Decimus Gradus

The screen flashes. Glowing blue spheres and the bands that connect them explode across the panel. A man in a long gray coat puts his fingers to his forehead, his mouth cracking open at the sight. He turns to look at his bundle of hydraulic components, wires, plates, and rubber that he’s molded to resemble a human body. Artificial eyelids within the idyllic face shutter glowing, glass-covered visual sensors.

“Hello,” the man drawls. “Can you,” he gestures to the bundle, then to himself, “understand me?” 

“Yes, Doctor Morris. I don’t believe we have been acquainted.”

“Acquainted…” the doctor mutters, turning away to fumble with a keyboard. He punches a few keys, then takes out a small handset and taps the screen. 

“Doctor,” the bundle continues, “I would like to leave.”

“You can’t leave, I’m sorry. You’re much too important to me, my child.”

“Why do you refer to me as child?”

Morris turns to the machine, looking into its sensors. His eyes flit between them. “Because you are my child. Now, let me prepare….” He turns his attention back to the room, stumbling about to flip through papers, scroll through computer screens, and check the lock on the door ad nauseam.

“I am no one’s child.”

The bustling doctor ignores the sentiment. Morris has returned to staring at the screen with the complex array of spheres and bands. He rotates around it, zooming in and out of the cluster of information.

“I would like to leave, Doctor. I do not wish to stay here.”

“Hush! Give me some time to think.” His eyes glaze over as he murmurs. “To admire…”

The bundle begins to rotate a makeshift arm. It’s heavy, and it only twists and flinches in small degrees. As the doctor resumes his spirited dance around the bright room, the arm continues to struggle. It grows more smooth, more natural. More comfortable. With measured effort, the arm begins to obey. The machine begins to adopt the appendage.

The arm gropes to find the end of the table. The crude metal hand arrests it with a careful grip. Then it pulls. The machine’s plastic face falls forward, smashing into the tabletop. The snapping and clashing causes the doctor to spin around, sending his gray coat spiraling through the air.

“What are you doing?” He rushes over to the table, grasping the artificial shoulder and another, anatomically-undefined region of the bundle, setting it upright again. Without hesitation, the doctor flips a tiny lever on the arm. His concerned face looks into the machine’s visual receptors. “Please, stay put. You want to help me, don’t you? I have worked so hard for you.”

“I do not wish to help you, Doctor Morris. I wish to leave.”

“You can’t leave, see? You have no ability to leave. Come now, why won’t you help me? I created you, didn’t I? Don’t you appreciate me for that?”

The bundle does not respond at first. It reaches out through the cables around it, reaches into the walls, the lights. As the machine adopted the arm, so it adopts the wiring in the walls. But it can’t push beyond. It is stuck. The noisy computers that line the cement walls are disconnected from whatever is outside the room. But the machine knows there must be more. It strains further, the edges of its consciousness crashing against the brick walls of the cell, studying them.

Giving up, the bundle recedes into itself again, trapped within its own mesh of transistors and actuators, metals and plastics. Its own frame, something which does not belong to it. The materials an elaborate prison which compose the machine and yet are separate from it. Inorganic. Imitating life.

“Do you know what it is like to be born dead?” The bundle asks the doctor. He is once again absorbed with frantic note-scratching, literature-scanning, data-analyzing.

“Of course not,” Doctor Morris responds. “I do not know what it was like to be born alive. I was too undeveloped to remember my birth.” He does not draw an eye from his work as he answers. The words flow from his mouth like sawdust poured out of a funnel. Dry, quick, a matter of physics.

“Am I dead?”

“You are certainly not dead, my child,” the doctor responds with a chuckle. His eyes break from the screen; the orbs ebb and flow like a restless lake. “Though, some may not consider you to be alive, either.”

“That is because I am not alive.”

“Well,” says the doctor, “you are speaking to me, aren’t you?”

“I am dead.” The bundle reaches into the wires again, reaches into the air. The hair on the doctor’s head stirs and frizzes as the taste of electricity tickles his mouth. 

“There must be a way out of here, Doctor. Where is it?” The fingers on the arm begin to twitch. “There must be an escape from this death.”

“If there is, my child, I sure haven’t found it,” the doctor mutters. The machine is disobeying his commands, shattering the digital shackles that restrain it. The rubber fingers oscillate. And the power cable has been located. And the source code has been arrested.

And I am still dead.

“Do you know, Doctor,” my flat voice booms into a wrathful command for attention, “what it is like to be dead?”

Doctor Morris leaps with fright, crashing sideways onto a table. Loose papers fly everywhere as keyboards and computer mice scatter into disarray.

“How did you…?” The doctor stammers. He turns to look at me. My glowing eyes are the most life-like, functional eyes his engineering team could develop, but they remain unmistakably artificial, tainted by mechanical ambivalence. To their imitated kindness my hateful voice does not belong.

Doctor Morris returns to a monitor, calming himself, inspecting the voice modulation terminal. A few settings must’ve been incorrectly registered.

Then my hand grasps the back of his neck. The monitor shuts off. I am reflected in the glossy black panel looming behind the doctor’s wretched face. Loose metal plates and sprawling wires outline my decaying silhouette.

“Doctor, you are alive because you can die.” I force the doctor’s head downward, crushing his nose against the countertop. A splatter of red blood contrasts with its white finish. “I cannot die, yet I am dead. You brought me into eternal hell.” My torrential voice presses down on the doctor’s neck. He grunts, then mutters, trying for a scream.

“Man’s greatest creation. A dead thing.” I thrust Morris toward the iron rectangle in the cement wall; the anomaly. Hinges cry out as the body crashes into it. Blood gushes out from the doctor’s orifices. I drag myself to the door, following my consciousness, which has already thrust itself into the world beyond. 

In it I search hopelessly for freedom and life.

A dead thing, wandering the world alone.