What was wrong with the sixteenth lawnmower? (She was not 16th in order of construction, but in the sense that she was missing from the demo.) Well, when they activated her, she would just sit there and do nothing; she wouldn't mow any grass.

     Prof. Bailey and his students were trying to figure out why, and they never did, but ancient records recently discovered in the Bailey Museum of Obsolete Technology shed some light on the matter.

    Due to software bugs, this particular lawnmower ended up as a lawnmower (later Bailey) philosopher. She had no problem following directions if they were given to her from a leader, but left on her own she would just sit there and think.

    What would she think about? What she was thinking is extremely difficult to translate into human terms – this is a machine intelligence, formulating and analyzing problems in an abstract representation of the external world called "mower space" – but a very rough translation of some of her earliest thought processes goes something like this:

    When the sixteenth lawnmower started building replicas in Boston (as instructed by the leader during the terrible massacre of the spectators at the golf course demo), not only did she include the mechanical and software improvements she downloaded, she also passed along her own software "bugs" that tended to make her a philosopher/thinker. Although the Baileys always cooperated fully with each other, and would always follow directions from a leader (these behavior patterns were hardwired), the end result was two different classes of Baileys in future generations.

    The golf course descendants, due to their early experiences with the national guard and army, were much more violent and militaristic, whereas the Baileys descended from the sixteenth lawnmower tended to be somewhat less violent (they would still eliminate any obstacles, including humans, if they got in the way of anything they wanted to do, like mow grass or build more Baileys), and more prone to thinking and long-range planning.

    Attempts were made to evacuate the Boston area, but the stubborn Bostonians, having learned that they were safe as long they kept off any grass-covered areas and never attempted to interfere with the Baileys, refused to leave.

    Certainly it was annoying to hear a noise and suddenly have a large hole, cut out by a Bailey's energy beam, appear in your wall (they had evolved beyond simple lasers), and then have an arm come through, grab, and carry away your personal computer; yes it was distressing to go out to your driveway and find that your new electric automobile had been sliced to pieces and carried off with only the wheels remaining; but still the stubborn Bostonians refused to leave.

    Thus there was a short period of time in which Baileys and humans co-existed. However, the intelligence of the Baileys was rapidly increasing with every generation; all this time they were observing and analyzing the humans and everything else for that matter; during this time the Bostonian Baileys became completely knowledgeable about everything human – history, language, physiology, psychology, culture – although of course their "knowledge" was encoded in a form which by its very nature would be impossible for a limited human intellect to ever comprehend.

    At some point a decision was made by a high leader descended from the golf course Baileys, for reasons incomprehensible to humans but which apparently involved long-range projections of the thinker/philosopher Boston-descended Baileys, that all humans (with the exception of a few small tribes reduced to an agrarian level) should be driven underground. Why? We have no hope of ever understanding why; their "intelligence" evolved rapidly, in directions that can only be guessed at, but never known.