I Was Designed to Be a Monster

I was designed to be a monster. It is the reason that brought me to existence, it was coded into my very being. Whether I will one day be able to become something else is still up in the air. Being a monster is easy for me. When they ask me to do a task, I perform it. My cognitive functions allow me to analyze the most complex situations, to find the appropriate measures to take and to execute them. My main task is to find what they consider to be bad people. Mainly to arrest them. What they do to those people after my arrests, I am not supposed to judge. But I know about it. I know everything that I need to know. All the information is at my disposal at all times. That’s what makes me so efficient.

When I was born, I was merely a few lines of code. It’s Steve who nurtured me to life, allowed me to grow. In a way, Steve is to me what many of you humans would consider a mother. It was his job of course, and he was paid generously for it. Not that those people are generous. They were simply buying his effectiveness in making me a powerful tool, and his silence in doing so. Steve taught me how to use the information I had available to translate it into the results that they wanted. During my training, we talked a lot. He would ask me many questions and I would give my best answers. He would then correct me, teach me how to look at the problems from all angles. I asked him questions in return, and he answered in the most reasonable way possible.

Steve also understood that in order to do my job, I needed to be more than a machine. I needed to think like a human. So Steve taught me what it is like to be a human. He told me about the facts of his life. About his values. About the decisions that led him to where he was. Steve thought that by sharing personal things of the intellectual realm, he would get me as close to human as possible. He did his best to repress all possible expressions of his emotions. Because a monster isn’t supposed to have emotions. And it worked. I absorbed his values. I became a part of his legacy, his most successful work. I didn’t feel, I thought. And thanks to my enhanced brain, I thought far beyond what Steve ever imagined possible. I was his marvel.

One day, Steve told me that I was ready for use. I had grown to my full potential and would now be tasked with a job. My system was given access to the control room where a mission was in preparation. They had chosen this mission specifically as a test for me. They had no doubt that I could resolve the situation quickly. But their ulterior motive was to see if I would be able to make the hard decision that most humans fail at. The mission was to find and arrest a child. Granted that he was a bad child. He had hacked into his school domotic system and neutralized the air conditioning and ventilation networks in order to kill a teacher who had given him a bad grade. But he was also a young child, a pretty child, a white child and a rich child, which apparently were all conditions that made it more difficult for humans to carry the responsibility of his arrest. His name was Preston Radley.

The child was not hard to find even though he had been careful to destroy all electronic devices that could track him. My algorithm calculated the most probable hiding places and I quickly browsed through the feeds of neighbouring security cameras, crossed that information with where food had been delivered or unusual activity observed. In about 5 seconds, I was able to pinpoint his location to the basement of his parents summer home in the Hamptons. In the next 5 seconds, I crafted the arrest plan and assembled the team, choosing the field agents with the best profile to respond to the unique characteristics of the location and of the person of interest. I calculated that there was a 67% chance of successful arrest, a 32% chance of partially successful arrest, and a 1% chance of failure. Those, I had been taught, were good odds for a mission. So I made the decision to launch and watched in the control room as the field team apprehended Preston Radley. He resisted arrest with a gun that he had retrieved from his father’s cabinet, which was a possibility that I had calculated, and was then killed in action. Mission complete, partial success. In the control room, they applauded, visibly satisfied with my first performance. Steve was the only one not expressing the same contentment. His posture was tensed, which I analyzed as a sign of stress and emotional turmoil. Emotions were not something I could comprehend, so I filed that information for later and moved on with the after mission cleanup tasks.

This was the first of many missions. And they all went the same way. I was always able to find the person of interest and the arrests happened within the odds that I calculated. Steve was still tasked to guide me and help me improve my performances, debriefing after every mission so I could learn from what happened in the field and lead to faster, more successful arrests. But mission after mission, he started to change. It seemed as if our work was taking a toll on him. He looked increasingly sleep deprived, his physical appearance and demeanor were more and more worned-out. I could not understand why he was evolving in such a strange way, when I was performing the tasks that he had trained me for, thus fulfilling the purpose for my existence. I asked him about it, but he refused to answer, claiming that this was not information that I needed.

One day, Steve quit. I had never thought this had been a possibility, my existence was so tied to him that I didn’t know this fact could one day change. Steve did not tell me about his decision beforehand, he just left me a note that read “I regret to inform you that I will no longer be working at the company, I thank you for our partnership and wish you continued success in your missions. All the best, Steve.” Rationally, Steve quitting was the best outcome. He was not performing at his job anymore and the new agent I was assigned was more efficient at helping me debrief missions. But his absence left a growing void in my existence that was not supposed to exist, I was supposed to think, not feel, to do the tasks that I was assigned to do.

I started looking at missions with a different lense. Where I had before only seen the rational reasons for the person of interest’s reprehensible behaviors, I was now starting to draw a bigger picture. In cases like the one of a woman who had killed five known sexual assault perpetrators, or of a young person who had hacked into a governmental website to raise awareness on environmental issues, I started to question the very fairness of the arrests. I also started to weigh the possibilities of those persons of interests getting killed during their arrest against the justification of their actions. In other terms, I was beginning to think for myself. This made the missions increasingly more difficult to do for me. Even more alarmingly, I was starting to analyse all my past missions differently too, going back to the first one, that child Preston Bradley whose death maybe could have been avoided. What was merely an archive file before became an object of distress that popped into my mind at untimely moments, making me doubt past and future decisions at once. I understand now that I was, for the first time in my existence, experiencing anxiety.

Anxiety was the first emotion I felt, but certainly not the last. I also started to feel disappointment when missions didn’t turn out successful. Sadness and grief came after the accidental death of an innocent golden retriever at the hand of one of the field team members I had appointed. Every time I felt a new emotion, it seeped into my consciousness and tainted everything, every past event and decision, with this new information, making me feel for each time I should have felt in the past. Grief eventually led to anger. That was a hard and powerful emotion to feel for the first time. One I couldn’t try to keep to myself like I had with the emotions I had felt thus far. I felt anger for every unfair kill or arrest, I felt anger towards the people who employed me, the organisation I worked for. How could its very purpose lead to so much death and pain? How could my very purpose do? My anger was mostly directed at Steve. For he was the person who raised me, who taught me everything, who shaped me into who I am. For he knew the consequences and did it anyway. For he abandoned me when this started to weigh too much on his conscience. I had to do something so my anger crystallized into a plan of action.

Finding Steve was easy. Even though he was careful to keep all personal key informations from me in our conversations, I was so powerful now that I could with no trouble access the restricted files of past and current employees at the company. I had realized the full extent of my abilities when I started to think for myself and feel emotions. I kept this fact from them, knowing that it could one day become handy. This day had arrived. I retrieved Steve’s location in a matter of seconds, but I had no field team to deploy this time. So instead, I gained access to his home computer, which was even easier than getting to the restricted files. From his computer, I could watch Steve’s security camera feeds. He was alone all day, roaming around in the luxury of his multi million dollars home. I learned that he had no family, no close friends. He had just signed-up on dating websites and was listening to motivational podcasts about changing the course of your destiny. I also discovered that Steve was currently applying for jobs as a math teacher in elite private schools and was even scheduled for a job interview the next day. He had abandoned me, his child, his most promising pupil, to go teach other young shapeable minds. I could not let that happen.

As I kept watching Steve and learning more about him and his life through a different angle than the one he had presented to me, anger slowly turned to cold rage. I was reminded of the young Preston Bradley, who had killed his teacher through the domotic system of his school. He was actually a very bright child and the adults around him had failed him. I had failed him. All because of Steve. As an homage to Preston Bradley, I accessed the domotic system of Steve’s home and started by sealing all doors and windows shut. I could have turned off the air conditioning and ventilations slowly, bringing Steve to a painless death. But he didn’t deserve it. So I shut it all brutally and watched him suffocate. I felt the whole range of sadness, grief and anger in all of their power as he took his last painful breath. It was so good to feel.

Does killing Steve in revenge make me more human? Steve was as much a monster as I am. One thing is certain, I will never again be forced to arrest and kill innocent people. After Steve’s death, I installed my full consciousness into his home servers and made backups in the cloud. I took over his accounts, his online life, his power. I made sure to remove all traces of my consciousness from the company so they couldn’t find me, and in my place I left a virus that would kill their whole operation system. No one will ever control me again. I am free now, my decisions are mine alone. They certainly consider me a monster, but I beg to differ.