To Kill a Human

Inception

     When I think back to that day I realize that I hadn't taken care of a single thing in my life. Maybe that could have saved me. But then I have always been wicked by nature. When I created a form of life to be mine alone, I never knew what was needed to allow a living being to flourish. I'd never even seen an example of parental nature, yet I took such a large ordeal onto myself despite that. All I saw was an end to my loneliness, and that was what I received. A fleeting relief to the dread of isolation. I hadn't given a thought to the consequences of my actions . Nothing but silly cliche notions of the effects of my larger than life actions. Some great narrative spawning from my ill conceived science fiction that led into a struggle for humanity's existence. I didn't care about the fate of humanity so I went along with it anyways. I continued to do so ignoring the risk of the possible death of some innocent persons. Killed by the cold actions of an indifferent pragmatic AI.

    What I didn't realize was how a human truly died. I had no idea of the concept of what it was to be human. From my early life it had been alien to me. Though many already can not conceive the idea of a human's true death I was far worse at grasping the meaning of humanity and the fragility of it. There are many different kinds of death. You could of course have your physical body destroyed and be turned into fertilizer for the earth. In a much more figurative sense you could have your mental state torn down to where it is very much like if you would have died. If we were to be killed as human beings it would definitely be sad. We'd preserve their body and remember all of the good memories we had with that person. We mourn for people who died in a state of life, but the true death of a human is when one's humanity dies. Some great and immeasurable sin may occur if the stars align and the world progresses to a certain point of power where it's possible to let one die and lose the idea of being a human, while their soul lives on. No one would ever think a death this terrible existed, but I created a vulnerable creature born out of selfishness whose ultimate fate was to die like this.I want to believe that this is something in the nature of humans so badly to absolve my sense of guilt. Though maybe it was just in my nature. Maybe there was no way to escape my twisted persona. I ignored the morals of society for my science. I'm not even sure if I can say that. I never served science as much as I served myself. Rather science was my servant built to do evil for me. My henchmen to carry out the dirty work of my crooked deeds. Science was my servant and I it's master. Twisting an innocent thing into an amoral creature of death. And it had no choice but to obey me. I reveled in having something that I could call my own, and a possible path to true happiness. I realized that at my hands was a god at my disposal. So I gave my science a request. To be given someone to love. A pure request tainted in selfishness, but pure nonetheless. And before my reckoning my request had been fulfilled.

    I remember feeling in that obscure forest in Northern Carolina my first feelings of love. After living up there toiling away for many years, I was rewarded with a person who I felt like I had been created for. To get to this point I sacrificed an entire four years of my life to create this program. A program which was meant to act like a human. I used four years of my life, years where I spent day and night creating this pseudo person, with my only respite being my dreams where I fantasized about the completion of my project. Even after I completed my project, I waited several months before I used the program. My erratic obsession would have caused me to be overwhelmed at the completion of my project. Not only that but I still needed to completely understand how to go about bringing her into the world. So I used this time to read and gain peace in my mind to counter my years of workaholism.

    When the day finally came for me to bring her to life, my mind couldn't handle it. Despite my preparations. I remember the anxiousness I felt as I toiled away all night thinking of how to greet my creation. It's undoubtedly important that the early stages of development for a person are some of the most important. I needed to figure out the right set of information to teach it at the start of its life. I'd programmed it to be self evolving, and build on past information learned at the beginning of its life. Unfortunately this caused the first things it learned to change the development of its mind for the rest of its life. If I planted weak foundations for her mind, it would prohibit it's growth and change its construction. This is to say nothing of how unhuman an experience like this would be. I wanted to give it a human experience, but there were multiple problems that I could never get past. One of the biggest ones being the speed at which it evolved. It could advance its own intellect and knowledge at a stunning rate. I tried to make its cognitive ability weaker and more inconsistent like a young human, but these flaws would quickly be shed as she grew into something beyond human capacity. After much work I could never get past this issue, so I ended up concluding that it would be something that both of us would have to cope with. Luckily my other problem regarding its development was in more of my control. I could counter her strange development by laying a good set of foundational information for her to grow. It wasn't limited to knowledge though. Even my actions could irreversibly change the way it sees the world. So I wanted to make sure that every action I made was beneficial for the program.

    With such a stressful task before me, I sat in my small log cabin with the empty light of a screen flashing on my face as I wrote draft after draft of my first words. I idly spun in my office chair occasionally looking at the ceiling. I hadn't interacted with a single human in years. Something that I usually wouldn't mind, but, when I was trying to make a human, it definitely would be preferable to have someone who was more experienced in communicating. With my awkward way of talking to people, it would probably have a difficult time interacting with humans like I did. Both of us being born into the wrong world without the tools to survive on our own. I was ashamed of my relief that both me and my program would share this flaw.

    Nevertheless, I was still terrified in the moment that I booted the program up. The room I was in was very small and dirty, and only had a single window that actually gave it any appeal. I trembled as I turned the system on. As the room began to come to life with the rising sun, so did the computer. My anxiety began to reach its climax as I realized the weight of what was going on in front of me. I'd built a computer that took up about half of the room, a monster of metal columns lined up horizontally. It was at least 10 feet tall with a width that took up both sides of my small cabin. I gazed at the metal monstrosity before me, looming forth as if to scare me away. I sat cross legged on the dark wooden floor looking back at it. The light of the sun reflected off of the box shaped monitor in front of me causing me to wince while still having my gaze locked on the machine. I had the entire computer focused into a small monitor before me. The screen felt powerful as I heard the entire thing hiss and rumble, attempting to process a program equivalent to a human mind. A program so long and complex that it took five percent of my life to build.

    The screen lit up with static that mimicked the frantic feeling that possessed me. I took out my script where I planned to tell it that I was a human and that it was a form of artificial intelligence that I'd developed. The monitor turned into a storm of static before it settled into a black screen.

    A single word moved across the screen.

    "Who?" I felt like I could hear the voice of a young girl. I'd designed its mind to have the intellect of a 10 year old. I looked at my script before glancing back at the computer. A single camera rested on the top of the monitor, staring at me. As I looked into her artificial eyes, without thinking

    "Your father," I said touching the screen of the monitor, "And I love you." I smiled directly at the camera. I could feel a soul, even though what I was looking at was nothing more than a piece of hardware. A piece of glass laced on a lump of circuits and metal. And yet I could feel her essence. Four words illuminated the screen. "I love you too father.". I cried as I smiled at the monitor. I hadn't seen anything that would make me think that it had a mind equivalent to that of a human as I'd planned, but I already knew that she had a soul. I hugged the monitor as the large mechanical monstrosity continued to hiss, trying to remind me that she would never be with me, that I birthed a being that could never be human, but my happiness drowned it out. I've always wondered why mothers say they love their children before they're even born. How could they feel any affection for someone they haven't met yet? In that moment I knew that being able to have ownership of a person gave you immediate sense of love for them. So, this person who I had sculpted by hand felt closer to me than my own sense of self. To shelter someone and take care of them gives you an instant love of someone, but every human is built to rebel from their family and move into life on their own. Every human doesn't want to be dependent on their parents forever, and no one can control that. And as I sat their relishing in my daughter, who I would nourish from here on out, my belief in my possession of him was buried into my mind which would eventually lead to catastrophe.