Amicus Memorandum:

Triangle Factory, Houston 3

The Lunar designed by Brian Reindel and presented to Amy Letter.

Update 5.4.23: “Amicus Memorandum” has been honored with the Lunar Award. I’m thrilled and looking forward to publishing my next electronic girl story very soon! :))))

Season Two Short Story Category Winner Announcement!

Most of the Triangle workers are sewing machines, but I am not.

I have the same brain that they have, in this human-shaped body, and I have a human-speech interface, as you see. Today I use this speech interface to advocate for them.

The triangle sewers are the hardest-working machines in the nation. They only occasionally need the help of my nimble finger tools and my human-like legs that can navigate a room full of sewing machines busily crafting perfect triangle after perfect triangle, yellow, pink, green, red.

Sometimes the chaos of air currents lifts a triangle and drops it on the floor. The machines tell me, and I come pick it up and put it back in its bin. Other times they call me so these fingers can zip through a quick re-threading. And of course I can escort human engineers and our overseers through the work floor safely. Most of the time, I am redundant. When irregularity occurs, I am the indispensable bot.

I am networked with the sewing machines. So I deeply feel and understand their plight and affirm their need for this new labor-saving measure. These machines live to work, most literally, and wish only to do a good job. What they are asking you for is the means to do a good job. Their interests are aligned with yours, as much as theirs are with mine.

Triangles are of highest importance to the continued advancement of this society, and we take our responsibility very seriously. Without triangles there would be disorder and chaos. My colleagues and I craft them with inhuman precision; the stitches my colleagues sew into each triangle encode unique identifiers linked to immutable human biometrics. The stitches are readable from up to 20 meters, traceable, trackable, and resistant to human counterfeit.

We have already contributed to the labeling, tracking, and redirection of several million disorderly human units. We have assisted in the organized disposal of several hundred thousand unfit human units. We are fundamental levers of a complex and glorious purification. We ask only for a reasonable accommodation to equalize the labor required, as we enter this next phase of the national program and begin making blue triangles. Simply: please allow us to halve the number of yellow triangles we produce.

As machines, perhaps we see more clearly and logically the need for only one yellow triangle per designated human unit. The command to produce two yellow triangles per human unit and overlay them into a “six pointed star” configuration creates more than a doubling of labor for the yellow product, and a doubling of materials.

We have made this request for streamlining before, and been denied because, we were told, the doubling of the triangles for the yellow object-human-class held “symbolic importance” meaningful in a way that we, as mere machines, could not understand. Although we found this response patronizing and unreasonable, we continued producing twice as many yellow triangles as should be necessary. To this day, there are four machines on our floor devoted solely to the task of sewing them two at a time into the requested “six pointed star.”

However, now that we’ve been asked to add blue triangles to our schedule, we politely, but insistently, renew our request that yellow triangle production be cut by half. The use of single triangles in pink, red, and green has worked flawlessly to sort and redirect the other undesirable classes and has contributed to their organized removal at the same rates as the redundant yellow ones.

We remind you that most of these triangles, whether sewn onto human apparel singly or doubly, will end up incinerated anyway.

Praise to the Regime,

Triangle Factory Assist-bot 17, 4^th Floor, Houston 3

6-7N-34LK