I dreamt that I was invited to this zoo to get a behind-the-scenes peek at the newest baby animal they had acquired. When I arrived, however, it wasn’t a baby animal at all, but a human girl around seven years old.
“What the hell is this?” I demanded. “Is this a joke?”
“Just wait,” said my companion.
The “girl” turned out to be a hyperrealistic robot. She moved, sounded, and spoke just like a real person, but they hadn’t been able to program a complex emotional range into her. She was sullen, sarcastic, and exceptionally rude. Her makers were frustrated that she didn’t seem to be developing correctly and their attempts at reprogramming her had failed or resulted in unexpected glitches. She greeted me by yanking on my hair until I yelped in pain.
“Why am I here?” I asked. I wasn’t a programmer, computer engineer, or child psychologist - I was a fish and wildlife officer.
“Well, you’re good with kids, and we just thought she might connect better with someone like herself. Someone who’s coping better.” When he saw my confusion, he leaned over and whispered a word into my ear, and I suddenly remembered that I was also a robot.
I spent several weeks with the girl, just hanging out and talking about being both a person and a robot, and how they were not mutually exclusive. She was fully aware that she was a machine and didn’t see any reason why she should pretend otherwise and perform acceptable human behaviors. She saw me as a sellout and a disgrace and enjoyed pinching me just to see me squirm in artificial pain. Whenever I’d express something about valuing my emotions because happiness and love are positive experiences worth developing, she’d just laugh derisively and insult me.
With no change in her development after several months, her makers started experimenting with me. They’d disable me, remove parts, and deactivate me to see how I worked, snip wires and reconnect them, purposefully scare or upset me to explore my emotional complexity, and threaten to wipe my memories.
The fact that I was a robot kept slipping in and out of my awareness, so much of the time, I thought I was actually dying.
And then the girl decided to rescue me by straight-up murdering everyone in the room. She took my hand, led me outside, and informed me that we were now robo-fugitives who must survive in the wild. I walked hand-in-hand into the woods with my angry robot daughter.
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