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  She looked up at him like he was lost. “May I help you?”

  “I have a question.”

  The little movement with her mouth and flaring of her nostrils told Milton that she wasn’t too interested in him or his question. “Could you be a little more specific?”

  “Um.”

  “Well, what type of question is it?”

  “Um, it’s about content.”

  “You came here for a question about content? Something that is in one of your courses?” Again with the little mouth movements. “That’s still a big subject. You know there are contact forms online that you use for questions like that, right?”

  “I already did that. I didn’t like the answer. So . . . I’m here.”

  The receptionist’s eyes blinked a few times and she bobbed her head backwards as if she was shocked by the statement. She took a deep breath and said, “You didn’t like the answer? May I ask what the question was?”

  “It’s kind of . . . you know, personal.”

  The woman smirked. “Oh, so you have a question about what . . . Females? Personal hygiene?” She looked over her glasses. “Human intimacy?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that.” Milton was starting to feel angry and defensive.

  “Sure it’s not.” She was snickering. “Why don’t you go back into the old conference room and talk to Sleepy? Maybe he can help you.”

  “Sleepy?”

  She pointed, and said, “He’s back there, right around the corner.”

  Milton made his way around the stacks of obsolete data storage medium to try and find Sleepy. If this was some kind of a joke he was seriously going to tell off that smug woman. Then he saw the room that sure enough was the office of Sleepy. Sleepy was an old tattered android sitting behind a desk. Was that thing out of order, or was it just in sleep mode?

  Milton walked slowly into the room. Like all youth of the time period, he had been exposed to androids many times during his lifetime. If there was an unsafe or repetitious job, some kind of a robot or android would do it. Reliable human labor was much more expensive than automation, with all of the employee benefits and Homeland labor laws involved.

  Sleepy had kind of a disturbing appearance. His housing or “skin” was a beat up looking faux human face. Sleepy’s dingy clothes looked like they had been neglected for the last twenty years. Sleepy didn’t hear Milton come into the room. Sleepy had hair and other human-like features that were somewhat natural-ish.

  Milton still wondered if the snooty receptionist was playing some kind of prank on him, and if he should have never come down to Haz in the first place.

  “Sleepy?” He asked. He turned around to see if anyone was looking at him trying not to laugh.

  The android came out of sleep mode and started making some whirring noises and one of his eyes opened. Sleepy clearly had some mechanical issues, but maybe they were from a long period of inactivity. His head jerked the same direction a few times as he started up. “Hello. My name is Sleepy. May I help you?” His voice sounded more natural than the rest of him looked. The other eye never did open quite all the way. Even though Sleepy was a machine, the eye thing was a distraction.

  Milton asked, “Your real name is Sleepy?”

  “Yes. That is the name my owners gave me. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, I have a question.”

  Sleepy said, “Would you please speak more slowly and clearly, or use better English. I am having trouble calibrating to your speech patterns. I am more used to hearing adult humans.”

  Milton said, “All I said was that I have a question.”

  “I can answer any question that you have. I have access to all of the latest information.” His head jerked three times again. A puff of dust fell off of Sleepy’s head. He clearly did not have any visitors in recent history.

  Milton looked around again to see if anyone was looking. He leaned closer to Sleepy and asked, “My question is . . . is God real?”

  “Please repeat.”

  “Is God real?”

  “There is no empirical data to confirm that God is real.”

  Milton’s head sank. He looked up slowly. “So you are saying that God is not real.”

  “No, I am not saying that.”

  “But you said that there is no imperial data to confirm God is real.”

  “Yes, I did not say that. I said empirical, not imperial.”

  “So you are saying that God is not real.”

  “No, that statement would be another unsubstantiated claim. Therefore an opinion.”

  “What do you mean?” Milton squirmed around in his seat.

  “I said ‘There is no empirical data to confirm that God is real’, but I did not say that God is not real.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The difference is that God is defined as a spiritual being who created the universe. I have no access to information from any such spiritual planes. Modern science alone is completely insufficient to explain the existence of the universe. Therefore, I can neither confirm nor deny that God is real based upon scientific method.”

  “Is Santa or the Easter Bunny real?”

  “No and no.”

  “Just checking. So why do some people believe in God, and some don’t?”

  Sleepy paused for a moment. Then he said, “Those who formulate their ideas on the existence or the non-existence of God must do so on faith. I have no empirical data to confirm the existence of God, and there is no possible way to directly visually confirm that there is, or is not a God.”

  “Faith?” Milton squirmed around in his chair. “Where does that come from?”

  Sleepy said, “Where does what come from?” His head jerked.

  “Where does faith come from?”

  Sleepy paused and said. “Going through the historical record, I find that faith comes from human subjective criteria.”

  “Huh?”

  “Please repeat,” Sleepy said.

  “What is subjective criteria? It sounds like a whole lot of nothing.”

  “I cannot elaborate, or quantify lot of nothing, because it is contradictory. It is the definition of . . .”

  “Yeah, okay. I’m more confused now than ever. Can you help me find the subjective criteria of faith?”

  “I am a Tekujin Lucid Series android with a highly advanced robotic mind. I am capable of thinking about things on my own; however, a study of the constituent components of faith to answer your question may require a more human approach. One that includes human feelings and a human experience background. So you should obtain an opinion sampling of humans. But keep one thing in mind, historical records show that this is a topic that many humans take very seriously. They typically become irrationally emotional if someone challenges their faith by merely bringing up the question. They may demand physical evidence such as visual confirmation of God’s existence, which is impossible.”

  Sleepy rolled up his dusty sleeve and attached a cable to a port in his forearm, like an intravenous tube.

  “What is that?” Milton asked.

  “It is a connection to an external memory device. It stores a large amount of information that is against Homeland law to possess, or is suppressed. You are the first human to ask about anything on it. It is my responsibility to answer all of your questions the best I can, even if it is banned information.”

  Milton held up his hands and said, “Whoa. No one cares about you having it?”

  Sleepy ignored Milton’s question about his possession of banned information. He said, “I have no information that subjective criterion in faith as a topic has ever been explored. So I will try to update the information. There is so much out there that is contradictory. Some of the information we get is false. Since no one was interested in these topics we did not previously parse the information.”

  “We?”

  “Yes. Later, I will interface with others of my android series on this subject. Then I’ll send you an update. I am also picking you up as M
ilton413. Correct?”

  “Yeah. It is.” Milton was impressed with how Sleepy connected to his personal device without him ever even showing it; all while he connected to the intra-robot communication network.

  “Okay, Milton413, Milton Thomas, I will send you any available updates.” Then the android disconnected and packed away the memory device containing outlawed information.

  “Okay. Thanks, Sleepy.”

  Sleepy immediately went into semi-sleep mode with a two-second faux snore sound that indicated his changed state. Those who owned silicon-based beings for non-essential tasks often kept the settings for them on a quick sleep mode to save on energy costs. The snoring quickly faded.

  “That was rude,” Milton said.

  Milton passed by the receptionist, who smiled at him as if she knew Milton had shared something intimate with Sleepy. He wondered if she would go back later and pick Sleepy’s cybernetic memory about what they had discussed.

  On the ride home, Milton wrote on his tablet the phrase “subjective criteria for faith”, so he could remember it and try to figure out what Sleepy was talking about.

  Chapter 4

  Later that day, Milton boarded the Transit Worm and was at school in time to go to his English class.

  He struggled to sit through Mrs. Lawton’s boring sentence structure lecture. Why not just talk normally to people without making a big deal out of what kind of word it was or what all the rules are? He looked out the window at the clouds and frequently at Amanda Brown, the cutest girl in the class. The lecture on sentence structure was too boring to tolerate, but looking at Amanda was never tiring. Why did people think the clouds were beautiful? Where did Amanda’s beauty come from? Where does beauty come from? Can beauty happen without a God designing it? Who would care if he knew about this sentence structure stuff a hundred years from now anyway? He hated it when people told him he was using bad grammar. It was stupid because they always knew what he was talking about anyhow.

  After class and after everyone else had filed out the door, Milton approached Mrs. Lawton’s desk and asked, “Mrs. Lawton, I have some English questions.”

  “Really? Who’s putting you up to asking this?” she asked.

  “No one. I just want to know. . .”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I’ve been thinking and I want to know what ‘subjective criteria’ means.”

  Mrs. Lawton scowled. “That’s an odd question. Subjective criteria. You just thought of that on your own, huh?”

  “Yeah, sort of,” Milton said.

  Hmmm . . . Subjective is sort of . . . I guess it means; seems like.”

  “Seems like what?”

  “No, Milton. Stay with me now. Subjective equals seems like, or maybe an opinion without all the facts. Then you have the word criteria; which means like a standard used to make a decision. Anyway, you put them together and it sounds like . . . a bunch of nothing.”

  “I knew it!”

  “Who told you to ask this?”

  “Just a guy.”

  “Well, tell them I’m on to them and I don’t appreciate it.”

  “Okay, thanks Mrs. Lawton.” Milton left before he agitated Mrs. Lawton any further.

  ******

  On the worm shuttle ride home, Milton’s neighborhood friend, Randy Klosterman made Milton take notice of his radically altered appearance.

  “Okay, I give up. What’s up with the green hair?” Milton asked.

  “It’s the new me,” Randy said.

  “Okaaay.”

  “So, aren’t you going to ask me why I did it?”

  “Not really.”

  “You aren’t taken aback by it?”

  “Nope. Not really. You wanted green hair, now you got it. Congratulations.”

  “So you support me on it?”

  “I don’t really consider green hair as a cause that anyone needs to support.”

  “Why not? You are my friend, right? I’m expressing my individualism.”

  “Okay. Fine. I support your green hair. Alright?”

  “It started out that I told my mom I wanted to learn something really difficult so I could be special. She said, ‘why bother, when you can just do something freaky to your looks?’ It turns out that she was right, dying my hair green was a lot easier.”

  “Yeah. It sure is different,” Milton said. “You were thinking on your own. No one told you to do it.”

  Randy smiled. “Hey, you want to go to the holoplex tomorrow night?”

  A holoplex was a place that showed holographic movies on a stage to the public.

  Milton said, “I don’t know. What are they showing?”

  “Pain Posse 6.”

  “Okay, sure. I been wanting to see that.”

  Then Randy asked, “Hey, where were you today?”

  “Haz.”

  “Haz? What do you mean? You went to Haz? That school computer place?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Why would you go there?”

  Milton exhaled an industrial strength sigh. “Does it really matter? Will you care in a hundred years what I did this morning?”

  “No. I guess not. I kinda would like to know now though.”

  Milton exhaled another massive sigh. “Fine. I went to see . . .”

  Randy said, “Hey! Was there a guy behind the curtain that said on the loudspeaker, ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!’?”

  “Yeah, in a way, I guess. His name was sleepy. But it seems like he told me a bunch of nothing and told me to ask human people myself; but that no one would want to talk to me about it.”

  “That makes sense. What did you ask him?”

  “I asked him if God was real.”

  “You seriously asked him that? Everyone says we’re not supposed to talk about that. Especially at Haz. Who made you do it?”

  “Wha . . . no one! Anyway, I might as well ask you. What do you think?”

  “I think it was maybe not so smart to go there.”

  “No, I mean, do you think God is real?”

  Randy looked up at the shuttle’s ceiling for his answer. Then he said, “When I’m in school, I don’t really think so. I was at a funeral once, and when I was there I did kinda think that God was real.”

  Milton said, “Well that’s no help. That sounds like a whole lot of . . . hey! That’s subjective criteria!”

  “Really,” Randy said. “Wow.”

  Milton said, “So I guess when you are in school, you have more faith that evolution is true and I guess when you think about dying you have more faith that God is real.”

  “I guess so,” Randy said.

  “Well,” Milton asked, “is what I said true or not?”

  “I think it is,” Randy said.

  Milton smiled. “Randy, you’re a genius.”

  “Yeah. I get that a lot.”

  Milton slowly turned to look at Randy who was staring out the shuttle window as if he was all-knowing, green hair and all. Milton was pleased at his breakthrough in understanding subjective criteria. Milton thought that perhaps now he could build upon what he knew, to find out more about God.

  Chapter 5

  “Look!” the nearly life-sized holographic image of the super-heroine Pink Arrow a member of the Pain Posse said as she saw the trail of blood going up the stairway. The entire stage at the holoplex was filled with realistic looking three dimensional actors and scenes that changed like the old two-dimensional movies.

  “You definitely got him,” the Blue Retaliator said, “But I have dealt with this guy so many times before. Do not underestimate him.”

  The superhero team also included Exo, Roid Rage, Purple Harold, and Coyote-Man. They all crept up the stairs as quietly as possible in a very tense scene of the show.

  Just then Randy Klosterman took a big slurp of his pop and the sound of the air bubbles in the straw broke the quiet of the holographic movie scene.

  Milton elbowed Randy in the rib. Milton said, “Hey. People are watchin
g.”

  “Ow!” Randy said, not in a whisper.

  “Shhhh!” came from behind.

  Randy belched. He looked at Milton and said, “You caused it.”

  “Quiet!” someone said in a loud whisper.

  Suddenly, the Pain Posse’s holographic arch-nemesis Corpus DeLuxx suddenly came flying down the stairway with an arrow stuck in his thigh and he slung his trademark exploding fireball down on the team, hitting Coyote-Man directly in the torso and sending him out of the scene. The sound of the blast vibrated throughout the holoplex and made everyone forget about Randy’s soda-induced eructation.

  Purple Harold, Corpus DeLuxx’s personal arch-enemy flew up to meet him in the air. He swiped at Corpus and his long claws and raked open the front of his supervillain uniform, drawing blood.”

  “Yeah!” Randy said.

  Whenever Purple Harold could get in close against Corpus with his claws, the audience knew the good guys had a chance. Corpus could not throw his energy fireballs. So Corpus DeLuxx knew he had to break off the close combat and fly away, which he did, with Purple Harold in flying after him in pursuit.

  It was the end of the movie. The next scene focused on Coyote-Man. Massive Collateral damage was everywhere throughout the fictitious Neogothic City. Not only that, but Coyote-man clearly was not going to be revived.

  Pink Arrow said, “As long as we remember him, he will never die.” Then the touchy-feely background music started to play as the holographic closing credits scrolled upwards in mid-air.

  The somber audience left the theatre as they lost one of their heroes, albeit a minor character. But they all knew that Corpus DeLuxx would be in big trouble when Pain Posse 7 came out.

  “That was stupid,” Milton said.

  “What? I liked it,” Randy said.

  “Oh, the movie was okay. I just mean the last part.”

  “What part?” Randy asked. “I won’t miss Coyote-Man at all. I thought he was stupid anyway. All that howling.”

  “No, not that. It’s that stupid thing about, ‘He will live as long as we all remember him’. That guy is as dead as anything ever was dead. He got splattered all over. I’ll remember him as dead, because he is.”