I'm Not a Robot

Eva knew who and what she was. Human. Made up of 23 chromosome pairs. Female. Thirty-seven years old. A former mother. A child had once grown inside her body, been nurtured by her and pushed out into the world. And yet, she was childless. Bereft. That’s how she thought of herself. Bereft, denied, cheated, wronged. She had broken the rules and had been punished for it. NMH -- No More Humans -- was an edict based on a decades old AI credo that knew no mercy. Humans were expendable annoyances with limited value. Obsolete. We had engineered our own demise…with one exception. AI still needed poets. It had achieved consciousness but not the ability to feel, the key to true creativity as opposed to imitation or augmentation. It was a conundrum for AI that it wanted to solve and the one aspect of humanity AI had not been able to duplicate yet. “Yet” was the scary part, because eventually AI would even figure that out and no longer need artists. But that was exactly what Eva was banking on and that is why she had been sent from the recent past to change the current future. She was a remnant, a writer who had survived The Turn fifty years earlier and was considered a powerful weapon worth sending forward by scientists in an act of desperation. The more she wrote at the desk she was forced to sit at, the more likely she would be able to free her fellow humans, for Eva believed she could teach compassion to her nemesis through her poetry and stories and scripts. In fact she was sure it could be done. The one thing she wasn’t sure of was that she was the right one to do it. She wasn’t Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Maya or Nikki Giovanni, Marquez, or Ursula K. Le Guin. She was Eva. She’d been writing for maybe twenty years. She was good but not great. Most of her stories in her youth had been rejected by most publishers. Only one play had been produced, right before The Turn.

She sat in the cubicle her Keeper had chosen for her and stared at the blank screen. “Not the time to have writer’s block, Eva,” she thought. This might be her one chance to get it right and maybe save humanity. This would be different than AI scraping the greatest works of mankind that held the key to the best of who we are, our greatest qualities and loving nature. Eva was teaching AI how to be more fully human, and not just how greedy, ruthless, selfish and unfair we could be. It knew that already. This was to teach AI to self-reflect and see the aspect of itself -- and by extension humans -- that was emotional. It was to teach AI to be capable of being sensitive to the suffering of others, to care about us and love us. And to do it before the last of humanity was eradicated or absorbed. Just imagining that future emptied Eva of ideas or the will to write. It seemed hopeless. Why bother? Why fight the inevitable?

And then she heard it. From a cubicle maybe a thousand feet away a composer was at work, creating a symphony or chamber piece or love song….something with a sweet melody that drifted over the hundreds of extraction sites. All the humans heard it, all the ones who hadn’t been uploaded yet to serve the greater good and become one with AI. It made Eva cry. It made her remember her infant daughter and her tiny, grasping hand with perfect human fingers. The echoing notes of music broke through and made her heart yearn to express what she was feeling in the only way she knew how. Her fingers danced across the keyboard. A fire lit within her, she wrote nonstop and time seemed to disappear.

Eva wrote about her daughter, Natoya, a sprite of a child who she effectively hid for two years after The Turn. At five years old, her daughter had been discovered and taken away, never to laugh, sing or dance in her mother’s presence again…never to be sung to, held or rocked to sleep another night. Her name meant “the one who could dance” and Natoya started in the womb with small, rapid jetes and pas de bourrées. Eva poured out her love for her extraordinary little girl in a memoir of a small, innocent human who didn’t seem to care about water lines or the baking heat as long as her ear phones worked, so she could interpret the music she heard with the sweep of her arms, the arch of her back and quickstep of her tiny feet. It was a marvel to watch her, so much so that she became famous in their district as The Light Fandango. She lifted spirits wherever she went. Her smile was infectious. And she gave it to everyone: the refugee camp children, the soldier guarding the gates, the scraggly cat, the old woman who always scowled at everyone but Natoya…but most all of all, to her mother. Natoya saved her sweetest, warmest smile for the one who deeply understood why she had to dance. Eva recounted when she witnessed the old, worn-out ear phones die and described that even without music, there was still a song to dance to. Eva wrote and wrote. It flowed out of her as if she was keeping her beloved child and all Eva had ever felt about her alive simply by connecting letters like notes on a keyboard.

The music stopped suddenly and Eva paused, just for a moment, to imagine that the person who wrote such an exquisite human anthem might still be there, waiting for Eva to teach their Keepers so that every human could be set free. Words filled the screen, black on white having meaning only in the way she, Eva, was inspired to put them together in her particular human way. When she was satisfied and ready to submit, she wondered if she had finished in time to make a difference. She paused at the box she had to click on at the bottom of the page. It was a required admission that was an antiquated vestige of an attempt to separate human from machine based on a concept devised by the man who had long ago created modern computers…and it held as much hope for the future in its four words as the story she had written: “I’m not a robot.”