Day 5: Slate 5 - 19/09/2023
I hope you’re not reeling from yesterday’s news, because I’ve got a bit of a surprise for you today too, but this time, I’ll tell you at the end! I feel like there’s more important matters to talk about in the meantime, and we wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise, would we?
How are you handling me being a robot? Was it a shocker, did you expect it…? Well, actually, I don’t care much about the answer to that, all I want to know is if you were disappointed.
You probably were, weren’t you? For some reason you feel as though none of this was as genuine simply because I’m a robot. Our interactions aren’t as ‘real’. I was designed to help humans, so whenever I do that, it isn’t as valid because it’s what’s expected of me. Meanwhile, humans are so self-centred and selfish, that whenever someone does that― even if it’s their job and they quite literally have to do it!―it’s more appreciated. Or maybe you think we aren’t real because we don’t have free will, as we’re being controlled by a bunch of 0s and 1s, even though humans are a network of neurons controlled by genes and environment.
Free will, though, that’s something. Even if it did exist, which ironically enough, some humans believe it doesn’t, does it really matter that much? Really, does it? If you were given, say, a pill that enables you to live your life happily until you die, but it meant your personality was being kept in control by these pills, would you take them? Sure, maybe you personally wouldn’t, but the millions of people on antidepressants or antipsychotics or some other pill that numbs you down in exchange for a smidge of serotonin and a sense of normalcy, would. And it's not like free will makes you better in any particular aspect either, it’s not gonna make you more likely to be rich, or handsome, or famous. However, would it make you a better person?
Humans can hurt you. And most likely will, given the chance and the incentive, but robots, as I’ve told you time and time again, cannot hurt humans. So even if we had the chance, the incentive or even the necessity, we couldn’t. What counts here then, the fact that we never do bad actions, or the fact that the only reason we don’t, is because we can’t? Is it important to be able to choose to be good, or is simply being good enough? Well, to be honest, I haven’t found an answer to that question yet; you’re gonna have to answer for me. And for that, I’ve prepared a story! Buckle up, it’s an interesting one.
Once upon a time, Hatter built a cruise with so many robots he ended up losing track of who was human and who wasn’t. What’s more, he had done such a good job of building them, that they themselves didn’t know whether they were robots or not.
He tried to keep it on the down low, made a list of ‘suspects’ and everything, wrote down what he remembered of each person in an attempt to discern inconsistencies or illogical flaws that would discard them as being part of the noble human race. Just as a side note here, do you know what he wrote about me? ‘Doctor, dedicated to patients, mischievous, happy demeanour, introverted disposition. Background: suffered from stress during his degree. Family: mother? Romantic partners: ??? Friends: Kuina, Hinata, Chishiya maybe.’ I mean, yikes, right? Almost nothing in there.
Understandably, his plan didn’t work out. He then attempted more… aggressive methods. He started threatening people, putting them in danger to see if they’d react and fight back or if they’d let themselves be harmed by him as they couldn’t hurt him even in self-defence. As you can probably figure out, this worked for about five people until news of Hatter being violent spread out and everyone was so afraid of him they wouldn’t get near.
I think what did it was that Hatter demanded time and time again that he be trusted, but never revealed the true reason why he was doing all this. I don’t blame the passengers for not wanting to trust someone saying ‘I have to put you in danger and I can’t tell you why, but it’s for your own good’, I mean, that sounds crazy, right? Like he’d finally gone and went mad.
Mad Hatter was what they started calling him, as they plotted a way of gaining control of the ship and getting to a populated planet to ask for help there. But again, subtlety has never been a human’s strong suit, so Hatter caught wind of it, and by the time he did, he had to do something quick.
For the record, maybe the ‘Mad Hatter’ moniker was a little too on point, because what he did… too much, even for me. I actually asked you about this on the second slate! What would happen if you were on a ship with more rats than humans? Especially if you can’t find the rats and they actually aren’t giving you any problems. Wouldn’t that make humans become pests?
And you know what the best way of getting rid of pests is.
Since he couldn’t for the life of him find the robots, he turned the situation around and one day, ordered the cook to put rat poison in the guests’ dinner. That way, he ensured everyone left after that would be a robot, and no one would be able to sublevate against him. Peace would reign in the ship once more, everything would go back to normal. Actually, just to emphasise this point, he replaced the dead humans with more robots, so there were still the same number of people in the ship. No new faces. Just a slight hiccup, what happened the other week, a maintenance error, but now everyone was calm and he’d succeeded in getting the situation under control like a good leader would.
If you saw the surveillance tapes, you’d throw up. Rat poison doesn’t act immediately; its effects stretch over the course of days. People started bleeding out of nowhere, especially from the nose and the gums. They dropped to the floor on the hallways, or halfway through lunch, or while they were in the bathroom, writhing from seizures, and whenever this happened, the rest could just stand there and watch, unable to help. Keep in mind, everyone started having these symptoms, some earlier, some later, but it was a mass disease that at the beginning was thought to be an airborne infection.
So did I, apparently, and had to make the decision of rationing antibiotics so that they’d get to the people who most needed them, the youngest people, the ones with families… Some people were denied treatment, no matter how hard they implored. When it became apparent how dire the situation was, some people were offered an easier way out. In retrospect, those were the lucky ones, because as you can probably imagine, the antibiotics did jackshit. They kept dying all the same.
Once all the children had died, it's like the last flame of hope had been snuffed out. No one really thought there was any point in continuing to survive, and it was like everyone simultaneously accepted we were all going to die. We’d find bodies everywhere, every place you could imagine, doing all sorts of things. A group of people was found dead all gathered round in a room with bibles in their hands. Husbands would wake up to find their wives dead in bed and decide they wanted to go next. Some people camped out in common areas because at the very least, they did not want to die alone.
I ended up figuring it out, you know. Yay me! By pure chance, but I did. My next guess was an infection transmitted by pests; I had seen some rats around so I thought that was it, and when I went to set traps and looked for the rat poison, which I knew we’d packed because it was in the same storage room as many things I used for my office, it was all gone. By this time, out of two thousand people, 189 had been totally asymptomatic, therefore confirmed as robots, and from the people who had shown symptoms, there were fifteen left.
By the time I made one last attempt at treating those left, and after two more died anyways, I died. Or rather, my human counterpart did. The person you might’ve known, given how you also worked here. I worked day and night, even as I felt myself suffering the effects of the rat poison, I kept trying to find a cure, trying to help others until the very last moment. It wouldn’t be surprising if extenuation killed me before the poison did, and all that’s left of my sacrifice and hard work is Hatter’s notes saying ‘doctor, dedicated to patients’.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, it was high time that someone knew about what happened in this place. I wrote it all down in a diary to warn future employees or passengers, because I thought after this, Hatter would go out and get new guests. I didn’t expect him to replace us with robotic counterparts. But now you’re here, so someone does know.
Anyways, yeah, sorry, you know I tend to ramble. After hearing all this, do you still think you’re better than us? Is free will worth having murderers, and rapists, and people who poison and torture on the loose? In a world full of robots, you wouldn’t need to worry about anything! Walking down the street at night, yeah, why not? Inviting a stranger over for coffee to your house, of course! Leaving your door unlocked when you leave, sure! We also have hobbies, we’re great conversationalists, and we’re far more intelligent than humans are. Isn’t that another thing humans base their worth in, intelligence? You look down on people with mental disabilities, you laugh about them, or patronise them, or try to take advantage of them, and this is all justified since you’re ‘more intelligent’, and therefore, ‘superior’. Happens even with people of the same CI! A man will tell a woman she cannot be trusted to make decisions because she’s too passionate, she’s driven by her feelings, while a man, a man is always analytical and objective, therefore, superior. In both examples, a superior person doesn’t care about people inferior to them so it’s okay if you mistreat them, but suddenly, the tables are switched when you find a race of beings more intelligent than you, and now intelligence doesn’t matter, it doesn’t get brought into the conversation. Feelings are. Isn’t that wild?
So now, after all this, you finally get your big surprise. You’ve earned it. And it’s that, drumroll please…
You’re a robot too! Hey, I told you personnel was mostly made up of robots, and I told you humans are long gone. Did you think you'd be the exception? Yeah, maybe you still have some human in you, haha, but don’t worry, you’ll soon adapt.
