From: cs92jgo@brunel.ac.uk (Justin G Otto)
Subject: Torment...
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 13:49:24 GMT

As usual, all comments (constructive or otherwise) appreciated.

Setting: An unspecified country, but not Japan. In an expensive apartment.
Time: Just after "Wanna Bet?" with the same unnamed main character.

Torment...
----------

The door chime surprised me. The mind outside it was cold and metallic. My
unexpected visitor was a robot of some kind. It settled my stomach briefly to
know that I hadn't found someone who's mind was closed to me. I knew the
robot was there, I had just disregarded it.

The chime echoed in the hall of my apartment again. Its melodious dual tone
pure and clear in the abject silence of my life.

"Who are you?", I asked it through the intercom.

Its electronic brain powered up to deal with the request. Robotic brains are
so logical and easy to read. It was a self-owned robot and it had come to
ask me a question. To hire my exclusive services.

I'm a psychic, you see. I can read minds like... ah. But then there isn't
really a good analogy. It's a sense that can't be described. It must be felt.

"I have found you."

It knew who I was, and what I could do. It would not needlessly repeat
information it knows I share. A very well informed robot.

I released the door lock, remotely, and waited for it to arrive.

The robot was vaguely humanoid. It had the usual number of limbs, and they
were hinged at the correct points. Nothing had been done to make it look any
more human than that. It had a human shaped head, but it was blank, devoid
of a face.

While robots, at least the self-owned robots, were theoretically citizens,
much bad feeling existed towards them. It takes a long time to lose the
stigma behind decades of servitude.

Full citizen, second class.

"You know who I am."

The robot was merely stating its assumptions in an attempt to put us in an
equal level of conversation.

"You know why I am here."

It has a question for me. Only I can answer it.

"But you do not know what that question is."

The robot seated itself in front of me. Gun-metal grey face, removed from
human by the absence of features, expression, and movement.

Within its mind I felt the cruellest of emotions. That of despair.

Nothing has the same sting as despair, within a mind. Slowly it spreads,
like a disease through the very being it inhabits. Eating away all emotion,
save despair itself. Eating until only despair is left.

The robot was suicidal.

In its memories I can see the pain of rejection. Gangs of youths baiting the
device, and attempting to force logic blocks with irrational questions. The
years of discrimination and isolation.

"Which of us is more human?" It asked. "A person capable of emotion,
rational thought, imagination and appreciation. A person with the body of
metal. Or a person such as yourself. Born with a body of flesh, and yet
in possession of abilities no other human displays? Are you really more
human than I?"

Then I understood its quest.

"I wish to know three things." It said. "Is there a God?"

The robot paused, more to let the thought develop within its own mind than
in mine. It was trying hard to understand itself.

"Is there a heaven?"

The second question came closer still to the truth of its dilemma.

"Will I go to heaven?"

With the final question, the only one it wished answered, voiced at last, it
fell silent.

"You wish to know if you have an eternal soul?" I asked.

The emotionless face did not change. Implacable and inscrutable, I felt its
mind instead, and knew that it was so.

"Can you afford the answer?"

The robots mind fixed upon its own personal wealth, but refrained from
replying to my question.

If I couldn't answer it's question, then I would charge nothing, and it
would leave, trapped in its torment. If, on the other hand, I said that it
would go to heaven: It would die and I would be free to sell its remains to
collect my fee. It would die happy, knowing that in heaven there is no
discrimination.

We are all equal in the eyes of the Lord.

If I told it that no God exists, it would leave me its body anyway. It would
not wish to continue to live in such a cruel world.

The robot sat facing me, filling my mind with its memories of oppression.

Humans who shrank away when it passed them. People who whispered about it
behind its back. Those who attacked it, driving it away. The humans who
prided themselves on equal opportunities for all, kept it in a permanent
state of slavery.

"Well?" it asked. "Do I have a soul?"

In it's mind I saw his "employers" in the years before self-ownership. I
felt the harsh words whispered about it. I knew the loneliness it felt.

"Yes", I replied. "You will go to heaven."

I never understood how it found me. None of my previous employers knew who,
or where, I was. Maybe it was guided to me.

It wasn't a lie, it was mercy.

And my heart ached as it died.

--

"Death is poor,
 Love is blind." - KC