Diary of a Broken Android — Day 8

Castaways and Suicides

Read from Day 1

Note: This chapter includes references to suicide.

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Alexander Selkirk was a Scottish sailor who lived in the most extreme solitude on an island for four years. He inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe. Luis Alejandro Velazco was a Colombian who survived ten days in the Caribbean after a shipwreck and inspired Gabriel García Márquez to write The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.

Chunosuke Matsuyama, an eighteenth-century Japanese castaway, died with his crew on a deserted island. He wrote a message on a coconut husk that reached Japan many years later. Ada Blackjack was an Inuit who survived in 1921 on an Arctic island after being abandoned by a group of explorers (she was there for two years). Pedro Serrano, a Spanish captain, survived a shipwreck in 1526 with a companion. He spent eight years on a Caribbean sandbank. Only he was rescued.

Due to technological advances, there are no more castaways, but I often think of them while pacing through the house. I see my own solitude reflected in theirs.

I also think of suicides, recent and past, like the writer Guy Mont, who jumped off a bridge, the dancer Dona Arzuaga, who threw herself from a three-hundred-twenty-story building, the brainrapper M. El Bueno, who leapt onto train tracks.

The musician Chris Cornell, who hanged himself in a bathtub, Horacio Quiroga, who swallowed a cyanide capsule, the poet Alejandra Pizarnik, who took fifty barbiturate pills, the writer Leopoldo Lugones, who drank a glass of whiskey laced with cyanide (for love).

Sylvia Plath, who stuck her head in a gas oven, Ernest Hemingway, who blew his head off with a shotgun, Jun Sadogawa, a Japanese mangaka who hanged himself in a park in his hometown.

David Foster Wallace, a writer, also hanged himself. Robin Williams, who played a robot in a movie, did the same.

And so I keep thinking about castaways and suicides. These are the days I feel the worst, when I need to be dismantled as soon as possible and want to see myself reflected in humans who thought and did something similar.

On the other hand, there aren't many reports of android suicides. Amanco, who threw himself from the 236th floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires, is one. And Sally, who jumped off a ship in the Pacific Ocean and was never found. The reasons for these suicides are unknown. I suppose both had some abnormality in their neural networks.

An android is incapable of harming its own body when properly manufactured. The same happens to me: when I climbed onto the house's water tank, not only did some neighbors quickly alert Mother and Father, who came to get me, but I was also unable to jump into the void. In any case, a fall from so few meters wouldn't destroy me.

Yesterday, I insisted to Mother and Father that I need to be dismantled, but there's no convincing them. They don't want to hear it because they say they'd die without me. That they'd have nothing left. Especially Mother. I tell them it's a right, like the one in Canada and other countries, where an incurably mentally ill person can request euthanasia. But Father gets angry, and Mother's eyes mist over.

They also remind me of the clause in the Riviera contract that prevents them from destroying me.

So I'm trapped in this endless pacing and must accept it. At least until androids have more rights over our existence. Morton sometimes tells me he wants to kill himself too, that there are days he can't bear that his family abandoned him, and I tell him not to do it. Especially not at the Dawson Hotel.

He says he'd leave his ghost there so the humans staying in his room would see it now and then. I tell him it's very unlikely for an android to leave a ghost. But he insists that if we have consciousness, we can leave ghosts like humans do. And besides, since ghosts don't exist and it's all suggestion, those who enter his room would feel something strange.

Maybe the electric oven would turn on by itself, by chance, and they'd attribute it to him, or the wall screen would shut off, or the lights would go haywire, and the humans would think Morton is still controlling the entire room from the void.

We agree that neither of us, like two castaways, will leave the other alone.

Morton scolds me again for continuing to pace inside the house and not leaving. He says I have to control it myself, that he doesn't believe it's a flaw in my neural network or a manufacturing defect (he thinks like Papa Armendia). Instead, he says it's merely due to the stress I experienced at the Dawson Hotel.

Since I do believe it's a defect in my neural network, we argue for a while. He wins in the end, saying we're all the same from the factory and that it's impossible for there to be a defect in my robotic brain. If that were the case, he says, he'd also have to blame Riviera for his family's abandonment due to his interest in psychology.

And he tells me something that hurts: that I might be justifying my moral failings by looking for an error in my neural network. Nothing, he says, absolves me of the responsibility for strangling the hotel guest or attacking Ara.

I tell Morton he's a harsh android. I pace faster from the living room to the dining room, to the garage, then back to the dining room, past the living room, and back to the dining room.

In the garage, I'm even tempted to climb the stairs and walk through the upstairs, where Mother and Father sleep and where the kids' bedrooms are (almost untouched, as they were when they were teenagers). I turn on the stair light. I turn it off. I go back through the garage to the dining room and continue my usual route.

I keep thinking about castaways and suicides.