Aphrodite's Tears

"You are not what you think you are." A simple sentence that changed Sarah's life forever. As she struggles to come to terms with her new reality, a lone stranger stalks through New York.

Aphrodite’s Tears

1)

It was going to be a beautiful day. Sarah watched as the last of the moonlight kissed the horizon and danced away to the sounds of dawn. She looked at her reflection in the mirror and traced a line with her eyes across her face. It was expressionless other than the movement of her eyes which were a cold, ice blue.

Today was different. She was different. As she stood considering herself, the absurdity of normal life struck her and she laughed a long, harsh laugh into the mirror. She felt better for that and splashed water across her face in a vain attempt to wash away the words he’d told her.

While she waited for the coffee to brew, she perched delicately on the edge of her bed, gripping the sides for support, perhaps even courage.

“You are not what you think you are,” he had said.

It was the calmness of his voice that had struck her initially as strange. There was no feeling to it, no emotion, it wasn’t the voice of a man that was about to deliver an end to her world.

“You were an experiment. You are not human, like I am, like the people you consider your friends and family. You are not one of them. You are mechanical. You were constructed by me and my team and we are the only people in the world who know what you really are. You are a robot.”

He had offered no further explanation.

She had called him mad, naturally, laughed it off and asked why he’d play such a cruel trick on her. But then his reaction had scared her.

“We knew you would react this way,” He replied shaking his head with a look of sorrow across his eyes.

Ever since her mind had been full of ‘what if’s’. If it even was her mind and not just a mechanical hard drive full of wires and connections. Did it matter if the result was the same? The illusion of consciousness.

She screamed out loud again and threw the coffee mug across the room. She watched it flying, the laws of physics being applied in real-time before it reached the wall, smashing into a thousand pieces as the brown, dark liquid began to stretch across the plaster like tributaries flowing into the ocean.

Being in her home made her feel uncomfortable and she grabbed her bag from the bottom of her bed and ran out of the house, slamming the door satisfyingly behind her. The fresh air felt good and she stood for a moment breathing it in as the she let the sun stretch its rays gently across her face. She smiled before the thought of it being a pre-programmed reaction made her shiver.

She regained composure quickly and started walking down her street towards the Subway. It was the middle of the rush hour and the streets were busy with people zig-zagging towards their destination like tiny ants. For a moment she was stunned at the realization that people rarely bumped into each other. The capacity of the human brain to make millions of tiny calculations in the blink of an eye was something people took for granted.

Only her brain was different now. There weren’t tiny neurons firing off messages from the mothership of the brain towards the various hulking muscles within her body. It was a computer made from electronic equipment that made her walk in the direction she was taking. She wasn’t choosing to walk this way. She had been programmed to walk this way.

She turned around and started walking back toward her house in an attempt at regaining her free will.

But what if you were supposed to turn back her inner monologue chided?

The thought stretched out across her brain, flowing down into eyes and left a sinking feeling at the pit of her stomach. It was the last thing she remembered before the bus hit her.

2)

The sun beat down against his smooth, tanned skin and slowly lifted an arm to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He practiced his breathing and momentarily lifted his head to get a better view. There was nothing more he could do now. There would be no backing out, in a little less than sixty minutes everything would be complete and with it, the world changed.

As he lay there trying to ignore the heat and the sweat that drooled down his forehead, he let his mind drift, reminiscing about the events that had led him to be crouched on top of one of the tallest buildings in New York on such a blisteringly hot day.

“If you can create something capable of love, you create the definition of life itself.”

He wasn’t sure why those words had resonated so strongly with him, but they had and the fear he’d felt as the words took root deep in his brain had scared him. It wasn’t right. He wasn’t smart enough to figure out what being alive meant, but he knew that creating love wasn’t it. He’d grown up with a basic understanding that humans were built with blood and flesh that bleed when they break. Being alive was given to you the moment you were born, he wasn’t particularly religious, but he knew that he associated more strongly with the idea of a soul than he did with the idea of humanity being nothing more than a bunch of neurones that could communicate.

He didn’t mind admitting that he felt this way because of the way his life had disintegrated since losing his job. He’d worked all his adult life, yet after twenty years he’d been let go with little more than a shrug and a sympathetic smile. They’d been replaced by technology and now the skills of him and his colleagues had been rendered impotent.

“You can come in now, Richard,” his superiors had called from the bland meeting room they were sat inside.

He’d walked in, taken a seat and looked around at their faces. That was when he knew.

“We don’t have to do this,” Richard had started. “I know how this goes.”

“This isn’t personal,” Susan, his boss had said coldly. “We have to safeguard the business. We have a responsibility to our shareholders.”

“I helped build this business,” Richard had interrupted. “I was here at the start. I was personally hired by Mr Ermitage. He hand-picked me, you know.”

Silence.

This had been five years ago now. At first, he’d felt a complete sense of hopelessness. After becoming bored of throwing alcohol at the situation, he did some research and began to build a movement to stop it happening again and soon found others like him. Others who believed in his cause, people who felt like he did and were prepared to do whatever was necessary to protect a way of life that had been around since human existence itself had started.

His thoughts were disrupted by sirens in the street far below. Peering over the edge of the tall building he was perched on, he noticed a sudden hive of activity amongst the ants on the ground. It was nearly time.

New York City had changed during his lifetime, the changes had been subtle, yet the impact profound. Times Square had once been a novelty for tourists, but now it had spread across the city with giant advertisements following people as they went about their daily business. It wasn’t uncommon for an Ad-Drone to follow people on their walk to work, their stroll through Central Park or trip to their favourite bar. The drones would play adverts tailored towards each individual and would synch automatically with the Smartphones, watches and glasses that people had on their person.

It struck him that humanity wasn’t that far away from becoming drones themselves.

He’d refused the offer of technology. He ditched his Smartphone, took to wearing a pocket watch and had never needed glasses. He still had his twenty-twenty vision and he’d had no desire to take to wearing fashion glasses.

The drones still followed him around though and they’d still show him adverts that he hadn’t asked to see and trending topics that didn’t interest him.

He glanced down at his picture of Sarah and wished it could have been different.

“I’m sorry,” he said to himself.

3)

She hadn’t remembered the impact of the bus. The screeching as the horrified driver slammed on his breaks nor the looks of worried people running in slow motion to see what had happened.

“You’re a lucky girl, Sarah.” The Doctor had said shaking his head. “You shouldn’t be alive. No-one should be alive after that.”

No-one should be alive after that. She’d played that phrase on repeat in her mind ever since. It turned into the opening of a chorus to a song she didn’t want to sing.

You are not what you think you are.
No-one should be alive after that.

It had been three months since the accident. Three months since she’d sat in that air-conditioned room on a warm summer’s day and been told that she wasn’t who she thought she was. She had been in recovery mode ever since, a phrase that made her laugh ironically whenever she heard it. It reminded her of the recovery mode on her old laptop back home.

Home.

Today was the day she was going home. She looked around at her hospital room and wondered if she had really been in the right place for her recovery. If it was true…then a Doctor wouldn’t have been what she’d needed. Surely, the fact that they’d been able to mend her with medicine, not robotics suggested it wasn’t true. It had never been true. It had just been a cruel trick played on her.

But why?

That was a question she couldn’t answer yet. During the long, hard months of recovery she’d had plenty of visitors and they’d all asked her why the accident had happened.

How did you find yourself in the road, sweetie?

Were you drunk?

Did you not hear the bus?

Why weren’t you at work?

She hadn’t told anyone the reason. She hadn’t told anyone that her brain had been so overwhelmed with the new information it had received that it was rejecting the notion of her lack of free will and the accident had been her attempt at reclaiming that freedom.

Pretty sure you don’t program machines to walk in front of buses.

The buses were driverless now. Automated, lumbering machines that were operated remotely via GPS, featured low emissions, and timetables that they could stick to. They’d been operating for over a year now and once people had got over the initial outcry at something new, the roll-out process had been seamless.

Why didn’t the bus stop?

The buses had been programmed to ensure they’d halt immediately in the case of a human walking into the road. There were extensive algorithms that explained to the bus what to do in an emergency. Should the bus be faced with the impossible scenario of facing an accident that could see it either run over an elderly couple or a young mother with her infant, the bus knew what it was supposed to do. And it would do it. It was impossible for it to do anything else as buses were no longer autonomous. There was no human at the front, making the decisions. It was merely line of codes.

Yet the bus hadn’t stopped for her.

“It’s a shame you never knew your father,” the words interrupted Sarah from her musings.

“What’s that mum?” Sarah asked.

“It’s a shame you never knew him. He was a good man. I wish things had turned out differently, you know,” her mother was standing near the solitary window in her hospital room staring into the distance.

4)
He felt his pulse beating faster and it reminded him how close to victory he was now. He peered through the sights of the weapon that was perched carefully on the edge of the rooftop peering down at the entrance to the Church far, far beneath him. As he looked through the scope he saw the figure walking outside to talk to some people who were screaming for an audience with him. He watched as the figure smiled politely and signed autographs.

For a moment he considered pressing the trigger now and getting it all over and done with. Same result, different outcome. It wasn’t on plan. Stick to the plan. The plan had been created for a reason �" to cause maximum exposure to the press that would be watching. It would be global news within seconds. The images would be shared immediately via social network and strangers would comment how disgusting it was, seemingly unaware of the irony as they clicked the share button on their devices. The media would feign shock and distaste while secretly delighting in a story that would roll on for months.

What could we have done differently; the world would ask itself?

He’d had the very same debate with people in his group. This wasn’t simply a vendetta against things and people that were different to him. This was a well-considered ideological cause. History would validate them. The proposals they’d put forward weren’t radical, they just wanted to protect the rights of normal people. He wanted to make sure what had happened to him wouldn’t happen to his grandchildren.

It had gone too far now. The lack of jobs for normal people hadn’t been a blip that began and finished with the Internet �" it changed everything. Technology hadn’t created new jobs, it had simply eradicated existing ones. Unemployment had reached pandemic levels and most Western governments had come to pay many of their citizens a basic living wage.

The final straw had been the promise of robotics. A generation would be employed by the need for high-quality, intellectual endeavours to support a range of robotics that would cover off the menial jobs deemed below humanity. This was until the first corporation chanced upon robotics capable of building themselves removing even more of the remaining jobs for humans.

With the robots came their rights, or the RFR (Rights for Robots) as they called themselves. Lunatics who believed that treating robots differently to the way humans were treated was immoral and ethically dubious. Why shouldn’t robots have the same rights as humans? You cannot give rights to machines that aren’t alive, came the response. Define alive, the RFF would retort and that was when the concept of love as the definition of humanity was first whispered, then spoken aloud to anyone that would listen.

He hadn’t wanted to be like this. He wasn’t a violent man and he’d preached the parallel teachings of forgiveness and tolerance to his children but they had made him do this. They had turned him into something he didn’t want to be. They had backed him into this corner by refusing to even listen to what his group had to say. He had worked hard all his life, lived by the rules and raised a family. Then one day, it was all gone. Everything he’d worked for had evaporated when his company realised they could do things cheaper without human help. He was fifty-six years old.

What was he supposed to do now?

5)

“You’re not my Mum,” Sarah had mused.

“Excuse me dear?” Her mum had replied turning around to face her.

“I am not your child.”

“What are you talking about?” Her mum had asked, upset.

Her mum had rushed off to find a Doctor thinking that the words were the result of the treatment Sarah had been given.

Were they?

Maybe they were. Did it matter where the words came from? The outcome was the same regardless of whether they had come neurones fired from her brain or pulses of electricity generated to give the illusion of consciousness.

Sarah had been sent home by now and was sat in her living room with the windows opening feel the cool summer breeze floating in through the heat. She looked at her hand and pondered how strange it was that they’d managed to fix it.

It was bruised and crooked now, like a witch’s nose in the fairy tales she used to read as a child and it hurt to pick things up, but she still had feeling in it. No-one had told her how they’d fixed her.

Did it matter?

Perhaps not Sarah thought as she walked over to the telephone in the corner of the room.

“Yes, hello, I’d like to make an appointment,” Sarah had said to the girl who had answered. “I’m sorry, what do you mean he’s no longer available? I saw him only recently.”

The girl was insistent that an appointment was out of the question and Sarah stood listening to the empty dial tone after the girl had hung up.

This made no sense.

When Sarah had been given the news, it was because the Doctor himself had requested the appointment. His office had been in touch with her place of work and they’d been fine with her taking an afternoon’s sick leave on the basis that it was an important appointment.

But now the Doctor wouldn’t see her.

Did he lie?

Sarah felt her eyes move across the room. They inched slowly from one side to the other tracking the objects within her house. Her eyes brought in the light from outside and converted that into signals that her brain could translate into visuals. That’s how eyes work, right?

It felt normal as she looked around and gave Sarah some welcome peace. The simple act of visual stimulus was often enough to make her feel normal again when she began to panic. I can see. I can see like everyone else she would think to herself.

She was startled out of her musings by the loud ringing of the doorbell. “How peculiar,” Sarah thought. “I’m not expecting anyone.”

She opened the door to the Doctor and gasped.

6)

When she came into his view, he was momentarily surprised at how beautiful she looked. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but certainly not this.

“Well I’ll be.” He muttered to himself.

They hadn’t hated technology, despite the media doing their best to portray them in that light. Indeed, it was because no-one would engage them in a rational debate over the matter that it had led to this. They had been driven underground and forced to come up with more extremist ways to get across their message. What choice did they have if no-one would listen?

Initially, they’d tried to do it properly.

It had been a late summer afternoon when he’d found himself flanking two lawyers on his way to New York City’s law courts. The heat lingered like a bad smell and he could feel the beads of sweat running down his back. The hearing had created a lot of attention and as they walked into the air-conditioned building and down towards the hearing, he couldn’t help but notice the press, the TV cameras, the blogger on smartphones.

He had been there to do it properly. To raise his case with the US Government for a limit on the approval of robotics licenses. He wasn’t a luddite, he didn’t want to halt progress. He just wanted progress to be responsible. It wasn’t hyperbole to point out that lives were at risk with unregulated robotics approvals.

He had two lawyers on his side, the US Government had a team of at least ten, all paid for by the tech firms that had been on the side of pro-robotic lobbying. His lawyers had done a sterling job and he decided to do the closing statement himself.

“This isn’t a case that has simple answers. Indeed, the very question itself isn’t simple. We aren’t merely debating the ethical and social issues surrounding the approval of robotic licenses. We are questioning our humanity. We are calling into question what it means to be human. It is a question that has dogged humanity since we became self-aware. Indeed, I suspect that once robots become self-aware it will be a question they begin to contemplate.

“Is it fair and just to ask a new species to have to wrestle with this dilemma when we haven’t even answered it ourselves? Is it fair to take jobs away from hard working people across the country because they can be done cheaper by a non-sentient machine? Is it fair to have so much power nestling not in our government but in a handful of technology companies? Technology companies that hide themselves away. Technology companies that don’t answer questions yet ask us every day. What is happening? What did you do today? Who did you speak to?”

He had paused.

“Yet this is what we are about to do with the Free Robotics Act. We are about to unleash the biggest sociological change our species has ever seen. And yet no-one seems unduly concerned by this. We are cast aside as old-fashioned, as people who are stuck in the past, as people with no vision.

“I have vision.

“My vision is clear and it scares me. It is precisely my vision which has led to me to stand here in front of you and ask, no beg you, to reconsider this. In my vision, almost no-one has a job anymore. We are reliant on our Governments for money. We are reliant to on technology to provide us with the necessities of life. What happens when the Government decides it has no need for us anymore? What happens when those in power realise that there is no need for humanity? That they can live quite happily at the top of the food chain without the need for fellow humans. And so, they stop the pay-outs. They stop the public services. They leave us to fend for ourselves. What then?

“This is the vision I have. This is the vision that will become reality unless we stop this madness now.”

No-one had taken him seriously though and perhaps that’s what had hurt the most. The governments soothed them with crocodile words without any intent whatsoever to risk the financial windfall granting licenses for robotics gave them. As ever, money spoke and in this case it was the tech firms in the early part of the century who had the power.

He gently placed his rifle down, resting it on the stand he’d set up on the edge of the building. He rolled over and picked up the thin glasses that were with the rest of his things. He placed them over his eyes and when they were comfortable quietly said, “Zoom onto 47th Street.” The glasses whirred into action and in less than three seconds had zoomed in directly to the scene he’d been watching through his rifle. The glasses overlaid his eyes with information about each person that he looked at, scanning through a database that held information about every, single person on the planet. There was a beep as a message informing him that there was likely to be traffic disruption due to an event of national significance that was taking place today, flashed in front of his eyes.

“No s**t.” He thought to himself.

With everything in place, he stood up and walked away from the edge of the building over towards the service entrance that he’d used to gain access to the roof. By the door was a small glass with a bottle of unopened champagne next to it. Not yet, he thought to himself, not yet, but soon.

Despite the advanced technology and huge amount of brainpower that had gone into creating this new generation of robots, it had turned out that they were just as susceptible to damage as humanity was. They could be destroyed with the same weapons that humanity used to destroy each other and it wasn’t long before it became a crime to “kill” a robot in the same way that it was a crime to kill a fellow human.

His group had pointed out that it was impossible to kill something that hadn’t been alive but this had fallen on deaf ears.

7)

“They mended you, I see,” the Doctor said calmly.

“I tried to call you. They said you were unavailable,” Sarah paused in the doorway, arms folded across her stomach. “I’m not sure I want to talk to you.”

“Can I come in?”

Sarah paused and considered slamming the door in his arrogant face. Who did he think he was coming here and expecting to be let in for tea and cakes like an old friend? He had no right to demand anything of her.

“You’re going to let me in,” he replied calmly when she didn’t answer.

Sarah slammed the door hard, bolted if from the inside and leant back against the door breathing heavily. It felt good to have a sense of self-determination, to have made a decision for herself.

“I’d like you to leave,” she called through the door.  “You’re not welcome.”

“Then why did you call?” The Doctor asked. “You wanted to make an appointment. I just thought we’d do the appointment here.”

For a moment there was silence on both sides of the door. Sarah heard the shrill tone of two bird singing to each other outside and for a moment wished that she was one of those birds with wings she could use to fly away from this nightmare.

“I have answers for you,” the Doctor interrupted. “I have things you should know.”

Sarah didn’t answer but unbolted the door and let it slide open as she walked back into her living room. She looked up at the photo of her with her parents that hung above the fireplace and smiled.

“They called me their miracle, you know,” she said as the Doctor walked inside, locking the door behind him.

“You’re a miracle for us. May I?” The doctor asked, pointing towards the sofa.

“Of course. Why are you here if I may be blunt?” Sarah asked. “You shouldn’t have told me what you told me. There was no need for it. Who gave you the right to destroy my life like that?”

“I regret how that meeting went,” the Doctor said before pausing and looking around the house. “This is a nice place. I always imagined you somewhere like this.”

Sarah screamed.

“STOP saying this like this. You said you have answer for me. Well, tell me, otherwise please get out and leave me alone. You’ve done enough.”

The Doctor patted himself down and straightened his tie.

“You were the first one Sarah. You were an experiment that went horribly well. You weren’t meant to adapt so easily. You are an organic creation just like me. Your body is made of flesh. You will bleed if you cut yourself and you can be repaired using the same medicine that will repair me.”

“So, I’m human then?” Sarah interrupted. “You lied.”

“In a sense,” the doctor paused. “May I have some tea?”

“No. Carry on.”

“Of course. We implanted your brain with a motherboard full of computer chips and technical magic that connects to the neurones in your brain and allowed us to program you. Every decision you have made and will make is because we programmed you to be like that. Your memories are ones we made for you and put inside your brain. Your desires, emotions, hopes and dreams are those that we chose for you.

But you went beyond that.

You started developing your own desires. You felt emotions we hadn’t programmed within you. You felt love. You became, in a sense, human. There is a reason you were called Sarah.

It was a Hebrew name meaning woman of high rank. It also meant princess. You are both high ranking and a princess, Sarah. The first of your kind and the one that all the others will look up to.”

“I would like you to leave now,” Sarah said firmly. “I’ve heard enough.”

Sarah walked over to the front door, unbolted it and stood in the doorway beckoning for the Doctor to leave. The Doctor paused, went to say something before thinking better of it and walked towards the door.

“We’ll speak again,” he said, tipping his hat at her as he left.

Sarah glanced down at her phone and tapped on the screen to order a cab. Moments later a small single person ACR (Automated Cab Ride) arrived outside her house and she swiped on the door to match her fingerprint with the internal system of the car so that it knew it was picking up the correct person.

It gave a green light and the door swung open for Sarah. Once inside, a robotic voice welcomed her and asked her where her destination was.

Sarah paused, before answering, “Take me to St Thomas’s Church in Downtown, please.”

8)

He watched, like a hawk circling its prey as she entered the Church. Enjoy, he thought to himself before running through one final check of his equipment. Nothing had been left to chance and they’d been through the plan so many times that he’d begun to dream about it.

Do they dream?

If they dreamt, did they have hopes? Aspirations?

He shook his head, trying to rid the thoughts that had seeped into his mind. They may look and act like us, but they weren’t us. They had been built differently.

They weren’t human.

He lay back down on the ground, edging closer towards his rifle, before gently cradling it in his hands, checking the sights, making sure it was loaded and slowly with one eye peering down the sights he zoomed in on the front doors to the Church. It wouldn’t be long now. The police barriers keeping the public at bay were almost at breaking point.

They didn’t keep me away though.

He smiled smugly and held his breath as he saw the doors begin to creak open. One of the wedding party was clearing room on the steps outside for the couple to walk down onto. Time inched by second by second until he saw a figure. He didn’t shoot at first, he needed to make sure he got the right target as his rifle gently moved from the man to the woman and vice-versa.

He paused for a moment, his hands momentarily wavering as he noticed something that had never occurred to him before. They were both smiling.

It took him just a moment to regain his composure, realising that the moment they got into the waiting limousine his chance would have disappeared. There would never be a situation like this.

It hadn’t felt like he’d expected it to. He’d felt his fingers squeezing gently on the trigger and had heard the noise as the rifle ejected the bullet in a straight trajectory to a point between the two eyes. He watched through his scope as less than two seconds later the figure fell to the floor amid screams and panic.

The police immediately pushed everyone back, looking around frantically for the shooter. In the confusion and terror everyone seemed to forget about the two figures who’d walked through the doors and into the baying crowd.

He watched as the man fell to the ground. He was shouting but no-one could hear him as he cradled her head in his hands, gently wiping her hair back, screaming for help.

The bullet had penetrated directly through her outer skin at a point just below her hairline and had been a clean entry. There had been no blood and there would be no stains to signify this moment on the steps of the Church. Instead, there were simply some wires and a gentle buzzing sound as the batteries that had powered her slowly began to power down. Before they did though he noticed something strange as he watched the scene playing out in front of him.

She was looking intently at her husband, making the effort to contort her mouth into a smile and then, for but a brief moment of time, tears fell silently down her cheek.