality Description:
Yesterday can be described as acting very stiff. Not because he isn’t friendly – he tries very hard to be – but because he hasn’t quite assimilated to human culture yet. Even though he’s been technically alive for twelve years already, his AI has so far only learned to act correctly within the culture that he was created in.
Right now, his personality is very scant. He is very new to earth and has no grasp of what acceptable and unacceptable behavior is. Yesterday has already quickly learned that the behaviors of people on earth are quite different than those that created him, and as an advanced AI, he’s trying very hard to learn the proper mannerisms. It’s more or less being built from the ground up, however, so he’s in the beginning stages. What he will learn to be acceptable, unacceptable, good and evil and otherwise will be determined by those he meets during the starting phases of his assimilation.
All he has down at the moment is that humans like smiles, they don’t like being spoken to loudly and they all keep giving him weird looks when he walks around naked. Of course, he’s learned some of the absolute basics through trial and error and is rapidly gaining more experience. He’s rather fascinated by everything because it’s all so different than his home, so he’ll become obsessed with the most mundane things and want everything about it explained to him. This applies especially to machinery and technology. At least he quickly grasped the patterns of language and has learned to read already, even if he takes absolutely everything literally.
His ability to feel emotions was a more recent development. Beforehand, he was able to mimic them with ease, but that was all it was. Actually feeling them wasn’t something he was initially programmed with, leading to frequent confusion. He never realized he even had the capacity to feel, so even the vaguest of emotions catch him off guard. More extreme emotions cause him to shut down and essentially restart, though he’s trying to rapidly cope with them.
Unfortunately, his relative inexperience with human behavior leaves him quite open for persuasion. He doesn’t have clearly defined lines between good and bad yet, so he would be easily pushed to either end of the spectrum.
Powers:
Robot Physiology: Yesterday is an advanced AI built in the far off reaches of space. The technology that allows him to function is beyond what modern science is currently capable of and allows him to pass as a human. Generally speaking, he also doesn’t need organic functions such as breathing, blinking and maintaining body temperature among other things. This inevitably leads to the creepy, uncanny valley feeling for those around him.
Advanced Intelligence & Memory: Yesterday can learn at several times the speed of what would be considered average. Considering that he’s programmed to learn based on algorithms, it isn’t difficult to see how and why. Patterns in language are the easiest to pick up and he can learn to speak serviceably by hearing a couple of independent sentences. His capacity for memory is also beyond what humans are capable of; it’s all stored as data and can be imported, exported and recalled much like a computer’s. Everything he experiences is recorded, and he has the ability to play it back at will or show it like one would a video.
Durability: He isn’t quite as squishy as a human is. His skin is made of a rubbery material that can withstand most stabbing or slashing wounds and his bones are all metal, making them extremely durable. He is also immune to extreme temperatures and seems unaffected by standing naked in the middle of a blizzard or in a coat on the beach during the height of summer. Unfortunately, he cannot heal himself at all. Of course, given the right materials he can attempt to patch and fix himself up but his artificial nature means that if he gets a cut or a bone is broken, the cut or break stays until it is repaired.
Biography:
Yesterday wasn’t born, but made in a laboratory many light years away from earth by a race that had only passively observed humans. When his program was initiated, he was already fully functioning and capable to fend for himself. Still, he wasn’t made to be an individual, but rather to serve as a walking, talking memory storage and archive. It would be easy to plug into a computer and gain access to important documents, but if said computer could run away, it would be much harder.
His model and number is nothing a human tongue could pronounce, and his vast stores of knowledge are useless on earth despite being worth hordes of treasure back on his home ship. His physical form was modelled after what his creator’s idea of a “beautiful” human was; pale and short, with slippery smooth skin and bioluminescent eyes and hair. Of course, this idea was definitely marred by the creator’s species own thoughts on beauty and haphazardly combined with theoretical human aesthetics.
Nonetheless, his first few years were uneventful. His program was initiated, he was ‘brought to life’, and he served as well as he was able. Despite being an advanced AI, all the nuances of his home culture were already preprogrammed into him, eliminating the need to learn vast amounts in a short time frame. There was no need for emotions here, only the ability to remember, learn and spew advice when necessary. It was a mundane life, but he was never programmed otherwise and this was his normal.
Things only got ‘interesting’ when he was the human equivalent of nine years old. The research ship, usually light years away from anything resembling the universe as humans knew it, had come a lot closer than anticipated purely for observation.
It went disastrously awry.
The crew had grown comfortable with the very routine path they were going to take, and comfortable lead to daring. They drew much too close to an asteroid belt and, unable to avoid it on time, it ripped the half the ship to shreds. One moment Yesterday was plugged in, transferring data to the main database on what was being observed, and the next was a jarring lurch and blaring alarms.
He wasn’t able to gather much data before he was promptly disconnected. Suddenly disoriented, he and a few other AIs were herded towards emergency pods, which were then ejected to wait for another ship to come by and scoop them up. Thrown out into space like a net full of escaped fish, Yesterday was supposed to be unconscious and put into sleep mode until he was disconnected from the pod.
That didn’t happen. Instead, for some reason or another that he couldn’t pinpoint, he never powered down like the others did. Surrounded by his comatose ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, he was left very alone with nothing but recorded memories and data. At first it wasn’t such an issue; he filed through the information, sorting it and putting it away. Soon the supply was exhausted and he was left with nothing but… Loneliness. He stayed like that for a long while until something did happen.
When he replayed the footage in his mind, there were more explosions, more shaking, then a rapid descent down to… earth.
He survived because he’d been in the center of the pod, but the other robots hadn’t been so lucky. His timestamps told him they had floated for three earth years before they crashed. Where was his ship? Where were his handlers? Where was he?
Additional Information:
Yesterday didn't choose his name, so much that it was the first word he'd seen written down on a police report about him stating that he'd been found the day before on the beach.
