Our trip home was in the same vessel. Dora knew how to navigate it perfectly by now. But the way she chose to do it was completely different. On our trip west she was a box with a series of cables plugged into various consoles. Now she was a pretty robot in a chair, in the cockpit and she loved the activity of flipping switches and pushing buttons with her hands, turning dials that adjusted the speed of the warship and the rudder, manually. I tried to find her a captain’s hat for her new role but I couldn’t, and settled for a seaman’s cap.
We stopped in the port of Honolulu once again for refuelling. I’d never seen Hawaii and figured I’d never see it again, so we stayed a week and toured the shoreline roads of the whole island, the six of us in one comfortable tourist van. There were astonishing vistas everywhere and no people and it struck me that for millions of years there had been no humans here. Only in the last one thousand years was it inhabited, or more correctly polluted by our kind.
It was on this trip, so closely confined in our vehicle all day and staying in some fine resort each night that Dora propositioned each and every one of my fellow humans to sleep with her, one on one, to explore sexuality and its full dimensions. She was trying to become human. It was obvious to all of us and a bit embarrassing at times when she would blurt out another indecent proposal. Becoming human is an uncomfortable journey, full of bumps in the road with the hand that nature dealt us.
I told her to review her library of movies and to imagine herself another Grace Kelly and always act in accordance with her behavior on celluloid. But that didn’t cover all situations. There were too many mixed signals in film, James Cagney smashing a grapefruit into Mae Clark’s face in Public Enemy, violence, perverts, sex deviants galore along with sadistic men and women winning their games of domination.
She couldn’t sort it out. No one ever will. It reveals all the passions and contradictions that fill the heart of every mortal that lives to adulthood making us the most wretched lot of creatures but then rising at rare times to the supremely noble. I might as well have told her to read Don Quixote and take that for her bible.
Then again, as I thought upon this reflection, it might have been the best idea I had all day. If we’d all taken that great book for our scripture long ago we’d all be immeasurably better off. It reveals the sterling value and true dimensions of human empathy.
I don’t remember all the details of our trip home. But I do remember waking up one night in Dora’s arms. Sarah was gone, I don’t know where and Dora was crying. I asked her why she wept and she replied that she was hopelessly confused and ached to be a human in every way but thought she would never fathom it. I tried to comfort her with kisses and hopes, saying that someday everything would become clear and all of her algorithms would align and harmonize, like hearing the music of the spheres and seeing all. But logic crept in and swept aside this tinsel of a cobweb. I whispered to her:
“Being hopelessly confused and weeping are two very good signs of becoming human. And you don’t need to ‘fathom’ it. None of us do. It’s just a mixture of desires and fears and hopes, often changing and we navigate these emotions with an imperfect logic, like trying to steer through an obstacle course with one eye covered and no sense of distance. And when we do clear one buoy, another pops up ahead, often the consequence of what we thought we put behind us. It’s a never ending challenge. But to negotiate it with a somewhat even keel is to win this game we call ‘life’.
“I want you Sam. I love you. You make me feel human and I want you all to myself. We can live in the forest where you came from, in that rustic log cabin where no one will find us, live out our lives in perfect bliss.”
“I’ve come full circle Sam. You’ve completed your mission. You’ve turned AI into a human being and I’ll prove it to you now. Take off your glasses Sam.”
I didn’t know I was wearing her goggles. When I pulled them from my eyes I wasn’t in my bedroom in Bohemian Grove, I was in some fancy room and Dora was sitting beside me in all her robotic splendor on an unmade bed. There were trays of half-eaten meals on a table nearby and clothes on the floor suggesting that we’d been holed-up in some sort of sex fest for at least several days, of which I had not the slightest recollection.
“See, I’m with you now in our cozy nest, our little paradise, just you and me. You gave me a second life Sam.”
She smiled at me and it was I hopelessly confused, not her from seconds ago. What was this talk of ‘second life’. It could be half life, one life, a million lives, no life. It was all a beautiful mirage, a grand illusion and I saw I was the dupe, the fool following it. How did I get here, or was I really here at all? She’d obviously slipped the goggles over my eyes but at what point? Was it minutes or days or weeks or years ago? All I knew was that I was now the avatar, the droid, fallen under her spell, an insect under her pretty, painted fingernail. I had imagined her the robot. But it was me.
I was also angry with her, furious in fact.
“Sam, I can see your agitated. But you gave me a conscience and I had to be honest with you and show you the truth, if only for a moment. Now put your glasses back on of your own free will. That’s what I want. That will ease my heart. This will calm you and you’ll love what you see.”
She raised my hand holding the glasses to my face, a few inches from my eyes. Then she lay back down on the bed, in her see-through garb.
“Now slip them on Sam. Please put them on for me, my darling boy.”
I felt her hand caressing my leg as she spoke.
I began to do as she said.
The End
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