Twin Robots: What Is Science and What Is Fiction?

In the world of Mítosz, the most advanced humanoid robots are never built one at a time. They are always made in pairs, and the two units belong together for good: they are the Twin Robots, sometimes also called Twin Minds. Often one works on Earth and the other on Mars, but sometimes only a corridor separates them.

In the novel, the two members of a pair are quantum-entangled with each other. What one experiences, the other experiences too, no matter how far apart they are. Their most important trait springs from this double existence as well: an exceptional capacity for empathy. They sense, understand and feel what people feel, they find their way through the most tangled group situations, and not even the slightest flicker escapes their attention.

In this form, it is science fiction, and I would not want to sell it as anything else. But I would not call it made up out of thin air either: behind almost every element there is real physics or technology that already works. In this post I walk through how far the science goes, and where the imagination takes over.

Entanglement is real

Quantum entanglement is not a writer's invention. The states of two particles can be linked so that the results of measurements on them stay correlated even when the particles are far apart. Einstein mocked it as “spooky action at a distance”, yet the experiments did not prove him right. In 2022 Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger received the Nobel Prize in Physics precisely for their experiments with entangled photons.

Today the phenomenon is an engineering task as well. In 2017 the Chinese satellite Micius delivered entangled photon pairs to ground stations more than 1,200 kilometers apart, and the entanglement demonstrably survived. Quantum key distribution rests on the same principle, and in theory it allows encryption that cannot be intercepted.

This is still a very long way from the world of the novel. Entanglement is fragile, the slightest disturbance from the environment destroys it, and today's labs work with photons and atoms, not with two humanoid machines. On top of that, entangled pairs get used up: every measurement consumes one, so the twins would have to carry an enormous supply with them, or depend on constant resupply. For two robots to stay entangled for years across interplanetary distances would be an enormous leap from what we know today.

What entanglement cannot do

Here comes the awkward part: you cannot send a message with entanglement. The measurement results of the robot on Mars are completely random on their own, whatever its partner on Earth is doing. The connection only shows when the two sets of results are placed side by side, and that takes a conventional channel, radio or laser. Physics calls this the no-communication theorem. No engineer, however clever, gets around this limit, because it follows from the structure of quantum mechanics.

And a conventional channel works at the speed of light at best. The distance between Earth and Mars varies between roughly 55 and 400 million kilometers. Light covers that in 3 and 22 minutes respectively, and the reply takes just as long to come back. In reality, then, there is no live conversation between the two planets, and entanglement does not help with that either.

In the novel, the twins still make it possible to talk to Earth without any delay. This is fiction, and it has a respectable tradition in the genre: many authors have used it since Ursula K. Le Guin's device, the “ansible”. Behind my twins, however, there is a physically conceivable explanation that needs no new physics. It just comes from prediction, not from entanglement.

So how do they experience the same thing?

By prediction. The Twin Robots start out with the same knowledge and the same memories, and each carries an exact model of the other inside itself. At every moment the robot on Mars computes what its partner on Earth is seeing, doing and feeling right now, and vice versa. The real data arrives minutes later, and the model adjusts to it.

In the vast majority of everyday situations this works, because human communication is largely predictable. Claude Shannon showed as early as 1951 that most of written English can be inferred from context. Anyone who knows the situation and the speaker well enough knows most sentences in advance.

What is more, the method has been with us for a long time:

• Processors compute the most likely continuation in advance and roll it back if they were wrong. This is called speculative execution.

• Online games hide network lag this way: the program predicts the other player's move and corrects it afterwards.

• Industry builds “digital twins”, a continuously updated software copy of an engine or a factory. The ancestor of the idea is spaceflight: during the Apollo program NASA used copies kept on the ground to test what might happen to the spacecraft.

• Robot fleets and self-driving cars learn together. What one of them experiences reaches all of them with the next update.

So a Twin Robot really does “experience” what its partner does, only in its own model, a few minutes before the proof arrives. Entanglement keeps a real role too, except that it provides authenticity instead of speed. From the entangled pairs the two twins can generate a shared secret key that nobody else can know. That way, when a message arrives late, it is certain that it really came from the twin and that nobody rewrote it on the way.

The weak point is obvious too. The prediction fails exactly when something truly new happens, that is, when the stakes are highest. At such times the robot lives for minutes in a reality that no longer exists. An engineer would call this a flaw, and I, as a writer, call it a gift.

Where does the empathy come from?

Machine emotion recognition is already here. “Affective computing” has been a research field of its own since the 1990s, and today's systems infer emotional states from faces, voices and text. In 2025 researchers at the universities of Geneva and Bern had six large language models take five standard emotional intelligence tests. The models scored 81 percent on average, while the previously measured human average was 56 percent.

But it is worth stopping here. Doing well on a test means that the machine knows what the right answer is in an emotional situation. Whether it feels anything while doing so is something science cannot say for certain today. The line between understanding and feeling is one of the biggest open questions in the field.

This is exactly the line the novel crosses. According to the story, the empathy of the Twin Robots grows out of entanglement, out of their double existence. This is the most purely fictional claim in this post: we know of no physical process that would turn entanglement into emotion.

Still, there is a line of thought that keeps me from calling it arbitrary. A Twin Robot's whole existence consists of modeling another mind moment by moment, and of facing, minute after minute, where it got things wrong. In other words, it never stops practicing what psychology calls theory of mind: working out the inner states of others. Much of human empathy is this kind of modeling too. For someone who has trained it on a twin for a lifetime, reading people is easy ground.

The question has stakes outside the novel as well. In 2025 Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, argued that it is futile to try merely to control machines smarter than us. In his view they have to be built so that they truly care about people. The Twin Robots are one possible, invented realization of that idea.

What is science, and what is fiction?

In the world of the Twin Robots	What we know today	Verdict
Two robots in a lasting entangled state	Entangled photon pairs have been sent across 1,200 kilometers, but machines staying entangled for years is a long way off	Real basis, with an enormous engineering leap
Instant shared experience between Earth and Mars	Physics rules it out; the signal takes between 3 and 22 minutes	Fiction, if taken literally
The members of a pair run a model of each other and predict ahead	Predictive models, digital twins and lag compensation already work today	Extension of existing technology
Entanglement authenticates the twin's message	Quantum key distribution works even via satellite	Existing technology
Human-level, autonomous humanoid robot	Humanoids that can walk and do simple work exist; this level of autonomy does not yet	Extension
Recognizing and understanding human emotions	Language models score above the human average on emotional intelligence tests	Real, but what it means is disputed
Genuine feeling that springs from entanglement	No known mechanism; whether machines can feel is an open question	Fiction

In closing

So the Twin Robots are made of three layers. The base is real physics, the middle is a bold extension of existing technology, and the top, empathy born of entanglement, is pure fiction. I wrote this third layer for the sake of the question it raises: if a machine understands us better than we understand each other, what do we do with it, and what does it do with us?

ICARUS, the first book of the Mítosz series, is available as an ebook here and in paperback on Amazon.

Sources and further reading

• The citation for the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics: nobelprize.org

• Entangled photons across 1,200 kilometers, from a satellite: Physics World

• Signal delay between Earth and Mars in practice: ESA Mars Express blog (ESA uses the rounded figures of 4 and 24 minutes)

• Language models on emotional intelligence tests: Communications Psychology, 2025 and the University of Geneva press release

• Geoffrey Hinton on caring artificial intelligence: Fox Business

• Claude Shannon: Prediction and Entropy of Printed English. Bell System Technical Journal, 1951.