ALIVE [Connor]

ALIVE: Isla's Monologue

Do I just start?

Yeah, whenever you're ready - just talk.

How is this position? Am I too close to the microphone now?

Nope, that's just fine.

Alright.

Alright.

God, I don't know where to start.

Why don't you start with your, uh, initial thoughts?

Right, okay. Um.

When I-

When I look back on the world as we know it, I see two things which stand out so prominently to me.

I see a divide.

And I see that us, as humans, are assuming the role of playing God.

But who are we to play God?

We assume ourselves this entitlement once we've discovered the skills and hardwork put into creating a new calibre of technology.

We're given the power to bestow life. And then enslave those we have gifted with it.

We're treating these 'things', these -

These androids as little more than a floor standing lamp or an entry mat to just walk all over. There's no 'he' or 'she' or 'they'.

There's just 'it'. Because it is an object, in our narrow-mindedness, the android's only purpose is to serve humankind.

We exploit them of their uses. For hard labour, sex, or even weapons of mass destruction.

We treat them like mindless beings, if beings at all, who struggle to wake up and open their eyes to the possibilities that they had been previously programmed to ignore.

And when they do find that strength to break away from an order or a routine. When they break free - they're punished for it.

They're now deviants. And they're hunted.

But they just want to be free. They want to experience life in the richest, most vivid experience possible and we, as the human race, act as their biggest obstacle.

We stomp down on what they could potentially be, purely out of fear. We attack them with force, we send them all to a huge camp and have them executed.

God only knows what happens to their bodies afterwards. A big dump, maybe? Piles upon piles of synthetic bodies, shed of the skin that made them look so human.

So much like us.

It's easier for them to be killed that way, without skin. Because it makes them appear more like 'things', eliminating that little twang of guilt at the back of our mind.

Remembering that, 'Oh, they're just machines. They don't know pain, or loss'.

Yet they think for themselves. They can feel, they can emote. They can live, just like us.

And what about him?

This wasn't part of the original-

I know, I was just curious if you wanted to talk about him.

Well.

What else could I say?

I mean, he's-

He's the love of my life.

And he was made by a trillion-dollar company.

He's an android, yeah. He bleeds blue.

But he's more human than some of the actual humans I've ever encountered in my life.

I mean, when I first met him, he was just so...-so hell-bent on accomplishing his 'mission'. To hunt down these deviant androids.

And believe me, I was all for it. I was there, working with the DCPD, tracking down androids that weren't doing as they were told.

But with time, I was realising that this wasn't the way it should've been. Androids knew how to feel.

Genuinely. Not simulated from some database.

They could look back on the memories in their, well, memory bank and evoke feelings that were too complex for the likes of just a machine.

You noticed that from the cases?

No.

I noticed that from him.

He learned to care, to be compassionate. Over the course of a short while, he began to feel.

In certain ways, I showed him what 'living' felt like. I changed him.

And he changed me, too.

Holding hands or slow dancing.

Laughing and joking.

Shouting and fighting.

Breaking up.

Making up.

Kisses goodnight and kisses good morning.

Through his experiences, he was finding instabilities in his original software. Every single day, he was becoming more and more human.

He still is becoming more and more human.

He took his sweet time, but I wouldn't leave him for the next human that walked right through that door.

He deserved the world at his disposal.

He deserved the closeness. That feeling of his hand interlocking with mine.

He deserved love.

He deserved life.

I deserved him.

And damn, he deserved me.