BOBBY LINK | THE COG | ANDROID 1.0 | 65
You’re a remnant of the old world, a relic of Luytan origins which has been condemned and demonized by humans and aliens alike. Robots shouldn’t feel, shouldn’t have their own evolving moral compass. They think you’ll decide one day that living things aren’t worth surviving, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Killing someone would make you hurt inside, make tears prick at your eyes. You hide in plain sight, pretending to be the human they say you could never be.
“They won’t listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don’t want the truth; they want their traditions.“
— Isaac Asimov (Pebble in the Sky)
You were not made to be perfect, you were made to be.
Those were words Abe heard from the moment he opened his eyes.
Though he did register every single moment from every single second of his life (Life? Was it really life? He questioned it because of the Earthlings but he had always been told he was alive.), though he had registered every moment of the lives around him, everything was always a surprise – the soft and nuanced difference between formal records and memories.
By the hands of Eridanus, ABL 1X-2 was woven. His creator was an old scientist, a respected inventor with an eye to detail that had brought into life, even if many disputed the fact androids were never truly alive. Abe was Eridanus’ and Saiph’s masterpiece, the inventor and her wife, living alone after raising three children, had dedicated their days to create something more than a “mere” robot. They didn’t want a house servant, they didn’t want a pet. They wanted to relive the years of raising children, of watching someone be amazed by life and the world, by all the new possibilities.
From the mechanic work of Eridanus and from the brains of Saiph, Abe’s series was brought unto life. Like a child, they did not give him more than basic pre-programing, language and motor skills, basic understanding of their world’s functions. They wanted him to learn and experience for himself – he was an experiment of sorts, like his whole series. If he learned things by himself, would it make a difference? What was the difference between programming knowledge into a positronic brain and letting said brain record information by itself? Would it make the ABL series more alive? They had a million experiments with artificial intelligence but they wanted further, they wanted sentience.
The answer, came in time – it did. Abe wasn’t the only one of his kind but the people who “raised” him, were one of a kind. Eridanus, Saiph and their three adopted children – Rasalas, Wasat and Polaris, they were his family and for a long time, he never questioned his existence as a being. But his “parents” wouldn’t let him off the hook that easily, they wanted him to be self-aware and beyond that. The ABL series was supposed to be sentient, to be alive. They couldn’t mimic all of the biological components to suddenly make a living character but they could try.
Abe read their stories and listened to their songs, he learned to have emotions, feelings and he had pain receptors. You’re like us but nothing like us, that doesn’t make you any less of who you are. Saiph told him, as they walked alongside the glass beach one day, her arm tightly linked to his. But he did not age and his family did. After him, many other generations came, many other androids – but none like the ABL ones. The work of a lifetime for a team of scientists, others like Eridanus and Saiph that had dreams of creating something beyond them.
But what taught him most was living around the three children of “his own parents”. ABL was brought into consciousness when Wasat and Polaris, twins, were mere ten years old and Rasalas twelve. In a way, he raised them as one would his own children or younger siblings – an odd relationship to say the least, all things considered. But the three younglings accepted him after some time, though of all three, Wasat was the one who took more to Abe. Most of days he spent learning, helping Eridanus and Saiph in their respective fields of study but also helping with the children and Wasat took to his side like a duckling.
From the boy, Abe learned how to question the world with the eyes of a child and while Wasat would grow into an adult, Abe’s worldview would forever be initially shaped like that. The world was a wondrous place and nothing was impossible if only you could believe. Abe and his “siblings” were best friends and often the android would try to take the blame for something it wasn’t his fault, or hurt himself in order to protect them. Not because he had to, since it was not in his core programming but because he wanted to. As soon as his makers realized that behaviour, they realized their creation was more alive and conscious than they could have expected.
ABL 1X-2 might’ve not been aware of that but he loved his family and they loved him back.
He was eighteen years old when his homeplanet found Terra, Earth as they called themselves. While Abe had spent his days by his parents’ side, he was their assistant in a way – the same artificial intelligence that navigated the ship that found Terra was his friend. In a way. Soon enough he and his family moved to the new planet, to explore, to learn. They were a family of scientists, after all.
Being physically a machine, Abe adapted fast to the planet – he could, at last, change his mechanical parts, update himself so he would be useful to his family, to his kind.
“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two
What did not happen was the planet adapting to him. Well, not quite the planet but its population. In his own opinion, Terrans were primitive, though not quite as primitive as other species in their own planet and they were like ignorant children, unaware of the wonder of their own world and the possibilities it represented. Most times Abe lied to those Terrans and they accepted he was a regular Luytan, always walking by Eridanus’ side and being called child or some other endearment form. Abe was often the one sent to recognition tasks around the new world – after all, his memory was vastly superior to that of any biological Luytan.
Time passed by like that. He had a family to go back to, he had a developing positronic brain and a life purpose. He was there to help his family and to make them happy, he was there to study Terrans in the same way they had studied everything else. Abe was always self-aware of who exactly he was. Non biological, slightly different in conception from his makers but he had feelings, hadn’t he? Emotions? He felt pain and cold and hunger – he didn’t need to feel those things, but he did. At night, he read stories to Wasat’s children.
His family lived in a big place as it slowly grew, as Wasat, Polaris and Rasalas had families of their own but did not trust Terrans fully, so they all lived around each other. Abe never aged. In no moment his family, his handlers, the friends and people around him had ever lied about his nature but Terrans had never fully asked either, at least not at first. Some knew, some didn’t – most Terrans deemed he was a particularly emotive Luytan that had better eyesight than others. Odd. Well, odd for an alien, maybe.
His years on Earth and his adaptational built made Abe assimilate Human and Centaurian traits along his Luytan programming and nature, though his core code would always be Luytan, he was an evolving piece of technology that could often rewrite his own protocols. Among his family and community members he was always the same, mirroring their behaviour nicely but regarding other species, Abe understood they needed more empathy, that “acting Luytan” would put them off. He understood concepts of emotions, lies, secrets and love – he understood feelings, he wanted to understand life like all of them. And life was an amazing thing.
That started putting people off. Maybe it wasn’t only him, maybe it was all of his kind – once he heard wolf in sheepskin. These creatures, stronger, smarter even than the smartest species, immortal and with no ruling codes over them, free to come and go as they pleased, connected to the very technology that was the basis of their governments. Terrans and Centaurians alike started to feel threatened by the Androids’ existence even if they could accept their need. Abe had never quite experienced that much hostility, sure some Terrans were uncomfortable when it came to androids but for a long time he had never been considered a threat. Why would he? He had the same moral compass as his family, weren’t they threats too? They were just as free to make decisions as he was, why then, he was deemed a threat?
As Eridanus and Saiph tried to work with the Terran agency and make a new line of androids, closer to what Humans wanted or at least felt more comfortable with, discord grew and the more shunned Abe and his kin were. The problem started when the second line of Terra-made androids was released.
As sensitive and sensible as the first ones but with the same penchant Terrans had to violence, malice and disregard for morality, fear struck all of the communities that then lived within Terra – Luytan engineers told them it was a sole case but said terror traced back right into the olden ones, like Abe. Though his family held tightly to him and forbid him from leaving anywhere that wasn’t solely Luytan, and though they considered shipping him back off to their homeland and avoid losing their very own family member, came the time the Luytan science council decided to appease the Terrans and dismantle all first-generation androids.
"Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein)
Wasat took his hand and put him in a car one day at three in the morning then made Abe drive them away. Don’t come back, he said, and Abe had never seen a Luytan cry before. Not like that at least and he wanted to reach out and wipe the tears with his fingertips but the expression also told him no to. His face was most unmoving, if not by the twitching corner of his lips, pressed into a thin line, the way his eyes gleamed, the knuckles gripped tightly around the hem of his shirt. It was 2021, Wasat, Rasalas and Polaris stayed all of the one day car journey with him. He didn’t need to ask why. The entire drive was his funeral and they were saying their goodbyes.
Abe said goodbye to Eridanus, Saiph, Wasat, Rasalas, Polaris, Titain, Suhail, Talitha, Scheath, Zaniah, Nunki, Ruchbach and Ogma. His family. His friends. The last member of his family he ever saw were the three children that no longer were children, he helped raise and loved, as they sat in an empty parking lot in Seattle, three thousand kilometers away from Albuquerque and millions of lightyears away from Luytan. The three of them sat, watching the sun rise together just once more. How many times had Eridanus and Saiph not come home and they all stayed ways past curfew, only so they could watch the planetary dance? ABL 1X-2 cried, Wasat, Rasalas and Polaris cried. You know what they want to do to you, we couldn’t let them. His children – his, his entire family, his community, they were good. They had kind hearts and they loved him as much as he loved them.
We don’t want you to die. Go, Abe, and don’t come back. Don’t ever come back.
His heart was broken and life as he knew, was gone.
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost
He didn’t have time to make a escape plan, well he never thought he would need one. But alone in Seattle, looked after for dismantling like all of his kind, Abe was given a backpack and a name to look after. A man in Vancouver, just a little ways beyond the border, who would give him a new name and a new identity. From a scientist to being an outlaw just for existing.
ABL 1X-2 was declared officially dismantled – by Eridanus and Saiph, whom had destroyed an old prototypical carcass, Abe was officially dead to the world and the first one he became was a man named John Smith. No one said he needed to get creative with a Terran name and starting from a clean slate mean there was much more work to get done, ABL never had to be entirely on his own before. Severed from his community and his people, he was akin of a orphaned young adult. No safety net, no nothing but himself to move forward.
The man in question that had decided to help him was a criminal terran man who had married a luytan citizen and took him into hiding, crafting him a new identity and pitying ABL’s situation, decided to teach how to get around in the outskirts of the law. He had to become more human than Luytan, he had to leave everything he knew behind or else his heart would give him away, and he’d never see his family again.
“John Smith” was what probably the alien impression of an average human man would be, he liked… stuff. And food! And he had gone to kindergarten, middle school, high school, college and grad school, and he was a lawyer. Looking retroactively, ABL had no idea how no real humans ever noticed who he was. But then again, no one was looking for him, no one would even consider his makers wouldn’t give him away.
“John Smith” lived incredible fifteen years with Sam Copper and his partner Castor. They weren’t quite as frowned upon all the way up in Canada as they would be down where the alien communities were bigger. ABL worked in the bar Castor had purchased and learned how to be a human, while pretending to be solely a Luytan. Sam Copper taught ABL the intricacies of human behavior and of… certain illicit activities. Forging papers, forging a new identity. With ABL’s knowledge of technology, they could make it seem like he had always been there, made up school histories, made up certificates, even photos. Sam made money from that scheming and ABL didn’t like it one bit but could not complain. He was being sheltered and protected by those same things, part of the money went to his own account.
Through the years he stayed with Sam and Castor, ABL changed his external appearance – there weren’t that many androids that he couldn’t be recognized sometime and he couldn’t risk being dismantled and having his family punished by lying. He stayed with the couple for twelve years and ten months before he perfected the updates on himself and on his looks, or as much as he could without his makers. Then he left.
Set to learn about Terrans, with his new con-artist (in a way) skills, “John Smith” travelled the world for sixteen years. Maybe if he learned enough, he’d be able to one day pitch his case, he’d be able to one day prove he wasn’t any kind of monster, but the more he travelled, the more he realized Terrans and Centaurians (and Tau Cetians eventually), wouldn’t recognize his “Life” any time soon. They needed to evolve and realize on their own, so he better not hold his metaphorical breath.
In 2050, “John Smith” died. And ABL set on his new identity, Adam Robert Link, a better and more appropriate name, with an actual decent track record so anyone who’d look into it had nothing to question about. As John Smith he couldn’t return to the United States without having every part of his life checked, paranoid as only those people knew how to be, but Adam Robert Link was unquestionable. An American citizen, Texan nonetheless. Forging social medias was easy, the documents were easy – the hardest part was going back to Albuquerque and not going after his family. Thirthy years down the road, he knew they were better off if things remained like this. He was happy to just be alive in the same place as they were.
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
THE CIRCUIT: You’ve fooled them, but not for long. They’re suspicious of you, it’s obvious from the way they look at you. If they found out your secret, it’d be off to a government lab to be poked and prodded at, ending in dismantlement. You’ll play human for as long as you can, blend in more seamlessly than anyone else. It’s all you can do to survive.
THE HAWKING: The only human to figure out your secret, they seem to be the other side of the same coin. Their heart is numb to emotions you so deeply feel, creating a kind of sadness that runs deeper than your programming. You’ll give them the best experience possible, try and give them at least a second-hand experience with feelings. They’re your best friend, they deserve the world.
THE MATRIX: They see you nothing more as a way to accomplish their goals, creating a new generation of thinking, feeling, self-sufficient androids. You let them open you up, look through all your hardware and programming. It’s not just for charity, you think if they succeed in their crazy idea, you might be free. You won’t have to hide anymore.
THE COG IS PORTRAYED BY COLIN O’DONOGHUE AND IS CLOSED
