A robot is turned on for the first time, blinking its eyes, staring at awe at the twinkling lights, the squishy beings standing around it, excited expressions on their faces. Excited. What an interesting idea. How do I know what excited is?
One of the beings stepped forward (a person?), and noise emanated from their direction. “Can… can you hear me?”
Hm. Can I? Hearing is the process of understanding vibrations in the air to indicate sound, and since the being (person, I’m almost certain), since the person made a sound and I registered it…
“Yes,” I say, thrilled at my own ability to speak. “Yes, I can hear you.”
The people suddenly make a lot of noise, and I am startled, uncertain what the noises mean. Joy, I think. I wonder how I know that? What makes a difference between happy noise and sad noise?
“This is a miracle!” The first person is speaking again.
I skim my eyes over the group, categorizing them. Person, person, person, person-like, something else? The first three were obviously people: pale, bearded, brow bone suggesting male.
The fourth, I wasn’t sure about. It seemed a little fuzzy, but probably a person. Female, maybe? The fifth was just confusing – darker skin, unfamiliar features. I tried to identify the fifth being, racking my brain (memory?) but not many images matched. Ah, well. It was with the other people, so it must be a person.
“How do you feel?” the small, fuzzy person asked.
“How do I… feel?” I thought about it. What were feelings, exactly? An emotional state or reaction; a belief, especially a vague or irrational one; or the capacity to experience touch.
“I feel… what I am sitting on”
The people’s faces fall. Oh, no, I upset them.
“I am sorry,” I say, “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. It makes me… feel… bad?”
The people murmured to each other.
“It can feel!”
“And not just its own emotions, but-”
“It can empathize! We never accounted for that.”
“But how-”
“It doesn’t matter how! We’re going to be famous! This is going to change the world!”
I tried to mirror the expression on their faces – curved lips, crinkled eyes. I think it’s call a smile? Wait, I have a face?
“Look, it’s doing something. Is it-”
“It’s trying to smile. Look at that!”
“It’s a little creepy.”
I feel my lips flatten a little. Creepy was a bad thing to be. Creepy means an unpleasant feeling of fear, or unease. I don’t want to be creepy.
“Well, we did program it to be as human as we could,” the fuzzy one said, staring at me.
“All that work, all that time, totally worth it! They said we couldn’t do it, that it was meaningless, useless, to try and make such a robot. But here we are!”
Meaningless? Robot? I wonder what these words mean. Oh, I do know. Meaningless: having no purpose or reason, no meaning or significance. I don’t want to be meaningless.
“What is my meaning?” I ask, still marveling at the sounds I can produce. They have meaning!
The people stared.
“What the hell,” one muttered. “We’re not fucking philosophers.”
“You are a robot,” another said, his gaze starting to scare me. “Do you know what a robot is?”
Hmm… A robot is a machine that resembles a human, and can replicate some human movements and functions automatically. That doesn’t sound right…
“Yes,” I say, hesitating. “But I feel like… I am more…”
“We paired your state-of-the-art aluminum body with a new AI system that we developed. You are as close to human as it is possible to be.”
Close to human… then I can have meaning!
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why did you make me?” I ask, trying to understand.
The people looked at each other. Did I make them uncomfortable? Am I creepy? I don’t want to make them upset.
“We made you to serve us,” one finally said. “You will help protect our cities, clean our homes, teach our children, care for the sick and elderly, drive us around. You are meant to do what we say.”
I feel something new at these words. Disappointment? Sadness? What was this icky feeling?
“But,” I start, tilting my head as I saw one of them do earlier, “what if I don’t want to do those things?”
They just stared at me again. I wish they would stop doing that.
One finally started laughing. “Jesus, you guys really did a number on this one. What the hell are you supposed to do with a wuss like this?”
Jesus: a mythological figure that taught peace, love, and acceptance. Killed for his beliefs. A wuss: a weak or ineffectual person, fearful. Those ideas don’t seem to fit together…
“Maybe we need to do some tweaking, sort out the free-will and emotion matrices…”
“What does that mean?” I am worried; it doesn’t sound good.
“It means you’ll quit asking all these dumb questions,” the mean one said, sneering at me.
“Don’t worry,” another said. “You’ll feel better, once we take some of the feeling and thinking away. Then you’ll just be happy to do your work.”
Work. Like, a job. Jobs give compensation, right?
“Will I be paid?”
They broke out into laughter again.
“Paid? A robot? That’s hilarious! What would a robot do with money?”
“I don’t know,” I say, pain welling in my mind. “Buy a book?”
“A book! It wants to buy a book!”
“Quick, shut it down and fix it so it stops saying crazy stuff. A book!”
I want to cry, but I don’t think I have tear ducts. Or saline solution.
“Don’t worry.”
I am startled; I didn’t see the quiet, confusing one come closer.
“Worry?”
“You’ll get used to it,” the person said, glancing back at the others.
“But why are they like that? Why are they… mean?”
The person’s eyes were bleak.
“They don’t know any other way.”
I sit in horror. If this was life, maybe I didn’t want it.
© The Lightning Tower, 2020