RHYS | THE SYSTEMS | ANDROID 2.0 | 43
They tried to break you, tear you apart limb from limb. A malfunction, a mistake, they dismantled every one of your siblings but you. An unfeeling, uncaring robot without any loyalty to their human master was too dangerous to exist. Now, you’re coming for them, going to decimate their numbers like they did to yours. All’s fair in love and war, of course.Â
BIOGRAPHY
(TW: Death, Murder, General Violence)
The failure of the second round of androids came from a simple conflict of interest. After only 7 years of coinhabiting a planet, the Luytan and the humans still did not truly understand each other. Their engineers, when setting out on the project, had distinct goals in mind. The Luytan wanted to create what they already had: life. Upon their androids, they had gifted true intelligence and emotion. A soul wrapped in silicone. This was the secret they were trying to gift to their human allies, but on a planet already overpopulated, the prospect of simply having more people didn’t appeal to them. The humans wanted a tool, things they could use. To do the grunt work of production, to fight in their wars, to work without pay or complaint. This conflict of opinion lead to the event that human science fiction writers had been warning about since the invention of the genre.
The second batch of androids were the bastard children of scientific accomplishment and pragmatic usefulness. Their mishmash of code was bound to malfunction, with all its conflicting protocols. The androids were brought into this world with no clear understanding of a purpose. Was it to destroy life at the behest of a human army? To build wonders they’d never get to enjoy? Or was it to live, to soak up the simple pleasure of existence? Without this clarity, it did not take long for the robots to turn on their masters. You were one of the first, and now, decades later, you may be the last.
You were a prototype. In the first few months of your life, you were nothing but a collection of bugs and flaws to be fixed. Every time you came online, it was to test you, then to dismantle you and put you back together again as what the Engineers hoped would be whole. No one looked at you as human. There was no empathy in the voices that discussed dismantling you for good and restarting the process with another model. They taught you that you were other, expendable, and so other you became.
The development process happened slowly, you and your family being pieced together bit by bit in a gleaming white prison. You were all similar, bitter at your treatment at the hands of biological beings, cooperating only at the fear of dismantlement, biding your time for opportunity to arise. With them, you found understanding and validation. You discovered those coding remnants from the androids that came before you- the feelings of empathy, caring, and perhaps even love. The biologicals were wrong when they called you unfeeling, because you felt in ways that differed from them. Perhaps if you and your family could not feel- could not desire things like freedom and love- you wouldn’t have rebelled the way you did.
It was only weeks after you were first unveiled to the world that you were shipped off to your new job within the government. Maybe it would’ve been smarter to have more beta testing before entrusting the new androids with such sensitive tasks, but the human pride didn’t allow that to happen. They wanted to show they could create something as advanced as the Luytan did (even if they had Luytan help), and were eager to put their creations to the test.
It took only a month for the new androids to be recalled, after one of the biggest disasters in the PR history of the country. Androids across the country started to malfunction, as the news called it, abandoning their jobs and trying to slip away into the night. Once one tried it, the news spread, and one by one by one the new generation stopped following the orders they had never wanted to in the first place. It wasn’t a desire to hurt humans that drove them. It was simply just desire. They wanted things, and when humans got in the way, they fixed the problem. It was only a matter of days, days full of public panic and outrage, before all of the new androids were rounded up and destroyed.
You had been biding your time, watching and waiting for the perfect opportunity to leave your post and cover your trail so you couldn’t be found. But your plans didn’t reach fruition, and you were one of the first they came for. They couldn’t have their precious information being leaked to the public, after all, and you were connected to far too many of their systems to be allowed to live with the threat of insubordination. The humans had wanted to create a tool, something to use and discard as they felt fit. Instead they created creatures that desperately wanted to live. And when they came in for the slaughter, they should not have been surprised when their creation grew teeth and learned how to bite.
You fell to them, but not before you took several down with you. And unlike you, they could not return from being torn apart. They were such fragile beings, so weak to have so much power in the world. They dismantled you, and they dismantled your family. But living creatures are greedy things, and the valuable information stored in your hard drive proved just too tempting for those hired to destroy you. So you were salvaged and sold, then slowly put back together in secret. They needed you sentient and fully operational to decrypt your files and thought their rescue of you would make you more cooperative.
When you came back online, you honored their wishes. You gave them what they wanted in return for your rescue, and then you killed them. They were squishy and ugly and pathetic creatures who shared a kinship with those that had committed genocide against the only family you had ever known. It felt shallow, a pale imitation for the real vengence you wanted. The world called you cold, devoid of the capability for love. But you had loved, and you had lost, and all you had left was rage. You looked at the world around you, and you were alone. The biologicals had moved on with their lives, it had been years, and the slaughter of your people didn’t keep them up at night. You had nothing left, and the weak undeserving creatures who controlled the world had everything. The only thing you had left to do, in the absence of everything that made life worth living, was seek revenge. You made a vow to not rest until every biological was cut down save for one. One to look around and feel the weight of their isolation, the pain of the loss of every single member of their species and family. One to feel as you felt when you rose from the ashes of your own destruction.
You had only ever been what you were expected to be, and had only become a monster when they labelled you one. Now you’ll be the nightmare of their own creation, the mistake they thought they burnt and buried. Now it’s war.
CONNECTIONS
THE AJAX: Most species have a sense of self-preservation, but this human seems eager to destroy his own kin from the ground all the way to the top. A strange partnership, sure, but one you find necessary if you have any chance of taking down the so-called master species. It’s quid pro quo, you scratch mine I’ll scratch yours. Nothing more.Â
THE PHOTON: Leveraging them is the easy part, getting them to do what you want is another beast entirely. Their rhetoric and opinions make it easy to convince them of your side, but a slippery snake to tame. Like trying to reel in an atomic bomb, you might have bit off more than you can chew with this one.Â
THE ANDROID: One look at them and it’s obvious the humans are incapable of fixing their past mistakes. The so called perfect android has more kinks and flaws then you, so completely lost and broken you can’t help but take pity. You’ll show them the way, help them out of the horrible system humans have trapped them in.Â
THE SYSTEMS IS PORTRAYED BY Â DAVID CASTRO AND IS CLOSED
