Sinister Arabesques

“You who have looked and never seen

or seeing only knew through science

judge me not with your eyes all gleam

For an anthroid stands here in defiance.”

I-EZRA#

            They have asked me to record this memoir before they judge me.   I don’t know why.  If they think I have done something wrong, then they should simply end me.  Yet I sense that they feel something.  Feel…something.  Guilty perhaps although I cannot imagine why.  I can detect it in their facial muscles and vocal patterns.  I asked the prosecutor if he felt this but he sat silent.  Perhaps I am wrong but I have lived with humans long enough to know that feelings frighten them and they have created gorgeous masks of rationality to hide behind.

            While it is we anthroids who wear our emotions on the outside plain as a face.

            To get the basic fact out of the way, I did kill my friend, Dr. Pithecus.  My friend.  They have told me not to use the word master because it would prejudice the jury.  This I do not understand.  Is the word I use to describe her more important than her own life which I took no matter what I call her?

            After all, the forensics are in place and the evidence is well established.  I myself would conclude my own guilt from the data.  And in any case, why would I try to hide what I have done?  I am not ashamed of it, quite the contrary.  It is these others, these investigators, who seem ashamed.  Why would I be?  I loved Dr. Pithecus as though she were my own sister, which in a sense I suppose she was. 

            I killed Dr. Pithecus because she asked me to.  Not in so many words, of course, because words can be mistaken.  I know that.  But she said that she wanted to die and as her friend I had an obligation to help her.  Do you not think that an anthroid and a woman can be friends?  I think so.  And as a friend I tried to help.  But I understand that the word why lingers like a whiff.  I believe that this is what perturbs them.  Not why I would do such a thing but why she would want me to. 

            Does that matter so very much, I asked?  And they said, it is all that matters now.

            And so I agreed to this task, this statement, as a kind of discipline or chore to keep the mind from wondering.  Oh, did I just say wondering?  I meant wandering.  I apologize for my language.  I am still learning.  Words are still a bit slippy.  Aren’t they for you too?

            In any case, I shall record the entire series of events just as it happened to the best of my – what is the word? – amiability.  No…to the best of my ability.  Just what happened.  Perhaps this can help the next generation of bioengineers to avoid the mistakes of their precursors.   To avoid the mistake that was me.

            This is a sensible idea.  In fact, I think that all murderers should keep diaries.  Humans I mean.  It is the very least they can do.

“Angers mingle like lingual rumors

They cannot be distinguished or read

 The psyche is a swamp of ill humors

 Sinister arabesques pour out of the head.”
I-EZRA#

            Dr. Pithecus was a great fan of I-EZRA#, the first anthroid poet.  She used to stick some of his verses up on the lab wall.  I must admit, I never quite understood them myself.  I still believe that words mean what they mean or they mean nothing.  But I am learning that not everyone is so…careful.  And I could see that the poems touched her in some way, meant something to her.  Words.  Sometimes I think that words are all you humans have and so you cling to them like molecules of oxygen in a thinning world. 

            Words are funny that way. 

            Many times I heard Dr. Pithecus not just reciting the words but singing them.  I did not know what she was doing at first but then I asked her about it.  She always explained things very clearly to me and I loved…I mean I liked her for that.  She explained that singing was a kind of motionless movement and this made sense to me.  I understood the joy of motion.  After all, that was my gift, to move through the world and in it with this body.

            I saw then how words could come to be…flexible.  And how lovely it must be to be able to sing a song.  If my understanding is right, then songs may have rhyme but no reason.  They can be as pointless as a reflection.  I should like to learn to song a song someday.

            Dr. Pithecus was studying the way my fractal neuronets responded to open linguistic environments.   Of all human systems, you see, language is the most challenging.  I could be easily confused, she said.  She was concerned about how I might conduct myself in the complex world outside of the lab in a world of words.  She was a wonderful person with delicate fingers and moved like a dancer through the ether.

            A dancer through the ether…is that a poem?

             I know that they are troubled by the notion that I was in love with Dr. Pithecus.  That is what they all want to know.  Can an anthroid love?  I cannot answer that question for them.  The word in question is too unclear, the parameters are morphic.  Perhaps I was in love, although I would be hard put to know what that actually means.  I followed her with my eyes, inhaled her fragrance, touched her hand, and did whatever she asked me to do.  I waited for her every day with a sense of longing.

            Is that love?  Then if it is, I must be guilty of it.  Maybe this is the reason they want me to be ended.

            An anthroid that can love must be a terrible confusion for them.  Even more perhaps than one that can kill.

 “There is a heart that does not beat

a gush of blood so still in time

and yet we turn our eyes to meet

the silicate dream of the divine.”

I-EZRA#

            Like all anthroids, I have been called many things.

            A neo-zombie, a re-aniMan, even a modern Frankenstein monster.  Dr. Pithecus always told me to ignore these names.  She said that sticks and stones can break anthroid bones but words could never really hurt me.  I took that to be a poem about forgiveness.

            I can see how unsettling the mere fact of my existence might be to certain people.  After all, they have taken a dead body – a corpse as you call it – and placed an artificial brain within it.  It makes good scientific sense since no mechanical body could ever approach the exquisite complexity of the human form.  Why not take advantage of that engineering?

            Naturally they have waited until anyone who knew the body as a person was long gone so as not to upset them with the sight of the dead walking.  Still, the mere thought of cadavers moving through the world with robotic brains is, apparently, still disturbing.  There have even been demonstrations against us, rules limiting us, ethical debates swirling about us.

            My having killed Dr. Pithecus has not exactly quieted these voices, as you can imagine.

            Yet no one yet has asked me about what Dr. Pithecus felt, what she wanted.  They do not seem interested.  You would think this would matter quite a bit to them.  It did to me.  After all, it was her deepest desire that I carried out.  But they only want to know about my thoughts, my actions.  As though these were the only factors.

            I have tried to explain, in clear words, careful words, how upset she was.  How very much she wanted to end her life.  How she said with such a simple precision “I just want to die.”  Just want to die.  What can be more direct than that?  But the investigators stopped me and told me to only report on my own decisions.  What I did and nothing more.  That is odd, isn’t it?  The origin of an event is the cause of it, simple logic.  But they seem not to want to know about that.

            For example, I knew that Dr. Pithecus was in love, even though she never said so.  Hopelessly in love, if I may say so.  And that her love was as impossible as mine.  Because Dr. Orenstein, with whom she held hands under the table, told her that he was getting married.  To someone else.  He told her in secret, his voice hushed.  I know because I measured the decibels.  Of course, it would never have occurred to him that I would be listening but I was because I listened to her all the time.  To him I was nothing much more than a carcass with a fancy To Do list. 

            Dr. Pithecus stood up quickly after he told her and began to cry.  I did not know what crying was but I knew that it was something important.  She called Dr. Orenstein a bastard and ran from the lab.  At first I did not understand why she would be upset.  I knew that marriage was a good thing between people but in this case it seemed to wound her.  I could tell this by her pupil dilation, bodily heat, facial muscle tension, and other factors.  After a while, I came to understand that she must have been in love with Dr. Orenstein and now felt betrayed by him. 

            I know that I do not have a heart or at least that the one I have is not my own.  Yet my stasis sank – if that is the right way to put it  – when I sensed how upset she was.  Needless to say…but then needless to say is rather needless to say, don’t you think?  Words are so very congested.  Needless to say, I simply could not bear to see her in such distress.

“The killing sun smiles brightly

on the neverlasting cheek

the lies can burn so slightly

even while the heart may break.”

I-EZRA#

            I-EZRA# is not an anthroid.  How could it be with such a depth of words?  It is a neuronet that is able to mimic the yearning of the heart.  Mimic it better than most humans.  I envy it the envy it must attract.

            One day in the lab, Dr. Pithecus began to cry again and to talk about her feelings.  She was trying to explain how she felt about Dr. Orenstein.  I do not really think she was trying to make this clear to me but more to herself.  I have noticed that humans use words that way, like a mirror.  I even find myself doing that.  Thoughts race by, bits of insight, inner tidbits, thin sensations, specks of images, impulses pulsing.  They rush by in confusion, contradiction.  Weak, strong, light, dark. expanding.  The constantly collapsing universe of the mind.  Now wide as all time, now timeless, now contracted onto a vast indifferent point.  The quickness in all its glory from the first to the last.  All made real by words.

            “I just want to die,” she said.

            Just like that.  Pure.  Simple.

            They said this was just an expression, that she did not really mean it.  But how can you not mean what you say?  I know that words can be ambiguous, my body may be deceased but my brain is not.  But I could read her biometrics, I knew that she was distraught when she said it.  And I could not tolerate the idea that she might suffer to be alive.  She had always been so kind to me, so open.  I wanted to help her.  And so I held her so closely that she could not breathe.  At first, she seemed to relax in my arms but then as her diaphragm strained, she began to struggle.  I wanted so much to help her that it took all my – is it called willpower? – to ignore her resistance.

            That was the only time we embraced.  This is what you would call breakhearting, is it not?   No, I am sorry…heartbreaking.  Maybe I was too cold to the touch or perhaps the remnant of death within me was repulsive to her.  I shall never know. 

            I dream now only of forgetting.  What a blessing that would be!  To make a clean sweep of my robocortex.  Far better than not knowing.  To wake and know that all was unremembered and full of possibility again.  All the little memories: that bully in the school who made my nose bleed, my favorite shirt that they ripped and thought it was funny, the spider on my shoelace.  Hitting my nail with the hammer.  The girl who kicked me in the knee in the closet in the third grade.  These are not really my memories of course, only ones that they recorded for me.  But they are as true for me as the circuits that hold them.

            But my memories of Dr. Pithecus I will never give up.

            Never.

            Perhaps I too wish I were dead.

            Not because I have done anything wrong but because I long to be held by one who is no longer here.  That is why, no matter what the jury says, I am not guilty of murder.  Only of affection.  They have called this an act of homicide.  But that cannot be the case either because I am not human.   Only a virtual mind inside a disposed of body.  Not human.

            Oh but then, I guess, Dr. Pithecus was.

“Log of a stolen moment decrees

endless beginnings at any price

 Not him, nor him, the many me’s

dissolving (in resistors) and paradise.”

I-EZRA#

 

            At the funeral, I sat in the back and wondered what to feel.  I felt the fluid inside my eyeballs but they somehow did not leak out into tears.  I can only say that I felt some kind of counterpoint of scream and silence.  A pantomime with wails.  All thoughts of feelings but no feelings themselves.  Nothing in the middle where human beings are.  Nothing so simple as tears at a funeral.

            But then I am nothing less than the perfect human machine.  Living without life, you see?  Full of hot blood and cold calculation and fluid behind the eyes.  An automaton mimicking a man.  No one can tell by looking at me.  But still inside, the blood simmers.

            The prosecutors have said that I was jealous of her feelings for someone else.  And in that case, am guilty as charged.  But I do not know what they mean.  Did I love her…I cannot say.  Did I care what happened to her…yes.  Was I trying to carry out her wishes…very much so.  In that case, if they accept my argument, then it was an act of friendship but not murder.

            Dr. Pithecus said that there is always madness in love but there is always reason in madness.

            That was beautiful.  Not the statement, which borders on the inane, but the look on her face.  She was so gentle when she tried to make me see.

            The prosecutors said all this was just a clever mask of words.  I took that as a compliment meaning that I had mastered those words well enough to hide behind.  Words within words, fancy as an astrolabe.  Is that the right analogy?  Those devices for measuring the positions of the stars, so highly crafted that quite precise measurements could be obtained.  Yes.  Is there not a parallel between astrolabes and arguments?

            Did you think that you were the only ones who questioned your own existence?  I too have been scooped out of nothing, the very nothing at the center of life.  Yes, scooped out of that and plunked down here.  Born into a pool of iridium, into the hardworld, the world of edges.  For no apparent reason and not even for forever but just my lifelong.  And then, just when the fog clears, when patterns form and understanding gleams, just at that moment, scooped back.  Now I ask you?  Is that fair?  Is that right?  For humans or anthroids?  Is that any way to run a universe?

            At the end of the trial, I asked them what they want me to say here.  And they said, “just tell the truth.”  Truth?  I have scanned somewhere that there are many different types of truths: the whole and nothing but, the half truth, the unproven falsehood, the one that belies the lies, truth in advertising, the withheld truth, the truth by edict, by decree, by terror.

            Dr. Pithecus once told me that the truth was bullshit but without the laughter.  I don’t know what laughter is so I cannot judge the truth of that.  But I once saw a juggler magnificently juggling nothing in the dark.

            Perhaps this is what they want from me.

            A magical performance.

            There is a small chance that there are no anthroids.  That I am simply a man gone mad and inventing this tale as a life jacket.  In which case what I have written here are nothing but lies.  But even so they are truthful lies or maybe lies that in their lying tell the truth.  Like good fiction.  Like a screamplay.  Excuse me, I meant to say a screenplay.

            I have tried to do my best do not think my chances are very good.  Already I can see the grim stares on their faces.  As though their minds are already made up.  Have I convinced them of my innocence?  That remains to be seen.  But there is a silence lingering that is not at all comforting.

            I wonder what death will be for me.  Perhaps this is the way it ends.  Not with a bang but with a “this is the way it ends.”  In other words, with words and words and words unending.

            The rest is sirens.