Robot Theory - 1 by Lorianne Benton

They say that at some point in our lives we reach a stage of epiphany, a moment in which we are struck with the realization of knowledge that we have carried with us throughout our entire existence. It has laid dormant within our cerebrum like some ominous beast in a dark cave, patiently waiting for its opportunity to strike.

How it is that such sudden light is shed upon the consciousness we may never comprehend. The only certainty that we are left with as a result of the experience is the sense that for a length of time barely more than a heartbeat we truly understood our place in the universe, and were one with it.

Or were we?

Why is it that our conviction is so short lived? Doubt, the shameless whore of logic, creeps into our reasoning and shakes the very foundations we create for ourselves. Men have gone mad questioning themselves and the validity of their own epiphanies.

So what is real? Is it that which our environment has conditioned us to accept, or is it perhaps the conclusions of those rare glimpses into a greater awareness beyond the ten percent that we regularly utilize for higher cognitive processes? At what point do we accept information and received sensations as truth? Is there some underlying code embedded in everything around us that only our subconscious self can detect? When all the right pieces of the puzzle are accounted for, is that when they are fitted together and presented to our waking self? What if there is a single piece missing?

Is it really possible to have the answer to every question and never realize it?

It was at this point that his wandering mind froze, locked on that final thought and its probability. He blinked, and realized that someone was speaking to him. He tore his gaze away from the glistening bottom of the cup held in his hands.

The waitress was slightly pudgy around the middle. Hip-hugging jeans did nothing to flatter this trait, but she had an attractive face, blonde curls everywhere and a little too much mascara.

“Do you want more coffee?” she asked a second time, growing impatient. “Refills are on the house.”

He mumbled his assent and something resembling a “thank you, miss” and proceeded to raid the provided container for packages of sugar.

“No cream, right?” She held a small white pitcher in the hand opposite to the coffee pot. He shook his head and she floated away wordlessly.

The atmosphere of the small roadside restaurant was quiet at best; more like bleary-eyed and empty of conversation at this ungodly hour. The waitress came and went mechanically, and when she was not circulating with her steaming pot of coffee she was to be found carrying on a low prattle of gossip with the cashier. A few other customers were scattered about, wordlessly sipping the contents of their mugs, picking at whatever remained on their plate, or toying with a napkin.

The daylight would find this place bustling with the chatter of old friends and the whine of young children. The waitresses would scurry from one table to the next, barking orders into the kitchen as they passed. Somewhere in the background there would be the warm hiss of skillets and the clang of dishes, and drifting in and out of the din like a breeze would be the music that no one really paid attention to. He saw it all in his mind’s eye as he took care not to burn his lips on the hot coffee.

Panes of decorative glass surrounded the smoking section like a transparent curtain, tricking the nicotine-free customers into feeling safe from the hated fumes. From his corner booth he gazed through the swirling patterns of foul smelling fog at the other ghosts haunting this place at such an early hour.

In the opposite corner sat a man in flannel. His steel-toed boots were cracked and splattered with what appeared to be dried concrete. Everything about the man seemed dust covered; his jeans had lost their blueness and the color of his shirt was also obscured. His hair and eyes were dull, and he hadn’t shaved in days. The hands that gripped the knife and fork he was using to carve away at the abnormally large cut of dark meat in front of him were coated in thick calluses. There was a considerable amount of dirt beneath the few fingernails that had not been chewed away. Only his wedding ring gleamed as he moved, a treasure nestled in the sand. He had the air of a man who worked too hard for too little, but was just old enough to have become set in his ways. Besides, he had a wife and probably children to provide for, and he must have felt that the time for chasing dreams had long since passed him by.

He watched the man for quite some time, wondering if he would go home to wake his sleeping wife to kiss her goodnight, or if he would simply pull her warm body close as he climbed into bed.

There was a heavyset young woman sitting adjacent to the dirt man, her chapped lips pulling at a long, black cigarette. Her attire suggested that she worked at a nearby grocery store. Her name tag offered no clear identification; it was covered in a variety of brightly colored stickers. Her black hair was lackluster and dry from having been dyed too much. The hairs closest to her scalp revealed that it had once been the color of soft caramel. It was impossible to tell what color her eyes were within the halo of dark make up. The khaki pants that she was doubtlessly required to wear while bagging groceries were frayed at the bottom and could not completely conceal her mismatched socks. Her forearms were imprisoned by an astounding number of bracelets, and her fingers were likewise encased by rings. She tapped her cigarette against the ashtray as she exhaled its product slowly. Propped upright against the napkin holder on the table before her was a copy of the Kama Sutra. She read avidly as she smoked and toyed with the remaining bits of a cheeseburger on her plate.

It seemed amazing to him to consider that she and the dirt man lived in the same town. She was colorful and artificial, he was earth and sweat. Surely they never guessed that they traveled the same state route daily or went to see movies at the same dollar theatre. Maybe she had once helped his wife carry her groceries to the car. They were eating at the same restaurant; perhaps they also remarked to the same toothless manager at the gas station down the road about the rising cost of tobacco products.

And yet they never looked at one another, never noticed, never thought of their similarities. To each one the other was just some filler of space in their world, not really an entity, but rather an object.

Subconsciously humans seem to feel that they are the only reality in the universe, that all action is in response to them. Rare is the man who walks through a crowd looking around him and realizing that each individual before his eyes has a life entirely their own. Each one must breathe and eat, each one has wept and laughed in turns. Every member of that crowd will eventually return to the place that they call home. They will climb into a bed and they will dream, and they will wake the next day to go about the business of being. They posses their own realities, but never realize that the common man around them is a part of that existence.

Unless, of course, this is not true.

His coffee had cooled now, and he drank liberally from the mug. He wondered now if the dirt man and Kama Sutra were entities at all. When he left this place and continued down the road toward the dawn, would these two continue to exist? If they were not occupying his present reality, did that mean that they were only real because he had chosen to perceive them? Why was it that he had suddenly taken notice of the man and the woman just as he had noticed the decorative glass in the room?

His heart was beating faster at the prospect of a developing epiphany. He knew that by this time tomorrow he would be miles away from this place, continuing toward his destination. This evening spent drinking coffee and watching those around him would be a memory blurred by the sleep that would eventually find him in some motel room. It seemed to him that these people would no longer exist to him because they were not an active aspect of his reality. He would not be able to relate to them and so to his mind they would become merely objects.

He chuckled to himself. He could not help but be reminded of the video games he had played as a child. Once the enemies were slain, they fell to the ground and their bodies vanished as if they had never been. As one wanders through the labyrinth that is life one encounters hundreds of thousands of people. The levels of interaction vary from potent emotional bonds to slurring the words “excuse me” as one unintentionally shoves into another. Constantly are we passing from one moment of contact to the next, as bees travel from blossom to blossom. Yet as soon as the insect reaches a new flower, it has forgotten the last. Once the response to an action or individual is complete, it ceases to be a part of our reality.

He reached for a napkin and the pen in his pocket and scribbled the words “reality is only individual perception.” He stared at what he had written.

The waitress appeared at is elbow soundlessly and refilled his cup. She did not ask him about cream this time.

His mind was whirling. Since one’s perception is constantly changing, he thought, this means that reality is in a constant state of flux. Like a diamond, it possesses innumerable facets that reflect life in a hundred different directions at once. Yet each facet falls into one of two categories: the reality that was and the reality that is. Days from now he could look back on this night and recall in detail the individuals before him. They would have become a part of the web that constitutes human memory, a snapshot of what his reality once had been.

Kama Sutra glanced up from her reading. It was a long moment before he realized that he was meeting her shrouded eyes. He started, and felt his face grow hot as he forced his apparently offending gaze back into the contents of his cup. Satisfied, she returned to her diversion after ordering some form of dessert.

A moment later, he took up his pen again. This time his untidy scrawl formed a question: “Does man control the shift of his reality, or is he merely at the whim of some higher state of existence?” His brow furrowed as he gazed at the question he could not answer, an inquiry which for some reason seemed to bear so much magnitude. He felt as if he were creeping up to a revelation, as one inches nearer and nearer to the edge of a precipice. Yet when his mind attempted to peek into what remained undiscovered, all that met his eye was blackness, an abyss with no solution.

He inhaled nearly half of his coffee and began tearing the corners of the napkin. Why could he not answer this riddle? If our minds and our selves truly possess the explanation for every question, why is this capacity never realized? It suddenly seemed to him that the human mind was somehow prevented from accessing the better part of its own knowledge, like a computer on which someone neglected to install a critical program. A critical, but very subtle program. Some detail so minute that it never occurs to us that we are lacking. Most likely, he reasoned, it was an unbelievably simple error to correct. But humans are notorious for making their problems three times as complex as they were initially.

Or could it be that something else prevented him from finding the correct key to the door of his understanding? Something sentient; some entity watching him in his frustration, providing him with just enough stimuli to produce an awareness of the nature of reality, but never enough to fully grasp its every facet. Was it amused by his confusion, or was it learning from him? Was his life really that of a computer in which all that he interacted with was simply a program?

He looked up at the dirt man one more time, who was rummaging through a worn and cracked leather wallet for a few bills to leave on the table. His process of thought and conclusion had been noted, and now the program that was the dirt man was shutting down. Soon it would be erased, and his reality would shift again.

Kama Sutra was licking her spoon clean. It was doubtful that a single micron of chocolate would be left upon it; a disk that had been reformatted. The waitress and the cashier were staring at him and speaking quickly. He looked away.

It was his peripheral vision that told him that the dirt man was striding toward the counter at the front of the restaurant. He paid his tab, flirted briefly with the two women at the cash register, wished them goodnight, and disappeared into the poorly lit parking lot. Scarcely minutes later, Kama Sutra closed her book and shoved it into a previously unseen handbag peppered with colorful buttons and strange patches. She left not a cent on the table behind her, tossed a crumpled twenty dollar bill at the cashier, jammed her change into a pocket, and left without uttering a sound.

Somewhere in his core he knew that the time had come to leave this place behind. He had been here too long as it was, and he knew that he could not resist the shift of reality. He must continue down the long and barren road he had traveled for so long already. With luck he would find some place to sleep, probably yet another seedy establishment in which the sheets smelled like mothballs and the walls were too thin.

He did not have much to leave for a tip, but he offered what he could, including a few coins darkened with age and the touch of hundreds of fingers. He consumed the remains of his cup, which were now a little too cool for his taste, and stood. He took in his surroundings one final time and casually directed himself toward the red counter where the cashier waited. He gave her a smile, which was returned cautiously.

A chill raced down his spine as he stepped into the night. The cool breeze ate away at the warmth that the small eatery had provided his body. He dug in his pocket for his keys. Perhaps man was barred from the full extent of epiphany because it would create a threat to his captors, a higher form of virus protection. Maybe we were simply too primitive to fit the key into its hole. A chimpanzee could be taught sign language, the basics of understandable communication crossing the boundaries between man and beast, but it would never sing an opera.

The waitress and her conspirator watched him from the desolate diner. The cashier spoke first.

“Bizarre,” she commented.

The other woman crossed her arms. “He’s come in here every night for as long as I’ve worked here, always at the same time. He always sits at that same table, and he always orders the same number of cups of coffee.”

The cashier glanced at her watch. “He leaves at the same time every night?”

“Yep. I guarantee you that there’s two dollars and forty cents beside the ketchup and the same two sentences scribbled on his napkin over there. Neither one makes much sense.”

“I’ve seen them once before.”

The waitress shrugged. “You might as well get used to it. He’ll be back tomorrow anyway. He has no choice.”

The two women silently returned to their work as his small, decrepit car pulled onto the abandoned highway and melted into darkness.