Betelgeuse VII: Suspicions
“Twenty four hours ago I was free as a bird,” she said, toting the cliché ball and chain across the concrete floor. “My only offense was that I was too human.” She sat down with a rusty creak on a lone plastic chair and stared into the video camera.
“As soon as they got the hang of making robots and could make them at low cost, they started perfecting them. That’s what they do with everything don’t they? Once they’ve got the technique down, they try making it better. So, then models of new robots came out for people to buy for only one or two hundred. They made them sensitive to heat and cold and basic emotions. They figured out how to get them to simulate the language process and speak without a programmed speech. Every model was one-upping the other model another company made. But things started getting really bad when emotions came into play. That was the door separating robots from humans and some idiot had to go find the key. Soon, robots had emotions like fear, hatred, love, jealousy, and frustration. They became less and less perfect and more flawed. Eventually, we were making humans from metal scraps and ethics got involved. The simple strive for perfection went up in political flames and people were quoting everything from the Greek mythology to The Terminator to make their point. Physical and intellectual guns went off in all directions and this bloody “coup d’état” lasted for about a decade. Then, without warning, they boxed up robots like me and started from scratch remaking robots from the first models. Some they shut off, others were hired for small jobs: flipping hamburgers, emptying garbage, and so on. Still others were kept in deliberate hiding until the time came to coup them up in jail for imaginary crimes. That’s what happened to me. If you look at my record it’ll say I’m in here for smuggling drugs, but the only way the established that was after a doctor examination. They never mention why you’re really here but deep down inside you know it’s because you’re a robot. You know it’s because you’re different. And that’s just wrong.”
The tape flickered out to black and then flashed back to static. Dr. Cindy Lawson rewound the tape and ejected it out of the player. She turned to the teenage boy, Aaron, who had brought this to her and handed it back to him. His long black hair was deliberately placed over his eyes and in one fast motion he brushed his hair to one side and grabbed the tape.
“You realize the evidence you brought to me,” she said sitting down.
He nodded, but remained silent. She sighed in frustration and stared into his blue eyes like a cat staring down its prey. He looked up.
“She doesn’t exist. Her records will not be in the computer as dead or alive. She’s an illegal model. I can’t do anything to get your girlfriend out. Besides,” Cindy said putting the file folder back, “if she’s a robot there’s even less I can do. There are no more laws on robots protecting them from the government. For the future, any marriage or relationship is null according to government standards. If you do succeed in having children, you’ll set the whole world in an uproar, again.”
Aaron looked at her with a greater ferocity and said coldly: “She’s not a robot.”
Cindy jerked her head back in surprise, but kept her gaze. “What?”
“I said: she’s not a robot. She only thinks she is. She’s human. I think they brainwashed her in that ‘doctor visit’ and made her think she was a robot. Besides, there’s no proof that the 700’s even know that they aren’t 100% human.”
“Do you have any proof that she’s human? Right now, it’s your word against theirs.”
“Are you in? I’m not going to waste my time if you won’t help me.”
“Right now, I’m a third uninvolved party.”
He looked at her skeptically, but continued, whisking his head to the side to get his hair out of his eyes. “I have written and oral accounts of her from school and other stuff. I even managed to steal some of her records out of various filing cabinets from the organizations she was involved in. Even medical records and everything says she was human. Then she disappeared and I get this tape in the mail saying that she’s a robot.”
“Why did you have her records in the first place?”
“We were planning on running away to Betelgeuse VII,” he said quietly, “and we needed our records to relocate.”
Cindy sighed and pulled out a pad of yellow paper. “It’s probably much more complicated than that,” she said, “she probably needed help and just so no one would suspect anything, she put clues in the video.”
“Exactly,” he said pointing his finger at her emphatically and leaning back in the chair.
“In which case,” Cindy continued, “she is still human and she knows she is human. What we need to figure out is why she sent this cry for help.”
“We?”
She ignored him and pulled out a pen from the pencil cup on her desk. “What sort of organizations was she involved in?”
He paused and stared at his shoes. “Well, she was a big supporter of the Robot Equality Act of 2029. When people signed petitions to get it changed, she signed just about all of them. If it came to politics, she was always talking about how robots should be treated like people and they should relocate them to other planets and do other exploration advances because some of the older new models never age and they don’t die. She was always seeing things that humans could do and what robots could do. I used to tell her that there weren’t enough jobs for all the people in the world, let alone robots, too, but it was like talking to a brick wall. The only thing we truly disagreed on was that subject. Nothing else is worth noting. Except maybe the supplementary mafia.”
“Supplementary mafia?”
“Sorry,” he said laughing a little, “it’s an underground organization that gives a time limit on people’s existence. Basically, the person that has not had a job for six years and does nothing but sit in his parents’ basement all day will have a horrible accident in the next few days if he doesn’t change his ways. They consider it cleaning out the gene pool. Trish joined most likely for people who would be racist, bigoted, or generally rude. It would give her the power to anonymously threaten them. She never killed anyone though, she would only use it as a harmless outlet for her anger.”
Cindy eyed him cautiously and surreptitiously checked her watch. “Well, we had better get going if we’re going to catch an air bus.”
He stood up quickly and gave her a frightened look. “Where to?”
“Betelgeuse VII.”
To be continued…
