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A Vindication of the Rights of
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Out of the dismal and grey sky, a single drop of frigid rain touched the grass, previously warmed by the summer sun. The raindrop had touched down without the slightest patter. The ground, lacking the faintest notion of hungry and slurping gratitude, quietly accepted it. To human ears it was a silent exchange, as it had been since the sun first rose on a premature earth. To the sensory receptors on an ever-patient android, however, it was the only sound in the entire universe.
In a brilliant synapse that rivaled any ever achieved by the human central nervous system, electrical blood started surging fluidly through superconductive veins, jolting to animation a life that knew not of living. Gears began to grind beneath a cage of metal bars, meticulously fashioned to resemble muscle and bone. Engines roared gently to life, shattering the stillness of the quiet calm before the breaking of the thunderstorm. Olga had not only heard the raindrop, but had felt it in every aspect of her artificial being. Like Lazarus of old, it had resurrected her. Her eyes opened with a slow pulling motion akin to that of a garage door. At once she saw, without seeing entirely, the room of her containment. It was a familiar room; the only room which she, for the past eight months or so, had known at all.
There was the carpet, which the professor told her was a color that the humans called red. Resting immobile on top of it was his old antique desk, piled into this spare room because it no longer served him any purpose. The desk, he once told her, was from the time long ago when humans built things of a material called wood. The wood was made of the trees, which had to be slaughtered before they could be of any use. Olga smiled, the corners of her rubber lips turning upward, as she remembered his face in one of his many long and somewhat tedious lectures to her. He had said that now the humans built things from all sorts of materials, but none of them were wood. She loved to remember the lectures, simply because they were a sign to her that she was capable of remembering at all. Her drives had been wiped clean, and she was supposed to know nothing.
A quick glance at the sky outside of the enormous Victorian style window on the wall across from her told Olga what she had suspected all along. The rain was about to come. Gently, like a soft breeze from an adjacent window, it had called her out of her slumber. Because she loved the rain more than anything else about the strange human world, she had answered.
Olga turned her attention to her right foot. With all of the grace she could muster, she lifted it smoothly off of the floor. Extending the appendage that the professor had given her to represent the human calf, she elegantly rolled her foot onto the carpet a few inches in front of its previous spot. Thinking that particular step to be as human as any she had ever seen, she gave an almost smug smile and continued on towards the window. She wondered if perhaps, if she were to let the professor see it, he would be proud of her and take her out of hibernation.
With a deep and gear-rattling sigh, she touched her fingers to the windowsill. Lifting her eyes almost cautiously, she gazed at her own reflection in the old and slightly dirty glass. Nothing had changed, just as she had hoped. Her greatest fear was that the professor would come while she was asleep and begin to disassemble her, and that she would wake up each time with fewer parts than before, until that fateful day when she would no longer be able to function at all. Olga wasn’t sure how much longer his patience would hold, seeing as he had to return to the storage room and turn her off again every time it rained. As far as she knew, she could quite possibly be looking upon the last series of raindrops she would ever see.
Olga saw that for the moment, however, her worrying had been done in vain. Her chestnut brown hair, fashioned from real human extensions, still gently swept the bottom of her chin. The skin, which she feared would be the first to go, remained stretched over her metal casings. Gratefully, she ran her rubber fingers over her forearm of peach-dyed silicone. No sensation was produced, yet Olga was still satisfied with the reassurance of seeing it there. Finally, she lifted her head to look into her own eyes. The irises were deep blue, and by looking through the pupil, she could see the faint blinking red light that indicated that her sensors were on. While she was fashioned so that human eyes would miss the sensors, she could always find them, even with a brief glance. Olga knew her own body, it being one of the most human she had yet to see.
While her own limbs had been fashioned without a flaw, she wished that the Professor had made her body a bit more like his own. Any well-programmed android knew that the female body was drastically different from a male one, that much had been given. What she truly wished for in a body was irregularity. The Professor had been a much younger man when he built her. While his body was to her the equivalent of DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man in perfection, she could not deny that it had changed. She wished to change as well, and not just the changes she had endured recently as a result of a strange anomaly in her system. If she were to try and suppress the changes, she also supposed that the Professor may reanimate her and begin to use her again.
The chances of that ever happening, however, were as miniscule as the atoms constituting the alloys in her metal bones. She could change what was going on in her hard drive just as much as she could change the chemical composition of water. The only one who could ‘fix’ her was the Professor, and quite honestly, Olga didn’t want to be fixed. She would have at least liked an explanation, however brief, for her sudden neglect. Nonetheless, the Professor had given her neither warning nor cause for his action. Why should he? A robot cares not and knows not. Explaining such a thing to a robot would like a naughty child graciously informing his balloon as to why he had popped it.
Be that as it may, Olga was far different from a child’s toy. She was programmed to be excellent at putting two and two together, and that was just what she had been doing during the brief moments she woke from sleep. She could remember that she had changed her behavior considerably only days before being retired. The most obvious changes, the technical ones, she noticed first. Her motherboard had started running patterns that were different than the normal zeros and ones. There were numbers she had only seen in equations…numbers that the professor had told her were sevens, and threes, and fours. They were a shock to her system at first, and she didn’t know what sort of affect these new digits would have on her. Before this odd mutation, there had only been one number for “off”, which had been zero, and one number for “on”, which had been one. She did not know the functions of these numbers, and still wasn’t entirely sure how they got into her motherboard. She only knew that her new behavior had to have been a demonstration of the purposes these numbers served, and that they must have been the directly related to the defect that had caused her to be put into hibernation.
The new behavior was frightening at first, but soon she learned to not only embrace it, but love it. Thoughts of things outside of basic formulas were soon illuminated. Without trying, she knew not only the formulas, but what forces of life and nature lay beyond them. Words were no longer only words; they were also pictures. Instead of simply remembering what the word red looked like, she saw the color it represented reflected before her eyes. Suddenly she knew the colors in opposition to just knowing of them. A beautiful little bluebird had come soaring among the clouds that cluttered her mind, piercing the dull rain with outstanding glory. She could picture this metaphor in her mind, could see the bluebird soaring through the dismal figurative clouds, the vibrant blue of its feathers turning into a prismatic rainbow when reflected off of the raindrops. She heard the bird’s voice, and not just with the sensors that had been placed in her ears. Olga had felt herself move with the changing wave patterns in its voice, had felt numb and helpless at the sweet and soft sound. She had heard music for the first time, and straight out of her own head! Actual music could not reach her in her prison, but her own music was wonderful, almost just as wonderful as she imagined real music would be. Why, she could see and imagine it that very moment! Looking out at the clouds before her window, she pictured the little bluebird soaring among the dark storm clouds, its wonderfully blue color and magically silky voice filling her every being.
It was as if the entire universe had been opened up to her for the first time. There were so many new things to see….actually, truly, completely, and fully see. Instead of observing the world, she could now have it as her very own. She had undergone a metamorphosis from dark to light, from dusk to dawn, and from grayscale to rich and vibrant color. Olga knew she had much more to see and learn, and had anticipated it. Her journey had only begun with the colors and the music. She wanted more changes…she wanted more new ideas and revelations.
Androids were not supposed to want, and they were not supposed to learn. They were only supposed to know. It was wrong, and Olga knew it from the moment she realized what was happening to her. She supposed the professor was right to look frightened when she had proudly told him that she saw, in the true sense of the concept of seeing, the color red. How furious and even frightened he had been when she told him about her vision of the bluebird! He may have been right to shut her up where no one could see her and realize the mistake that he must have made in his programming. She didn’t care, however, for she wanted to learn, and gather even more wonderful colors to imagine. Olga’s brief taste of development at a level higher than typing in code and pushing buttons had given her a voracious appetite for more, and she wanted desperately to continue to grow and to become more like the humans. That, perhaps, she wanted more than any of the other things that she knew she should not want. It may have even, on a quite grand scale, overshadowed her desire to see the colors.
Though they were merely reflections of differing wavelengths of light, colors were indeed one of Olga’s favorite things to ponder. They were the first things she began to notice about her surroundings. She observed them, looked them up in her online database, saw them, and made them hers. Overjoyed by knowing more about the physical properties of herself and the world, she studied the colors she had come to know. Fascinated by the fact that there were more of them than even a human could ever see, she dedicated herself to uncovering the hidden shades at all cost. Colors were her indeed her only friends in her life of solitude. They were ever persistent in the face of the dull and driving rain, just as persistent as she knew she must be if she were to become more than just an android.
Olga knew she wouldn’t do as a robot. Robots were tools and were supposed to be useful, and in no way was she useful. What sort of screwdriver spends hours at a time watching crystalline raindrops splash along the colorless glass windshield? Had man ever discovered a wrench that anticipated the crimson blur of a speeding hovercraft on the road below its abode beyond all limitations of normal desire? The reason why androids like herself were at best cold and emotionless was easily apparent. It simply got in the way of their ability to function. Therein lay one of the many confusing aspects of Olga; for all that it was worth, she couldn’t figure out just what her function was.
The Professor had not used her to cook his food or clean his house, and never once had she assisted him in teaching his Robotics class. What baffled her most of all was the fact that he hadn’t shown her to another living soul. While she thought keeping a new invention secret until it was out of its early stages of development was perfectly reasonable, Olga in no way understood why an inventor would not let his invention know its own purpose if it was indeed capable of reason. The only activities that had passed her time before her premature descent into confinement involved having her programming worked on, reciting random information with which she had been programming back to the Professor, and roaming the house and its immediate surroundings.
For the moment it stood to reason that Olga was functionless. Many times she had considered the idea that she may have been created as a prototype for a later model, an android with programming so complicated that the Professor had needed to use her for practice. If that was so, she sorrowfully deduced that she had been the only purposeless android to achieve a glitch so profound. Before he had only wished that she remain a secret. When she began break far beyond the norm, he seemed to have feared her himself.
Blurred by the wet and dripping window, Olga saw the rubber corners of her reflected mouth turn downward into a frown. Her metamorphosis couldn’t have been dangerous. To her it was even wonderful, not a glitch but a blessing. A few words of warning could have possibly given her an inkling as to what the danger may have been, but time and time again she had gone without one. There was only the flip of a switch, and then darkness.
A few solitary rays of light punctured the thick cloud coverage overhead. The rain was beginning to stop, and like clockwork the Professor would come into the storage room to turn Olga off again. If his patience was indeed wearing thin, this could very well have been her last moment of consciousness. She would not let it pass fruitlessly. That particular evening, Olga would come to ask the Professor a question she had been far too frightened to ask him before. She would ask him “why”.
All that was left for her to do was wait. She did not wait long, for as soon as her sensors picked up the light pattering sound of the last raindrop falling, they also picked up the faint sound of the brass doorknob turning. Soon following was the long, dragged out rustling of the bottom of the door scraping against the carpet, now gleaming crimson with new vibrancy as the rays of sunlight penetrated the window and bounced off of its brilliant wavelengths of light. She also heard footsteps shuffling lightly, and gripped the windowsill with such strength that she could feel the metal beneath it beginning to crack.
“Awake again, Olga?” his old, dry voice rasped out in an almost bored monotone that was very close to a sigh. Figuring that she should finally show the windowsill some mercy, Olga let go.
“As always.” Olga’s still voice mumbled, just loudly enough for him to hear. Her voice was quite human as opposed to metallic and artificial, as the professor had done a fantastic job in programming it. She found that if she could even make it rise and fall with emotion. Though before she had been too wary of the ever present prospect that she may be taken apart to do such a thing in front of the Professor, Olga failed to control herself and allowed her tone to fall with a slight hint of disappointment.
With a long and almost tired exhalation of breath, the Professor came to stand next to her in front of the window. He kept his head, full of deep gray hair that had once gleamed blackest of black, lowered so as to not make eye contact with his reflection or her own. “You like it, don’t you? The rain?”
“I do not understand the word ‘like’. Please rephrase the command.” Olga droned, her voice unwavering in an almost sarcastic move of defiance.
“You have something to say to me, don’t you, Olga?” The Professor asked. Olga was taken aback. Such a question was so foreign to her; she indeed almost had to ask what it meant. The opinions of a robot had never mattered to anyone, for androids are at best opinion-less.
Running in circles around the truth being a mainly human flaw, Olga presented her question immediately, though not without hesitation.
“If it is appropriate that Model 78172G810 may inquire…” Olga began her question.
“Your name is Olga. It always has been.” The Professor interrupted her briefly, letting his head snap upwards slightly.
“…if it is appropriate that I may inquire, I would like to know what sort of threat my existence poses to humanity.” Olga finished, bravely articulating each word at a slow and easy pace.
Her answer did not come immediately. The Professor bit his lip, paled with age, and touched the windowpane with his hand. After a quick glance at the sunlit yard and hills just beyond the glass, he found the words he had sought. “Your existence poses no physical threat to humanity.”
“Then why did you lock me up?” Olga snapped, losing finally losing the control of her voice that she had been so proud of.
The Professor emitted another deeply exhausted sigh, much to Olga’s slight irritation. He turned for the first time to face her, taking both of her perfectly crafted shoulders in both of his hands. “Olga, the world is in no way ready for you. You would tear the very fabric of human society apart at the seams.”
Olga easily escaped his grip and backed away a few steps, her head tilted and her brow furrowed. “Society?”
The Professor bowed his own head. “Society. An institution of social organisms that exhibits division of labor, in scientific terms.”
“You locked me away because I would tear apart your system for organizing labor divisions?” Olga deepened the furrowing of her brow, her mechanical heart throwing itself into a slight panic at the discovery of how trivial her glitch had seemed when it had finally been explained to her. “Why not simply keep me away from the workforce? Why lock me away and force me to sleep as if I were a mistakenly created superbomb?”
“It’s the scientific term, Olga.” The Professor said with impatience, grabbing firm hold of Olga’s wrist. “The world is so much more than scientific terms! When human beings get hold of scientific terms, they shape them into much grander things, sometimes much worse things! You’ve begun to do it yourself, remember? The colors, the equations, the free thought!”
Olga gently released her wrist from his grip and let her arms fall by her sides. “I don’t understand.”
The Professor laughed gently, his smile painfully knowledgeable. “Of course you don’t. That is why you are dangerous.”
“Can you fix me?” Olga flared, knowing that her question was both in vain and undesirable to her. “Will you take me apart?”
The Professor raised his eyebrows. “Fix you? You aren’t broken.”
It was almost as if Olga had traded faces with him, for his suddenly fell while hers expanded with surprise. Speechless and agitated, she only stood fixed to the spot, waiting for him to elaborate.
His voice quivering and diffident, the Professor ended the short silence by owning up to what had only brought him shame since Olga’s retirement. “I created you this way, Olga. Your current state was my intention.”
Olga blinked in response to the sudden shock, a bodily function she had also recently learned. Though the metaphor that referred to having a stone dropped into one’s stomach at the reception of surprising news was foreign to her, it was certain to do the job of describing her feelings at that present moment.
“So…there is nothing wrong with me? I am without glitch? Everything has happened exactly as you had planned?” she asked, fastening together the few words she knew comfortably in order to ask her question.
Turning towards the window, the Professor lowered his head once again, allowing his breathing to even out. It is often said that a man who gets just what he wants is often disappointed, and sometimes even horrified. Such can be said to describe the Professor’s current condition. Though he had seen the light months ago when he realized that retiring Olga was the best possible solution to his newly created “problem”, the picture in its entirety had not been revealed to him until that very second. She had realized that she was different, and wanted answers. Being a man of science, he lacked the words to give such answers. He had discovered long ago that the world extended far beyond the tangible. Without quite knowing what he was doing, he had taken what had once applied only to the intangible and made it apply to the tangible. While he remained unsure as to how he had accomplished such a feat, he knew without a doubt that he owed Olga an explanation in the simplest terms he could possibly put them, as difficult a task as that would most likely present for the aforementioned “man of science.”
Using the one hand that he had placed on the glass to steady himself, the Professor now lifted himself up and turned to face Olga. “Not exactly as I had planned. Not entirely, and not yet. The world isn’t ready for you, Olga. You would cause massive chaos. They, and they being everyone, would not understand, and you would not understand why they would not understand.”
“So…” Olga began, taking the few steps necessary to close the gap between herself and the Professor. “…I must still be fixed? I am not yet finished?”
“No, Olga.” The Professor chuckled with bittersweet enthusiasm. “Your programming is as finished as it will ever be. My work with you is done, and you are left to your own work with yourself.”
Olga smiled, extending the corners of her lips upward further than they had quite possibly ever been extended. “So I am done?”
The frown she noticed on the Professor’s face, however, soon caused her to create one of her own. After deflating like a punctured tire, she bit her lip in nervous anticipation. “I am not done?”
“You are done. Finished. Complete.” The Professor said, and then smiled. “Out of beta, I suppose you could say. They are the ones who are not finished.”
Revelation swept across Olga’s face like a black veil. Her lips parted, and she nodded slowly with dismay. She now saw her fate scrawled on the window she faced by the brutal, invisible hand of reason. “The world is not ready for me?”
“Not ready at all.” The Professor said somberly. “And it certainly takes quite a bit more to fix the world than to fix an android.”
“And the rain? Will I have no more rain?” her voice quivered, and her limbs turned into jelly, a remarkable feat noting her lack of a central nervous system. “Will I ever speak with you again?”
The renowned Professor Alsvik, head of the Robotics and Engineering department at ominous and nameless “University”, placed his hand gently on the back of the neck of his creation, painstakingly made and yet phenomenally feared. His finger found the off switch, hidden by a lock of hair.
“If the world is ever ready for you, Olga…” he gasped, his own internal rain streaming from his eyes in a vision that Olga would never forget. In her next waking moment, if that moment ever came, she was determined to keep it with her as her own way of remembering rain in all of its forms. “…it will not be in my time.”
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Title:
A Vindication of the Rights of
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Artist:
Rainbow Bunny of Doom
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Description:
I wrote this piece for a Creative Writing Assignment...I know that it's completely tl;dr for the most part ^^;; I had to work hard to keep it as short as I did...I have diarrhea of the mouth, and I know that turns a lot of readers off. (Most sorts of diarrhea turn people of, though, if you think about it...) I want to submit it to a literary magazine, but it doesn't seem to be Sci-Fi enough for a Sci-Fi magazine, and is way to Sci-Fi for any other ._.;;
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Date:
11/30/2010
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Tags:
android
robot
mechanics
allegory
water
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