Notes & Stuff (That Probably Won't Amount to Anything)

"Define Human"

The following are some random story ideas and notes and scenes that I found jotted in an old notebook.

-1-

I am a machine.

The realization ran through me like ice water in the veins. I stared into my own eyes in the mirror snd tried to spot the mechanics in them, the pixels in my irises, around the edges of blue. My mind registered the feeling should be sadness and an automated tear slid from the aqueduct of my eye, slipped across my skin to my chin, though I felt nothing.

I turned the faucet on and watched water flow. For the first time ever, I gave pause before touching it. How did it not short circuit me? How had I not died in the shower a hundred times as mechanical gears got soaked? But then again, plenty of electronics are waterproof now... watches, radios, cameras.

Humans.

I put my hands in the filling basin and wiggled my fingers below the surface, waiting to see if something would happen, some proof this was true, or else that I was insane.

-2-

I know the truth now. She told me that I am a machine, but not everyone knows it. It has been a cover-up as long as I can recall. I was manufactured in little bits at a time, illegally, of course, from spare parts. I was modeled after someone famous, though all I know of him is that he lived a long time ago and died very tragically.

-3-

He seemed like a normal man - but then, they all do from across the bar. She kept stealing glances his way. He was sitting with his feet hitched on the bottom bar of the stool he sat on, avidly watching the TV mounted in the corner of the ceiling. He seemed so fascinated, so much so that the sweating bottle of beer he clutched sat untouched before him. The only thing that gave him away as a machine, she thought, was that the TV was off now, and his interface was clearly powered down.

-4-

"I can't love you like you deserve," he said. He stared at her through mechanical eyes. He could feel all the gears and spockets in the torso compartment of him, grinding harder, faster. "I can't love at all."

"That's bullshit," she replied. She put her hands on his chest. He wished he had been programed with synesthism there, but he felt nothing, even as her fingers grappled and splayed across the shirt that covered him. "You're as real as any man," she said, desperation hanging in her tone, "Realer in some ways. Don't act like a machine now! You aren't a machine!"

He closed his eyes and the mechanics of his visual processors slowed, allowing him to use that RAM for thinking, analyzing her words and piecing together his response. Finally he answered her, "But I am a machine. I was manufactured, not born, and I was programmed to be everything my maker wanted me to be. I can be nothing more. I might feel like a man to your touch, but this is artificial skin, and under it all there is just a steel structure, some hydraulics, and a computer with an advanced processor. There is no DNA, I have no fingerprints, no identity beyond my software and serial number. They could make 100,000 of me and no violation would be made. And worst of all, there is no heart in there. Only gears."

"That's what they want you to believe!" she said, shaking her head. "But it isn't true."