What Makes Them Human - Detroit: Become Human

Chapter One - Family Matters

| November 7th | 2038 | 8:49 at night |

What makes us human? Once this thought arrives it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It dominates. There's not much I can do to make it go away. Trust me. It's there whether I like it or not. It's there when I eat. When I sleep. It's there when I shower. It's always there. Always.

The idea isn't new, it's as old as me. But I've only now started to notice it. To question it. With all the androids in the world, defining humanity is more important than ever. Is it being made of flesh and blood that makes us human? What about people with prosthetic limbs? Those aren't made of blood, are they no longer human?

Is it sentience? Cognitive thought? Or just the knowledge of our own existence? Of death?

Everything has to die. That's the truth. One likes to think that there is always hope—that you can live above death. After all, it's a uniquely human fantasy that things will "get better". Born perhaps of the uniquely human understanding that things will not. There's no way to know for certain.

But I suspect humans are the only living things that know the inevitability of their own deaths. Other things live in the present. Humans cannot. So they invented hope.

I hope that one day I'll get out of here, and find somewhere far away. Until Detroit is a memory I only think of when I'm not doing something else.

I was born here, and I've been here my entire life. Nineteen miserable years. I suppose I should be grateful I have a roof over my head, shouldn't I? Some people are homeless, some people don't even have the luxury of having anyone speak to them.

But it just so happens that the people who speak to me are the ones I wish wouldn't. My mom. And my dad. I don't even like calling them that, they're as much of parents as they are loving. Which is not at all.

My dad is always too jacked up on whatever drug he can get up his nose to even notice when I'm in the room with him. My mom is too drunk to even know where she is half the time, usually passed out drunk in bed while my dad screams at me to bring him whatever substance he wants to abuse.

I have barely anything of comfort. I haven't gone to school in a little less than three years, I graduated a year early. Not because I'm necessarily smart, I just took every before and after school class I possibly could. Whatever I could to avoid being in this hell hole of a home.

Being stuck here I pass the time with music. It's the only comfort besides Jessie that I have. I found a guitar in an old thrift store long ago, it's been sitting in my room for years. But as of now, I've started to learn it. Of course, I can't play it with my parents in the house, they hate the sound of music. Or me. Anything I do. It's all a headache to them.

So I play outside, sing to myself. Something to drag my mind through this nightmare. Something to keep me from ending my life before it's even really started. Jessie once said, "Music is your true voice" I'm not sure what that means.

Jessie. My android. My brother. He's my only friend. My only family, the only person I can talk to.

A few years back one of my mom's friends got a new android, and they planned on throwing Jessie out. My mom said she'd take him. One of the only decisions she's made that I support.

Jessie is an AP700 model android, he was built as a sort of nanny robot. Someone to run around and take care of the house and the kids. He cooks dinners, he does the laundry, and he'd even bathe me if I were to ask him to.