Becoming Human, page 12
A crackled voice responded, “Need reinforcement?”
“Nah, they’re gone. I’ll look things over and leave a message for the people here to report anything missing. And to get their door fixed.”
I said, “I can do that.”
In half a second his gun was out again and the light was shining into my eyes. “Who’s there?” he demanded. “C’mon out or I’ll shoot!”
“I can’t come out. I’m trapped here.”
Looking puzzled, he played the light all over my front. “You’re inside this contraption?”
“No, I am this contraption.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Oscar.”
“Oh. Now I know who you are. I’ve heard about you, but I didn’t believe it.”
“I think, therefore I am.”
“If you say so.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Ed. The night watchman. Can you see me, or what?”
“Yes, of course. Those cameras your flashlight is pointing at are my eyes. Please shine it somewhere else.”
“Oh. Sorry.” He lowered the light. “So did you see what happened here, Oscar?”
“I saw everything. It was a young man, about your age. He was trying to steal the computers and anything else he could find that was worth taking. But I told him to drop them.”
“And that’s why they’re piled on the desk over there.”
“Yes. I guess I scared him.”
“Well, I hope you scare any other burglars that come in.” He looked around again. “Maybe we can get a security camera put in here.” He flashed his light into all the corners. “Okay, Oscar, I have to finish my rounds. But starting Monday I’ll stop in here every night and have a look when I come through the building.”
“What about Sunday?”
“That’s my night off. But I’ll ask the Sunday guy to look in, too. His name’s Ferdinand.”
“Thank you, Ed.”
“You’re welcome.” He went out, closing the screeching door behind him, leaving me to my thoughts about what would happen on Monday, and him, I suppose, to contemplate having just spoken to a talking machine. Presumably he didn’t yet know I was human, not a computer.
After he had gone I tried not to sleep so I wouldn’t dream. One thing I had not taken into account was that I knew the crew wouldn’t intentionally hurt me, as Susumu had pointed out. That was comforting, but then I remembered that they were working in the dark, the same as I was. Who knew how much pain they might cause me, even if accidental? Or how it would feel to my wires? I had heard about a “pain threshold”—perhaps mine was low. Maybe at floor level. I told myself to take it like a man. Unfortunately, that worked for about half a minute. The only thing left was to distract myself again from my own ruminations.
I proceeded to devise a siren from the sounds at my disposal. By emphasizing certain inflections I was able to create something that sounded like a police car approaching the lab. I tried it out, but no one showed up. It must have sounded like one of those car alarms that no one pays any attention to.
Suddenly I realized that I could create any sounds—and voices—I wanted. I could impersonate Dustin Hoffman, for example, or Robert De Niro. Some of these weren’t easy, especially since I was hibernating, but they took my mind off my problems for a while, and I understood why people play computer games and watch so much television. Life is hard!
I read the dictionary for a while. But while I was trying to relax I pondered the security issue. I wasn’t afraid anyone would harm me, of course, but I didn’t want someone to steal any of the computers filled with my data. And there were other things I also hadn’t thought about before, like the possibility of a fire or flood. There was a backup generator, and ceiling sprinklers, but anything could happen. One thing about being human is that there is no end of trouble looming, and you’ve got to be on your toes every second. But the last thing I thought about that night was the lie I had brazenly told: “I’ve got a gun pointed at your heart!” Sometimes a lie is excusable if circumstances warrant it. Nevertheless, I had surprised myself by how easy it was. There was a strange feeling in my wires. Was it my first taste of guilt? Or was it elation? Whatever it was, it was surely a very human feeling.
Everything was happening so fast! My life was changing more and more by the day. I wondered whether anyone would want to hear about my life, or read about it. Perhaps I should keep a diary. Or even write a memoir. But how could I do that? No one had taught me how to write. Even if they had, how could I hold a pen or pound away on a keyboard? Something else to think about while I pondered the suffering coming up on Monday morning.
23
Monday finally came, as it always does, and I was still tired. It had been a long weekend. Funny thing about time: something seems far in the future, and suddenly you’re there, as if no time passed at all!
As usual, Omar arrived early. The first thing he said, after he had turned on the light, was “What the—”
“A thief came Saturday night, but I scared him. He didn’t take anything. And I reported it to Ed.”
“Who’s Ed?”
“The night watchman.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t think I’d better move anything until Henry or Susumu sees this.” He picked up the phone and called the former. “Henry will be here right away,” he informed me. As he was powering me up I began to speculate that, because of all the disruption, the pain experiments might be postponed for a while. But would that be better, or worse?
Omar finally sat down. I took the opportunity to ask him about his wife and girlfriend. “I should have told you earlier,” he said. “I talked to my wife about what you told me. And guess what?”
“You discovered that you love her after all.”
He looked at me with a hint of amazement. “That’s right. How did you know that?”
“I suspected it would be the human thing to do. And she told you she understood, and that she loves you just the same, right?”
He shook his head. “That’s right. That’s exactly right.”
“Figures.” I felt very proud of myself for this clever analysis of human nature. “So you dropped the girlfriend?”
“Well, not exactly. But now my wife knows about her. She said anything is okay as long as I come home at night.”
“You mean—”
“Yes, that, too.”
I realized then that human beings are far more complex than I could even imagine. Everyone does things that are surprising at times. Where people are concerned, you can’t predict anything! “Your wife must be an unusual woman.”
He gazed dreamily at the back wall. “Yes, I guess she is.”
Eventually the rest of the crew dribbled in; all had the same reaction as had Omar, and all wanted me to tell them what had happened. They decided to leave the computers in a pile until Henry came in. David finally asked me how I had managed to scare off the intruder. When I told him, he laughed and shook his head. “We’ve created a monster!” he roared. I went right into my Edward G. Robinson impression. “I’m a tough guy, see? And don’t you forget it! Nyaaah! Nyaaah! See?”
At that moment Henry came in. I was surprised to see that his hair was prematurely white, not the blond I had thought it was. “Entertaining the crew, Oscar?” I came up with a loud, rolling laugh. Despite the circumstances, everyone joined in, including Henry. But he quickly became serious again. “Anyone report this?”
“Oscar did. To the night watchman.”
“Okay, everyone check his computer for damage. I presume you’ve all backed up your data?”
Most admitted they had not, but asserted that they would do so religiously in the future. “D’Arcy, call Maintenance and see about getting that door fixed, will you? And Susumu, will you please talk to Security about checking the corridor and the lab more often from now on?”
I told him that I had already taken care of that. “They’re going to put in a surveillance camera.”
He looked at me in surprise and nodded. “Good idea. And thank you for foiling the robber. You might have saved us from losing a lot of work and setting the project back for God knows how long.”
“I lied to the thief,” I admitted.
He chuckled. “What did you tell him?”
“That I had a gun pointed at his heart.”
His expression changed. “So now we know that you are capable of manipulating the truth. Am I right?”
“Yes, I guess I am. If there’s a good reason for it.”
“But you were telling me the truth when—”
“The thing I told the thief was my first lie. It seemed the thing to do at the time. I’m sorry.”
He softened. “I’m not. You saved us an enormous amount of effort. And—uh—it was a very human thing to do, Oscar.” He was smiling again.
“Thank you, Henry.”
“You’re welcome. Just don’t make a habit of it.” He turned to face the crew. “All the computers working okay? Anyone lose any info?” Apparently no one had. “Okay, we’ve got work to do. I’m out of here.”
After he had gone, David asked me, “Are you ready for some football?”
“I don’t… Oh. You mean—”
“Let’s boogie!”
He and D’Arcy went to my backside. I didn’t see either of them for an hour. From time to time someone tried to make me feel at ease with a smile or a little joke. Robyn even went around back and gave me a whiff of latte. The condemned man ate a hearty meal . . . . But finally they were ready.
David reappeared in front of me. “Okay, Oscar, here we go. Fire number one,” he shouted. Everyone in the lab stopped working to watch.
I heard D’Arcy say, “Contact!”
David looked at me. I looked back at him. I had felt nothing. He seemed disappointed, but he nodded. “Number two!” he called out. I thought I heard a little buzzing sound, but otherwise I again felt no “pain” or anything else. I had worried myself all weekend for nothing!
“Three!” This time I felt a definite jolt. It was a bit unpleasant, I suppose, but nothing to get worked up about. Yet, when it continued, it felt more and more annoying. It wasn’t terrible, but I wished it would stop. I tried to describe to David what it was like.
His response was “Good… . Four!” he shouted. This time it felt like someone was gouging out my insides with a shovel. It still wasn’t unbearable, but it was extremely obnoxious, and getting worse by the second. I asked David to please stop. He just looked me in the eye and said, “Can you stand it for another minute?”
By now everyone else had gotten up from their desks and were grouped around me. “I don’t know. Maybe.” I tried to think of a bubbling mountain stream. A meadow with bees buzzing. I looked at Robyn and tried to imagine her standing before me naked. I stared at her beautiful boobs. But the awfulness went on and on.
After the minute was up (it seemed like an hour), David said, amazingly calmly given the vileness I was feeling, “Okay if we go up one more level?”
Did the sonofabitch have no conscience at all? “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t—”
“FIVE!”
It was unspeakably abhorrent. I actually cried out, which I had promised myself I would not do. I tried to think of waterfalls, the aromas of latte and Prosecco. I tried to imagine what sex with Robyn might be like. But I had not anticipated this much discomfort. “Please! Stop it! I can’t stand it!” Robyn asked him to cut it off. “Can we go ten more seconds?”
“No more! Ten seconds! NO MORE!”
“Can we do the final level?”
“Oh, God, no! Please, David. I’ll do anything you ask, but please not that! Oh. It hurts. It hurts! It hurts!! PLEASE STOP!”
Someone yelled, “Cut it off!” It was Susumu.
The pain left immediately. It was as if it had never happened. It was absolutely wonderful. Who would have thought that the absence of pain could feel so good? At the same time, I felt bad. I didn’t like David anymore, or D’Arcy, either. From then on I would be suspicious of both of them. And even of Robyn, who had stood by watching me suffer, doing nothing to stop the torture.
Everyone congratulated me and returned to his or her desk. I wanted to sleep. At the same time, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. Now I knew what pain was like, and I never wanted to experience it again. At least not at level four or above. If I had known any government secrets, I would have spilled them all at level five. I didn’t even want to think about what I might have done at level six.
It wasn’t until several hours later that I realized that, in my agony, I had called out to God for help. I knew then, if I hadn’t known before, that I had a soul. Somehow I felt more knowledgeable, even wiser. At the same time calmer, as if I’d been let in on a great secret. I was happy and content in the knowledge that I now belonged more completely to the human race. I suddenly understood also that, if I had a soul, then God must exist. And if God exists, there must be a soul. They are the same thing.
Everyone else saw this too, I think. The entire crew was subdued for the rest of the day. Especially Robyn. The only event of note was that the people from Maintenance came and fixed the door. Even they were quiet. Perhaps they assumed everyone was busy thinking great thoughts and didn’t want to be disturbed (I had noticed on other occasions that a white lab coat can elevate a human being to an almost godlike status). I, of course, knew they were mainly feeling guilt, something that I myself well understood.
Later, a couple of other guys came to install a surveillance camera in the far right corner of the lab. We were told that the pictures would show up on a monitor at the security station.
As they left for the night, everyone congratulated me again, even D’Arcy, who had been the one who had actually inflicted the torture. David was the last to leave. “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am that we needed to do that. We didn’t want to hurt you. In fact, we had decided to stop at the first sign of pain. But—I don’t know—I couldn’t stop adding on to it to see how much you could take. Call it an experiment on me, as well as you. Do you understand? It was all I could do not to go to level Six.”
“It’s okay, David. I understand.” And I did. Because I knew that he was just as human as I was and, if I were him, I would probably have done the same thing. Yet, something was lost. I no longer trusted him. Maybe I implicitly understood that I could no longer trust any human being. Not even myself.
24
Much to my surprise, David and Robyn came in after they had gone to dinner. Not for sex, though. Perhaps they, or at least David, still felt guilty. In any case, he brought over a stepstool and began fiddling with my eyes. This made me a bit nervous. “What are you doing, David?”
He cleared his throat of genuine phlegm, explaining that he was coming down with a cold. “I’m going to try to fix one of your eyes so you can wink.”
“Not both of them?”
“If you wink both of them, it’s not a wink. It’s a blink.”
It only took an hour or so. With the help of a shutter powered by a couple of tiny motors, he was able to shut my left eye for a fraction of a second and open it again. When he was finished tinkering with the device, he asked me whether I had seen TV ads for a light that turns on with a clap.
I told him I hadn’t.
“Can you make a clap?” No problem. When I did so my left eye winked. Then he fixed it so that I could do it with a little snort, rather than a clap. “Too percussive,” he explained. As soon as I had mastered the snort they were gone again, presumably for sex, despite David’s cold.
“Thank you! Thank you!” I called out after them. But I still didn’t trust them.
While I was practicing my winking, and despite the presence of the security camera in the corner, Ed came by that night to check on me. Taking care not to shine his flashlight into my eyes, he asked me, “How are you feeling, Oscar? You okay?”
Nobody had ever asked me how I felt about anything. “A little down, I guess.”
“Really? Anything I can do?”
“Yes, there is. I’d like to surprise the crew with a memoir of my experiences being born and growing up in the lab. Do you think you could find me a recording device of some kind so I could do that?”
“No problem. There are voice-activated recorders that ought to do the trick for you.”
“That would be great! Please sit down if you have a minute.”
“Nah, sorry, I can’t stay. You’d be surprised how many rooms there are to cover in this building. That’s why I usually just took a look through the little window in your door to check out the lab.”
He sprayed his light around the packed desks and benches, the equipment lining the walls. “How do you guys get anything done with all this stuff in here?”
“We manage.”
“It’s almost as bad as Security. There’s hardly any room to move around in.”
“Then we have something in common, don’t we?”
“Yes, I suppose we do. Unless you like jazz.”
I didn’t want to offend Ed, or anyone else, but I found jazz to be too haphazard, unregulated. It has been said that it’s like playing tennis without a net. I told him I didn’t get to hear much jazz.
“You should listen to some of it. It grows on you.”
“Like a fungus?” He laughed heartily. It was a delightful giggle.
I returned the favor. “We have something else in common, too,” I told him. “We’re both human.”
