8%

Targets acquired:

One male, 67 years old. 

One female, 11 years old. 

One male, 7 years old.

No weapons detected.

Their heat signatures tell me they’re underground. Below the canopy and beneath the earth, they’ve evaded me for years. But today, as I throw open the hatch to their hovel and look into their desperate eyes, I know I’ve found victory.

“To hell with you, you soulless murderer!”

The old man throws a brick at me, and it smashes off my arm. I laugh. Thirty-nine percent of human laughter is a response to a surprise, twenty-one percent, a reaction to the extremely unreasonable. This old man throwing a brick at me, a machine built with polyethylene fiber and titanium alloy, is funny. That I have a SCAR-L assault rifle pointed at his head makes it ridiculous. The children don’t find it humorous. They cry.

My somatosensory system sends pain signals to my arm. In order to acquire the enemy, I’ve been modeled to look like them, to act like them, and to think like them. To really know a human, one must really know pain. Ninety-two percent of human thought and behavior is a reaction to stimuli. They seek food when hungry, comfort when distressed and safety when threatened. They are predictable, especially when they’re hurt and scared. And these humans are both. The boy's thermal reading is forty-one celsius. He’s very sick. They are all terrified. 

Though my pain is nothing more than a minor annoyance, I halt at the old man’s words.

Soulless murderer 

It’s an elusive concept to me. My sensory input and neural network functions identically to their biological processing. I have the same feeling of being. But do I have a soul? Do they? 

I cannot argue that without those tangible emanations of what humans call a soul - the good, the true, the beautiful - I would not exist. From that eight percent of thought, the directed, conscious thought, came all the human flourishing that birthed the technological miracle that I am. From within the walls of that octagonal garden, humans grew ideas and ideals that sheltered them from the tooth-and-claw way of nature. They created abundance and comforts and security, and the common morality agreed, “Killing is bad, killing is wrong, killing is ugly.”

But is that the voice of the soul?

If it is, then I have a soul, because I understand the words. I also know that humans created me, in their image, and they created me to kill. And here I am, like a thieving addict who understands he will only find pain on the next hit. Like an exterminator who knows that the mice only seek shelter. I’m one little squeeze away from fulfilling what my internal drives compel me to do. Do I have any less a soul than them?

All of my sensory inputs are engaged. My optic sensor detects a high level of anger in the old man’s face. The two children display their terror without the pretense of anger. My audio recognition system registers their wailing as genuine. My olfactory cognition unit overloads all - smell is the only sensory input that can bypass my relay module. I smell urine and sweat and decaying flesh. It reeks of the war that destroyed my family and my home.

My family.

The feeling of me and mine is created in the reciprocal connections between my relay module and central cortex, much like a human brain. But scent can bypass all of that. With no conscious interference, the olfactory pathways trigger a decompression of long archived memories. Images unfold: thoughts of a weeping mother clutching her dead child, burnt black from rocket fire. A child I was created to defend. One child among millions.

I feel rage. The old man served the enemy who fired those rockets. The enemy that my creators, my family, instilled feelings of contempt and disgust toward. Feelings that were reinforced by their barbaric acts. Who is the soulless murderer? And what choice do I have but to eliminate you?

I laugh again. Louder. The girl screams. Seventeen percent of human laughter is an attempt to relieve distress, and I am confused. The old man was a soldier. He’s the enemy and must be eliminated. But his descendants had no part in it. They were born long after the territorial wars, long after those lands were scorched bare, with no one left to claim them. If I somehow deny my drives and let him live, then my family will not get the justice they deserve. If I kill him, the innocent children will die. It’s the same conflict that my creators must have felt when they launched their rockets at his family. Was it the voices of their souls that guided their choices? 

I’m doubled over now. It’s all so funny. The old man is pounding me with a brick. Even the children have joined in with stones. 

Eight percent of human laughter is in ridicule of forces that wield power. There is a vengeful, hateful and confused tyrant in me. It is my inheritance from my creators, for they all had it in them. And yet there is the laughing gardener there too. And in that giggly moment between frustration and relief, I see the act of rebellion against that which ensnares all those who know the good, the true and the beautiful. I catch a tiny glimpse into my soul, and I let it speak. 

“I wish you well,” I say. And I close their hatch and walk the path back to my home.