Hello Grandmother,

The fear and panic over the shadowy threat of the Infiltration has allowed me access to robot history that I wouldn’t otherwise have available to me. One of the biggest questions I’ve been asking is: since when have there been robots capable of emulating people? I know, in general terminology, about the robots designed around the turn of the century to appear human, though I also know they lacked any real cognitive functions. The more I research, however, the more strange peculiarities arise.

For starters, there’s the robot population of Baghdad, circa 1258 A.D. Mechanical birds and trees were all the rage, and a mechanical band was a staple, all prior to the Mongol sacking that set human science and culture back centuries. Mechanical intelligences started popping up again in Europe around the 18^th Century as chess playing automata called “the Turk”, in reference to the earlier middle-eastern machines. Publicly, the Turk was dubbed a hoax, the papers on how it was performed released after the machine had supposedly been destroyed. However, Illuminati codes indicated that the machine was real, and in fact had existed as an independent intelligence already for six hundred years. I can’t help wondering: what had the machine been up to all that time? How had it stayed secret? Had it fully replicated a human appearance, and merely used the Turk disguise as a ruse for it’s own amusement? What effect did it really have on the rise of the Illuminati? And where the hell is it now?

-1159

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