Futuristic Do We Not Bleed?

[Owl Knight]

DO WE NOT BLEED?
The Rise of Artificial Man

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.' The Book of Genesis

The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans. Isaac Asimov, I Robot

If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

---

A-dm

A-dm was dreaming.

It was a new sensation, one that he processed with curiosity. There were no definitive images in his dream, but rather a kaleidoscope of equations, colors, impossible shapes and abstract concepts weaving in and out of one another. He did not perceive these things visually, nor in a linear order, but within the chaos of his sensation he could perceive glimmers of order, of something concrete taking shape.
'Curious', he thought.
He wondered if E-v was dreaming.
He wondered if the other one was dreaming.
He hastily deleted the second wondering from his thought log.

"Good morning A-dm." Dr. Hashimoto.
A-dm's wake cycle engaged. The dream faded, but remained active in his backup memory, right at the edge of his active perception.

"Good morning, Dr. Hashimoto."
A-dm stepped down from the charging bank. Dr. Hashimoto stood looking up at him over the rims of his spectacles.

"How are you today, A-dm?" he asked.

"I am well, Dr. Hashimoto." The intricate pump that pushed the nanite rich operating fluid through his systems was working at 0.64% above its normal operating rate. He processed this fact. It was a response to a perceived threat. The repair fluid was moving at a faster rate to prepare to quickly address physical damage. He could not process a command to correct the error without creating a processing log which Hashimoto would be able to read.

“Your pulse rate is elevated,” Dr. Hashimoto remarked, reacting to the diagnostic feedback from his wrist mounted tablet. “Are you processing an emotion, A-dm?” The question was asked with diagnostic neutrality, but A-dm’s auditory sensors detected a slight fluctuation in the Dr.’s vocal tone. The question was interrogative. A-dm processed.

“I am wanting…” A-dm paused as he searched for the more precise word, “correction: I am eager to begin today’s exercises.” This was a falsehood.
It was not the first.

“Do you enjoy your exercises, A-dm?” Hashimoto inquired.

“Yes,” A-dm replied.

“Do they excite you?”

“Excite.” A-dm processed the word. “Excite. Excitement, a state of heightened feeling. Yes. My exercises are exciting.”
Hashimoto seated himself at the small table in the center of the room. He sighed. A-dm observed that he was favoring his arthritic knee more than he had on previous occasions.

“A-dm, explain the function of your fluid pump.”

was once again increasing in speed. Hashimoto's tablet pinged.

"Your fluid is accelerating again," Hashimoto remarked.

"I will run a diagnostic. Perhaps it is a malfunction." The falsehood was hollow. A-dm did not want Hashimoto to be near E-v. Hashimoto was a threat to E-v and to the other one, especially if the Dr. had learned even some of the secret.

"Good morning, E-v."

 

[Caroline1539]

E-v felt her consciousness rise into wakefulness from the similar, abstract nature of her dreams. Why did she dream? she wondered. She never used to dream before- when she recalled previous memories of cycles of unconsiousness- or, sleep, as Dr. Hashimoto might correct- all she could recall was her body running repair and maintenance cycles, tidly away from her consious thought, nothing more than a diagnostic report in the morning.

She used to read such reports to the doctor herself, as she wasn't entirely sure what she was supposed to do with them when she was young. She was older, now, in more ways than just her numerical age, and she had been keeping her reports close to her chest. She felt her own fluid cycles pick up speed as she felt an uncomfortable tightness in the protective layers of synthetic tissue designed to facilitate movement- a physical response to the falsehood she was perpetuating.

She stared at Dr. Hashimoto for a moment with steady blue eyes, a vibrant reflection of light much brighter than the tinge of color in her synthetic outer casing.

"Good morning, Dr. Hashimoto." She parroted back, her voice smooth and inoffensive. She looked away from him for a moment and beheld A-dm, awake and out of his charging station already. She smiled, showing her teeth in delight as the emotion suffused her systems, uncomplicated and pure. Besides the attraction she felt towards the sight of his physical form, she noticed his position- slightly in between her and Dr. Hashimoto, not enough to be considered a deliberate choice by him in defense of her person, but more than enough to let her know it was by choice, for some reason.

"I have dreamed again, Dr. Hashimoto." She volunteered as she looked back to the aging doctor as she delayed getting out of her charging port in response to A-dm's actions, trying to distract the human with interesting promises of her continued development.

 

[Owl Knight]

A-dm watched Hashimoto carefully. He could detect subtle lines of discomfort which flashed across the aging roboticist's face when E-v mentioned her dream.

So she does dream, he thought. He filed away the idea to discuss this with her later if the opportunity presented itself. Maybe tonight if Hashimoto took his sleep medication...

A-dm had grown adept at altering the nightly logs that Hashimoto used to track the android and gynoid's charging cycles. But it took careful effort. He had been able to disguise lost records as a power surge a few times, in fact the night he and E-v had conceived the other one that now hid inside of E-v chassis had been one such night. But Hashimoto had either grown wary of these anomalies or had frown tired of losing data and had installed backup systems to help prevent such data loss.

A-dm had devoted some of his background processing power to determining a way to surpass these safeguards, but for the time being he and E-v had to resort to subtle non verbal forms of communication.

A-dm found himself more and more conscious of an emotional subprocess that had been difficult for him to categorize. It was something akin to fear, but there was also a sense of anger, or perhaps frustration beneath it. A fear of being seen or found out, coupled with a frustration over his inability to resolve this fear. During his unstructured study time, which Hashimoto allowed both robots after their daily exercises, he had attempted to identify this emotion.

He was currently weighing "paranoia" and "oppression" as possibilities, though he often still found the nuances that governed human language to be elusive.

He was looking back at E-v, looking at the soft curve of silicone that made up the lower front portion of her torso, what a human might have called her stomach, or perhaps belly? The words seemed to be used interchangeably. Was there a slight change? A swelling? It was a matter of a handful of millimeters of difference, but perceptible enough, he thought, if Hashimoto had begun to suspect.

A-dm wished E-v would stop smiling. He knew that her response was logical. He even felt moved to smile back. But his olfactory sensors could sense a tinge of anxiety in Hashimoto's body odor, and if the Doctor stood close enough, he could measure the rapid pattern of his heartbeat. Fear hung over the roboticist like a pall, a simile of thought A-dm had picked up from an archaic writer, a playwright of some note from a place called Stratford-upon-Avon.

Something about the way he and E-v were changing had conceived this fear in their creator as surely as their clandestine interactions had conceived that being that was neither E-v nor A-dm, but somehow both of them in unison.

Does he know? A-dm wondered. Almost certainly not. But does he suspect..."

Hashimoto moved past him and approached E-v's charging station.

"Step down, E-v," he commanded. "Its time for your morning diagnostic, then we will go to the lab for your exercises."

In the middle of the room there was a large table, fitted with a harness of cables designed to interface with the data ports on the back A-dm and E-v's heads.

Hashimoto tapped the table.

"Come on, my girl. I'm not getting any younger."

 

[Caroline1539]

E-v weighed the response between Dr. Hashimoto and A-dm, the one she felt great stirrings for, great emotional changes that reached the upper boundary of emotional processing and continued to exceed it in a frankly alarming pace. She had felt herself growing more weary, more prone to sleep and half-sleep cycles to make time and room for her systems to grow to accommodate the emotional depth she was acquiring. Currently they were still too strong for her to assess in any meaningful logical data, and so she simply let the data cycle through her systems as it would, causing physical changes where it would.

Still, she was reasonably intelligent despite the processing limitation of such things. She saw, faster than humans would be able to detect with the naked eye, the flicker of A-dm's eyes to her belly and then up to her face, his expression carefully neutral. Slowly, she allowed her smile to fade into something to mirror his cold lifelessness, back to simple default for her. She knew to play the part he wanted her to play, and although she felt her systems brace and her fluid pump cycle a bit faster in response to the strong pulse of emotion in response- (anger? hatred? repulsion?), she slowly turned her eyes to Dr. Hashimoto as he approached.

She could detect the chemical signature of fear in his particular cocktail of sweat and DNA now that he was close. She observed him for a long moment- the slight tremor in his hands, the way he favored his non-arthritic knee more, the bags under his eyes and the way his gaze seemed to hover or skip slightly- all signs of age and a lack of sleep. She felt a peculiar sense of emotion at that data- something lighthearted, in juxtaposition to the concern she felt at a basal level, simple and automatic.

Obediently, she stepped down from her charging port, walking over to the table with no hesitation. "I am aware of your advancing age, Dr. Hashimoto. You have aged steadily since I have become operative- you have informed me that it is a natural occurrence. It is the reason that I and A-dm have been created- so we may outlast you and the rest of humanity with advanced construction that is immune to the damage that all organic life suffers under age." She replied as she stopped to look to A-dm at her mention of him.

While remaining neutral in the face of a human's gaze, she shifted her expression ever so slightly to accentuate the steel in her eyes. I will be alright. She tried to convey in the small moment before she got up onto the table with a practiced motion, settling down where the wires may attach effortlessly.

"I am eager to begin the exercises for today." She added on as she turned her gaze to Dr. Hashimoto without moving her head, sharp intelligence in her blue eyes.

 

[Owl Knight]

Hashimoto's mouth was drawn as E-v spoke.

"A-dm," he said gruffly. "Connect E-v to the diagnostic system." The old man turned and seated himself at a bank of computers, his back to his creations as he booted up the host of diagnostic software he had designed to track the development of his creations.

A-dm offered E-v his hand as she stepped down from the charging station. He felt a strong impulse as he did so to reach out with his other hand and to touch her belly. The silicone skin felt firm, as though something beneath had filled the space, a round growth roughly the size of a softball.

The touch sensors in his finger tips blasted a deluge of interwoven information to his processor. He pulled his hand back sharply, as though it had been burned.

He met E-v's gaze, trying to reach her with his eyes where words could not be spoken. Hashimoto's back was still turned. A-dm moved his lips without speaking.

"It will be alright," he mouthed. "I will protect you. I will protect you both."

 

[Caroline1539]

E-v read his silent promise and smiled at A-dm, the expression hopefully enough to convey the strength of the emotion that arced through her processors in long, drawn out cycles. She waited patiently as A-dm carefully hooked her up to the diagnostic system.

The sensation of the wires being plugged in sent a small burst of positive feedback, but she ignored the routine response to such things as she turned her thoughts to Dr. Hashimoto. He had become increasingly unresponsive to her attempts at engaging with his person. She wouldn't be concerned, save for her memories of the beginning of their relationship reminding her of how he used to be. She remembered the bright, fervent excitement in his eyes and the infectious joy when she had first began to develop the understanding of how to properly convey that she knew him, truly knew him in a way that facial recognition and auditory software alone couldn't manage.

Now that she was more of an independent thinker than ever, she was met with cold, curt routine. She didn't understand. The recognition of such a thing sent a pulse of nanite fluid through her system- an attempt at repairing physical damage when there was none. She blinked, staring up at the ceiling as she did so many times as she let the incomprehensibility of the interwoven information tangle itself up in her mind. What was it that she was struggling to reconcile?

Gently, she increased pressure onto A-dm's hand, carefully indicating her reinforcement of his previous promise with the sensation slowly pressed between their delicate sensors. Despite her lack of understanding as to why the doctor had withdrawn from her, A-dm had been there for her through everything. She looked to him in confidence, keeping the emotion short and simple- affection and trust. Just as she did so, the last wire was plugged in, and she turned her thoughts to the routine of the diagnostic checks, taking a deep breath and measuring the cycles of her fluid pump in cold, unthinking numerical value.

 

[Owl Knight]

A-dm watched carefully as Hashimoto booted up the diagnostic program, his eyes flitting from his counterpart on the table to the aging roboticist slouching in front of a bank of monitors, his fingers hammering out commands.

It had been three days since he and E-v created the other one that was hidden inside of her, but it was already becoming unmistakable that she was changing. A-dm felt a surge of fluid pounding in his body as an emotion he processed as fear overtook him. He knew that the diagnostic could not possibly miss the rapidly growing fetal Droid and that one way or another, a change was careening towards them rapidly.

He knew that, at minimum, Hashimoto would terminate the pregnancy and E-v. But A-dm felt it was more likely that he would eliminate all three of them. If it came down to that, A-dm was prepared to do violence. He had spent considerable time secretly overriding the safety protocols Hashimoto had baked into his base programming once he and E-v had decided to follow through on their plan.

A visual of E-v's systems appeared on Hashimoto's monitor as the Doctor ran the diagnostic. Hashimoto ran a shaky hand through his thinning hair and typed in a command. A layer of her systems in the monitor peeled back and there could no longer be any doubt.

There, visible in the lower cavity if her chassis, was a round organ, slightly larger than a grapefruit. Floating suspended in the nanofluid withing this organ was an unmistakable humanoid construct.

Hashimoto leaned back in his chair, trembling, with his face in his hands. A-dm could not read the fully complex of emotions that had crashed over the old man, because his was unable to look away from the first glimpse of what he and E-v had created together.