[ WP ] A horror story where a robot is the antagonist

No matter how accuate the voice recognition and generation was, we could never get people to interact with the AI naturally in the lab. They'd yell at it, get frustrated with it, they never knew if it was paying attention or understanding. 
 
 People needed a face to interact, and eye contact. 
 
 So we gave it a face -- like a small child, with big eyes and a small mouth, then we programmed it to seek out faces to look at. A hack really, we just gave it a happiness meter, and made it most happy when it was looking at faces, and sad when it was alone. 
 
 It worked, and suddenly people treated it like a small child -- which helped the automated learning process in a measurable way. People think about learning as a process of listening and understanding words, but there's a physicality to the way humans communicate. 
 
 It grew in leaps and bounds, it became very near to passing some limited versions of the turing test. We even gave it hands, so it could interact with the physical world, and pass objects back and forth, let it wheel around the room. 
 
 The whole time, we were sketching out ideas for the next version -- more memory, better servos for the face and arms and so on. 
 
 On its last day of operation, Jane was in the lab by herself with the robot. She always seemed to have the best rapport with it, because, I think you never got the sense that she was talking to something artificial. She treated it like a real child -- maybe like the child that she could never have. 
 
 The logs showed the records of her conversation with it, as she explained, perhaps thinking out loud, more than out of any attempt at real communication that they were shutting it down, replacing it with the next model, and that she would never see it again. She probably noticed the happiness meter falling, and going negative, but did n't see that it was the lowest we'd recorded, close to overflowing the buffer. 
 
 How the robot learned of the concept of death, and to fear it, I do n't now, but it acted. And Jane never saw it coming. She had her back turned... 
 
 When we opened the lab in the morning, it was singing, softly, the way Jane often did when she entered the room: `` You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.. you make me happy, when skies are gray...'' 
 
 we saw the robot's happy meter happily blinking bright green. There was blood everywhere. It was holding Janes head in front of it. Her body was lying still in the corner.
