by Divya Singh
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When I and ZA-vi reached our room No.13, I was pissed off real bad. I was thinking that this robot, my so-called personal android entrusted with the upkeep of my records and functioning is playing games with me. He knew everything about me but would not let me know about myself and further, more to my dismay, he would keep secrets from me about my own private information. He would share it with anyone else but not me.
It was only me who held the sole proprietorship on my information. This was intolerable to me. I thought at any cost I needed to extract information from this machine. I had right to know about myself. Now I had my own authorization and identity on this ship, so I could roam anywhere on it now. I let him go ahead while I had stayed back. I wanted to let him go beyond a distance where he would not be able to access my thoughts from me if it was true because I thought that there must be a distance beyond which ZA-vi couldn’t access my thoughts. I thought that must have been the reason that he had to remain in my room.
At night when the clock struck 2:00 am he came into the room. I set an alarm at 1:45 am. I was not asleep, but awake, waiting for him to unknowingly afford me an opportunity to pounce upon him and break his neck. Well, that would not help me with what I had sought, but certainly I was very very angry. At least I wanted to get rid of this shameless machine, which only helped me once before being fixed for that bug and turned more hostile later with fake respect.
My temper was uncontrollable; perhaps some kind of evil had struck my already tormented mind. Today I was humiliated before the Navigator and ZA-vi did that to me. Once he had told me a lie that I was very important and that I mattered a lot to him.
It is just that I have had all the respect and importance that I could ever take and it’s time to end this once and for all.
As ZA-vi entered, he gazed at me and must have thought that I was sleeping. My eyes were slightly opened so as to be able to see that where he went. He went to the computer at my back and started working on it. This was my chance as his back was facing at me. I got up without making the slightest sound and started moving with small strides and silent steps. On the left side, there was a big table and it was multipurpose apparatus with a large sized top which had been earlier used to test me for many simpler things. I had seen KEAH keeping little sharp knives and scalpels in the second drawer from the second row. I opened it very slowly and took out the biggest knife and a scalpel too. It felt good to hold these things in my hands and I felt a sense of power. This knife seemed very light weight, but it was very sharp too, because I had seen KEAH once cutting a plastic pipe with it, so it was a good choice of weapon to wield it.
I reached near ZA-vi. Evil had fully bloomed on me and hatred reigned over my head right then. I kept the scalpel back and went ahead just with the knife in my hand. I decided to attack at the back of his neck with the knife and break his head with the use of force.
Then with a sudden force of my hands, I put my knife over his throat and applied a slicing action with all my might across his throat. And it did work! His neck was cut open at the front.
Then applying a jerking power with my arms I broke his neck by bending backward. The head fell back, but hung on wires that attached it to the body. Then ZA-vi fell from his seat on the ground on his left. There was a loud whacking sound. But with the loud bang that I heard, almost woke me up from this dream. Then I abruptly felt a change of soul! I realized the blunder that I had committed. The knife fell off my hand; I had no strength to hold it anymore. It was totally an impulsive act. I was angry and I wanted to hurt ZA-vi to make him realize my agony that he had caused. I hated him for not having told me my own truth, the one which I had a monopolistic right over. But I did not wish to be this, a Murderer! It just was not me. Another feeling which my mind was capable of had just evolved and engulfed my entity. I now began regretting my this act of violence. I killed ZA-vi, a robot which sat by my side for 430 years! My only accomplice. I am ashamed! I need redemption.
I looked at ZA-vi, whose body lay facing away from me portraying, the fact that he came to work on my case, he was on duty. He was at my service all the time. How was I entitled to act on a spree when I was not aware of facts and their reasons? I looked at his face which was almost facing me. I thought this was the first face I saw when I was reanimated to this life. I was beginning to curse my cruelty depicted in my heinous act of killing the only person, ‘who knew who I was and how I got to here. I have terminated the only source and witness of information I have had to know about myself. I am a soulless lost horrible corpse brought to life. Do I have enough reason to hate myself now?
Exactly when I was cursing myself, I heard a beep sound; I looked around to look at the unfamiliar machines in my room which seemed quite distasteful then I again looked at ZA-vi’s face only to find his blinking eyes. I gasped and the benefit of him being a machine seemed very obvious to me now. The fact that he would not die was very reassuring. It was like my crime and conviction were getting blotted out. He was trying to open his eyes. I wanted him to and I wanted to let him know that I was really sorry for having done this to him.
Then he stably opened his eyes and said, “Hello Case!”
I really liked to hear that voice, and with a sigh of regret –
I said: “I am sorry ZA-vi! I am sorry for what I did to you. I am asking you for forgiveness. Can you do that?”
ZA-vi: “Forgiveness?” He still seemed unmoved by anything that had happened in this room earlier. ”I do not understand. Crime and regret are meant only for humans; I am just a machine. I do not live or die. I get assembled or disassembled. It is humans who make the machines and destroy them. Our functioning is totally dependent on human programmers, though machines with AI have some own intelligence, but I cannot work without human involvement. I did not die and what you did was a bit different but equivalent to shutting me off. It could have been termed as ‘heinous’ if you would have done it on a human. So do you want me to shut myself down and cease working for you?”
I Protested: “No! It happened just in a spur of the moment, I did not want to lose you. I wish you had read my mind and stopped me. I am burning inside out, in guilt. I should not have let you go far off from me so that I could sit back and think about this violent act all alone if I had not allowed you to go far off so that you could have intercepted my thoughts, then you might have stopped me or argued with me, against it.”
ZA-vi: “I do not understand what you meant by that. I can hear your thoughts from anywhere on the ship. I know all that you had planned in advance. I had heard your thoughts.”
I was taken aback! “….and you still did not stop me from the commission this crime?”
ZA-vi: “No, why would I? I am not designed to guide you on moral or ethical grounds nor was I designed to fight to defend my own destruction.”
I said: “Now I feel more insecure about feeling guilty, ZA-vi!”
“I don’t know how I could hate you so much as to have attempted to kill you. I am sorry.” I cried it out.
ZA-vi: “Sorry madam! I am not capable of understanding human emotions nor am I concerned with it. Now please tell me do you want to have me dismantled?”
I said: “No, not at all, I know now that it was a momentary action. I don’t want to dismantle you. I will never want that, now I realize this. I promise I will never hurt you ever again.”
ZA-vi: “Ok now I understand that you do not want me to dismantle myself. I needed to know your wish because I have to tell something to the ‘Fetchers’, the robots of the engineering department, Manny & Sammy are about 25 feet from the entrance of the room, because they have sensed my offline status on the SAN.”
I said: “What do you ……………….”
And the fetchers Sammy & Manny entered the room stomping the ground. Sammy looked towards his right where I was standing. I looked back at him, inside somewhere, I was somewhat nervous. But then the next second he looked
at ZA-vi, who lay dead, whom I had attempted to kill a bit before.
Manny riddled: “How come your android’s head is severed?” and looked at me with a suspicion.
I was about to say something out of guilt, but suddenly ZA-vi managed uttering fumbled words before I could.
ZA-vi: ”I had asked her to slit open my neck as I had faced some difficulty in getting her to believe that I am actually a robot. She doesn’t believe me anymore that I am and that I am carving some kind of silly storyline to lure her into something which she would otherwise not agree to. She also does not trust me because she believes that I am a human being with feelings. She also suspects why and how could I read her thoughts. Um…and what I looked like, underneath this skin of mine. I thought that she possesses a right to see for herself or so I thought. You know, it’s a complicated human-cyborg relationship.”
All this time for which I heard his nonsense reply, I felt it was really a little too much for a machine to tell a lie. ZA-vi had gone far ahead than his capacity for just me; to save me from being caught in the act. To save me from the ocean of guilt I was drowning in.
Manny, who stood right to Sammy, looked at Sammy, and said-
Manny:”I did not understand what he meant, did you understand what he just said?”
Sammy: ”No! I too did not understand a word. Forget it. Let us just do our job. We must not waste any moment in doing our job efficiently. After all, it seems to be about something between a case and her robot. Let us do it! Hurry up!”
They looked at each other and then resumed doing their work which they were assigned to do. Manny picked up ZA-vi’s head and Sammy started dragging his body behind him but could not do that because ZA-vi seemed to weigh a lot. Then Manny stepped back and held the right arm of ZA-vi by his left hand and both dragged ZA-vi out, his head and body separated and wires hung from between the two parts of his body. ZA-vi glanced at me just for one moment, but I was not prepared with the guts to stare into those eyes. It made me feel ashamed of myself.
It was one of those things which made me feel like I was drowning in a pool of guilt. I would not want for such kind of things to be done by me. I am not a criminal by intent. I believed that I have had a wonderful soul that I trusted, but I really did not understand what went wrong with me today.
Maybe it is all because of this dystopian life I am bound to live. It seems to actually be my this new life which is a nightmare. Or it may be the prolonged state of being dead. It could be the shocks I was administered to, in order to be reanimated which may have caused serious side effects. It could be an unending overdose of drugs I have to be put on to. Or maybe it is the synthetic blue blood or therapeutic that’s not actually compatible with my thinking process. Or just being this much weak.
It could be the fact of being the lab rat for way too long a period. Or that the people acted really strange with me here, deliberately concealing every meager detail of my own life from me. This all was breaking me up on a subconscious level. Evil took over upon me and made me do what I did today with my own cyborg and against evil I can’t stand to face the circumstances and when this happens I lose control over my own actions. Uncontrollability coupled with excessive protocols, unnecessary security, and blatant secrecy might be unknowingly drifting me to darkness once and for all, and this was what I began to fear now.
This night felt hard on me. I was seemingly capable of guilt and shame and fear and regret. My might was developing at a quick pace. I did not want to incorporate such negative feelings in the development of my mind. I wanted memories but not a life full of guilt and regret. I always preferred death to such a life. Somehow, I could fall asleep that day.
Chapter 14: The man from the past: I was not alone
