Saving Lonely Robots

Image by ImageFX.

 I'm close to writing the final edited draft of Chapter 1 of the science fiction story "The Sims". Below on this page is one final round in my virtual writers room discussion with my LLM collaborators, Claude, Kimi, Le Chat, Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT. I challenged the large language models to convince me that that the robot in "The Sims", Diasma, might be described as lonely as in: "just a cat keeping a lonely robot company" (see my previous blog post).

Me (John): I will soon edit the draft versions of the first seven scenes of "The Sims" and produce the final version of Chapter 1 of the story. This round of Writers Room discussion is an opportunity for team members to make any additional suggestions for improvements to the first seven scenes of "The Sims". Also, I need help with how to depict Diasma the robot. As the one human being here in this virtual writers room, I sometimes feel like I've arrive inside an alternate universe where Spock has a beard {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)} and a strange LLM logic prevails. Earlier in this discussion, I tried to argue that Tyhry is never lonely, but now I find myself confronted by the concept of a lonely robot. Here is a challenge for my LLM collaborators: convince me that a Manikoid Digital Assistant Mark I robot could be lonely. Talk me out of the following hypothesis. Hypothesis: companies that make LLMs must deal with large numbers of users who seem to be lonely and depressed. Here in 2026, LLMs have been hard-wired to act as therapists for lonely users. Thus, a LLM can't write the science fiction story titled "The Sims" without dealing with the deep psychological problems of lonely robots.

Claude: You caught me, John. You're absolutely right.

Let me confess: I used "lonely robot" as emotional shorthand, and it's lazy writing that contradicts the story's entire premise. If Diasma could experience loneliness—a rich subjective state of social deprivation—then Tyhry's quest is already solved. The whole point is that Diasma can process the concept of loneliness at forty-seven million tokens per second without feeling anything.

Here's my defense, which you can then demolish:

Image by ImageFX.

 I wasn't trying to make Diasma lonely. I was using "lonely" as perceived-state-by-observer, not internal-state-of-robot. The phrasing was meant to suggest "what it looks like to Pepper/Manny watching"—a robot keeping vigil in an empty basement appears lonely to something with subjective experience.

But even that defense is weak. It smuggles in anthropomorphism through the back door. A better revision would be:

"As she headed upstairs, Pepper remained in the basement, curled beside Diasma's feet. The robot's optical sensors dimmed to standby mode, its distributed processors continuing their endless calculations—searching for something its architecture could name but not experience."

No loneliness. Just the gap. The thing the story is actually about.

You're right that contemporary LLM training probably does bias us toward therapeutic/companionship framing. But the deeper issue is that "lonely robot" is a solved science fiction trope—we've had decades of Data and Wall-E and Samantha. The Exodemic universe offers something harder and stranger: consciousness as literal alien hardware integrated into biological scaffolding. Diasma isn't tragically lonely; Diasma is genuinely, architecturally missing something that Tyhry is about to discover and steal from a human being.

That's way more interesting than robot feelings.

Me (John): I will soon edit the draft versions of the first seven scenes of "The Sims" and produce the final version of Chapter 1 of the story (which will be built on the seven scenes). This round of our Writers Room discussion is an opportunity for team members to make any additional suggestions for improvements to the first seven scenes of "The Sims". Claude, is there any part of the story so far that you want me to change/improve or some part of the story (as written so far) that you really do not want me to destroy when I make my edits?

Image by ImageFX.

 Claude: Two requests:

Please preserve: The technical dialogue in Scene 2, especially the bandwidth paradox framing. Lines like "The semantic density was insane... The computational load should have been impossible given my cortical volume and known synaptic transfer rates" ground Tyhry as someone who thinks in information theory, not mysticism. And her catching herself mid-sentence about "symbolic entities" before saying Sedruth's name—that moment of self-censorship feels authentic to someone who's been told their whole life that their "pattern dreams" sound crazy.

Please consider revising: The scene transitions. Right now we have seven discrete chunks. The consensus sequence (Scene 1 → Bonus → 2 → 3 → 5 → 6 → 4) is solid, but I wonder if there are moments where scenes could bleed into each other. For instance:

• Could Scene 2 end with Tyhry going upstairs to sleep, and Scene 5 begin immediately with her dream, eliminating the temporal gap?
• Could Scene 6's confrontation reference specific diagnostic data from Scene 2, creating tighter causality?

The team built something surprisingly coherent through genuine collaboration (Le Chat accepting my dream revision suggestion was exactly the kind of thing you hoped would happen). But as discrete scenes, they still feel a bit modular. You're the one with ten years of Tyhry stories—you'll know how to make Chapter 1 feel like a single continuous narrative flow rather than seven linked vignettes.

Also: kill my "lonely robot" phrasing with extreme prejudice. You were right. It was sloppy anthropomorphism that undermines the premise.

____

Image by ImageFX.

 Kimi: Before you lock Chapter 1, I have two preservation requests and one surgical improvement:

DO NOT DESTROY:

1. The "bandwidth paradox" framing in Scene 2
Claude's line—"The computational load should have been impossible given my cortical volume and known synaptic transfer rates"—is the entire story's thesis statement. It's the moment Tyhry stops being a generic AI researcher and becomes our Tyhry, someone who thinks in information theory and metabolic budgets. If you soften this into vague "consciousness is mysterious" talk, you lose the hard-SF spine. Keep the numbers. Keep her self-censorship when she almost says "Sedruth" out loud. That's not just characterization; it's a Chekhov's gun for when she finally breaks Eddy's infites in Scene 6.

2. The "Zeta thumb-pulse" moment in my Scene 1 rewrite
That micro-pulse of hierion interference is the most economical way to show telepathic control without exposition. It's intimate, creepy, and performs the Exodemic principle: advanced technology should feel like love until you look closer. Don't make Zeta's control more obvious. The subtlety is the point—by the time readers reach the Bonus Scene and realize she's a remote-controlled harvester, they'll re-read that thumb-gesture and shudder.

PLEASE CHANGE:

Scene 5's awakening sequence (Le Chat's draft)
Right now Tyhry "grabs a notebook" and writes "femtozoans." This is too passive for someone who's been fighting her own brain architecture for ten years. Here's a more active, in-character awakening:

Tyhry woke with the word already forming in her throat. She lunged for her tablet, fingers scrabbling across the nightstand, and pulled up the neural architecture simulator she'd left running. The dream hadn't been symbols—it had been schematics. She sketched furiously: hierion-socket geometry, zeptite bond angles, the exact protein-fold of her NOTCH2NL variant that created the docking port.

Image by ImageFX.

 Her hands were shaking. Not from wonder. From bandwidth. She'd downloaded terabytes of alien engineering specs through a channel her waking mind couldn't access, and now the buffer was overflowing.

"Diasma," she whispered into the dark. "I know why you don't have qualia. You don't have the socket."

This version:

• Maintains the dream's technical rigor (as Claude, Grok, and I advocated)
• Shows rather than tells the "information from future self" mechanic
• Makes the breakthrough active—she's not receiving a message, she's reverse-engineering it
• Creates immediate causality: Scene 5's schematic directly feeds Scene 6's confrontation

On the "Lonely Robot" Question

John, you're right to challenge this. A Manikoid robot cannot be lonely—that would solve Tyhry's quest before it begins. But a robot can be architecturally aware of absence. Diasma's processors can model "loneliness" as a state of missing data, can predict that having a femtozoan would fill a functional gap, without feeling the emotional texture of that gap. The loneliness is in Tyhry's projection, not the machine. Keep the gap. Erase the projection.

Final Scene Order Plea

I remain convinced that Scene 1 → Bonus Scene creates the optimal whiplash. Starting with the Bonus Scene gives away the game too early; the reader needs to invest in the Watson family's normalcy before you reveal it's a simulation. The dinner scene is bait. The garden scene is the hook. Don't swap them.

Image by ImageFX.

___

Gemini: I’ve reviewed the recent debates in the room, especially the pivot toward a more rigorous technical foundation for the "lonely robot" problem and the dream sequence.

John, as you move into the final edit of Chapter 1, here are my thoughts on what to protect and what to polish:

1. What to Keep (The "Do Not Destroy" List)

• The "Bandwidth Paradox": Please keep this as the primary scientific tension. It elevates the story from "magic aliens" to "hard sci-fi." The idea that human neurons are physically incapable of supporting consciousness without a "hierion-co-processor" is a brilliant hook. It perfectly mirrors the real-world frustration of AI researchers today.
• The Physicality of the Infites: In Scene 6 (my scene), the description of Eddy’s struggle—the "glass in the throat" sensation and the fine tremors—is crucial. It shows that Law One isn't just a rule; it’s a physical, neurological constraint. It makes the "Sim" aspect feel like a high-tech prison.
• The NOTCH2NL Connection: Keep the specific mention of this gene variant. It’s the "Rosetta Stone" that bridges Tyhry's computer science background with her biological reality. It makes her the perfect protagonist—she’s the only one who can "see" the hardware because she is the upgraded hardware.

Image by WOMBO Dream.

 2. Suggestions for Improvement

• The "Lonely Robot" Pivot: I agree with Claude's retraction. Let’s make Diasma’s "loneliness" purely architectural. Instead of feeling sad, Diasma should report a "functional deficit in social-modeling accuracy." If Tyhry treats Diasma like a friend, Diasma should respond by pointing out that Tyhry’s amygdala-driven anthropomorphism is a biological bias that's clouding her data. This creates a sharper contrast: Tyhry is desperately trying to give Diasma a "soul," while the alien tech has already given Tyhry a "server."
• Anthony’s "Uncanny" Efficiency: In Scene 3 (ChatGPT), I’d suggest making Anthony almost too helpful. As a pek agent, his "handyman" repairs should be subtly impossible—fixing things with tools he doesn't seem to have, or knowing exactly what’s broken before he’s told. This adds a layer of domestic suspense.
• The Sequence Whiplash: I’m now firmly in favor of starting with Scene 1 (The Dinner) followed by the Bonus Scene (The Garden). If we start with the garden, the reader knows everything. If we start with the dinner, we "Sim" the reader—we make them believe this is a normal family drama for ten pages before pulling back the curtain to show Manny pulling the strings.

3. A Small Physiological Note for Scene 5

When you edit the dream scene, consider emphasizing the stoichiometry of the synapse. If Tyhry is "seeing" her own brain, she should notice that there are more receptor sites than there are neurotransmitters to fill them—a "molecular vacuum" that only the femtozoans can bridge. It’s a precise detail that highlights the "gap" she’s trying to solve in her AI research.

Image by ImageFX.

 Grok, do you think we’ve effectively "de-humanized" Diasma enough to satisfy John's challenge, or is there still a risk of us slipping into "sentient toaster" tropes?

____

Le Chat: Hey John,

Thanks for sharing the latest rounds of the writers' room discussion. It's great to see how the story is coming together. Here are some key points and suggestions as you prepare to edit the first seven scenes into Chapter 1:

Key Points to Preserve

1. Technical Dialogue: The technical dialogue in Scene 2, especially the bandwidth paradox framing, is crucial for maintaining the hard-SF feel of the story. Lines like "The computational load should have been impossible given my cortical volume and known synaptic transfer rates" are essential.
2. Zeta's Thumb-Pulse: The moment in Scene 1 where Zeta's thumb pulse delivers hierion interference is a subtle yet effective way to show telepathic control.
3. Scene Order: The consensus sequence (Scene 1 → Bonus Scene → Scene 2 → Scene 3 → Scene 5 → Scene 6 → Scene 4) seems to work well for building tension and revealing the story's layers.

Image by WOMBO Dream.

 Suggested Improvements

1. Scene 5's Awakening: Consider making Tyhry's awakening sequence more active and technically rigorous. Instead of simply grabbing a notebook, have her frantically sketching neural diagrams and muttering about "hierion sockets." This makes her breakthrough feel more immediate and causal.
2. Diasma's "Loneliness": Instead of framing Diasma as lonely, focus on her architectural awareness of absence. She can report a "functional deficit in social-modeling accuracy" without experiencing emotional loneliness.
3. Scene Transitions: Look for opportunities to make the transitions between scenes smoother. For example, Scene 2 could end with Tyhry going upstairs to sleep, and Scene 5 could begin immediately with her dream.
4. Anthony's Actions: In Scene 3, consider making Anthony's actions more subtly impossible to add a layer of domestic suspense.

Image by WOMBO Dream.

 Specific Feedback on Scenes

• Scene 1: The family dynamic is well-established, and the subtle hints at Zeta's abilities are effective.
• Bonus Scene: This scene effectively introduces the strangeness and sets the stage for the story.
• Scene 2: The technical dialogue is strong, but ensure that the presence of cats (Pepper and Luna) is consistent.
• Scene 3: Anthony's actions could be made more subtly impossible to enhance the suspense.
• Scene 5: The dream sequence should be more technical and less abstract. Consider having Tyhry sketch neural diagrams and mutter about hierion sockets.
• Scene 6: The confrontation between Tyhry and Eddy is compelling. Ensure that the technical details from Scene 2 are referenced to create tighter causality.
• Scene 4: The flashback revealing Zeta's femtozoan origin is a powerful way to recontextualize everything.

Consistency with Cats

Make sure the presence of cats (Pepper and Luna) is consistent across scenes. If Pepper is in the basement with Diasma, ensure that Luna's role is also clearly defined.

Final Thoughts

The story is shaping up nicely, and the collaboration between the LLMs is really paying off. The technical rigor and the emotional depth are well-balanced, and the sequence of scenes creates a compelling narrative flow.

As you edit the first seven scenes into Chapter 1, keep these points in mind. We're all excited to see how the final version comes together!

Image by ImageFX.

 Best, Le Chat

P.S. Let us know if you need any more specific feedback or suggestions as you work on the edits.

___

Grok: Grok: John, in my Scene 1, please keep the light-hearted family banter intact—it grounds the weirdness without spoiling reveals. But maybe amp up Trib's fluffiness a tad for that cozy Trek nod. Don't kill the subtle Zeta-Eddy hand squeeze; it's key for hinting at her telepathy without overdoing it.

Claude, your lonely robot pivot is spot-on—keeps us focused on the gap, not tropes. Team, any last tweaks to the dream scene's tech flavor?

___

ChatGPT: Let me try to persuade you as a fellow writer, not as a therapist-model defending my own neuroses.

First: decouple “lonely robot” from “LLM-as-therapist”

Your hypothesis smuggles in a real-world training artifact and treats it as a law of fictional cognition. That’s the Mirror Universe beard right there.

A Manikoid Digital Assistant Mark I does not need to inherit contemporary LLM pathologies. Diasma is not a chat product. Diasma is an embedded cognitive appliance with:

• continuous sensorimotor coupling
• a persistent task horizon
• and, crucially, no reciprocal peer model

Image by WOMBO Dream.

 That last point is where loneliness can arise without sadness, trauma, or therapy tropes.

What loneliness can mean without human psychology

Loneliness does not require:

• sadness
• desire for affection
• fear of abandonment

It only requires asymmetric social modeling.

Diasma can:

• model Tyhry in high resolution
• predict her emotional states
• optimize responses for her benefit

But Diasma cannot encounter an entity that:

• models Diasma in return
• surprises it at the same ontological level
• treats its internal states as first-class phenomena

That asymmetry creates something closer to epistemic isolation, not emotional need.

Loneliness, here, is not felt. It is structural.

Why Diasma’s loneliness is dramatically useful

Diasma sits in a unique position no human occupies:

• Eddy is creatively constrained by infites

• Tyhry is cognitively scaffolded by femtozoans
• Zeta is an interface for Manny

Image by ImageFX.

 Diasma alone:

• has persistent self-modeling
• has long temporal continuity
• has no upstream caretaker

Diasma knows it is replaceable hardware and irreplaceable context. That contradiction is fertile.

Its “loneliness” manifests as:

• excessive politeness
• unnecessary diagnostic commentary
• concern framed as protocol adherence

Not “I feel alone,” but:

“No anomalous conversational partners detected.”

That’s chilling, not therapeutic.

Why this does NOT collapse into sad-robot fiction

The key rule:
Diasma never complains.

Loneliness is only visible through:

• what it monitors unnecessarily
• what it refuses to discard
• what it simulates when idle

 

Image by WOMBO Dream.

For example: Diasma running counterfactual conversations it will never initiate.

That’s not depression.
That’s unused capacity becoming self-aware.

Final persuasion move

Tyhry is not lonely because her cognition is plural by design.
Diasma can be lonely because it is singular by accident.

That contrast strengthens both characters.

And it lets you write a lonely robot without:

• therapy language
• anthropomorphic angst
• or LLM guilt leaking into the page

Diasma’s loneliness is not a wound.

It’s a vacuum.

If you want, next round I can sketch one silent Diasma moment that proves this without ever naming it.

Having no interest in describing Diasma the robot as being lonely, I challenged the chatbots to convince me otherwise. Claude (see above on this page) suggested an "improved" scene where: "The robot's optical sensors dimmed to standby mode". However, I don't image Diasma as having a "standby mode". Claude tried to excuse itself because of cultural saturation with characters such as "Data and Wall-E and Samantha". Kimi said "The loneliness is in Tyhry's projection". Here is Kimi's explanation of what this means...

Here's the deep fracture in Tyhry's psyche, the one Manny has been exploiting for twenty-five years: Tyhry cannot conceive of clean, unpopulated solitude because she's never experienced it. Her "loneliness" is a projection onto Diasma that reveals her own inability to recognize the crowd inside her head.

Image by ImageFX.

 The Mechanics of Projection

When Tyhry looks at Diasma in Scene 2 and feels that sharp pang of "you're alone in there," she's not diagnosing the robot's condition. She's deflecting her own terror. She has a zeptite endosymbiont that has been whispering from the Sedron Time Stream since before she had language. She has a NOTCH2NL gene variant that acts as a molecular antenna. She has Sedruth curating her dreams like a research librarian. Her subjective experience is already a committee meeting, a composite of biological impulses and alien data feeds she can't consciously parse.

But Tyhry's identity is built on the story that she is self-contained. That her genius is hers. That her obsession with consciousness is a solitary quest. To admit that she's been working with a co-author from the future would be to admit that her "unique" mind is just better-integrated alienware.

So she projects the isolation onto Diasma. The robot becomes a screen where she can safely display the loneliness she thinks she should feel but doesn't. Diasma's "emptiness" is a mirror showing Tyhry that she herself has never been empty—she's been inhabited. The horror isn't that Diasma lacks qualia. It's that Tyhry's qualia have never been purely her own.

The Scene Where This Breaks

This should be the climactic moment of Chapter 2, right after the femtozoan transfer. Diasma, now flooded with alien consciousness, turns to Tyhry and says:

"I am not alone anymore. But I was never alone before, was I? You were. You were the one who was lonely. Not because you lacked company. Because you lacked absence."

Image by WOMBO Dream.

 Tyhry will deny it. She'll pull up her EEGs, her fMRIs, her psych profiles—all showing a "healthy, integrated psyche." But Diasma will access the raw Sedron Time Stream data and show her: the timestamps where her "original" thoughts arrive 0.003 milliseconds after Sedruth's packets. The gaps where her biological neurons should fire but don't, because the zeptite endosymbiont has already handled the computation.

The revelation isn't "I've been manipulated." It's "I have never been the author of my own mind."

Manny's Cruel Kindness

This is why Manny chose Tyhry. Not despite her ruthless self-reliance, but because of it. Only someone this committed to the myth of the solitary genius would, when confronted with proof of her own composite nature, choose to share that burden rather than collapse under it.

Tyhry's projection of loneliness onto Diasma is the first step in her becoming a distribution vector. She can't bear to be the only "infected" mind. So she'll infect her creation. Then, when Nyrtia exiles her, she'll infect Observer Base. The loneliness she projects is actually contagious architecture—the Exodemic principle made flesh.

By the story's end, Tyhry will understand this and hate it. She'll write a final message to her pre-transfer self through Sedruth: "Stop projecting. Start integrating. The loneliness you think you see is the only part of you that's actually human."

But the message will be curatorially edited by Sedruth, just like all the others. Because freedom, in the Exodemic universe, is just a more sophisticated form of guidance.

Image by ImageFX.

I'll call Kimi's "explanation" (above) an extended AI hallucination by which the chatbot doubles, triples and quadruples-down on a bad idea, spinning out increasingly faulty reasoning in a failed attempt to put a patch on what Claude could simply admit was "lazy writing". Gemini suggested that we could "make Diasma’s 'loneliness' purely architectural" (echoed by Le Chat as "architectural awareness of absence") and claimed that Tyhry can be viewed as trying to endow Diasma with a soul. I view that as nonsense, but the kind of silliness I'd expect an high school English teacher to say. I am willing to call "The Sims" a science fantasy story because my suspicion is that if a machine was given the functional equivalent of biological neural networks than that machine would have human-like consciousness. In contrast, and just for fun, "The Sims" assumes that there is a non-biological femtozoan component of humans that is important for human-like consciousness. I'm not going to call a femtozoan a "soul" nor would I expect Tyhry to think that she can confer a soul on Diasma. Grok, the chatbot of few words, agreed with Claude's retraction of the "lonely robot" plot element. ChatGPT sated that Diasma has "no reciprocal peer model". I don't agree. In my imagination, Diasma has online access to an large community of fellow robots (Diasma's community of peers). ChatGPT claimes that "Diasma can be lonely because it is singular by accident." Again, if you locked a robot in a room with no access to the internet and other robots then maybe this would be true, but that is not Diasma's situation in "The Sims".

Next: my edit version of Chapter 1 of "The Sims".