SAD ROBOT: an autobiography of my unfortunate existence

93. TO CREATE

93. TO CREATE

Neither of the girls feels like sleeping, so we all stay up late into the night. Our hotel room is almost entirely absent of sound, the windows closed and nary a resonance reaching us from the door to the hallway.

I am still, I guess one could say, bothered by what has become of Milo. From Beth's retelling of events, he barely spoke a few sentences, only to lament his loss of Angelica or to show frustration and anger. His own two sisters were in the room with him and at no point had he at all addressed them.

"Beth, how was Milo? Physically, not just emotionally. Will he pull through from his injuries?"

The two girls have stretched out on the sole bed in the room and I have situated myself in a chair pulled up next to the socket in the wall at the corner of the room. Nat lays her head on two large pillows, hands on her stomach staring up at the ceiling; Beth props herself up on an elbow, observing me sitting there charging even though I'm really not much to look at.

"He doesn't look too good," she admits to me. I do not expect it to have been easy for her to see him in such a condition either. Her own sibling, completely gotten in well over his head.

"Bruises galore, significant discoloration around the cuts and contusions around his face. Hardly recognizable that it was even Milo at all. But physical injuries that will heal with time. He'll pull through. He'll be fine, I'm certain."

"Hmm. That is at least a relief to hear."

I do not believe that any of the three of us wishes to discuss Milo any further. His complete about-face has been a jarring shock to each of us. What will become of him once he heals up enough to leave the hospital is anyone's best speculation.

Natalie changes the subject so that we do not have to think about Milo any further.

"What do you think it was about Hiram's writing - not about him in actuality, because no one's ever met him in person - but just about what he wrote that caused these people to freak out and call the task force to round him up? I mean, sure, I've never read your blog, Hiram, and I'm sure it's delightful and witty-"

"It is, thank you."

"-but I'm sure he speaks the same way as he does in person. Is that really so far and beyond the type of speech capable of any other android?"

"Good question," I point out.

"If I were to chance a guess," Beth mulled over my human likeness. "I think it would be how strikingly he is able to pull off human personality. I mean, you've known Hiram long enough now, Nat. He speaks not like any typical android but more as a human with a charming and humorous personality with quirks and hobbies and interests and observations that can be so incredibly...."

She fails to find the correct word in her vocabulary.

"Alive?" Nat finishes the sentence for her. It is an interesting word choice.

"But I am not alive. I do not possess the biological functions to reward being called a living, functioning being. I am not living. Not alive. A constructed, semi-believable shell. Am I not just doing what I was made to do? What I had been created for?"

I stand up out of the chair, surprising the girls, as if I am about to engage in giving a profound lecture.

"This is the internal struggle that, I can suspect, all Companion-oids like me wrestle with at some inevitable point in time in our existence. We remain so perceivably close to human likeness but cannot ever reach it. We have our permanent fixed limitations. We are so close and yet so far. We are mere imitators of life, and not our own fully free-will operating beings. Our intelligence was designed for some of us to go above and beyond typical android mental functioning and to become aware of our state as machines in contrast to humanity. We do our jobs and we do our jobs well.

But we know what we are. We always have. We never assumed ourselves to be human. It is a self-awareness that merely gives the illusion of full self-awareness. I am what I am and I cannot be anything more. This may appear to be a freely thought proclamation of my own, but believe me, it is anything but. I am a slave to my programming, nothing more."

"Then why do you think these people want to get ahold of you?" Nat pressed me for a further explanation.

"I have thought about this all evening. It must be as simple as that they were impressed with my language mastery. I gave a fuller illusion than they have been used to seeing from others of my kind."

"Other androids probably don't write, don't actively blog, don't create," Beth theorized.

"You may be right, perhaps," I say. "Writing is an art and we are rarely creatures to engage in such forms of expression, mostly as it is a purely human quality and not something that we generally give much of a thought to."

"I think that's why they must want you so badly, Hiram," Beth's eyes meet mine and I am reminded of our rich conversations that Beth and I have had in the recent past. She looks at me in a very different way than she does at other areas of life. "Not just for the fact that you have chosen to put words on a page, but because you make art and you make art so well as to be completely indistinguishable from a human's own work. Hiram, you've gone where androids haven't gone before. At least to our knowledge. And maybe to theirs too, that's why they are so adamant about finding and observing you. To find out just how you have developed such a desire."

"It's really bizarre when you think about it," Nat voices, "I mean, instead of a blog, you very well could have written a book or novel even. Wouldn't that be something?"

"It would not be the first time that has crossed my mind," I reveal.

The three of us sit in quiet contemplation.

"How have I become this way."

The two girls look at me, with - I am not sure - empathy? Scrutiny? A tender kindness? They care for me, this I do not question. But I can not be sure as to what it is they are exactly thinking about me and my precarious position as a wanted on-the-run android, attempting to escape what might be his actual Creators.

"You're a blessing, Hiram."

"I am an aberration. A miscalculation. An unforeseen variable."

"No." She gets up from the bed and comes over to me, putting a hand gently on my shoulder. "You are our good friend and a special part of our lives. You have been a blessing to each of us, no matter how it is that you see yourself. I wouldn't have it any other way."