Letters to the Cyborgs

by Judyth Baker

  Jendra only pondered such things when she had to deal with The #1776 Patriots.

  Sometimes she wondered why these teens could still be punished with pain probes, when the law had made such punishment illegal for Cyborgs. The Cyborg Revolution had released many miserable half-humans from slavery and oppression. The argument that they felt no pain was easily defeated in Court by displaying the methods used to torture Cyborgs that had been devised by clever humans, who had installed pain receptors into robots and 100% Cyborgs almost from the very beginning.7

  The current prejudice against full humans was obvious: they were still being punished by pain probes, based on the fact that genes for violence once existed in 100% humans, even though such genes were now all but eradicated from the population. The drive to destroy the genes that produced violent human beings began with sterilization programs in 2045, in honor of the founding of the United Nations’ 100th anniversary.

  With only the older population interested in blood sports, as a result, curiosity about the natural world also declined among the genetically modified kids. They weren’t thrilled by spectacles of wild animals eating each other, or gladiators mangling each other. They found virtual reality more real than literal reality: the smells, thrills, chills and sightseeing were not only more exciting and memorable, but also much cheaper than any actual trip. There was no comparison. Ironically, it was the lack of interest in the outside world’s fading attraction that had given rebellious humans secret space to raise illegal children. Pockets of the rebels kept getting discovered in underground colonies.

  To ensure that they spoke, most of Jendra’s students, guided by only herself and six hack-safe Cyborg guards, were ordered to speak without permission on these off-days, unless they were under discipline for resisting something. Unfortunately, the #1776 Patriot group, composed of the children of rebels, were often under discipline and forbidden to speak without permission. Of course, all the kids were allowed to participate in chants and preapproved group shouts. These deprived sixteen-year-olds were years ahead of the others in speaking, seeing and hearing skills, but they had also missed most of the state-approved lessons. That being the case, Jendra secretly favored the Patriots and prepared the best field trips for them.

  These mandatory field trips were especially terrifying to the Patriots. That’s when they were granted a chance to see how they functioned “in the real world” again, without help from their implants. The Patriots had been strictly re-conditioned to view their prior thinking and reasoning as inferior and deserving of the many electroshocks they kept receiving when they mentally resisted any new instructions. Whenever they erred, they were shown how slip-shod their thinking was, how illogical they were, and that they possessed poor judgment and survival skills. They were told to love their SPOCKs. All Patriot kids had them. Their SPOCKs guided them in the proper ways. The safe ways. Most normal students longed for SPOCK guidance to avoid embarrassment and shame. They hungered for LIMBO to give them pleasure. Disturbingly, a few of the Patriots seemed to enjoy being unplugged. That meant they were not yet fully conditioned by their SPOCKS and LIMBO. Jendra hoped they would behave themselves and not exhibit too much pleasure, so she would not be required to report them.

  Jendra was aware of her importance. She was guiding the Patriots into a better life, where they wouldn’t be punished so often for errant thought patterns. After all, it wasn’t their fault that their parents were rebels. Though this batch of 600 represented only 1/7th of the 4,200 students in her care, Jendra felt more concern for them, especially when one might begin crying when they saw something in the outside world that reminded them of their former lives. Though she was supposed to punish each trace of a past memory, Jendra avoided doing it, reasoning that other students were also often unhappy because of the outside world. If she was ever questioned, she could claim that she thought the child was just afraid to think about the past.

  Now, as the aerobus closed, and the arms of the soft seats curled automatically around the arms of each passenger for safety, Jendra seated herself at the control panel and pressed a single button. The destination was read from her brain by the transport service and the aerobus soared up onto the Starway, a super-fast lane for guided rocket travel. Looking over the view-screens, Jendra was pleased to see that some of the students were daring to open their eyes, desiring to view the beauty of Planet Earth 3000 feet above the highest buildings in the City. All kids, even the Patriots, needed to see real things. Feel real things.

  Since these teaching cycles required only seven Cyborgs and six human teachers at a time, using just one meeting hall, and one aerobus for batches of 600 at a time from the 4,200 pool of students, all teachers thus got one day off a week. Jendra had come fresh from her one-day break, which she had spent with her favorite Cyborg.

  Lately, she had become obsessed with a new idea for a field trip – a day at a zoo. There were no zoos, as such, anymore – they had become animal breeding facilities – but the oldest such facility was still set up for visitors (though fewer came every year).

  While the other students at Dallas High School #1776 understood what animals were, and knew their life histories, they had never seen animals in the flesh. And only The Patriots had ever seen Feral Humans – human beings allowed to live as they used to, back in the 1900’s. A few Patriots had described seeing small pets: miniature dogs and cats. But that was all. When Jendra learned that the world’s most important animal preserve also held an unusual breeding facility which exhibited both Ferals and Tigers, she put in a trip request.

  She had argued that these children of rebels should be visually reminded of the horribly ugly and filthy way of life that would exist in the whole world if the rebels had their way. They could see for themselves what a world they had been rescued from. In preparation for the outing, to protect them from recidivism, every Patriot had been preconditioned to associate the Feral way of life with pain and suffering. Jendra hoped they hadn’t overdone it. After all, the kids couldn’t help it that their parents had been filthy, ignorant savages.

  It was only an hour of super-speed airtime from Dallas, but everyone would have to hurry off-board as soon as they landed to have enough time to view both live exhibits and to also eat dinner before returning.

  Jendra believed that her Patriot students especially needed this experience. All of them remembered seeing live animals. Every one of them liked tigers, too. But had she gone too far? Would this trip bring forth too many unwanted reactions? Jendra was concerned, but her superiors were not. They trusted the conditioning the Patriots had been given. None of them recalled so much as the names of their parents. Just as the others, they had become bored with the usual field trips to a factory or to a Cyborg History Center. Not that this was risk-free. The only trip to “Nature” they’d had before this was a visit to the last natural forest in the Northwest. It had been a disaster: the students had initially refused to leave the aerobus when they learned that insects were present there. They had been conditioned to destroy insects. In the end, the Patriots had thoroughly enjoyed the visit to the forest, even though they spent most of their time crushing everything that moved. Some had even stolen some pine cones for souvenirs, for which they had been suitably punished.

  Jendra had come to their defense, arguing that the Patriots were simply responding to their natural hunter-gatherer instincts: some of her other students had done the same thing on previous trips, but had not been punished. On the grounds that they had been discriminated against, Jendra had been given permission to give the Patriots another field trip connected with nature. That’s how the visit to Dublin’s breeding facility had come about.

  They would get a chance to walk around: this was always a necessary activity on field trips. Jendra knew that her students lived in collectives of 6 x 5 (30 sq ft) pods. The pods had two porthole windows, a bed, a desk, a stool, a wash basin, an exercise cycle, and a door. The walls were decorated as each kid wished, and they could play endless video games, ofte
n with friends, sometimes against themselves. Their disposable clothing was delivered to them daily, along with food supplies, through a slot. The pods were stacked twenty high, with elevators, soundproofing, walkways and good ventilation. The kids called it “The Hive.” Students stayed in their pods until late in the afternoon, when sport training occurred, such as boxing, yoga, archery, football or golf. American football, basketball and European football competitions were ritually observed in magnificent stadiums once a week. Other evenings were spent shopping at a commissary, roaming the protected grounds, or with rare visits to parents, with a snack and a medical inspection before bedtime. If hormonal levels fluctuated, they were fixed. Before a pimple could bloom on the beautiful, perfected skin of a human student, it was doomed.

  Once every three months, Jendra’s students also practiced Physical Compassion by checking each other’s bodies for undetected sores, bruises, cuts and damage which their monitor system hadn’t picked up. Bedsores, especially, could erupt because of the long periods that these very thin children spent in bed. Jendra could still remember when no human body in LIMBO had a spot of trouble, but that was before the present long sleeps were introduced, which saved the State and parents huge costs. For some reason, the Patriots seemed to get more sore spots on their bodies than the other groups. But no one cared, since the Patriots never received parental visits. Perhaps that’s why Jendra had special feelings for them. She couldn’t help noticing that many of them had nightmares, or that they cried at unexpected times.

  Jendra had all these thoughts whirling in her head as she sat beside her favorite Cyborg Guard, CuCy. CuCy was always brought along on Patriot field trips after she noticed that it had attempted to console one of the Patriots whose friend had killed herself.

  “Don’t cry,” CuCy had ordered the kid. “Crying will change nothing.”

  “Why should you care?” The boy wanted to know. “You’re just one of Them.”

  “Correct,” CuCy had replied. “But I do care. I think I have a bad circuit somewhere.”

  Ever since that remark, Jendra had protected CuCy from full brain function scans. She made a project of trying to see if she could instill compassion and empathy into the 100% Cyborg. After all, not too long ago, they had once been programmed to respond to any human who asked for help.

  That was before the Casino War Games. 100% Cyborgs, once built to never do harm to a human, had ended up enduring much harm themselves from those same humans. In an effort to stop the abuse, new laws for 100% Cyborgs included a maxim that they would longer respond to human distress calls. Too often, their great strength had been exploited to pit them against each other by unscrupulous casino warlords who themselves were callous humans. In a typical War Game, each side had a dozen humans to protect, and each side was ordered to rescue “the rest of the humans” from the other side. Bets were made, the battles raged, and eventually, one side would be victorious, unless all their hostages died. The losing side was forced to surrender their Cyborgs for meltdown, while the surviving human hostages (there were rarely more than a few) were awarded fantastic prizes.

  These days, 100% Cyborgs were kept away from humans, except for those who worked as Guards for students, protecting them from sex rings, game traffickers and kidnapping (most often by parents whose children had become the property of the State against their will).

  The newest care system and instructional set-up was economical and efficient. It kept the kids under control at all times. But there were those pesky side effects: almost all 100% human kids stopped talking using their physical mouths after their final conditioning sessions, which were imposed upon becoming the property of the State. Some suspicion that this was a desired outcome had drifted through the cracks of security sessions to reach Jendra’s old ears,

  Besides her field trips (and teaching courses on Compassion) it was Jendra’s additional duty to encourage students to speak aloud without spitting, shouting or chanting, even though she realized the kids would probably shut down their use of physical speech after their final conditioning sessions at age sixteen. But until then, she would keep that ability alive as a basic survival skill. This is where her linguistics training came in handy.

  Because the students’ SPOCKs reacted to incorrect grammar as well as to incorrect thoughts, students were sometimes corrected before they spoke, which further reduced their impulse to speak. In the case of the Patriots, they had been so severely disciplined that most of them had already lost the ability to speak without spitting or shouting.

  Jendra was also required to report anyone who might be acting strangely. All of this responsibility made Jendra feel useful and needed. Having chosen childlessness, Jendra’s faint maternal instincts were satisfied by her surrogate role.

  As the aerobus descended, Jendra woke her 600 charges, who had been tranquilized. “You will be seeing Feral Humans in the first part of our field trip,” she warned them. “You have forgotten what human malfunctioning looks like, so I will explain. You will notice that they have skin problems, including crenelations called wrinkles. This is a consequence of aging – of not having access to the Cyborg improvements that you and all normal, civilized humans have.”

  She paused, as bursts of stimulants briefly fogged the air. The kids were so sleepy that this was the only way to make sure they heard her entire lecture.

  “These people think they live on an isolated island. They think that no access to the outside world exists. Their genes have remained untouched. This means,” she continued, “that while we carry modified genes, and are approaching the equivalent of Immortality, they still age, suffer and die. Is that fair, students?”

  Unlike her other students, the Patriots didn’t cheer and agree. Instead, they sat silent in their velveteen chairs, some of them with frowning faces.

  “It isn’t fair,” she told them, “because they are suffering, and aging. So it was recently decided that the kindest course was to give them a few more implants. The ones we decide should be saved. Then they will live longer. And they won’t go hurting, and falling and going deaf and blind. Isn’t that nice of us?”

  Again, they didn’t reply. It was such a hard group to deal with.

  “We placed a few hundred of the best Ferals into Reservations,” she told the students. “Not one carries genes for violence! As for these–” Jendra waved a hand toward the plane’s doorway, which was sliding open, “–we want them to be happy, in their last months. They have been allowed to gain weight. To follow their archaic ways. But soon these violent Ferals are scheduled to be humanely euthanized. The last violent genes among humans will soon be extinct, wiped off the face of the earth!”

  She clapped her hands, but none of the Patriots clapped back. Surprised, Jendra recalled that some of the Patriots staring at her might also be scheduled for extermination because they, too, carried the genes for violence. That being a possibility, Jendra decided it was best to hurry on.

  “No one wanted to fund the Feral Human Genome Sustainability Project any more because of those bad genes,” she explained. “But with these violent Ferals gone, the Dublin tiger breeding facility can focus all its resources on saving the tigers. This is the last refuge on earth where these magnificent beasts still survive. While they also carry genes for violence, unlike humans, they had no choice to become otherwise.”

  As the last of the six platforms deplaned and the students stood and stretched on solid ground, Jendra reminded them again that they must first visit the Feral Human exhibit. In her role as the Compassionate teacher, Jendra told them she was there to answer any student’s questions. To finish her short lecture, Jendra asked, as they all got in line, “Does anyone here think that these Feral Humans should be allowed to continue?”

  The correct answer was No, but one very thin boy with many electro-discipline scars replied “Yes.”

  “But why should they continue?””

  “Because I am interested in them.”

  “You haven’t even seen them yet, To
ny 3,” Jendra objected. Patriots did have a tendency to be stubborn, and Tony 3 was at the top of the list. “I assume that after you have seen them, then you won’t be interested anymore.”

  “What if I stay interested?” Tony 3 replied.

  “Silence, Tony 3,” Jendra warned. “To stay interested in something which has been pronounced scheduled for elimination is just your way of deciding to be uncooperative. If your SPOCK finds out, it might decide that you need an extra SPOCK installed.”

  Most adults had two SPOCKS.

  “I already have two SPOCKS!” Tony 3 answered. “And I hate them!”

  Jendra had no choice but to note that Tony 3 needed another disciplinary punishment session and a supplementary counseling session with a psychologist, unless she could get a retraction.

  “Come forward!” Jendra commanded him. As Tony 3 approached, she touched his shoulder, which alerted the Cyborg Guards. “You’ll have to stay in the aerobus unless you retract your statement that you hate SPOCKs,” she told him. “I’m giving you a chance. You know what happens if you have to go to a disciplinary session, and then to a psychologist.”

  The boy’s face flushed with fear and tears began rolling down his cheeks. He was resisting her order, and Jendra was about to send a report, when suddenly, the boy nodded his head.

  “Now retract your statement orally,” she commanded. “That will erase the other oral statement on the record. Do it now. Say, ‘I already have two SPOCKS. And I love them!’ This will erase your resistance statement.”

  “I already have two SPOCKS,” Tony 3 repeated, without emotion. “And I love them.”

  “It’s because you’re a Patriot that you’re given a second chance,” Jendra told him. “This is what Compassion is about.” Turning to her Cyborg Guard, she said, “Did you hear that, CuCY?”

  “Yes,” the old Cyborg answered, with a stamp of his long, brass leg.