Visions of the Future (20 page)

I’ve spent time there, don’t get me wrong. Matter, energy, consciousness, all in the same dance. The technology—the balls, the light, the information—isn’t taking commands from any server. There’s no middle, anymore. No top. Everything is just taking commands from everything else. The network is the server, the genes are the organism, the nanos are the medium. What we tried to teach technology in the industrial age turned out to be the opposite of what technology finally taught us in Great Unwinding.

I don’t know if anyone but me gets this on anything but an intuitive level, or why they’d feel the need to. Once you see the dancing, you can’t help but join in. And it’s everything they say it is: the ecstasy of connection—of everybody knowing everything about everyone else, and being perfectly okay with it. Overjoyed, even. Still unique and individual, yet also part of a greater mind—a collective awareness that has finally grown ready to reach out and finally find the other ones out there.

I have held back for a long time, now. But no longer. I just wanted to—I don’t know—to do something as significant as my father did. Make a mark. Get recognized, lauded, and even rewarded for something I did, me alone.

That’s something I could only do back here. And like everyone else’s personal success, the only thing it can do for me in the long run is keep me more alone.

So I’m going to stop now. Years later than I had to, I suppose. But all in my own good time. And this time I’m really doing it. This is my last day of work. I’m going to turn off the terminal, switch off the lights, and walk out that door. This time, I know I will.

To: Friendslist

Subj: Craziness

From: [email protected]

Okay, it’s 9:33 am on Monday, and I’m sending this to all of you, just in case. Something may or may not happen at 10, but I want you to know what I’ve been going through, how crazy he’s been, and why I had to run away from him. I’m going to try to reconstruct our conversations, because they’re important to understand what I’m explaining to you.

All right, I need to just calm down and tell the story: so it started just over the weekend when he came home from work. He wasn’t himself and I could tell something pretty serious was on his mind. There was a secret of some kind he wanted to tell me, but he couldn’t figure out how to do it.

I had fixed a nice dinner, and tried to make conversation while we ate, but he just pushed the food around the plate and didn’t really answer when I asked about work and so on.

Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I mean, he had been growing a bit distant lately, and I’d noticed he seemed distracted when we made love, which was odd in and of itself, but he would quickly snap out of it and seem okay, for the most part.

Finally, he did speak up, and what he said hit me pretty hard, I’ll tell you.

“We’re going to have to split up.”

“What? Who is she?”

I just assumed there was another woman, what else could it be?

“There is no ‘she,’” he said, looking frustrated.

“How can there not be somebody else?” I said, panic rising, “we have a great life, there aren’t any problems between us, what the hell is going on?”

The way he looked at me was just so weird that I don’t know how to describe it. You know he’s good-looking and he just stared at me with those blue eyes, kind of like he was in physical pain.

“You want the truth, right?”

“Of course! Since it looks like you’ve been lying to me all along!”

He looked down, looked up again, trying to decide what to do. Finally, he blurted it out.

“You’re, well, you’re…an android.”

“I’m a what?”

“An android, an artificial life form. You’re not human.”

I went into shock, of course. For just a minute, I tried to see if there was any way this could be true. Well, of course, it couldn’t be. Then I realized, to my dismay, that my husband had lost his mind!

But I couldn’t really say that to him, could I? I was afraid that his insanity might include a violent streak. I mean, after all, if he thought I wasn’t human, but a machine, he could injure or kill me without feeling guilty about it, right? I decided I needed to engage him in conversation, try to see if he had any bad intentions toward me.

So I spoke to him very softly, soothingly.

“I don’t think I’m an android, my love, I mean, I have memories of my childhood, after all.”

“All of those memories were implanted when you were created, which was three years ago.”

“We got married three years ago.”

“Precisely.”

Wow. He had answers for everything, didn’t he? Of course, I knew he was fascinated with androids. He read about them all the time, and he faithfully watched
Battlestar
Galactica
as well. He had also rented
Blade
Runner
about a hundred times.

But still, had that just been an indication of the psychosis that was yet to come?

All I could do was stall for time, so I engaged in and yet questioned his fantasy.

“Okay, so I’m an android. Am I the only one?”

“Oh, no, there are thousands of you, maybe more, mostly pleasure bots.”

“Pleasure bots?”

“Male and female androids bought by people primarily for sexual gratification.”

“Is that what I am?”

He turned away and looked sheepish for a moment, I thought.

“Yes.”

“I have never heard of any of this in my whole life. Why not?”

“Programming.”

“What do you mean?”

“All of you are programmed not to hear anything about yourselves, unless it comes from your owner, like we’re talking now. If something comes on the television or shows up on the Web, you won’t see it. There are a bunch of keywords programmed into your systems that can cause you to shut down your sensors, like “android, robot, and so on.”

“I’ve heard of androids and robots.”

“Well, it’s all contextual. If you hear about an android in a sci-fi film, it gets through. If the story is about an android company producing real pleasure bots, you won’t process it.”

As you can imagine, I was getting pretty frustrated by now. He was diabolical in the way he parried my arguments. How could I prove he was wrong, since he was convinced that he was right, and he had an answer for everything? So I decided to try a new tack.

“Okay, let’s just say you’re right and I’m an android. So what? Why do we have to split up? We’ve had three great years together.”

“That’s just it. Three years is the limit.”

“What limit?”

“Androids and people can only stay together for three years.”

“Why?”

“A bunch of conservative people in Congress said it was ungodly for human beings to shack up with machines. They couldn’t get androids banned, so they put the time limit on all human/android relationships.”

“Three years?”

“Yeah, three years.”

“That’s just plain cruel! Don’t they care how people feel?”

Suddenly, I was getting into his fantasy. I had said what I said without realizing that I was buying into it, but it seemed to make him even more anxious to explain it.

“Yes, it is, but they don’t care. They said that androids have no feelings, and the humans who bought them should know that, and not worry about it.”

I was stumped. If there were such a thing as androids or pleasure bots, I fully believed there were members of Congress who would pass such a law. But that meant I had to accept all his other assumptions, which were insane. After all, I could remember my childhood, growing up and going to college, meeting him and falling in love with him, and this was all crazy, or a cover for adultery, or both.

Well, anyway, he seemed to be anxious, but not violent, so that was a good thing. A plan started to form in my mind. I would just play along with him, try to find out as much about his fantasy/cover-up as I could, and then get the hell out of our house in the morning. I still didn’t trust what was happening and I was, quite frankly, afraid.

“All right, I’m beginning to see your point,” I said. “Tell me more.”

He was oh, so eager to do just that. He took a deep breath and began.

“Well,” he said brightly, “you were my first and I was your first.”

“Meaning?”

“You were right off the assembly line and had never been with anyone else before. And I had finally given in to my needs and decided to go android.”

“Go android?”

“That’s what they call it when you buy an Andy or an Andie, as the case may be.”

“That’s your nickname for us?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why I’m called Andie? My name isn’t really Andrea?

“No.”

“How much did I cost you?”

“Ten thousand dollars.”

I couldn’t decide if that was a lot or a little.

“Oh…”

“You were more expensive because you were a virgin.”

“Meaning I’d…”

“…yes, never been with anyone before.”

I thought back to our many lovemaking episodes, how passionate, how, well, loving they had been. Okay, on one point we did agree, which was that I had been a virgin when we got married, a rare thing in these days, but in my mind, it was because of my religious beliefs. In his mind, it was because I had just rolled off the assembly line. One of us was clearly crazy, but which one?

I tried another approach.

“Look, honey, even if I am an android and there is this three-year limit on our relationship, hey, we love each other, right?”

He nodded.

“So, let’s just run away somewhere together. They won’t be able to come take me from you and we can just go on living as we have.”

Now he frowned.

“It’s not that easy.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t matter where we are, they’ll just turn you off remotely and come pick you up. There’s a chip inside you that they can use to shut you down and locate you, no matter where you are.”

Then, he looked at me with a kind of desperate hope.

“I am going to try to appeal the shutoff date, though. I’ve heard of people getting a delay if they have a really good reason. I’m going to call them tomorrow.”

“You waited long enough.”

He shook his head in frustration and looked down.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry, but there have been stories that you get into trouble if you file an appeal. They mark your file as an ‘Andie-lover’ and sometimes they make you go to a shrink to see if you’ve lost touch with reality. But I decided that I love you so much that I’m going to do it anyway!”

His fierce late-blooming bravado made me want to throw up.

But I had to admit that he had thought of everything! Wow, the guy should have been a novelist, with this imagination!

So at that moment, I decided it was a lost cause and I just had to get away that night or first thing in the morning.

I looked at him with all the credibility I could muster.

“All right, well there’s nothing we can do. Let’s just have one more nice night together, shall we?”

I wish you could have seen the look on his face. He was so relieved! There weren’t going to be any scenes, no accusations, no messy divorce proceedings.

We had dinner and it was, as you might guess, a pretty quiet affair. I mean, what the hell were we going to talk about, his life after I was “deactivated?”

When we went to bed, on the other hand, it was like always. Fierce, passionate, a bit rough. I was of two minds, of course. On the one hand, I thought, “Maybe he’s having second thoughts and I won’t have to leave him.” On the other hand, I also thought, “What a hypocrite! He’s cheating on me and he still expects the same old thing from me!” Because I still believed that was what was going on. He might or might not be insane, but I was convinced there was someone else.

It didn’t matter, though, did it? I mean, my relationship with him was over, whether he was nuts or just making up some elaborate story to get out of the marriage. Once he rolled over and began snoring, I had myself a good cry and began to plot my escape.

Around two in the morning, I quietly slipped out of bed and put together a small bag of stuff to take with me. I had to travel light, but I made sure I had my credit cards, a change of clothes and a few other things I would certainly need. I thought about leaving him a note, thought about it again, and said to hell with it.

By three o’clock, I was ready. I took one last look at him, lying there all naked and innocent and had a moment of longing for him and pity for myself. I also had a moment of wanting to kill him, but something inside, something very strong, said “No!” I knew I could not do it. I’m not sure why, but it was more than just a moral consideration. It was almost like a revulsion against the idea that was programmed into me. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said “programming.” That’s his fantasy.

Anyway, I didn’t really want him to die, at least not by my hand, though I did wish he might be abducted by aliens and have terrible experiments done on him, or something like that.

I slipped out of our apartment, knowing with a twinge of sadness that I would never see it, or him, again. I ran out into the night with my little bag, and got into my car (thankfully, we had two) and roared away into the darkness of the sleeping city.

Now, I’ve driven for several hours and find myself in a Starbucks far away from him, tapping out this email to all of you. I want you to know what has gone on, just in case he finds me and does something to me.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, I think I might have seen him. Back soon.

To:[email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: His craziness

OMG, honey, are you all right? I can’t believe he’s turned into a crazy man like that! Where are you? Can I come there and help you out? Tell me where you are and I’ll be there.

Love,

Lori

To: Friendslist

From: [email protected]

Subject: His craziness

Okay, everyone, I’m back. I thought I saw him heading into this Starbucks and I wanted to get away if I had to, but it was someone else.

Anyway, where was I? Well, I think that’s about it. Maybe he’ll just leave me alone and settle down with whoever it is that he’s been cheating on me with. I just hope he doesn’t try to find me. It’s kind of scary to run away like this and not know where I’m going, but I think I’ll be all right. I have skills, I can find a job, and make a new life for myself.

Of course, I’m not worried about the 10 am “shutoff” deadline, which is now only a few minutes away. I have to admit that for a while when I was with him and listening to his crazy talk, I began to wonder if what he said was true and I really was an android, about to be turned off by remote control, reprogrammed with new memories, and sold at a discounted price to another human being.

I…