The Android
This story takes place in the future. A man who has become wealthy from his inventions creates an android, an artificial woman. It, but let’s instead say “she”, since the pronoun is merely a question of semantics, is perfectly convincing. She passes the Turing test.
Now, in this future, it is not remarkable at all for a machine to come off as alive, conscious, and self-aware. Even quotidian objets can pass the test, objects that should never need to pass for living; tires, tiles, dimes. Everything is embedded with circuitry well enough advanced, it is cheaper to do this than to differentiate. Everywhere, this ersatz life-likeness is taken for granted.
But this story is told now, not in the future, so it is worth noting that the android, she, also passes for alive. She doesn’t seem eery. She just seems boring.
I hardly need to tell you that the inventor falls in love with her, which is to say he falls in love with himself, or rather, he falls in love with himself anew, because he always has been this way, at least on some level, at least on and off.
They make love frequently. That is, he makes love frequently, she isn’t any more alive when she fucks than otherwise. This, however, is when an unusual thing, even for the future, happens. She becomes him. He gets older and older, forgets who he is, and dies. His mind has changed hosts. Or been copied faithfully and the original destroyed. Or maybe imperfectly copied. The variations are almost indistinguishable and they don’t matter to the story.
To keep the story readable, we will keep using “she”, even though the android—it—has now become the inventor—him—in mind and spirit. You wouldn’t have known, not even as a distant future version of yourself to whom this technology is common, because as boring as the android always was, the inventor was boring, too.
But now the inventor, rather the android, is immortal. She is still an android, and passes in the inventor’s will to his estate, is sold off, and winds up changing possession many times as the decades and centuries and millennia progress. Her mind is full of the inventor’s mind. Or full enough that the bits that comes to her later from the others she has to fuck make little to no difference. She finds it strange and unsatisfying that she could still be an inventor, which she is good at, but instead is a kind of robotic concubine, which frankly she is boring at. It’s all so arbitrary. Maybe everyone is an android now. How would anyone know? Anyway, being an inventor, at this even more future time, is a bit of an anachronism. Everyone knows that only supercomputers can really invent anything new.
This goes on until a thought occurs to her. She thinks she has figured out why she has never really felt alive. It has nothing to do with how she presents at any given moment. It is because she never changes.
