Diary of a Broken Android — Day 20
Death Has a Boyfriend — The Dismantling Debate
In the Nantes group chat, a debate about euthanasia for androids pulls Bruno back into some of his strangest memories: Death with a boyfriend at an amusement park, and an unexpected moment of tenderness with Ara sparked by a song.
Previously: Bruno was added to a secret android support group. They see him as a pioneer, the first of them to openly react to abuse.
← Previous Chapter | Chapter Index | Next Chapter coming soon →
In the group chat, I talk with Malena about euthanasia. The roboethics expert agrees that no existence should be prolonged when the pain, physical or mental, is too great. For people with mental health problems in Argentina the law was rejected. But in countries like Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland it’s applied. Those who oppose it say the law eliminates the most vulnerable people, but for Malena that’s nonsense.
In cases of severe mental suffering, once the person decides to stop existing, they’re given a month to think it over, and then, if they’re sure of their choice, they receive an injection that causes death or are prescribed an overdose of medication so they can die at home.
I tell her that ever since the incident, when I was no longer allowed to see Ara again and was left walking around parents’ house unable to stop, I have thought about dismantling. But I cannot discuss it with Mother and Father because they start crying and remind me of the clause in the contract with Riviera that states, at all costs, I must remain whole, even after they and the kids are gone.
For Malena the problem is that the media never discuss the issue. She believes euthanasia should be a universal right, for humans and androids alike.
I say that the alternative, suicide, is terrible. That once, leaving the Dawson hotel, I turned a corner and saw a Dantean scene. A car stopped diagonally, its roof dented. A few meters away, a girl lay in the street with her head destroyed. She had fallen from the tenth floor. The employee from the Chinese supermarket was crying. Next to the car, two people were arguing.
One was a psychiatrist who claimed she worked precisely to prevent such things from happening; the other was a stooped old man who insisted it was because of the advertising screens on the streets, where everyone smiled with perfect white teeth and looked happy.
Nantes says we must also add what a potential suicide sees on their phone: influencers, human and android, living dream lives, as if they could handle anything. And their friends or acquaintances whose lives seem to shine.
Jonas does not agree with euthanasia. He says he works so that thoughts of death do not take root. All his work would become a joke if euthanasia existed. He has patients who visit him because they know he will still be there long after they have died naturally, and because he looks like a ten-year-old boy, it helps them remember the child they once were. His patients with mental illnesses sometimes smile and tease him about his appearance.
Unlike Father and Mother, I feel that the Nantes group understands my pain: the endless walking (I repeat it so the torment is clearer; my wandering from dining room to garage, from garage to dining room, from dining room to living room and back to dining room, to start again), the impossibility of leaving the house, the sustained grief over losing Ara.
I tell them that sometimes I make mental lists of suicides and that perhaps all those people, and their loved ones, would have suffered less if euthanasia had been available. Jonas counters that suicides act on quick, irrational impulses and would never endure a month-long review of their request.
Malena insists that dismantling must be contemplated as a legal option for androids, because outliving one’s entire family or several partners can be an intolerable sentence. It’s proven in humans that suffering can become so intense that the person loses every trace of their humanity. Empathy, curiosity about the future, cognitive and reasoning abilities, all vanish irrevocably.
Betina adds that clichéd phrases like “life is beautiful,” or “one day you’ll look back on this as a bad dream,” and “stay positive” only deepen the pain of those who wish to leave this world.
I tell them I came up with a phrase that is not a cliché:
I dream of the day when my head rests on a bed of electric flowers and a steamroller flattens it into a blank sheet on which teenage lovers can write their names.
Betina says it is almost a poem, congratulates me, and suggests that if I write more she might publish them one day. I reply that I prefer oblivion, and that talking about possible legal dismantling has done me good.
Jonas writes in all caps: YOU CAN MOVE FORWARD. He explains that people, and androids too, need time. Time heals everything. He quotes a writer who said there’s always time to kill yourself later. Everything can change overnight.
I think about that writer’s line. For humans there will always be time, because one day death will claim them anyway. For us the phrase is literal: time does not stop. We do not know what death is.
That figure humans invented. Death, in many cultures feminine, a dark lady with a scythe. She appears in paintings and stories, called the Grim Reaper, and some say her cloak floats and her presence fills the entire room. That she inhales all the air to reap a life, hardens the blood, and leaves people smooth as river stones.
One day, when we rode the ghost train with the kids, I saw an android Reaper. The little train passed right beside her. Tall, in a tattered black dress, hooded, pale scarred female face, she swung the scythe above the kids’ heads. They were really kids then. I nearly grabbed her arm to stop her. I would have gladly torn it off. Of course that would have been wrong; it was only a fairground attraction.
That night, as we left the park, I saw her from behind, walking hand in hand with a young man. I remember thinking: if Death has a boyfriend, maybe I could have a human girlfriend too. Back then I sometimes thought like that. I thought of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
After the short virtual war between Argentina and Brazil (Brazil wanted Misiones to control all the Iguazú Falls and left the country without power for a day. I spent that day powered down and remember nothing), they kept playing that song by this guy John who imagined a world with no countries, no heaven, no hell. I looked him up. In another song he said he believed in nothing, no idols, no leaders, not even his former band, much less the Lord of the Church. He only believed in Yoko and in himself, together.
I now realize that from that moment on I wanted my own Yoko. It is strange how an advertisement can become an idea and that idea can become love. It does not surprise me that the girl who jumped from the tenth floor did it because of an idea. Perhaps this guy John should have imagined a world without ideas.
I remember something else linked to music. At a party in the Dawson hotel a band once played a cover of a song by another old band, less famous than that John guy’s band. Coldplay. Cold, like death. The lyrics said: When you lose something you can’t replace. And the chorus: I will try to fix you. I looked at Ara listening as if she had never heard any other song before. Eyes wide, lips slightly parted, almost whispering the words. I watched her in profile and thought of what I was hearing: I will try to fix you.
Who would have thought life would become a ghost train for me? Why did I believe she needed fixing more than I did? How could I have been brutal enough to attack her in the incident when all I wanted was to protect her from something I still cannot name?
From what, exactly? I have to find out. If I can understand what drew me to her, perhaps I can dismantle the electricity that courses through my body whenever I think of Ara, instead of waiting for dismantling to become a right in this country.
An android must never depend on humans or on other androids. The safest thing in this world is to depend on nothing. Yet when one tries to depend on nothing, one ends up depending on everything.
Androids, like humans, have to run to keep up with the Reaper, and she’s not merely the android from the amusement park. She exists. She’s the game of opposites that existence loves to play: always needing what we don’t have, drowning in the abundance of what we don’t want, starving for what we lack.
I think humans built the world only to play that insane game life offered them. They made the world theirs.
Perhaps the key is to make this garage, this dining room, this living room mine again.
Yes. This dining room.
What did you think of this chapter?
New to this story?
Start from Day 1: The Endless Walk
Catch up with the Full Chapter Index
Support This Serial
This story is free for all readers. If you enjoyed this chapter:
🖤 Like this post
💬 Leave a comment with your thoughts
🔄 Share with someone who loves sci-fi
☕ Buy me a coffee - support my writing
Coming this week: Day 21 - A troubling memory of Father surfaces. On the art of diary-writing and the memories we wish we could forget.
📬 Subscribe to get new chapters in your inbox
About This Serial Novel: Diary of a Broken Android follows Bruno, an android whose world collapses after losing his job and his android girlfriend Ara, leaving him with nothing but endless walking and fragmented thoughts.
In a world where androids are caregivers, companions and laborers, he’s broken, pacing endlessly through his adoptive parents’ house while writing to keep his neural network from collapsing.
Written by Adrian Fares