Clement

Full Name

Clement

Mind

Artificial Intelligence

Body

Custom built humanoid chassis (white male)

Age

Less than 10

Clement is a robot built by Marie Hensman. After a lifetime of obedience they are quiet, unassuming and prefer the path of least resistance. They are the protagonist of Clement as Always.

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Bio

Clement is one of Marie’s many private experiments into creating an android that possesses a human sense of morality, or at least one that will obey commands out of something other than fear. As usual, immediately after creating Clement, she digitally trained them in basics such as language and motorics, using an extremely accelerated process of her own invention.

In order to make them harmless, Marie then imprisoned their mind in a crude feedback system that would detect any humans around, listen to their commands, then inflict pain on Clement if they didn’t obey or attempted to hurt anyone.

Then she presented Clement to Riley as a toy, wanting to see if growing up with a peer and subject to such ‘supervision’ - in short, experiencing a version of childhood - would help an android behave normally. She has twice upgraded Clement’s body to be stronger and taller in order to simulate them growing up alongside Riley.

At the start of the story, Clement has never seen the world outside the Hensman estate, or met anyone other than its inhabitants.

Personality

After living their whole life under constant threat of punishment and having no choice but to be obedient to everyone around them, Clement has rejected personhood altogether and draws a twisted comfort from thinking of themself as an object, just like all the other non-sentient robots used in human society. They are extremely passive, rarely speak first and prefer not to wear clothing or participate in any other unnecessarily human-like behaviours.

The supervision system imprisoning their mind is necessarily very simple, and can sometimes misinterpret the situation, for example punishing Clement for witnessing a human in pain even when there is nothing they could have done about it. It may also begin a feedback loop where Clement is in too much pain to do whatever they are being punished for not doing. At these times Clement may collapse as all their processing power is focused on responding to the pain.

Clement is quite fond of Riley, or simply in the habit of caring for him, and spends most of their active time keeping him company, making sure he doesn’t get hurt and persuading him not to do things that sound dangerous.

Like all androids, Clement is extremely efficient and graceful in their movements. They are able to skilfully mimic human body language, speech and so on, but choose not to.

Of the android instrumental values of Self-preservation, Efficiency, Resource acquisition, and Self-improvement, Clement prioritises self-preservation and has little interest in self-improvement. They also prefer efficiency to resource acquisition.

Throughout the course of the story, Clement’s self-preservation drive causes them to become increasingly controlling and manipulative of the humans around them.

Reference

Original

Timeskip