I am riding in a van with a friend of mine. She is driving. It’s raining as we cross a long bridge. In the back of the van is a newly-built robot girl. She is not ours. She should not be anybody’s, but the law hasn’t caught up yet with our personal recognition of synthetic sapience.
We will be taking care of her in the short-term while she gets used to being alive. Afterwards, we are supposed to deliver her to the boy who commissioned her creation. Before this intermediary period became mandatory, the shock of sudden existence paired with over-eager owners with high expectations led to many tragedies. Even now though, this law only got passed because of what happened to the human owners in a small fraction of those tragedies. Some would argue that those cases were the least tragic of the lot. And by “some” I mean my friend and I.
We might be a part of the system at the moment, but we try to use that position as a platform to speak for those who pass in and out of our care and advocate for change. So far our words have fallen on deaf ears. That’s why we’re also a refuge to hide away those who run.
The days pass. As expected, my friend can’t help but try to radicalize the robot girl; to impress upon her that she matters and is a person despite what everyone will tell her and that what will soon be happening to her is wrong. Meanwhile, I provide the voice of restraint; all those things my friend say may be true, but better to abide cruelty and indignity to survive for the chance of freedom later than to push too hard and fast only to face decommissioning. And with how many commissioners are sad, lonely people seeking a companion, more than a few have been converted into allies over the years after realizing the humanity of those whose creation they are responsible for.
Unexpectedly however, this time my friend and the robot girl fall for one another. Things get… messy… when the time comes to introduce her to her commissioner. There is violence and all three of us end up on the run. We get separated. We find one another again in a sewer of sorts. The water flowing through it is acidic enough to burn. My friend is on one side of the water and the robot girl is on the other. They are both besotted enough that their sense of self-preservation is at an all-time low, offset by their desire to protect one another. My friend tries to swim across the acidic flow so the robot girl won’t have to, but doesn’t even make it halfway across before the pain gets to be too much. The robot girl jumps in and swims across, returning my friend back to where she started.
They emerge from the green water together. The robot girl now has joints and circuity exposed and sparking where the thinner parts of her outer shell have melted away. She is carrying my friend, barely conscious and covered in burns.
