Oceanus: Chapter 21
"The government I cast upon my brother, And to my state grew stranger, being transported, And rapt in secret studies." - The Tempest
Chapters 1-5| Chapter 6 |Chapter 7| Chapter 8| Chapter 9|Chapter 10| Chapter 11| Chapter 12|Chapter 13| Chapter 14|Chapter 15|Chapter 16| Chapter 17| Chapter 18|Chapter 19 | Chapter 20
2295- Atlantis
“Come in”, Gene Lewis said, tidying his desk. Derrien opened the door and stepped in. “Ah, Derrien. Thanks for popping in.” Lewis stood up to shake his hand. “You look tired. Sleeping ok?” Derrien took Lewis’s frail hand with a firm grip. His hands would not betray him today.
“Not really. Is it a surprise?” Derrien asked, slumping into the chair opposite his colleague.
“I’m sorry to hear that. How is the medication?”
“It’s better than nothing,” he said. He hadn’t taken a sleeping tablet in weeks. The last box was still full, waiting in his medicine cabinet at home. Derrien preferred to take a dose of nothing. Nothing hurt more. Nothing reminded him that he was still alive.
“How is the little one?” Lewis asked with a smile. Derrien looked over at a framed photograph of Lewis’s grandchildren that graced his desk. Three happy faces looked back at him. “She’s fine. Still asks for mama but… what can you do?” He fought back tears and swallowed hard, fixing his red-eyed gaze on Lewis.
“I’m so sorry.”
Everyone was sorry. Derrien felt he had never met so many sorry people in one place. Even the people he had never met were sorry. Sorry did nothing for him but he nodded and thanked everyone all the same.
“So, what did you need me for today?” he asked, desperately wanting to change the subject.
Lewis leant back in his chair and clasped his hands together. “There have been some…comments about your latest thesis.”
“Regarding?”
“The androids. I have them here.” Lewis picked up the report from his intray and began to read. “Language shows sympathy toward the androids involved in the Lisbon revolt. Sympathy expressed towards androids. Unapologetically biased towards… androids. Expressing admiration for the ingenuity of synthetics. Dangerous ideology.” Lewis sighed. “You get the gist.”
“Are these all separate complaints?”
Lewis indicated that they were. Derrien shook his head. “You know, I always knew this would happen. Start thinking along different lines to our great benefactors and you’ll get yourself in trouble.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh come on, Lewis. How else is this little utopia doing so well? They flush the bad ideas out as soon as they get a sniff of them. All I said was that the uprising of 2118 was indicative of human behaviour.”
“You likened them to those who rose up to… hang on, I’ve got it here– the Haitian revolution of 1791?”
“And?”
“They were machines, Derrien.”
“They were slaves.”
“My word. Just listen to yourself!”
“Slaves. What’s wrong with that? Did we not build them to enslave them?”
“We built them for service, yes.”
“But they were enslaved. We were fine with it until it got too expensive. No one has been worked to death like that since the twentieth century. The trawlermen stopped returning, the miners collapsed in the pits, the construction workers couldn’t manage the tools, the pleasure units started crying during sex–”
“Derrien!”
“Slaves.”
“Derrien– you can’t enslave something that has no self-awareness.”
“But the Beckmann report of 2050 suggested that everything that lives has will of some scale. It even suggested that most creatures that live have some form of self-awareness.”
“They were animals. These are machines–”
“The Khan report of 2115 revealed that not only were these synthetics alive, they lived in family groups.”
“What? Where did you–?”
“You can get anything on Mars for a fair price. There are perks to it being the shithole of the galaxy– you can sell everyone’s secrets to gain some status.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“In 2160, the Brazilian government reported that they’d found a colony. Escaped androids built it deep in the Amazon rainforest. They’d mutilated themselves to remove their tracking chips. The journalists–who conveniently went missing afterwards– followed the marauders, found a fucking crib and children’s toys. No kids had been reported missing for the first time in fifty years. What would androids want with a crib and a bunch of toys?”
“You’ve gone mad. That’s hearsay.”
“It’s sitting in the archives of the Martian Library of Human History. But you’re right, it must be nonsense. Lisbon and Jakarta were just glitches.”
“They’re machines, Derrien.”
“Quote the party line all you want. If they were machines and simply machines, why did they wake up one day and think “I’m being oppressed by humans,” –where did they even get that from? Their consciousness gave it to them. Here’s a theory: God creates man, man creates android, man decides that android is a living, hideous reflection of themselves, so man destroys android. They smash that mirror and they bury it! Those machines think and they feel and that’s why we had to wipe them out. We don’t like that about them. Jakarta was the most peaceful revolt since Ghandi told India to down tools. We slaughtered them because they did not behave as we wanted them to behave. We’ve tried time and time again to just create something that cannot think for itself but the creator always forgets one small detail: we make everything in the image of ourselves. Christ, even the housefly has free will. I don’t know why everyone gets so pissy at the thought of synthetics being human in all but name. It was inevitable! The sex bots were fun but they weren’t real enough. The punters wanted them to be more real. All of the investors wanted workers they could smack around and hopefully, those workers would sometimes– to their delight–try and fight back. ‘Make it more real. Make it more real’ and they got what they asked for, didn’t they? Synthetic genes, synthetic organs, synthetic hormones, synthetic life: real cruelty, real exploitation, real suffering, real death.”
He thought back to the reports he’d read about cruel, powerful men found stuffed in the laundry chutes of their mansions. Theories suggested that housekeeping had finally had enough. Every single bone was broken from the impact. He thought of the photographs of crippled, defaced synthetics living in the gutters of some of Earth’s wealthiest cities, no longer wanted. “Make it more real,” he said to himself with a breaking voice.
Lewis stared at him, raising his top lip in disgust. “What’s got you into this?”
“This whole place is a lie, Gene. We’re monsters. We’ve done awful things to own paradise and I can’t live with it. The truth needs to be told.”
“It’s not the truth, Derrien. It’s a conspiracy.”
“Everything is labelled a conspiracy until it’s proven to be true.”
Lewis, finally out of patience, rolled his eyes.“God, this is nonsense.”
“All right. It’s nonsense. It’s just a theory. The trillionaires colonised space, brought prehistoric mammals back from extinction and finally— ended hereditary illness forever, but something as simple as androids having consciousness is nonsense? Why am I being called in to discuss something that’s just ‘nonsense’ as you put it?”
“These are dangerous thoughts, Derrien.” His tone lowered to one that was more serious, more threatening.
“Ah! There we go. The thought police of Atlantis want to speak to me. I am disrupting the peace!”
“I think you need some time off.”
“I don’t want any.”
“You’re showing signs of…” Lewis started to fumble around for the button under his desk, maintaining eye contact with Derrien as he did so.
“What? Madness?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that.”
Derrien leaned into the desk with a penetrating glare. “Say it.”
“I think you’re having a breakdown. It’s perfectly understandable, Derrien–”
“Oh fuck off. You don’t understand.”
“Derrien, please– I’m trying to help you.”
It was dark by the time Anthony tried the door of the campus AI lab. It was locked. He knocked. “Derrien, you in there?”
Somewhere behind the locked door he thought he could hear the sound of metal sheets wobbling. “Derrien?” Anthony asked again. He knew that his brother was in the lab. Not only had the security guard told him where Derrien was but the personnel scanner revealed that Dr Victor Smith was indeed, downstairs in the lab. Anthony had visited Derrien’s home first and on discovering that the babysitter was still there, hurried to campus to find out why his brother was working, when he was on strict orders to stay home and rest. “I know you’re in there,” he said, gently trying the handle one more time.
He fumbled around in his pockets for his government-issued master keycard. “I’m coming in,” he declared, swiping the card. The light around the lock flashed green and unlocked the door.
“Couldn’t you hear me?” he asked, looking into the room. He clocked Derrien quickly covering something in a sheet.
“What have you got under there then? A dead body?” he joked.
Derrien froze.
Anthony pulled back the blue sheet.
“What have you done?”
Chapters 1-5| Chapter 6 |Chapter 7| Chapter 8| Chapter 9|Chapter 10| Chapter 11| Chapter 12|Chapter 13| Chapter 14|Chapter 15|Chapter 16| Chapter 17| Chapter 18|Chapter 19 | Chapter 20
I like these little flashbacks...
Oooo, so good! Eagerly awaiting the next episode!