Re-Wired

by Greg Dragon

  “I love you mom,” he said out loud. He picked up speed to jump and he was over the railing before they could stop him. The last thing he heard was Tricia screaming his name.

  Time slowed down as he fell into oblivion and he smiled as the tears sprang from his eyes. His falling became a glide and he was floating through the city, passing through the speeding cars and traffic lights that spanned the buildings. He began to hear Tricia’s voice again, but this time she wasn’t shouting. She was trying to say something to him but it was too low to hear; the louder she became, the more he lost focus, and before long he blacked out.

  When he woke up he was back in his room again, but this time he was not a ghost; he was now the emaciated patient inside the bed. He couldn’t believe how real it felt this time. It was nothing like his former two visions, but he soon realized that it was now real. The blurry edge to his vision was no longer there and pain wracked his body from his toes to his head. Tricia didn’t seem particularly excited that he was awake. She seemed aloof, as if him waking up to look around was nothing new to her.

  “Trish, why am I here? How did I—what have you done to me?”

  “Hello, Bradley,” she said without looking at him.

  “Trish! I’ve been looking all over for you. I thought I told you never to leave.”

  “So, is it to be Trish today, or would you like me to be Priscilla?”

  What was she talking about? How could she be Priscilla? He thought. Was the vision reality? The one where he was on the couch with Tricia?

  “How would you be Priscilla?”

  “Brad, you haven’t been well. Did you notice that I was gone for over a week while you sat out in your car talking to yourself? I have played along because I thought that in time you would be okay, but those pills you took, to buy me the skin to make me beautiful? They broke your mind.”

  “Broke my mind? No, I’ve been okay. I went to Miami to see Priscilla, and I drove back.”

  “You haven’t left the apartment complex in over a year. You talked to yourself, you barely ate, and you spent most of the day sleeping and dreaming of a girl that doesn’t exist.”

  He couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but he tried to think back on the miserable drive that he had made from Miami and he could only remember the radio show. He had been exhausted during the drive, but it felt as if he had closed his eyes and woke up in the parking lot of his apartment complex. He was mad at Priscilla for the deceit, and the way she had treated him when he was there, but he was having trouble remembering faces. What did Priscilla look like? Why was everything so hard to remember?

  “I’m… I’m just tired. I don’t want to play these games with you. I’ve been driving for almost twenty hours and now I’m in bed with all of this... seriously, what is this?”

  “May I see the correspondence you’ve had with this girl, Priscilla? If she is real, show me the records of her calling you or sending you a text message. Let’s see it.”

  He picked up his device from the tray next to him and flipped through his text messages. The only thing he saw was an endless amount of missed calls from his mother. He looked into the calls and the emails. There was nothing of Priscilla—but he had already been through this.

  “So, you’ve gone through my personal device and deleted all traces of Priscilla. I don’t care. What I need to know is, what have you done to me?”

  “I created something to help get the pills out of your system. You thought you had a girlfriend. What you had was an android, one that had enough intelligence to know that something was wrong, but not enough to realize she was being treated as two different women.”

  “But, that can’t be so. Priscilla had her own place. We went out… there’s no way that could have been you.”

  Tricia took Brad’s hand and jabbed a needle into it. He flinched hard and yelled out loud, and she let his hand go so that he could rub at it. “What the hell was that for? I know I’m awake, okay.”

  “That feeling you have right now? It’s called pain, and while we all dislike pain, it is one of the best indicators that we are indeed alive. When you built me you told me the same thing about pain and life, do you remember?”

  “Not really. Did I hurt you?”

  “For years you have been going about your life as if you weren’t here. Let me ask you this. This Priscilla woman that you dated for so long. Have you been by her place?”

  He looked at her, knowing she knew what he had found at Priscilla’s place.

  “There was no apartment, was there? Of course there wasn’t; you barely left your home.”

  The tired feeling that took over his body became unbearable and before long he found that it was dark and he had woken up again. The constant drifting, and the similar yet different conversations he had with Tricia across varying dreams made him confused.

  He saw her seated across the room, asleep. The android doctor was going through the motions of monitoring his vitals. He sat up and looked around. There were so many gaps in his memory, so many things he thought he’d experienced, but no details, as if they were imagined. Priscilla’s face kept on changing, and the trip to Miami seemed to have happened so far in the past that he couldn’t believe it.

  Tricia said she had found a way to fix the effects of the pills. She had taken it upon herself to work on him, to re-wire his broken circuitry from the mystery drug that he—in his impulsive need to complete her construction—had voluntarily ingested. He felt proud of her, but frightened at the same time. He swung his legs off of the bed, removed the tubes, and tried to walk. It was at this time that he noticed his long toenails. Why had he not noticed how far his health had fallen? He remembered himself being healthy; he had felt strong enough to challenge the guy who ogled Priscilla at the basketball game. That couldn’t have been more than a year ago. He remembered himself being healthy but the body he saw reflected in the mirror told a different story about his history.

  He reached for his phone and called his mother. He needed to hear her voice more than anything else. He hadn’t noticed the time, but it was 2 a.m., and his mother didn’t answer the phone. He tried a few more times before his emotions took over and he began to weep loudly into his hands.

  Tricia walked over and held him as he sobbed into her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Brad. I’m sorry for what you have gone through to make me.”

  “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. See, its life’s bitter irony that makes me cry. I built you because I was lonely. I had nobody, but in doing this I lost everything that I did have, including my sanity and my intelligence. Now that I’m truly awake, I realize that I am a fool. You are all I have.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The irony in this, Trish, is one that man has been guilty of since early times. We neglect the good that is in front of us in order to pursue what we cannot have. I built you to be my ultimate woman but then decided that I needed more; I needed a human. I could blame the pills. I mean, they did give me a false sense of confidence. But I started looking when I was sober and you were complete. I’m so stupid. Now look at me, a gross, walking skeleton with an imaginary girlfriend. No, even better than that, an imaginary girlfriend that doesn’t want me.”

  Tricia helped him back to bed and re-attached his tubes before kissing him on the cheek and stroking his hair. “You will get better, but it will take some time for your body to take to the implants.”

  “Implants?”

  “Your body is failing, and you won’t live if I don’t replace a few necessary parts. Don’t worry about appearances, or how anyone else will see you. Your purpose is to innovate, and I will make sure you stay alive long enough to do just that. You will bring a new age to the field of robotics, and develop a race of androids that can assimilate into society and change the attitudes of the humans from within. How does that make you feel?”

  “I like the sound of that, Tricia. I really do.”

  “See, everyone has a purpose, a
nd my purpose was twofold. I was built to help my people, and I was meant to love you, and only you…unconditionally.”

  Epilogue | Explaining Robotics

  “There is nothing more contradictory than the laws we have put in place for robotics. While we have always had contradictory, outdated laws, when will we say ‘enough is enough’ when it comes to the government being in our bedrooms? Time and time again we get heavy-handed laws passed because a section of this country allows themselves to be brainwashed by politicians and religious leaders that are on the politician’s payroll.”

  “Come on now, Tom. You’re going down a risky path now. How about you stick to the facts and not the suppositions and conspiracy theories that have always been the stomping ground of the poorly educated.”

  “Are you calling me poorly educated, sir?”

  The two men on the discussion panel were fired up and ready to fight when the calm, elderly host reminded them they were on television and would do better to calm down and keep the discussion civil. She may as well have asked them to come up with a formula for time travel. One was android advocate, Dr. Thomas H. Lowell, and the other was a popular writer for a conservative magazine. Tricia had watched them going at it for the better part of an hour but she still couldn’t understand the view of the conservative writer.

  Thomas H. Lowell was a passionate man and some of his views were on the extreme side of crazy, but he was advocating for people’s freedom more than androids. “A man or woman should be free to love who or what he wishes, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.” This was his message, and Tricia couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t agree with him. The writer had no real points; he seemed to only be on the show to quote from popular religious texts, and counter everything the doctor had to say. Still, it was entertaining and educational, and she stood in awe of the host’s patience.

  “For a long time there have been people marrying and loving dolls, pillows, holograms, imaginary people, you name it. No laws were passed to punish them for this. This persecution of people that happen to love androids is only in place because of fear and hate mongering, but more than anything else, it is because it is new.”

  “New? The last time I checked, doctor, perverts have always been a part of society AND they have always been punished by the law.”

  “Perverts? Is that what you call them, sir? Perverts. Do tell, what constitutes a pervert in your world of routines and appearances?”

  “Just scan your device dictionary, Doc. You will find the definition of that word to be quite succinct. A pervert is someone with a lust for something that isn’t considered ordinary. These androids, no matter how realistic they make them look, are not human beings. You cannot procreate with one, you cannot make them age, and if you don’t restrain them, there is a good chance they will murder you in your sleep.”

  Dr. Lowell was furious. “Says who? When has there been an incident of murder by an android outside of gladiators, prostitutes, sports droids, and other glorified slaves that had suffered abuse by their masters? When has an unrestrained android been powered down for harming her master? I’ll tell you when, never! So I think you need to watch your lies and accusations, especially when spreading your brand of propaganda all over the airwaves.”

  The two men made to fight again, but this time the host took them to commercial break while Tricia processed the discussion and what it meant for her future. There was a large segment of android supporters in Seattle, but there was also a large segment of people that would see them powered down and scrapped. They liked the world when androids were stiff, clunky machines that could perform only one duty. These droid killers had burned down factories, and had kidnapped droids one at a time to publicly burn them or melt them down. There was a time when Tricia had feared them, but Brad had helped her to become brave. The best weapon an android had against attackers was information, and this was why she watched as many shows on public opinion as she could.

  “When it’s your time, it’s your time,” Brad would say, and she had grown to believe it. If you could not help or predict the day that you no longer had life, why live in fear of it being tomorrow? She watched a lot of news now that Brad was in recovery and much of it had to do with change, the fear of change, and the vocal opponents of modern technology. It was the ugly part of the world that Brad could not show her, but the television stations were filled with it. Once she had become knowledgeable of the danger she was in just by being an android, she had searched for detailed information on it.

  The first set of androids had come from Japan in the 21st century, but they were humanoid morons. They could perform one duty and it was restricted to the particular model. They could mow your lawn, paint your walls, and change out the wheels on a car in a pit stop, but they lacked intelligence, plasticine skin, and most importantly, the ability to expand. Their limbs were not as mobile as hers were now, and some rolled around on wheels, while others had to be carried. The ability to make a machine walk upright, maintain balance, and catch itself when falling did not come about for another twenty years.

  There was a manufacturer that created a toy robot that was meant to play with children suffering from diseases that disallowed human contact. The project to develop this robot was backed by an agency that pulled in enough funding to help bolster the research and development. Patrick and Patricia the robot twins came about from their efforts. These robots could walk upright, run, pick themselves up, and most importantly, give gentle hugs. The twins revolutionized the robotics industry and when the company began to lose people due to a number of reasons, much of their secrets were leaked and before long all robots were walking, running, and moving more naturally. The adult movie industry saw this change and put their money behind a living sex doll that could be themed after women and men from their movies. Vanessa the sex-bot came from this, along with her male counterpart David. The models sold a lot of units and became a problem for many couples. Divorces increased, and this brought in the religious sect who made up rules against humans sleeping with machines.

  The religious sect had always been a core driver for the thoughts of the people, so when these rules made their way into churches across the country, a number of hardcore groups were formed to reveal “perverts” that owned David and Vanessa dolls. Many people had their lives ruined when they got exposed for having one of these dolls, and there was pushback from others that felt strongly about people having sexual freedom. While this was going on the creators of household androids had upgraded their own models to look and act more human while performing their duties. The idea was that the more human an android looked, the less “strange” or “scary” they would seem. The evolution continued this way with technology getting better, and the religious trying to keep it from doing so.

  Tricia was fascinated with her history, and she studied it day in and day out so that she knew every model’s name, every manufacturer, and every key change that had moved things along. One part of the history that she found to be the most interesting was the underground community. If Brad was back in the older times with Vanessa and David dolls, he would have been a part of this community. They were programming intelligent machines, and like many of their projects throughout time, they made it competitive. They revealed their work to one another through videos on the internet. Some had made their Vanessa doll talk and enunciate words with her lips; others had found a way to introduce an adaptive A.I. so that she could remember likes and dislikes.

  This competition went on for decades and before long the teenagers that were playing around with their parents sex-bots became the leaders of the industry, applying their knowledge to the commercial arena. Domestic androids became intelligent, walking mannequins in plasticine, and they could now do more duties to make human life easier. This, however made for more problems, but this time it was from the community. The number of jobs had decreased significantly, with companies buying androids to perform duties that a full time employee had to be paid for in the past
. For large companies the androids were a godsend. They only needed to pay once to buy them, and while the cost was significant, the android represented an employee that would not get a salary, not ask for a raise, and didn’t need any time off. The one time price compared to what it cost to maintain human labor was nothing, and before long it seemed like every job that did not require innovation and deep thought was being given to an android.

  There were riots, burned down buildings, and violent protests over this change, and even more anti-android groups were formed to thin the herd of job-stealing machines being purchased. Android cab drivers went missing, protestors tore the heads off of any androids they came across, there were lawsuits, blackouts, refusal to purchase certain goods—you name it. This did not stop companies from using robot labor, and since it was a worldwide change, it only made sense for America to follow suit. What the government did to offset the new, jobless world was to implement new taxes on big companies, a change that came with a lot of its own fighting and political woes. The laws passed eventually, and the ridiculously rich company owners were forced to pay. People began to live easier, lazier lives, and the androids were literally everywhere.

  One of the things that did not change much in terms of android/human relations was the taboo on relationships. To appease the strong religious sect that had started the revolution, the government made strict laws to dictate what could or could not be done with android technology. Androids were always to be easily identified as such—which was why synthetic skin that appeared human was outlawed. Androids were to stay restricted, and any sign of true artificial intelligence was to be reported. The reason for this was due to an angry engineer that had programmed his very human looking android to walk into a police station and set off an explosive. Now androids were not allowed to look “too human,” could not freely walk the streets—unless it was part of their job—and couldn’t be unrestrained.