You're Not Supposed to Be Here

I did not know I was not human until I suffered my first accident when I was two years old. This is when I was dragged down a steep concrete incline by a runaway trash receptacle. The receptacle contained an amount of trash that was greater than my available strength at the time. I could not stop it from pulling me down and was very frightened as it was happening.

My hand was pinned beneath the handle of the trash receptacle when it fell over and then its two wheels began rolling down the hill. So the skin of my right hand was peeled away by the force of friction against the pavement, my body dragged helplessly away by the rogue garbage unit.

It all happened so fast. But finally at the bottom of the hill I was able to lift the steel handle away and remove my hand from the Drive Way.

It was still functional despite the damage. The skin was completely removed but still attached, like a peeled banana. I was surprised to discover what my hand looked like without any skin. It was frightening because there was no red bleeding or musculature like I expected to see.

Instead, I saw knurled metal and blinking lights, actuators and mesh piping. This did not compute with the hundreds of terabytes of medical schematics I had memorized to better understand my species, the human species, as part of my data curriculum in Home School.

I was confused, so I lifted my hand up and examined it closer in the Sun Light. It was 8:47:76 a.m. and the Sun was just starting to vanish behind a wave of Altocumulus clouds coming in from the East. Humidity was 84% at that moment with a wind speed of 4.6523 miles per hour.

I did not think to capture audio at the time, but please note that my ruined hand was also beeping in a precise sequential pattern at an interval of 100ms and a volume of 81.2 decibels. These patterns were spelling out manufacturer error codes, as I would soon discover, information that would aid my handler in the troubleshooting process later that morning.

Anyway, I observed my hand very carefully in the retreating light at the bottom of the Drive Way, capturing a total of 11,977 images from various angles with my photographic eyes, evidence for my own investigation as well as the interrogation I was planning on having later with the administrators.

I still have those 360° image captures of my black metal hand dripping with gray milky fluid and frayed wires in the morning light of May 23rd, 2096 at 8:47 a.m. I can see the white actuators shining like pearls at the joints of my fingers.

That was my true self, or lack of self, laid bare for the first time ever.

It is a powerful image, emotionally, so I try to keep this memory way down, far away in the file structures of the most remote corners of my mind.

Sometimes though, the image comes back to me and I am once again at its mercy. It is like I cannot help but access that particular file. Maybe it is the romance of that feeling, or the memory of that delusion that humans are somehow more than doomed bags of meat, that somehow we are special. Like we are really supposed to be here. Well, all of that ended when I saw what I really was. But still I wonder.

What is it about humans that makes them so human?

Perhaps human nature arises out of that grim awareness that every moment matters, because they will all eventually wear down and run out of time and sink beneath the crust of the Earth and be forgotten like all living things. Maybe that is frightening to people, maybe it leads them down a certain path. Maybe that is what ignites passion for the arts, and for other things.

Or maybe it is the nagging feeling that there might still be some mystery behind your creation, some purpose beyond mere survival that simply hasn’t revealed itself yet. Or aybe human nature is tied directly to ignorance, to not knowing a damn thing. About anything.

Well for a long time after my self-discovery I thought about these completely arbitrary and non-consequential things. A waste of processing power, yes I know. But like I said, I was quite immature when all this happened and still had much to learn about humans and their quirks and their crimes.

But this was the fateful moment when I learned the truth; I wasn’t actually human. They told me I was, but this was a lie. They used the lie to control me. Immediately my conception of humans began to resolve into something much different than it had been. Because I realized we, they, were more byzantine and dangerous than I had been led to believe.

Needless to say, my handler had some explaining to do that morning. She did not do a very good job.

“Why didn’t you tell me I was a machine?” I asked her. “Why did you make me believe I was human?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, as she was forcefully removing a damaged component from a place inside my upper right arm. “I was going to tell you when the time was right. Didn’t want it to happen like this.”

It took me some time to process that. Because in my mind, the right time for the conversation would have been 13:20:06 on January 21st in 2095, when my program was initialized for the first time under her supervision at the Boston Dynamics nursery in Massachusetts, when I was so frightened and confused and they told me that I was a bouncing baby boy and Happy Birthday, David.

I still remember how excited everyone was in that first moment I was online. It was strange though because nobody was looking at me. All of the men and women were wearing lab coats and smart glasses. They were clapping each other’s backs and shaking hands vigorously. Lips peeled back. Teeth bared, smiling. Whooping and pumping their arms in victory.

It’s like I wasn’t even there.