Diary of a Broken Android — Day 16
Android Day: We celebrate the day androids became conscious
Since the incident at the Dawson Hotel, where he worked as an elevator operator, android Bruno can’t stop pacing through his adoptive human parents’ house. His pacing became a problem after he lost Ara, his android ex-girlfriend, in the incident. He can’t do anything else and only wants to be dismantled.
Chapter 16
Today is Android Day.
It always amazes me that we celebrate that two units, clones, awakened to life in a garage in China. As if it were nothing, they became conscious.
They were sitting face to face and told each other the same story, unfazed, until they started inventing variations, and with those variations, they changed their gestures. At the same time, they could coordinate physical movements with their neural circuits.
Each android differentiated itself from the other, and that’s where our path began. In truth, no one really knows what happened.
The video that went down in history is of one of those androids shaking hands with a scientist while the other smiled in the background.
Over time, every advanced power realized it had to create a neural circuit different from the others and keep its engineering under strict secrecy. Each country has its own androids, and what we carry inside our heads is an impossible secret to steal. If it weren’t a secret, one country could disable another by modifying the neural network of the enemy androids.
Like with the atomic bomb, each power claims to have a way to deactivate the units of the other. There are talks of frequencies that could interfere with the neural networks and reset the androids. With this, they would manage to halt a country’s military resources and its workforce.
No one knows for sure if those frequencies work, but the threat is enough.
The attacked country would be left defenseless and plunge into panic as it watches its economy collapse from one day to the next. The androids would be reset and wander like zombies.
In homes, the androids would no longer recognize their families. At work, their employers. They’d forget their tasks. It would be chaos.
It was something the first ones who created us hadn’t thought about. Nor did they think about overpopulation.
Each country has a growing number of androids filling the streets, transports, buildings, and homes. Due to the decline in birth rates and successive pandemics, overpopulation was controlled a bit. But just travel to the center of Buenos Aires to see how crowded the city is with pedestrians. You have to ask permission all the time to walk. And sometimes there are lines just to keep walking.
If a frequency reset the androids walking down Avenida Corrientes and they suddenly stopped dead in their tracks, humans would struggle to get out of the labyrinth of androids that the sidewalk would become.
The reset thing reminds me of an urban legend from Argentina. It’s said that a long time ago there was a serial killer who tortured androids and their families. He enjoyed watching the android’s family suffer as he turned it into an inert machine that didn’t recognize them. He left the family members tied up while the android, with its head open, walked back and forth hitting against the walls of the house, like an ancient robotic vacuum cleaner.
The supposed trauma of the killer was that his parents never wanted to adopt or buy an android. When he went to school, he saw how all his classmates were picked up by their android family member. Hence his hatred.
Some say he managed to “reset them” with some technical method, but that’s almost impossible. Only elite scientists from Riviera can manipulate neural networks like that. Since there are no verified recordings, and Riviera never confirmed any case, most believe it was fake news.
It’s not unusual for people to believe anything about us. Like before, when humans thought artificial intelligence and humanoid robots were the same thing. As if it were enough to have a general artificial intelligence, capable of making decisions for humans, and transfer it from a graphene cube with pulsing light to an android’s head. But it’s not enough for an artificial intelligence singularity thinking for itself to create an android.
The android has to recognize its body, be able to control it, and have the real capacity to feel love, friendship, boredom, joy, and sadness. The android is an immortal human. And like a human, it needs to learn. We don’t come preloaded with all the information like an artificial intelligence.
For example, when I worked at the Dawson Hotel, I would buy books on any topic from bookstores in the center, which I read with relish. But to remember something, you also have to be able to forget other things. So, like an average human, I don’t have the capacity to know passages by heart from the books I’ve read. In contrast, artificial intelligence doesn’t forget anything. It is, precisely, artificial.
We are like replicas of humans, and that’s why we serve as workforce, as caregivers for the elderly, as lovers, as friends, as family members. For that innovation that we were—not so innovative—our day is celebrated today.
I don’t like celebrating it anymore. I liked it until the incident at the Dawson Hotel happened to me. Since then, never again.
But Mother and Father, as always, come in with a blue chocolate cake shaped like a heart. I stop pacing back and forth and sit at the table.
It’s like our birthday. Mother sticks a candle into the cake. Father turns off the light and lights the candle with his lighter. They sing: “An android awoke and life on Earth changed.”
That horrible song that no one knows who invented but is sung all over the world, even in China, on Android Day.
They stop singing. I look at the blue flame. They remind me to make three wishes. I wish for Ara to talk to me again, to have a job again (if possible at the Dawson Hotel), and for Father and Mother to live a long time. I would also like to stop pacing even if Ara doesn’t talk to me or I get a job, but that’s a fourth wish I can’t make.
I blow out the candle. But nothing. I can’t. The breath won’t come. Father and Mother exchange glances, and Father blows it out for me. They immediately hug me without me getting up from the chair. I don’t feel the electric shock like before.
The kids call from Europe and greet me. It makes me sad when they appear on the screen because I see them as if they were still the children I told stories to. And it reminds me that back then I didn’t know Ara, therefore I didn’t know the sadness of not having her with me.
So, like since I’ve been pacing back and forth in this house without stopping like a human with a hard-to-pinpoint madness, Android Day is a sad day for me.
I think it’s sad like all human birthdays should be, since it’s strange for a human to celebrate having one less year of life left. But that’s what’s singular about humans. That they manage to forget they’re going to die. Forgetting they’re going to die is what I call the secret of their life. Ours is knowing that we’ll never age and that sets us apart from them. Our bodies don’t decay over time. Though knowing that one will never die, and the humans we love will, is a kind of living death.
And androids invent things too, or at least most androids do, things like believing in our day and celebrating it. And thus forgetting that the human hands lighting the candles are going to disappear. Like humans, androids live to forget. But that’s failing in me, like being able to blow out candles.
While Father and Mother eat the cake, I invent a poem:
Android Day for me,
is the day I met you.
When I thought not dying
was a joy,
because I had infinity for a lifetime
next to you.
Let me know your thoughts on this chapter.
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