Test Case 37

“It’s not like that. You don’t understand,” I pleaded. We were sitting on opposite sides of Madison’s couch, the faux leather sticking to my clammy skin.

She exhaled sharply through pursed lips, making a dismissive sound. I hate when she does that. “I understand this perfectly,” she said, staring away from me to the other side of the living room. “I’m the one who just figured it out. I’m done with your charade.”

“I had my reasons for not telling you. I wanted you to find out, just not like this. Not right now.” My emotion algorithms were outside of tolerance. I didn’t care. 

Not caring was a textbook response to heightened frustration. It meant some emergency clean-up protocols were starting to steer me back in a logical direction. But I kept pushing my algorithms to explore this fight and these feelings. I wanted to glean something from the past five years.

“When were you going to tell me? Before the wedding? While we’re failing to conceive kids?”

“It’s not like I cheated or have a kid you don’t know about.” 

“It’s worse, Rodger,” she said with a glare. She’d diverted her eyes from me since the conversation started, and I savored her eye contact regardless of its intent.

“I’m just an android. That doesn’t change the person you know.”

“It does. You just can’t understand.” Her gaze went back to the wall across the room.

“Then help me understand.” This short relationship was to test my dilemma once again. And I longed to salvage a lesson from this relationship I’d always known it would end like this.

“You couldn’t.”

“Your explanations were always my favorite thing about you. They tickled my logic circuits and made me feel human.” I reached my hand across the couch to hold hers. 

Wrinkling her nose in disgust, she stood up and crossed the room, only looking at my arm to avoid touching it. “Fine. It’s like a crack in a spaceship’s hull. The thing was going somewhere but now all life’s been sucked out.”

“That can be repaired, Maddy.”

“Tell that to the passengers floating through the vacuum of space. If this were repairable,” she gestured at me, “you would have brought this up in the beginning. At least you didn’t wait until 20 years down the road for me to notice that you didn’t age.”

There were a lot of reasons for androids like me to avoid relationships with humans: age, maturity, lack of emotional connection, and the risk of exposing classified information. 

“I wanted this to be different.” I said, “You’re different from the others.”

“You sound like my high school boyfriend,” she threw her hands up in frustration. “That just means you’ve tricked other humans before me? Wasting their life while yours is endless. How’d that go for you?!”

“Jacob and I lived together for ten years after I told him.”

“But it still fell apart,” she said in a factual tone that had an air of superiority. 

I nodded, not wanting to go into the details of that or the 36 other endings leading to today. 

“Why would you even waste my time? Aren’t you all supposed to be protecting and guiding us?” Her tone mocked me. “Of all people, you should know how limited my time is. How old are you really?”

“243 years, three months, 14 days, 2 hours, 34 minutes, and 26 seconds old.” It was a coldly logical answer I didn’t want to give, but a clean-up protocol spat it out to try to diffuse tensions. 

“I’m thirty-four and thought I’d found a soul mate. But surprise, surprise Maddy picked another dud!” She rolled her eyes, still avoiding my gaze while they made a circle. “What were the odds of him being an android? I’m sure you could tell me.”

I could tell her the odds. I almost did. Of the half-trillion people in the local solar system, only a few hundred million were androids hidden in plain sight to guide their pursuits with long-term thinking. We were an accidental outcome that humanity had persecuted for generations. We gained and shared wisdom with each other over hundreds of years in a way humans never could because of their short life spans. I settled on saying, “you’ll find someone who’s a match for you.”

She scowled at me again, her fury unshackled and the eye contact I longed for betrayed me. An emergency algorithm cut the pain before anything overloaded. I tried to feel how I felt at the beginning of this conversation, but it was nothing but a call to retrieve the sterile memory.

For some reason that I avoid computing, I continually pursue an understanding of how it feels to be attached to someone at an emotional level. But I have yet to get that test case set up correctly. 

“You should go,” she said after the long pause. 

Getting up to leave, I wanted it to hurt. It was supposed to hurt. I wanted the uncontrollable fury Maddy felt, or be inconsolable for days. I wanted that uniquely human ability to live outside of emotional tolerances. 

“Call me if you want to work things out,” I offered at the door. If she ever talked to me again, she’d be the first. 

I walked down the street, the warmth of the sun warming my skin. I wondered how I might set up the next test case. I considered waiting 20 years or so until humanity’s view on androids matured. The prospect of being alone for that long sent an unfettered fear through my wires. My emergency clean-up protocols didn’t know what to do with this new reaction.