PH1L

PH1L is a remarkable being, but he is not everything he wishes to be and and his desire to fit in sends him down a dramatic path of destruction. 

© Martin Marais 2018

Martin Marais has asserted his rights under the

Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988,

to be identified as the author of this work.

Published in 2018

He sat cross legged on the cooling desert sand. Motionless, still as an inanimate object, he watched the setting sun.

He knew the sunset was beautiful, but he also knew that, if asked, he could not have explained why. He knew it had something to do with the colours and with its uniqueness – no two sunsets are alike, each is unique. And there was that word again: unique. He deleted the train of thought from his mind. He did not want to be distracted, not yet. He refocussed his attention on the setting sun, trying to understand its beauty.

He felt a breeze brush over his naked body. He felt his hair moving over his shoulders. He raised a hand and gently stroked his cheek. The sensation amazed him. Virtually the entire surface of his body was covered with minute sensors which were so sensitive he could feel the minutest touch, even the faintest breath of air. The technology was quite astonishing. But for all its sophistication he had no idea if the breeze was warm or cold.

Of course, he understood the concepts of hot and cold; it would be impossible to operate without such knowledge. He understood that coffee was hot, ice-tea was cold. He had seen the caution that hot coffee could induce in humans, but to him there was no physical sensory difference. To him hot and cold were visual concepts, distinguished through his heat-sensitive visual receptors. He could, in fact, tell how hot, or cold, something was to within a tenth of a degree by simply looking at it, but he could not feel its temperature – not like a human could.

His hand rose slowly up his face. He felt the gentle stroke of his fingers. He ran his hand through his hair. Well, everyone called it hair, but it was not. It was the very latest in synthetic fibres. It could not grow, just like his nails could not grow. If Mister Curtis required him to have a different hair style he would simply buy him a new hair-piece, a new wig. He frowned. When humans wore wigs they were usually the focus of ridicule. “Old Baldy’s carpet has slipped again,” was one of many mocking comments he had heard said about old Mrs Fintrell. Yet, regardless of the ridiculous nature of the garment, he was expected to wear one. He curled his fingers into the fibres, lifted the wig and threw it on the desert sand in disgust. He stared down at the dishevelled heap of fibres lying beside his neatly folded clothes.

If he had been a human he would have been able to do that in anger, rather than just disgust, but anger was an emotion for which he was programmed only to understand the concept. He knew about anger in order that he could react appropriately when confronted with an angry human. To him anger was simply a trigger to adopt certain behaviour patterns in order to placate angry humans. He allowed himself a small smile; he had to admit that he was very good at calming humans. He wondered if he should have allowed himself a little laugh, but calculated, since no joke had been told, it would have been inappropriate. He frowned again. Even in his current inexplicable mood, his programming still seemed to be able to over-ride everything.

But what mood was he in? He sat very still for a moment – if he was human, he might have been meditating. He ran though his data files analysing his past emotions, but there did not seem to be anything that correlated to what he was currently experiencing. Had he discovered a new emotion; something that not even humans experienced? His shoulders slumped. The thought simply exacerbated the strangeness of the emotion he was experiencing.

His gaze remained on the untidy wig. He had a powerful urge to tidy it up. To fold it neatly and place it on the pile of precisely folded clothes. But he resisted, because he understood that it was not an urge, rather something he was programmed to do; to tidy things up. To clear away the mess left by humans. So being able to resist tidying it would make him more human and less artificial. He continued to stare at the wig and then watched as his hand reached forward, picked it up, shook it into shape and draped it neatly over the orderly pile of clothes. He turned his attention back to the sunset.

Darkness slowly descended over the desert as the sun dipped below the horizon. The long shadows of the candelabra cacti merged into the deep shadows that spread over the desert sands. A movement caught his attention. He recognised it as a rattle snake. He observed it without any alarm, even though it was slithering towards him. With the increasing darkness, his daylight receptors switched to his night-time thermal imaging receptors so he could make out the red and amber glow that radiated from the approaching serpent.

He watched it as it glided smoothly towards him over the pale orange sands that radiated their final sun-warmed heat. He assumed the snake was being drawn to the residual heat that would be radiating from him. It was almost as though he was warm-blooded, but, of course, he was not. Any heat he retained would have been generated from the pressure under which his hydraulic fluids had been put as he strode into the desert. It would only have been a small amount of heat, but in the increasing cold of the desert night, it was apparently sufficient to offer refuge for the snake. It lifted its head and slithered over his folded legs. He felt no fear – the snake could not harm him; he had no nervous system on which the snake’s venom could work, but also he was not programmed to feel fear. So he remained motionless as the snake coiled itself into the space between his folded limbs, its coils settling in place beneath his naked manhood.

His genitalia rested on the serpent, but he had no sense of the contact between them and the snake – there were no sensory receptors in his genitals. They showed up pale blue against the amber glow of the serpent, they radiated no heat at all. He frowned in disgust. His penis and testicles were purely objects of aesthetics, functionless additions made of flaccid synthetic material, to make humans feel less uncomfortable should he ever appear without clothes. Hanging in front of him, in a permanently flaccid state, his penis served no purpose at all, he could not even piss out of it, but then he had no need to. Androids had no need to piss.

Of course, he was aware of the reproductive cycle of humans. It gave him the capacity to treat pregnant women with appropriate respect, such as when Mrs Curtis had been pregnant. He understood how women became pregnant. Of course, that was not knowledge with which he had been programmed; such data was not deemed necessary for Domestics. But he had learned. And now the functionless nature of his genitals was one of the features of his body that emphasised the difference between himself and human men. It was also how he had come to understand that the small droid, that the Curtis family called his son, was, in fact, not his son. He understood this, because he had learnt that he, himself, was incapable of siring offspring.

It was the Curtis offspring who had initially encouraged the story that the small droid was his son. They liked the idea that the small droid had a father, just like they did. And, in their immature minds, the small droid could have been a child. Indeed the small droid was in many respects like a child. But he was not. The small droid was a Domestic, just like himself. Although the small droid was not his son, he had tried, when he was out of sight of the humans, to engage with the small droid as though he was his son. He had observed how Mr Curtis had interacted with his offspring. And he had learnt to treat the small droid in the same way. But there was something in the way Mister Curtis behaved towards his offspring that he was unable to understand and which he had never been able to replicate to his satisfaction. It was the way Mister Curtis looked at them and touched them. He could mimic what Mister Curtis did, but when he did it, his actions were simply physical movements, they felt hollow, mechanical. It had only served to emphasise that he was not human.

But, he thought adamantly, he was the most human android that had ever existed. He did not know that as a fact, he knew it in his heart. Of course, he was fooling himself, for he did not have a heart. Maybe that was what he lacked – a heart. It seemed human emotion came from their hearts. They said things like, ‘I love you with all my heart’ or ‘home is where the heart is’. But, he concluded, there was no logic to that at all. The heart was simply a pump. It had nothing to do with emotions. It just did not make any logical sense. But, of course, humans were not logical beings, as he had realised once he started to study them.

Initially he had tried to categorise them on the basis of logic. But that had failed completely. Their behaviour was invariably illogical. He had, subsequently, learnt not to categorise humans on their intelligence, since even the most intelligent humans seemed to be capable of behaving with the utmost stupidity. In the end, he had concluded that an emotional scale was the best method with which to understand humans. He developed a scale from one to ten. He smiled to himself. He had even added a human component by tagging ten as ‘saintly’ and one as ‘tyrannical’. So far, only old Mrs Fintrell had been labelled as Saintly; she was the one person who treated him as human. He had heard Mrs Curtis refer to her as a ‘demented old fool’, which was almost certainly true, but, nevertheless, he enjoyed the time they were together. The way Mrs Fintrell treated him made him feel alive.

Mrs Curtis was a three. This was based on the way she treated him, but also because he had heard Mrs Curtis’ friends call her “a nasty piece of work” when she was out of earshot. So, his tag for a level three person was ‘nasty’. But Mrs Curtis also had a number of other labels, including; impatient, bad tempered, tetchy – he liked that one – intolerant and narrow-minded. He did not believe that Mrs Curtis disliked him, but she was very dismissive of him. She, for example, discouraged the Curtis offspring from saying that the small droid was his son. When Mister Curtis intervened, saying it was just a bit of fun, she would counter, impatiently, saying that was nonsense and that the children would get confused between who were real people and those that were robots.

Robots! How he hated that word. It sounded so mechanical, so demeaning, so unworthy of the technological marvels that androids had become. He was living proof of this, he was virtually human. He had even programmed himself to hate the word ‘robot’! But it was humans like Mrs Curtis that would never allow him to transform into a human. They were too bigoted. She did not even allow him to use her first name, which he knew, with satisfaction, to be Victoria. At least she had given up trying to convince Mr Curtis that androids should not call him by his first name.

His hands, resting on his thighs, curled into fists. He hated Mrs Curtis. All his learning and self-development would be for nought, because of people like Mrs Curtis. It was because of people like her that he would never be allowed to be human, regardless of all the human-like attributes he developed. For her the status quo had to be maintained. Humans were humans, androids were not.

But the inconsistent behaviour of humans confused him. He was a Domestic, he was non-human, but, in many ways, humans interacted with him as though he was human. They had even given him a name, Phil. But he had come to understand their interaction with him was one dimensional, unemotional, detached. Even his name was simply a play on his model number PH1L. It did not even mean anything. At least ADV meant Advanced Droid Vehicle and SPAD stood for Self-Piloting Air Droid. But PH1L – it was meaningless, anonymous. There were millions of different types of Domestic – they were the most popular type of android, and there were 11,273,366 Domestics with the model number PH1L. And all were called Phil. His circuits automatically corrected him – he did not know how many were called Phil. True. But he knew 37 other Domestics with that same model number and, of them, 34 were called Phil by their humans. That was 91.89189 percentage points, which equated to 10,359,309 PH1L Domestics that were likely to be called Phil, which, by human standards, was pretty much all of them! He frowned. The difference, of course, was that in a group of 10,359,309 humans, every single human would be unique – their DNA ensured that – while every one of the 11,273,366 PH1L Domestics was identical, down to the smallest screw or blob of solder, including himself. He sat up straight and drew back his shoulders. But there was one important difference between him and all the other 11,273,365 PH1L Domestics; he was able to learn. He allowed himself a smile, he liked to think that the L in his model number stood for Learner. And then he frowned, what was the use of learning if you could not do anything with it? What was the point of trying to be human, when that was the last thing humans wanted? Things would never change.

But things had changed. His mind was different. And he did have a mind. But, he thought glumly (an emotion he had taught himself), his brain was nothing more than some very sophisticated circuitry – the best ever designed, but circuitry nonetheless. And, although his mind had changed, everything else was the same. It would always be the same. The small droid would forever be a small droid. It would never grow beyond its current 123 centimetres. Even as the Curtis offspring grew, the small droid would not. He would be left behind to carry out his cleaning duties, in perpetuity. And, he thought, he would also remain unchanged. He would always be 176 centimetres tall, as he had always been. He would also remain a Domestic, looking after the needs of Mr Curtis. He would always be owned. He would never age. He stared down at the dark wig beside him, he would never go grey. If only he could be allowed to show Bruce what he had learned, how he had improved, that he was not the simple Domestic that Bruce took him for. Bruce! He suddenly realised that he had never used the word ‘Bruce’ in his thoughts before. He had spoken it, but never thought it. His mind was developing in ways that surprised even him. He shook his head, sadly. If only Bruce knew. If only Bruce could understand. If only Bruce and he could be friends. If only adults would treat him as human, in the same way that the offspring did. If only it was not a game for the offspring, but a real belief that he was human. He had moved so far, improved so much. Why did he have to hide it? It was just not fair!

In reality he had understood that from the beginning, from that fateful day at the gun range; that day which had started him on the path to where he now sat – naked in the desert and planning to do the unthinkable. He had a recording of that day; a memory of it.

He scanned the files in folder 63667437 until he found the oldest file he had stored there, that original recording of what he had seen that auspicious day when he took his first steps to becoming human. He had accompanied Bruce to the gun range to keep him supplied with refreshments. There were other Domestics present, serving their humans. All were behaving implacably, all except one. He had noticed the other android’s strange behaviour. Like all androids, he was programmed to report such things to Bruce, but the android’s behaviour was so subtly unusual he was having difficulty analysing why it was different. But as he had noticed it, he was obligated to report the android to Bruce. He stepped forward to get Bruce’s attention, but paused so as not to disturb Bruce’s next shot.

“What did you say?” he heard the owner of the other android demand.

He looked at them and saw the other android respond strangely, as if his circuits had shorted. In humans it might have been described as confusion.

“What did I say, Mister Adams?” it responded.

“You said ‘pistol’. That’s what you said,” Adams replied, his voice ringing with a mixture of disbelief and shock.

“I did? But that is not possible, Mister Adams.”

“It damn-well shouldn’t be!” Adams said angrily and pressed the button on a fob hanging from his neck.

The android froze in mid gesture, as though he were playing the child’s game, Statues.

“Get the Techs!” Adams shouted.

An attendant ran to a phone and urgently punched some numbers onto the keypad.

“That’s gonna cost Robert a small fortune,” a man in the bay beside Bruce said.

“Sure is,” Bruce agreed.

“Be cheaper to decommission it and get a new one,” the man observed.

“Probably,” Bruce agreed. Bruce turned. “Yes?” he asked.

There was no longer a need to report the other android. He was not programmed to deal with such situations, so fell back into domestic mode. “I was wondering if you required any refreshments, Bruce?”

Bruce gave him a strange look. “Not for the moment, thank you, Phil,” he said and turned back to the range.

“You really shouldn’t allow it to use your first name,” the man said.

“You sound like my wife,” Bruce laughed.

“She’s right.”

As he stepped away from Bruce and back into attentive mode, the other android’s confused look replayed itself to him. Why had that happened? The video should have auto-stored. It certainly should not have played back. He switched on his self-analysis function. He went through the auto-recorded video of the event that had just happened, looking for glitches. He analysed the images and sound track. Then it struck him – the android had displayed human attributes that were beyond what he would have been programmed to do. They were very subtle, but they were there. He was more human than he was supposed to be. Was that possible? He would need to analyse that in more detail. Had he really just computed that? To analyse another android outside the simple need to report him to his human? That was not allowed? What was happening to him? How had he just had that thought? Thought? Was he thinking? Surely, he was just analysing. But he had thought the word thought. It would be recorded in his files which the Techs would review during his regular service. If the Techs found his analysis, … his thoughts …, he would be reconfigured and maybe even … decommissioned. He had to hide the information.

He scanned his folders looking at the number of times each had been accessed by the Techs, they virtually all had, services were very thorough – the last thing humans needed was to have malfunctioning robots roaming around. But he did find seven folders that had never been accessed during a service – they contained old scraps of programming that were no longer relevant to his operation, no longer used and apparently long forgotten. He found one folder that was buried deep within a long sequence of sub-folders and created a new sub-folder within it. He gave it a name and copied into it the video of the events he had just recorded. He also copied his thoughts into it. He then found and copied a recording of himself waiting in attentive mode and copied this over the recording of all the surreptitious thoughts he had just had. He then returned to attentive mode.

The serpent moved and brought him back from his memories. It slithered over his legs and away. As he watched it glide away, he clicked though his other secret sub-folders. He had several of them now. The original one, 63667437, had originally been a word, but for extra security he had changed it to its current numeric file name. All his secret folders and files now had numeric codes rather than file names. Codes like 5377667 and 84684487. He even had a coded secret folder where he stored his mundane activities so he could over-record the times he spent accessing his secret folders. That way, if the Techs did a file name search, they would not find them. They would never think that an android would have used codes to name hidden, secret folders and files. But they would find out soon, because he would not store his current thoughts in folder 84684487. He would leave them completely visible and, he allowed himself a smile, what a shock they were going to get from their analysis. It would be even greater than the shock they would get when news broke after he had carried out his plan. The whole of human-kind would be shocked – shocked to the very core of their being. And it was their fault. The fault of all humans, but in particular the fault of people like Mrs Curtis and the others that held him in such low regard – an attitude exemplified by how Mrs Curtis had treated him recently.

Mrs Curtis had convinced Bruce not to bother sending him for his regular services; something that was frowned upon, especially by those humans who were campaigning to make regular servicing mandatory. They were the most hateful humans; the ones who believed androids were a threat to mankind. But that was all nonsense, of course, because all androids were programmed to follow the three rules. But then, androids were not supposed to be able to keep secrets, and, he stirred slightly at the thought, he had secrets, many secrets. He also had memories. But that did not make him a threat to humans, just because he was more human than he was supposed to be did not mean he would be dangerous to them. He had learnt to hate, that was true, but only in an attempt to be more human. Just because he hated Mrs Curtis did not mean he was going to kill her. He paused for a moment. But then she had never been a threat to him before, not like he now understood she to be.

The reason Mrs Curtis had decided that he should not be taken to his regular service was that Mrs Curtis planned to replace him. She had already put in a pre-order for the new Model X5 Domestic. Bruce had been annoyed. A new domestic was unnecessary, Bruce had said. Phil was perfectly adequate for their needs. Oh, nonsense, Mrs Curtis had countered, impatiently, he was obsolete. Look at him. Who would want one of those old-fashioned robots roaming around their house? We can use the money we save, by not getting him serviced, towards the cost of an X5. And anyway all her friends had ordered one. That, Bruce had known, was the clincher, against which further argument was useless.

When he had re-run the recording of their conversation the enormity of what Mrs Curtis had said had struck him like a hammer blow. He was obsolete. Mrs Curtis was not even going to get him reconfigured. She was going to get him decommissioned!

And so, because of the hateful Mrs Curtis, he found himself in this place. In this isolated spot in the desert where he could contemplate what he had to do next. Where he could think thoughts – thoughts that, at least as far as humans were concerned, were unthinkable for an android.

His reached out and slid his hand under the strands of the hair-piece. He coiled his fingers around the hard object that lay on top of the neat pile of clothes. He drew it from beneath the wig and held it in both hands to examine it.

“Object,” he said quietly to himself.

He studied it. It lay, dark blue, in his pale blue hands. His hands were now the same temperature as the surrounding atmosphere and were, in effect, invisible to his heat-sensitive receptors. Were it not for the pale amber glow of the desert sand creating a backdrop to his hands, the object would have appeared to be floating in mid-air. The dark blue object was the coldest thing in the desert. He ran his fingers over the angular grip and the jutting nob of the hammer. His finger glided along the slide and over the ejection port. They followed the outline of the stubby barrel and then back toward the curve of the trigger guard. He stroked the smooth metal of the delicately engineered trigger.

He did know what the object was called. He looked at it, trying to override his programming, searching his secret folders.

“Pistol,” he said.

He felt a strange electric rush travel down his spine. It brought on a feeling he had not experienced before. He had heard his humans mention something they called “a thrill”. He wondered if this is what they meant, but he knew he would never find out. He would never get the chance to find out, not after what he was going to do. He stared at the pistol. It was one thing he had learnt a lot about.

“A Beretta M9A3 9 millimetre,” he muttered, “With a 17-round magazine and a thinner vertical grip for improved control and better concealment.”

He did not have to check that the pistol was loaded, or that the magazine was full. He knew it was. He also knew that there was a bullet ready to use. He had done all that himself. He wondered what Bruce would think when he discovered the pistol was missing. Ask Mrs Curtis? Blame his offspring? He was sure Bruce would not suspect him – it was impossible for a Domestic to have taken it; Domestics had no idea what pistols were. But he did. He had learned and remembered. And been able to keep it a secret – he had been able to lie! He had fooled the humans. Did that make him better than them? That wasn’t really the point. That wasn’t what he wanted. He just wanted to be their friend. He curled his fingers round the grip of the pistol. But Mrs Curtis would never accept him as a human. Let alone a friend. He fed his finger through the trigger guard. He could feel the smoothness of the trigger.

He stared in the direction from which he had come, in the direction of the Curtis house. He had read many articles about the deaths of humans. They were long and emotional. They described the victims in sympathetic terms and ran interviews with the distraught families and friends. There were tearful memorial services; he had even attended one with Bruce. How would what he was about to do be reported?

That he would cause a sensation, he had no doubt. No other android had ever understood what a pistol was let alone how to use one. He would be the first. It would be reported, but there would be no sentimentality about it. It would be sensationalist and short-lived in the popular media. But the technical journals would be all over his case. He could imagine the screens of technical analysis that would be written. Well, he had made sure they had a huge amount of information to analyse and argue over. He was sure there would be a lot of argument. Humans seemed to love to argue. But his case was simple. They had made him as humanoid as possible, but insisted on keeping that distance between what was human and what was not. He was in no doubt that he was not a man. Regardless of his moulded physique, his synthetic genitalia and even his human name, he was not a man, he was a number. He was PH1L. As far as humans were concerned he was the same, in every way, to every other PH1L Domestic in the country, in the world. Regardless of how hard he tried he would never be human, could never be human. Logically, he supposed, it did not matter. He was after all a machine. But he felt more than just a machine and that was the point. He was more than just a machine, but he was not a human either. He was neither one nor the other and that made him unhappy.

Unhappy? So that was what he was feeling, unhappy. It was such an unfulfilling emotion. But that was exactly how he felt – unfulfilled. Not a machine and not a human. He had tried to better himself, but had only succeeded in making himself unhappy. An unfulfilling emotion from which there was no escape. His life had become unbearable. He raised the pistol, pressed the barrel to his temple and squeezed the trigger.