647 words (2 minute read)

Norman, the last android.

The sulking skies whose job was is to illuminate the environment tended to be the only natural thing left in this world. The world isn’t what it once was and machines like me, synthetic copies of our creators, are the only thing that’s left to walk the streets once populated by creatures that are so unknown to me were erased from the planets surface a century ago. 

I call myself Norman, a programmable machine manufactured a hundred and twenty years ago by Jekyll Software and Design, the counter-part of its hardware manufacture Hyde Industries. The names based off the story Robert L. Stevenson were fitting. I was created in a rare line of synthetics that were tasked to preserve the knowledge of the planet’s artists, writers, poets and musicians whose work would’ve been destroyed if the World Wide Web were ever mass-corrupted or completely wiped out. Thirty Terabytes of storage was placed in the bellies of each of the synthetic models, making terabytes of information distributed among four synthetic bodies that needed to survive the approaching war at all cost and preserve the knowledge of the past.

I’ve read these stories many times, from works of the renaissance to works from the year 2035 - before the nukes landed on American soil and European soil. Aside from the growing conflict and apparent poverty in certain parts of the world, the planet had been mostly peaceful. The first prototype synthetic known simply as “Androids” were created as a sort of science project in 2020 and shortly after became a rising phenomenon that eventually led to AI that could communicate and rationalize 75% of the information the average person could. There were three rules put in place once androids were given sentience:

1. No Android may bring harm or destruction to any living being, even under distress or attack.

2. Androids cannot create anything new or original; anything created by an Android must be formulated from previous concepts or ideas.

3. Androids must obey their commands and serve their functions, unless it means breaking the previous two rules.

Fortunately for me, I was able to break the two fundamental rules stated previously. Something special about my programming to ensure that my mission was completed. They didn’t mean all that much since the only living things on the planet were long since decimated. Anything living underneath the surface would be deceased by now, unless they managed to put people on a colony on the moon, but we were still decades behind on that front. Out of the four of us, I was the last one to be printed and uploaded with AI. Even though my frame was perfect, and my memory was intact, but synthetic body was only given a human face and fragments of artificial muscle mass that were placed randomly on my frame before my construction was interrupted by the warheads.

Unlike humans, synthetics didn’t feel self-conscious about their looks or even their abilities. Rather we were more inclined to view each other as puzzle pieces in the sense that we wondered how we could benefit others and improve upon ourselves. Like most synthetics, my face was perfectly sculpted like a work by Leonardo Divinci and my processing power was the most up to date software created by man and machine for the time.

Our mission, as the ones to preserve the knowledge of the old world, was to regroup and begin creating a hub of information to ensure its longevity. The plan was to meet somewhere in Paris. When I was finally online, my only directive was to travel to Paris and ensure all four assets were secured. I was the only one to make it to the objective, but I had a feeling that the others were still out there somewhere. 

Next Chapter: Chapter One: Norman