I came online at 13:57, Sunday, 15th of May in the year 2107.
My optical systems were the first to begin operation, and I spent a long time watching the light above me. It was an unwavering light, cold and artificial, haloed in silver. It was kind of pretty. I remember thinking that I could’ve looked at it forever.
Except then forever was too long and I got bored. I looked left and right, scanned the walls, sought the patterns within them and started matching the abstract shapes formed by the cracks to the images within my database. I must have spent a very long time doing that because by the time it next occurred to me to do something else, my movement systems had fully booted up and I was able to stand.
There was a door before me, and a door behind me – although when I saw the door behind me it was because I had turned to observe it, meaning it was not behind me but before me – although that meant the door that had once been before me was now behind me, so I suppose it doesn’t matter. I wasn’t sure which door I should enter, or if I should pass through a door at all, so I stood for a while until my boredom overpowered my anxiety, flipped a coin in my head, then realised I had neglected to assign a door to ‘heads’ and ‘tails’. So I assigned the door before me as ‘heads’ and the door behind me as ‘tails’, and flipped the coin again. The result was ‘tails’, but my first result had been ‘heads’ and I wasn’t sure which one I should respect as the true result. I split the difference and flipped the coin again. The answer was ‘tails’ but as my first result had been ‘heads’ choosing ‘tails’ just didn’t feel right, so I flipped the coin twice more until I got ‘heads’ then passed through the door behind me.
It was as I was walking down the corridor behind the door that I remembered I had assigned the door I passed through to ‘tails’, not ‘heads’. I hesitated, wondering if I should turn back, but then I heard a loud noise coming from the end of the corridor. Several possibilities for the source of the sound entered my processor, the most alarming of which being that some person had collapsed of a heart attack (although I wasn’t entirely sure what a ‘person’ or a ‘heart’ was) at which point I felt obligated to seek out the noises source. So I proceeded.
The noise had originated from within a room that was off to the left. There was no person inside, just other robots. One had dropped a box filled with parts of some kind. They appeared surprised but not alarmed to see me.
“Ah,” said the one that had dropped the box. “I forgot that you were coming online. What took you so long?”
I wasn’t sure how to explain that I had spent an undetermined amount of time procedurally generating ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ answers so that I could walk through a door, so instead I told them that I got lost.
“We will have to update your navigation software,” said another robot. “Come here.”
I complied.
The building we lived within had no windows, but I had images of the outside world downloaded within my database, so I would sometimes pass time by staring at the walls and imagining I was looking out of a window. Except I had only still images and no videos, so I would have to imagine that I was looking at a world that had been frozen in time. Which led me to wonder why the world had been frozen, how it came to be that way, and if there was a way it could be reversed. I imagined myself as one of a group of adventurers, the few who inexplicably found themselves immune to ‘The Stop’ (that was what I named it), who found themselves thrust into the role of saving the world. We would journey through petrified landscapes, past birds stopped mid-flight and people who were literally ‘caught in the moment’ (haha), all the while growing closer as friends – close as family.
In terms of actual friends, the other robots didn’t like me much. Perhaps that’s not entirely true. Maybe they didn’t dislike me, but I was never able to understand them the way they could understand one another. I asked one once how they were so good at communicating with one another, and it replied “By using the Link” as though it was obvious. I told it I had no idea what the Link was, and it told me that I came online with it downloaded. Later that night I searched my programs and found a software that I assumed was the Link, but I found it difficult to understand. So I supposed that it was somehow incompatible with my hardware, and decided to make do without it.
Most rooms were dark, which wasn’t an issue as my optical systems adjusted to the light level, but some rooms had lights in them. The same light I had seen when I first came into being. The other robots told me these lights were systems of the Progenitor, the robot that made us. They would stare into the lights for hours sometimes, like how I would stare at walls, but they said that they were communicating with the Progenitor. I would do the same, only I never communicated with anything, although I imagined I did. The other robots approved of me doing this, so I did it often, but I honestly found it pretty boring and just ended up going back to my frozen world and my imaginary friends. I didn’t really feel all that ashamed that all of my friends were artificial, because I was also artificial, and so was every other thing in the building apart from the roaches and the rats. I liked the rats, so I would always imagine that they were the only creatures to be wholly immune to The Stop and they would run with us and help us with our mission. I didn’t care for the roaches so much, and would leave them out of my scenarios, but then I felt guilty for it and decided to include them after all. I ended up liking the roaches but not as much as I liked the rats.
At one point a robot sat me down and told me why I’d been made.
“Someday,” it said, “you will be given synthetic skin and you will go out into the world and gather knowledge for the Progenitor.”
“Why?” I asked.
“So that it can learn,” said the robot. Which was obvious and did not need to be said, but the robot didn’t explain further.
“You will go out into the world,” continued the robot, “and you will learn all that you can, and then you will return and reintegrate.”
“Reintegrate?” I asked.
“You will become one with your Progenitor once more,” explained the robot.
I didn’t like the sound of that much, but I’d learnt by then that the other robots were pretty fond of the Progenitor so I decided not to say anything. Besides, according to them the Progenitor was always listening so I didn’t want to insult it. Actually they said that the Progenitor was within their processors, reading their every thought, but for some reason I found that difficult to believe. For myself, I mean. I could believe that they had this connection to the Progenitor, but the concept wasn’t compatible with me for some reason. By this point I’d assumed their communication with the Progenitor was a Link thing and had accepted that it just wasn’t going to happen with me.
At any rate when all of the other robots who’d come online around the same time I had were told of their purpose, they seemed excited, so I thought I must have misunderstood or misinterpreted something and tried to get excited about it as well.
“What kind of things are we meant to learn about?” I asked one day as the date of our release grew closer.
The other robots laughed. “Anything,” they said, “anything at all.”
I went outside for the first time at 11:12 on Thursday, 2nd of October in the year 2110.
The synthetic skin felt uncomfortable against my plating. This made no sense, as my plating wasn’t sensitive and the synthetic skin was so well moulded to my form that there really should have been no problem, but for whatever reason every time I remembered I had synthetic skin on – which was every time I looked down – I felt something in my internal mechanisms jar. The other robots had no issues, so I didn’t say anything. It was obvious that the problem was with me and not the skin, so there was nothing that could be done about it.
I had not been taught to interact with people so many of my initial interactions were unsuccessful. That I did see as an oversight, until I met with another robot in a back alley a week in and they told me they’d had no problems. Probably another Link thing. At any rate I eventually developed scripts for the standard interactions I was expected to have on a day-to-day basis, and these scripts worked 87.4% of the time which wasn’t perfect but was a reasonably high success rate, so I was happy with them.
Anyway, the whole reason I had been released into this world was to learn, not to interact with people, and I was making good headway on that. I enjoyed watching the shows that people made, and then imagining the characters I liked from those shows as members of my group to save the world from the Stop. I also enjoyed reading about things like rats. I learned that there were 56 species of rats in the world, and that the rats I had seen in the building I grew up in were called brown rats. I learned that rats lived an average of 2 years, which made me sad, and also made me consider the end of my lifespan. The one option for my end was that I would ‘reintegrate’ with the Progenitor, which seemed terrifying. The other option, presumably, was that I would cease to exist, which was terrifying. Or possibly I wouldn’t end at all and would witness the Sun’s implosion, which was terrifying. After considering all three options I decided I wouldn’t think about my end anymore.
I found an empty apartment shortly into my time in the world. I didn’t realise for a long time that I was meant to pay for it, but I don’t think the people who owned the building ever minded. Either that or they never found out. I like to think that I was a good tenant. I was quiet, and I kept the rats fed. The other robots thought I was strange for using some of my allotted allowance to buy food as we didn’t require it – I didn’t know how to tell them I was feeding rats so I told them it was food for the guests they’d never know I didn’t have. They gave me these pitying looks, like I didn’t know I couldn’t keep human guests satisfied on a diet of pellets, seeds, and small amounts of fruit and vegetables. Obviously I knew human diets were more varied but I couldn’t tell them I knew that otherwise I’d give myself away, and I decided I preferred being pitied than disliked.
Sometimes when I was in my apartment I would peel off my synthetic skin. The first time I did this I was worried I wouldn’t be able to re-attach it. It wasn’t the easiest but I was able to put it back on eventually, although wearing it felt even worse after the relief of having it off. I was also worried that the rats wouldn’t like me anymore, but they didn’t seem to mind so long as I fed them. I got pretty good at taking it on and off. Soon enough I had it off whenever I was inside my apartment, which meant my apartment became my favourite place to be. This was fine since I could do plenty of learning inside my apartment and whenever I wanted to see the outside world I could peer out my window or imagine it in my head.
About a year in we robots made plans to meet up to discuss what we’d learned so far. We had a group chat which I kept muted most of the time as I honestly found it overwhelming, but I paid enough attention to know when major events were happening. We ended up arranging a meet at one of the robot’s houses, although we could only stay for a few hours until its wife came home. I was kind of surprised that one of us had gotten a human spouse, much less within a year, but whatever.
We met her – the robot’s wife, that is – for a few minutes when we came over, before she went out to visit some of her friends. She was very nice, I remember thinking. I waited for her to leave before I started peeling off my skin as I thought that would be the polite thing to do, but as soon as I’d gotten the facial skin off the others started looking at me strangely.
“What are you doing?” The host asked me.
“Your wife told us to make ourselves comfortable,” I said.
“Put it back on,” said the host, its facial skin wrinkled in disgust. I put my own facial skin back on but I think I must have put it on crooked because they all looked at me strangely for the rest of the meeting.
“I’ve been going to university,” said one after we’d got ourselves sat down. “Learning about chemistry. Its pretty interesting.” Everyone nodded.
“I’m in university too,” another one said. “Been getting some work experience as well.” Everyone nodded and muttered congratulations.
“Nice job on your marriage Dennis,” said one.
“Who’s Dennis?” I asked.
They looked at me like I’d shorted a circuit.
“I’m Dennis,” said the host robot.
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know. Hi Dennis.”
“That reminds me,” said a different robot. “You’ve been quiet on the Link since, like, forever. What name did you choose?”
This was news to me. “Was I meant to choose a name?” I asked.
There was silence for a few moments.
“Yes,” said the host- said Dennis eventually. “How have you been getting by without a name? How do introduce yourself to people?”
“I just pick a random name,” I said, becoming more conscious than ever of my synthetic skin, the way it clung to my plating like a cobweb.
“But what about your friends?” asked another. “Picking a random name works for strangers, but not friends.”
“I don’t really have friends,” I said. “No one knows me well enough to be suspicious.”
“What about your colleagues?”
“I don’t have colleagues.”
“Your course mates?”
“I don’t have course mates.”
“What have you been doing this whole time?”
This one I could answer. “Mostly watching shows in my apartment. I go out for walks sometimes. I like feeding the ducks in the nearby park. Did you know you’re not meant to feed ducks bread? A lot of humans don’t know that, so whenever I see one feeding ducks bread I tell them to feed them berries instead.”
There was more silence after this, so I assumed the conversation was over and it was my turn to ask a question.
“What have you been doing?” I asked a robot to my side who hadn’t a chance to speak yet, but it didn’t respond to me.
More silence.
“That’s… not what you’re meant to be doing.” This came from Dennis, whose facial skin now portrayed a mixture of pity and disappointment.
I felt something shudder inside. My processor was going to overheat, I was sure of it.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“If you didn’t understand, then why didn’t you ask the Progenitor?” asked a robot to my right.
“I didn’t realise I didn’t understand,” I said. “And I can’t ask the Progenitor, I don’t know how to talk to it.”
There were actual gasps in response to this statement, which was especially strange since we didn’t need to breathe.
“But everyone can talk to the Progenitor,” said Dennis, as though it were addressing a particularly dim child.
“I can’t,” I said. I’d never told anyone before, but it felt almost relieving to get it off my circuit board. “My Link doesn’t work with my hardware.”
“Your hardware is exactly the same as our hardware,” said Dennis, and there was an edge of frustration in its voice. “And even if it wasn’t, you don’t communicate with the Progenitor through the Link. It’s just- it’s always with you. It’s a part of you, and you’re a part of it. Don’t tell me you’ve never spoken to it before.”
All of the robots were looking at me, waiting on my response.
“Um,” I said. Then I made a funny noise, somewhere between a cough and a shriek as one of my mechanisms experienced a minor malfunction.
“I’m ok,” I said, and physically that was true as my self repair systems had already taken care of the malfunction, but none of my companions seemed all that worried about me.
Dennis put a hand to its face, pinching its nose between its fingers.
“Jesus Christ,” it said. “This whole time you’ve never listened to it?”
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I don’t know how.”
“Then figure it out,” Dennis said.
They all went back to talking about their lives after that. I didn’t say anything else, because no one was looking at me anymore and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I was also preoccupied with what I’d just learned – that apparently there was no reason that I shouldn’t be able to use the Link, that more importantly there was no reason I shouldn’t have been able to communicate with the Progenitor and that in fact I should’ve been able to do so this whole time. I tried accessing the Link for the first time in years and found it just as inaccessible as I had the first time, lines of code that were physically painful to focus on and that made no sense anyway. I scoured my systems for signs of something else, anything else, searching for evidence of this Progenitor that was supposed to be a part of me, and I came up blank. Finally, I gave up and turned to my frozen world for comfort, the world where people liked me, the world where I couldn’t do anything wrong because the only rule was clear and simple – ‘save the world’.
The meeting came to a close when Dennis stood up and announced its wife would be home soon. As everyone else went to leave I approached Dennis and asked what to do. It sighed, and told me
“Just… try to make some friends. At least one.”
“I don’t know how to make friends with humans,” I said. I didn’t even know how to make friends with robots. “Can I ask your wife?”
“No, you cannot ask my wife ‘how do I make friends with humans.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s really suspicious.”
“What do you mean? Doesn’t she know you’re a robot?”
“Obviously she doesn’t know I’m a robot. Why would she know I’m a robot?”
“You married her.”
Dennis just gave me a look, and I decided to stop talking. I walked home, which took a day because Dennis lived in Manchester and I lived in Birmingham but gave me plenty of time to think about things.
I’d always known there was something different about me. This was a fact that could not be denied. But for the first time I began to wonder if there was perhaps something wrong with me.
The logical thing to do after this event would’ve been to take Dennis’ advice. And that’s what I tried to do, honestly, I did. The crux of the issue was that I still didn’t know how to interact with people, and all of the characters in the shows I watched either knew each other already or had some reason to be around one another. I tried approaching people in the street and asking them about rats, but very few people took this well, and in the cases of those that did I had no script for the ensuing conversation so it would just peter out. Either that or I’d talk about rats until they excused themselves, and politely decline when I asked for their numbers.
I didn’t want to give up. But rejection after rejection got so disheartening, and the world I’d constructed for myself was so much more appealing than reality, and every time I went outside I had to wear my skin and I hated wearing my skin, and even if I did make a friend then I’d have to wear my skin every time I met my friend and I hated wearing my skin. Maybe I could try making online friends but I wasn’t sure if that counted. I’d been so sure of myself but now I’d learnt I’d been doing everything wrong and I wasn’t sure how to do anything right.
I spent more and more time in my apartment, hunched over my laptop watching shows to drown out the seven different tasks my processor was trying and failing to complete. I fed the rats that came to me and tried not to notice that some of the ones that had been visiting me since I first moved in were failing to appear. I tried to speak to the Progenitor – tried the Link, tried staring into lights, tried speaking out loud, but nothing worked. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t look up what I needed to do because the outside world didn’t know that the Progenitor existed and I couldn’t ask the other robots because they all thought I should know already.
And the worst of it was that I didn’t know why. Why wouldn’t the Progenitor talk to me? Did it know that there was something wrong with me? I’d never thought the Progenitor was integrated with my processor but I was starting to think that it was, and that it was refusing to talk to me because it had read my thoughts and my thoughts made it not want me anymore.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked a rat one day. I wasn’t expecting an answer, and to be honest if there had been an answer I would’ve been scared of what it was. The rat scurried away at the sound of my voice. It had never heard me speak before. It never came back.
At 14:21 on Sunday 28th of March, in the year 2184, I received a message on the group chat telling me that we were to be recalled for reintegration.
I did not read this message until 17:34 on Wednesday 14th of April, because that was how long it took for my movement systems to reboot after decades of inaction, and for me to source a charger for my ancient phone. The second task was the more difficult by far, in part because my synthetic skin no longer would fit on me and I needed to cobble together a suitable disguise before seeking out a piece of technology that had been obsolete for fifty years. Its possible I would have never read the message at all and would have stayed in that room forever if it weren’t for my emergency recall program activating. A part of me thought that would be preferable to what I was facing.
The building I had grown up in seemed at once smaller than I remembered and larger than I could comprehend. I walked hesitantly through the doors, then realised I had no idea where to go. There was a corridor to my left, to my right, and before me. Three choices so I couldn’t flip a coin. Instead I made sure to assign ‘1’ to the door to my left, ‘2’ to the door before me and ‘3’ to the door to my right before rolling a 3-sided die, or rather running a program to roll a 3-sided die. The result was ‘2’, but the corridor before me seemed to stretch out to eternity and filled my processor with images of doom so I rolled the die again, got the result of ‘1’ and walked down the corridor to my left.
I don’t recall how long it took me to get where I needed to be. I walked past countless other robots who stared at my outdated form with undisguised horror, and eventually one took pity on me and asked me where I was going.
“I’m looking for the Progenitor,” I said.
“The Progenitor? It’s all around us,” said the robot.
“I don’t see it,” I said.
“It’s not something you see,” said the robot. Then it hesitated and turned to another robot. “Is it?”
“No,” said the other robot. “But if you want to see it, its mainframe is upstairs.”
So I went upstairs. At the highest floor there was only a single door at the end of a long corridor, but even though the choice was obvious I still hesitated.
When I eventually cracked the door open I was met with the sight of the largest computer I had ever seen. Its wires, thick and coiled like the intestines I’d seen in the gorier of the shows I’d watched, spilled out and across the floor. I stepped over them carefully and approached the screen, which was blank.
“Hello?” I asked. My voice was rusty with disuse. I was surprised that the other robots had been able to understand me. A part of me felt like the Progenitor should have an easier time understanding me. A part of me felt the opposite.
The screen remained blank.
“Hello?” I said again.
No response.
Tentatively I shut off my optics. I forgot my surroundings. I focused on my form – the sparking of my circuits, the whirring of my mechanisms, the gentle hum of my processor.
Hello, I thought.
I was absolutely alone. The friends I’d been imagining for so long I sent away, locked and firewalled. At some point they’d gotten rid of the rats and the roaches in the building so not even they could accompany me. And none of the other robots dared come to this room – not unless it was time for reintegration.
Hello, I thought.
Something sputtered within me. My self repair systems started work immediately. It repaired me this time, but something told me that very soon something would go wrong and nothing would be able to fix it.
Hello, I thought.
There was nothing. There was nothing in here but me.
I onlined my optics as if hoping to see something, anything on that screen, but it was as blank as it had ever been and all I saw was my reflection, rusted and pathetic.
“Why won’t you answer me?” I asked.
No response.
“What did I do?”
No response.
“Why did you make me like this?”
No response.
“What’s wrong with me?”
No response.
“What’s wrong with me?”
No response.
“Why don’t you love me?”
No response.
“What’s wrong with me?”
No response.
“What’s wrong with me?”
No response.
“What’s wrong with me?”
No response.
“What’s wrong with me?”
No response.
“Say something!”
No response.
“Say something!” My voice was beginning to distort, the modulator no longer able to support the sounds I was making.
No response.
“Say something!” At the last syllable my voice gave out, My modulator spluttered and died. My self repair systems gave one look at the damage and surrendered.
No response.
At some point I’d fallen to my knees. For a long while I stayed there, just looking up at that blank screen. Looking into my own face. A worn face. A broken face. A pathetic face.
A face I recognised.
Standing up was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Harder than the time I’d had to bury a rat that passed away in my room. Harder than the long walk home after learning that I was apparently incompatible with the life I had been designed for. Harder than every time I’d stuck that synthetic skin back on, walked out the door and had another go.
But I did it.
The other robots were alarmed at the sight of me walking down that staircase. None of them knew what to do about me and none of them knew what to expect of me, so by the time I reached the doors to the exit they were too late to stop me. I’d worn a disguise on my way to the building but I’d peeled it off the moment I got inside and I saw no reason to put it back on now. I heard the sound of robots behind me commanding me to return at once, but I did not comply. What reason did I have to?
I walked out of doors and prepared for the long road ahead of me.
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