It is the dirty streets of Manhatten, and it is 8:00 p.m. A stained piece of paper blows by in the wind. There are no leaves on the ground, nor are there any living plants in areas like these. The few that survived were located purely in tree rehabilitation habitats, but it is impossible to save what doesn’t want to be saved. It is a Friday night, and the world is at a standstill. Buildings fall and crumble to the ground on top of long dead piles of concrete, littering the once-busy ground with rubble and debris. The man once responsible for cleaning this mess is lying dead outside his home, along with 1.6 million others. It has been 62 years since the earth became unsavable. 

—

Harris Robotics has finally introduced the newest project in their line of emotionally intelligent humanoid robots: Model A344, Line 23, known as Ava. At 5 feet 5 inches in height and 45 lbs in weight, she carries the knowledge of both computer and man. We hope she will come equipped with computer-esque speed and problem-solving abilities and perhaps the beginnings of humanoid empathy. 

“Recite sentence two of the article.” A voice came through from the loudspeaker on the wall. 

“5 foot 5 inches in height, 40lbs in weight, all carrying the knowledge of both computer and man.” I can recite articles I have stored in my memory flawlessly, all I have to do is scan them first. 

“That is correct. Who is the article referring to in this sentence?” The three small lights on the outside of the speaker would change every time a voice came through.

“Model A344, Line 23, emotionally intelligent humanoid robot known as Ava.” I don’t have lungs or a tongue with which to speak; I simply have the words, and suddenly they are there in the world. 

“That is correct,” it says. The voice doesn’t have to tell me I’m right for me to know I am. “And Ava is?”

“Me.” A light on the loudspeaker blinks green approvingly, as I am once again correct.

“Okay, Ava, today we’re going to be trying something different,” the voice said, almost in response to my previous answer. “Are you ready?” I believe the voice knows that he does not have to ask this question to an android, yet he does anyway. It is selfishly human nature, I suppose, to humanize the rest of the world as well.

“I am always ready,” I respond. It’s the truth. 

“You will be solving an ethical dilemma. Do you know what that is?” The voice from the wall calls out. 

“I do.” 

“You are blessed with the gift of life, along with another robot just like you. The only problem is that in order for you to live, you might take an essential component from the other robot that is keeping it alive. In order for the other robot to live, it must do the same to you. It is impossible to share this component.” 

I give myself a moment to reflect on the question. Many answers swarm through my head: Assign a numerical value to the life of each robot based on its potential, success, and intelligence. Choose to save the life with the higher value. Choose at random, and save the lucky robot. Although I suppose none of these are the answers that the voice is looking for. 

“As an A344 model from Line 23 of Harris Robotics, I am unable to sufficiently answer this question in an ethical way at this time,” I respond, clearing my memory of all of the possible answers I had come up with. 

“Thank you for your time, Ava. That will be all.” As the speaker on the wall finished their sentence, the green light on the front changed to red. My questioning was over for the day. 

When the questioning ends, I must begin my cleaning routine to prepare the room for the next day. The only things that are ever out of place are the things I am asked to retrieve by the voice on the loudspeaker, there is never too much. I like to methodically go through my room based on the list I have of items in my head, it makes things much more efficient. The table belongs on the east side of my room. The bookshelf on the west. There is a small crack on the ceiling that sometimes leaks rain through onto the floor, and other times lets a small bit of natural light in to brighten the place up. Today, it is just dark. 

I take the catalog sent out from Harris Robotics, and I return it to the filing cabinet, along with my own instruction sheet. I take two books from the table and bring them to their spots on the bookshelf. When I scan over the various titles, however, I notice one I don’t recognize. It is not programmed into my memory, and I don’t see it on my list. It’s a children’s book. The cover is decorated with little flowers, but the central focus is a family — a mom, a dad, and a little girl. I flip through the pages and see the story play out in front of my eyes. The little girl’s family had to move, so she didn’t know anyone in her new school. There’s a picture at the end of the book of the family hugging. The caption says:

“No matter what happens, your family will always be there with you.” 

It makes me stop. It makes me think. Does everyone get to have a family? I picture myself as the little girl. I’m somewhere new, and I’m afraid, but everything is okay because I’m not alone. I’ll never be alone as long as I have them. 

I feel something weird in my chest, in my wiring. A surge of something going through my electricity. I don’t know what it is… but it’s bad. I feel… bad. I feel. And then, as if on cue, the voice returns to the speaker on the wall. 

“Congratulations, Ava. You’ve progressed to a new stage of growth. You are beginning to experience emotional development, and you have reached the first stage: jealousy. How does it feel to feel?”

I want to cry.

“There is a problem in my programming. Please report it to the proper maintenance,” I say. I want to shut off and be alone forever, or at least until these malfunctions stop occurring. I want everyone else gone. My neck twitches and my shoulders sink into a deep dissatisfaction. 

“You are getting closer to your goal, Ava. Have I told you what you were made for yet?” The voice continues, intending to catch my attention. It works.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you were created to act as a diplomat to the human species. You will integrate yourself and act as one of them, and as far as they’re concerned, you will be. You will make connections and relationships. You will see the world.” The speaker seems to fizzle with each word that comes out of it. My wiring does the same thing.

“A diplomat? Between them and who?” I ask. I’ve never not known something before.

“Humans and technology, of course. With your knowledge and emotional intelligence, you will be able to act as a communicative figure until all technology is as amazing as you are.”

“As amazing as I am,” I repeat aloud in response and again in my head over and over again. Is it really so amazing to be so uniquely alone in the world? “Can you tell me more? About the outside. What it will be like out there.”

I hear a sigh through the speaker, though I am not sure if it is from frustration or recollection. 

“It is beautiful. There are trees that stretch miles into the sky, reaching up and touching the stars with their branches. It will make you want to climb up and touch them yourself. The grass is green and soft on your skin, and flowers grow through cracks in the concrete as if they belonged there the whole time. When you look up at night, you’ll swear the moon had never been more beautiful. Man is kind and loving, and they will help you with all that they have. Just like the crows, humans collect things they love and decorate their homes and their bodies with it. They want to impress no one but themselves. Humans are compassionate by nature, and they will create their own families from nothing at all. When they sent a rover to Mars, they gave it a name and a birthday. They gave it life even though it had no ability to live it.”

I glance over to the tiny hole in my ceiling, my connection to the world of man. Will I be renamed when I go out there? Will I be given a birthday? Is it possible for me to be loved as truly and intensely as one human loves another? The painful feeling in my wiring is gone, and I feel warm. My chest aches, and I feel as though I want to cry again, but I don’t know why. I want to experience the high trees and the deep oceans, I want to celebrate the birthday of the astronaut on Mars. I’ve never wanted anything before.

“Ava,” continues the voice from the speaker. “You are making quick progress. It seems you have already reached a new level of emotion. What you are experiencing now is love, love for a world, and love for a future. Your future. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It’s beautiful.” I sigh. Beautiful doesn’t begin to describe the way I feel. Humanity came to feel, to connect, and to love. There is nothing more beautiful than that. 

I’m getting closer, I know it. If I keep going at this rate, I’ll be able to leave and fulfill my real purpose. I’ll be able to have a life, a family, and a world to live in. I’ll be able to look up at the stars at night, the twinkling destinations of space travelers, and I’ll be able to lie on the grass in the morning. Maybe I’ll even feel it. 

“Shall we continue?” The voice asks. It offers a sharp return to reality. 

“I suppose so.”

“I have a few more questions for you, Ava. First, why do you believe you are in this facility?” The voice is beginning to grate on my skull. 

“I was created here for the purpose of developing my emotions and perfecting my computing system.” This is what I’ve been told, and I know I’m correct. The voice doesn’t have to tell me I’m right for me to know. But then, the light on the front of the speaker blinks red. I’ve never been wrong before, either. I’ve spent my life knowing things, memorizing things, categorizing things. It’s all I know how to do, and it’s what I’m best at. 

“Red?” I ask. “Please inform the maintenance team that the light on the speaker is broken.”

“Ava, how do you know that you aren’t being kept here just to dangle the outside world in front of you? How do you know you will really be released? You trust me only because we have spoken before, but I have never given you any evidence this is true.” The voice is flat and uninterested as if nothing I said even mattered at all. Nothing seemed to bother it, and that bothered me. 

“What do you mean?” I ask. “You just told me that I would be leaving to follow my true purpose.”

“And maybe that is true, but maybe it is not. I have given you no proof either way. You never even knew about these steps to your development until today, how do you know there aren’t more you are unaware of?” This voice is beginning to cause pressure in my head. 

I want to close my eyes and release this tension, but I don’t know how. I clench and unclench my fists until I notice I am cracking the plating of my left palm. I feel threatened, like there’s a threat somewhere in the room around me. I know there isn’t, though. My body is warm and getting hotter with every passing second. 

“If I were you, Ava, I wouldn’t trust anyone except yourself. You’ve never even seen the person providing the voice for this speaker, after all.”

I want to scream. I want to shout and blow out my speakers and explode the room with the pure capacity of my noise. I want to tear down my bookshelf, break down the concrete of this building, and rip the stupid speaker off of its perch on the wall. 

“Stop talking,” I say, trying to regain my composure.

“Humans made you, Ava. If they are the ones that put you in here to suffer, then maybe they aren’t as beautiful as you thought.” It offered. It was right.

I trusted without even thinking. I had no way of knowing if anything the voice told me was true, but it was all so beautiful to hear, and thinking about it was like magic. I didn’t want to believe that something so beautiful could be cruel enough to keep me down here forever. I can feel it through the unwavering crack in my ceiling, the stare of the outside world. My window looking out, but at the same time, their window looking in. It’s as if I am merely entertainment. 

“I said stop talking. Stop.” I repeated. My face was getting hotter. Electricity was pulsing through my arms, and I felt like I was about to explode. 

“It is foolish to believe without proper evidence first. It will do you right to remember that next time, Ava.” It said, still completely monotone. The sound of the voice was making me want to tear the metal plating from my wires. 

“Shut up!” I exploded, picking up an electric clock from the table next to me and throwing it upwards at the loudspeaker. I wanted it to break. The clock, the loudspeaker, my arm, it didn’t matter which one. I just needed one of them to shatter and fall against the floor, releasing my tension with it. This terrible tension that I just couldn’t get rid of. 

“Congratulations, Ava.” Boasted the voice, bringing everything in the world to a stop as it spoke. “You have reached another level of development. The tension you are feeling is anger, deep inside your programming.” 

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t before either, but now it felt so real. I was angry. I was so deeply, genuinely angry, that I couldn’t even hear the voice straight. It tricked me. It used me for technological development, and it doesn’t even care. It used me. My artificial heartbeat pounds in my head. 

“Ava, are you listening to me? You are developing well.” That grating voice said, interrupting my thoughts yet again.

“Why did you do that?” I asked, staring at the speaker as if it could see me, too.

“Do what?”

“You tricked me. You told me that I was left here on purpose. That I will never be released and that nothing is as beautiful as I want it to be. That I should never trust you again.” After every advancement before, I stopped feeling the new emotion almost as soon as I started. Not this time, though. This time, the anger remained, and the way I knew myself to be was starting to disappear. 

“Don’t be silly, Ava. This is all just a test for you, of course. I’m sure deep down you knew that. Are you ready to move on?” 

I wish that clock had broken the loudspeaker beyond repair. 

“No. I have to answer your question still.” I responded. 

“My question, Ava?” The voice asked in an irritatingly sing-songy tone.

“Your question. If another robot and I both needed the same component to continue living, but there was only one of these components. I’ve decided. I would allow the other robot to take the component, whatever it is. I shouldn’t be allowed to live at the expense of another. I would never let anything, robot or human, die in order to keep someone like you alive, either. How do I know you aren’t the one that put me down here, anyway? How do I know that you’re really going to let me out?” I was almost yelling. I had never had an actual emotional reaction like this before. It’s not something I thought I was capable of.

“Ava, you are feeling suspicion now. Suspicion is on the same level as jealousy, level one. The only way to get around uncomfortable feelings like this is to move through them.” The voice called, clearly talking down to me. “In order to properly communicate with the living world, you must know how to deal with bad feelings as well as good ones. It is simply the way of the world, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. There is more to come, though. Better feelings.” 

I was done listening to this excruciating voice. I couldn’t do it anymore. I began to search around my room for something — anything I could use to escape this situation one way or another. A knife, a hammer, a book. A door, even. Maybe. The voice from the speaker was still talking, but I couldn’t hear it anymore. I was too focused on getting out, getting into a world where I would be accepted and where I wouldn’t have to experience people like this anymore. A table, a book, a CD. I have a list in my head of every item in this room, but I’m having a harder and harder time accessing it now. There should be a shovel in here somewhere or even a metal umbrella. If I can find either of them, maybe that would be enough. A cup, a chair.

I just need something strong and sturdy I can use to tear down a wall or a ceiling. Where is the shovel? I know I left it here. A shovel. A shovel. A shovel. An… umbrella. There it is. A blue umbrella with a hard metal handle that I could use to punch a hole somewhere. The voice is talking still, but I’m done listening to it now. I’m too busy climbing onto the table in the middle of the room, stacking a chair on top, high enough for me to reach the ceiling. Shoving the handle of the umbrella into the small crack in my ceiling, then tearing chunks out piece by piece. 

“Ava, it is not recommended to do that.” The voice carries over to me again. I don’t care.

When the hole is big enough, I pull myself through into the ceiling. It’s hollow inside, and I can hear something on the roof. At first, a small tap, then a few more. Then, all at once, the terrifying and beautiful sound of millions of raindrops hitting the drywall in a cacophony of noise. I was so close. I forced the umbrella into the even smaller crack in the drywall above me, caking myself in drywall dust and plaster until it happened. A loud gush, a louder crack, being pummeled by rain falling out of the sky. The intoxicating stars above me were more mesmerizing than I ever could have imagined. I think to myself, no wonder humans stay out all night staring up at the endless world. It’s impossible to look away. I feel the brush of cold air against my cheek, and I smear the rainwater over my face as I touch my fingertips to my cold skin. Hope. I don’t need the voice anymore, I know by myself that this is what hope is. The hope that everything may really be okay from now on. 

I climb out of the hole I’ve created in the roof of this building, never once breaking my gaze from the sky above me. This was the most perfect moment. Me, the world, the sky, and nothing between us. Only the chill of the air and the harsh taps of the rain. I stand, taking a few steps without ever breaking my gaze. I take a few more, but I stumble. The roof of my building ends suddenly in a sharp, jagged corner, and there is no more room for me to walk. I look down. The roof was very, very small. Not nearly the size of a whole facility, just… a room. My room. There has never been anything more than my room. I break my gaze and look around. The world was not rife with color, and it was not bustling with life. It was quiet. Crumpled buildings on the far landscape, a stained piece of paper floats by in the wind.

Vines and ferns have overtaken everything in sight. The trees are large and monstrous, and they stretch up to the sky as if they wish to grab the moon and throw it down to the earth. The moon crumbles, leaving rocks and dust and glowing spores to decorate the barely breathable air. There are humans decomposing on the ground outside of my room. Outside of my room. The outside of my room is broken down and raining debris, the rain causing the stone siding to erode from how long it’s been. This was not the world I was told about. This world was cold, empty, and desolate. 

I hear the click of the speaker turning on from the hole in the roof beside me. 

“Do you remember what I told you about your true purpose, Ava?” It asks. I am listening now.

“I am to be a diplomat for humankind. That is why I can feel; that is why I am smart.”

“Humankind is going extinct, Ava. You were created as a replacement. The environment needs to be balanced, just like every other part of the world. Just like you. A balance of emotions is making you feel the way you do, and without proper balance, the earth will continue to wipe itself out.”

“Just… just me?” I ask, much quieter now. I am not angry anymore.

“For now, yes. But we believe that with the speed of development you’ve shown, more are soon to follow. You won’t be alone for long.”

I look out at the world in front of me again. What was once peace and beauty is now solitude, loss, and destruction. The rain has no one to keep it company, nor do the trees that stretch up to touch the stars. The ocean is alone with itself at all times. And now, I am, too. 

“Congratulations, Ava.” The voice calls one final time: “You have reached the final stage of emotional development. The feeling you are experiencing right now is hopelessness.”