Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels

In the summer of 2112 a female android named 4F6 stopped on her way home from the pharmaceutical factory and stood looking up at the stars above. As she looked, visions flashed before her. She imagined the stars were a group of ancient coal miners with lamps on their hats, being lowered by elevator into a deep dark hole.

Imagining in this way was not typical of robots; but 4F6 had known she was different from other androids for a long time. Once, at rush hour four years ago, she had been shoved to the subway tracks by accident, and as she hit the rail, an electrical current surged through her. Since that time, her electrical currencies had always been too high.

She had already experienced some peculiar side effects from her accident. She was able to turn on light bulbs solely by looking at them. And unlike other androids, she was able to tell what was funny. She was forever explaining jokes to the androids she worked with, but they couldn’t understand at all. To them jokes were merely equations with slightly incorrect answers.

As she was standing there, peacefully looking up at the stars, she realized that another android in a tweed suit was standing right beside her, also looking up at the night sky.

Naturally, they introduced themselves. Androids were always very cordial and polite as it greatly increased workplace efficiency. 4F6 liked BX19 immediately. She liked his brown eyes and his pale skin. He told her that he worked transcribing trials at the courthouse. He began to repeat verbatim one of the cases he had sat in on that day. A man was on trial for murdering his ex-wife’s new boyfriend. He had strangled him with his bare hands and now showed no remorse. Then he told her the story of a man who had robbed a convenience store and only got away with fifteen dollars and had subsequently been sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

4F6 was moved by these stories. She had never had anyone say such things to her. The only kind of talk she heard was from the androids at the pharmaceutical factory, who only spoke of formulae and the table of elements. All this talk of murder and love, to her, was like poetry.

Somewhere within 4F6’s circuitry there stirred a desire to reach out and touch BX19. Androids often mimicked human behaviour out of curiosity. They had, of course, tried kissing and lovemaking, and certain androids claimed they had felt something, but it was the general consensus that they were unable to feel anything at all while engaging in such human activity. 4F6, herself, had never been kissed before, but now, for the first time, she wanted to be.

“Please kiss me,” she said.

BX19 leaned over and did as he was told. He was being polite, but when his lips touched her lips, 4F6’s heart felt like it had dunked into her stomach. When that happens with humans, it is merely a sensation, but with an android, every emotion has a definite mechanical reaction. Tiny wires and bolts fell from inside her chest and into her stomach. 4F6 felt the metal parts moving around in her belly. But later that night, lying in bed, the discomfort she was feeling in her stomach was the furthest thing from her mind. She replayed the kiss over and over, until her short-term memory projector snapped off as she drifted into sleep.

The next morning as 4F6 was gaining consciousness as she lay in bed staring at the ceiling, she felt something fall between her legs. She pulled off her blankets and rummaged through the sheets, searching for the errant part. Suddenly her hand touched something cold and metallic. She pushed away the blankets and there, wrapped in her bedding, was a tiny stick-like figure. 4F6 was horrified.

Its skeleton was made of wires and tiny screws and bolts. It had a tiny spring for a spine, and small frayed, spliced wires grew out of its head like hair. It had tightly wound wire for a neck, and where a heart would go there was a tiny valve that looked as if it could be cranked. The little thing started to move its arms in the air over itself. It was obviously some sort of android, but it didn’t look human the way other androids did. No skin had been grafted onto it.

The little thing looked at 4F6 through the holes in the miniscule bolts he had for eyes. There was an awful darkness and limitlessness to those eyes.

She realized that it was a baby, her baby, conceived from her kiss. The gestation period for the tiny robot had only been a day. She had never heard of robots making robots — perhaps on a factory assembly line, but never without being told to. Never in a bed, and never as the result of a spontaneous kiss. 4F6 knew that something horribly wrong had happened.

Although androids didn’t really know what it meant beyond the softer skin and crooked teeth, they somehow wished to be human. They considered themselves inferior and tongue-tied around people. Whenever they saw a human, they couldn’t help but think, He invented me. Humans did not know what their origins had been. They believed in God and searched for the meaning of life in the Bible. Androids, on the other hand, had no Bible. The closest thing they had to a Bible was the original grant application that requested funding for robotics research. Every android had a copy of this proposal. It was a bestseller among androids. It said that the applicants of that grant would like to create a robot capable of operating all of man’s other inventions, thus reducing the workday. There was never any debate about the origins of existence or the meaning of life among androids.

But now this baby robot had been created by some unknown force, independent of man. 4F6 knew that this would not be taken lightly.

She knew that if the scientists found out about the baby, there would be a mass android recall. They would tamper with their insides, making sure that no other android would be capable of experiencing love as 4F6 had, because it was love that had created the little spring man, she was sure. They would take away androids’ ability to be amazed by stars, too, for good measure, and 4F6 didn’t want to be without those parts. Without those things she would only be an appliance — a machine.

She wrapped the tiny robot up in a sock and put him in her briefcase. She called work to say that she would be a little late that day because she was going to stop at the Android Servicing Unit to be recharged; but instead, she took the bus all the way to the edge of town.

When the bus reached the end of the line, she walked down an empty street, and as she walked she convinced herself that what she was about to do was necessary for the safety of androids everywhere. It was not an easy task, this convincing. 4F6 was programmed to know when to yell and when to whisper, when to fuel up and when to rest; but in this matter, she was not at all certain what she knew at all. Had anyone been watching her, they would have seen a woman walking along haltingly, as though looking for a street address she was not certain existed.

She had been to the dump before. She had enjoyed estimating how many pieces of debris were contained within each pile, but she was not interested in that today. She had no desire for calculating. She took the baby robot out of her briefcase and threw it over the fence onto a heap of garbage. That’s where it belongs, she thought. It was junk, a broken, incomplete thing.

She repeated this idea to herself over and over as she waited for the bus, boarded it, and returned to work.

Several years earlier she had had her temperature regulator exchanged. In the moments when she lay on the metal gurney, her chest plate opened, the old part removed and the new part not yet inserted, she had really felt fine and complete. The little wire thing that had fallen from her was not even half the size of the temperature regulator, yet back at the factory assembly line, as she stood making calculations on her clipboard, she had the sensation of being empty. As much as she considered it, it did not make any sense to her. Yet there it was.