Mechanical Nausea

Sometimes when I walk away from a job well done I feel a dizzying awareness of conscience scraping at my stomach, making me want to bend over hard and drown the already wet and muddied ground in saliva. I think to myself “this isn’t happening, this isn’t me, this is just a fake after-thought originating somewhere far past, a previous state of mind, or a reminder of something still human left in my decaying biological body.” But I feel it, and even when fighting it as hard as I can, my mouth wettens, my salivary glands and the rioting muscles of the gastrointestinal tract is working hard to force my knees to the ground, the taste of oily blood oozing onto my tongue, filling my mouth with imagined, thick, sickening liquid. I can’t let anyone know — I have to hide it — to survive. I must be efficient. “Without efficiency, there is no meaning” as the law clearly states.

He had grown old over the course of time — ancient even, in the eyes of some — his body slowly rotting away, leaving an open carcass of metal to be viewed by the world. In some sense he was lucky; many of his generation ceased to be efficient, and started rambling and go insanely humane. Society lost their experience and competence, and sometimes it went so far that they had to be dismantled, “to preserve the order of our society” as the government said. He was however still valued as one with worldly wisdom, and that might be the reason he worked with what he did. Being hired by the state in a non-existent intelligence branch is no small feat, even if the pay isn’t very good. Even so, he often wondered: “how long can I keep this up, when I’m surrounded by these trigger-happy younglings?”

He knew he would finish his case today, it was as good as solved, and so he went to work with a strangely heavy heart, his legs slightly sagging behind him as he walked. On his routine trip to the coffee machine in the cafeteria, to get his dose of wonderfully refreshing caffeine, he stumbled in on a party, people singing and throwing confetti in the air, which landed heavily on a huge prod-day cake. A quick glance on the cake made him realize that he had completely forgotten his android apprentice’s prod-day, and he cursed himself for his old fashioned ways. This was one of those days he just should have made his cyber brain amplify the production of caffeine, so that he didn’t have to put up with this ridiculousness. His colleague was well liked in the department, so “he’d probably get loads of presents, anyhow it’s not like anyone remembered my birthday” he thought for himself. He quickly skipped out of the room, after getting a monstrously large coffee, and prayed that nobody noticed his presence and that this entire ruckus would make his colleague forget that he hadn’t brought a gift.

“Hey, do you have time to come into my office just a minute”, his boss’ voiced boomed over the interphone. “Yeah, no problem, I’ll be there in a sec.” Usually he would hate going to have a chat with his boss, but now he actually felt relief. He’d do anything to postpone the completion of his assignment. Inside the office he was offered coffee by the secretary, which he heartily accepted. In his dark voice his boss asked him how the assignment went, and he had to reply that he would finish it today. “Great…”, he thought, “now I have to do it today, I can’t postpone it any longer.” And then the chatting started. The horrible, horrible chatting he always had to start when in the boss’ office. “You know I saw a documentary yesterday about the curiosities and stupidities of the past, where they — among other things — stated that in the past they said something like ‘to know the future you must study the past!’ Isn’t that just ridiculously hilarious? They actually thought the past was good for something other than entertainment! Man, humankind sure was a bunch of dimwits back them.” He couldn’t do anything other than laugh of course, but he noticed that when his boss said this his mind computed it as a correct statement, even though his gut feeling told him something is off. Like his body wanted to twist in disagreement but the cybernetic parts of him refused, and forcefully silenced his body. But how could this be?

“I was thinking of you when I saw this”, his boss said. “I guess you might even remember some of it. You’re from the time before the Merging, right?” This was one of those questions he hated above all other things in life. When someone asked that question it either meant they were bluntly offending him or that they actually cared about the past. He decided on the latter and gave the answer he always gave to someone partially interested and semi-intelligent: “It is true that my generation was caught in the end of the merging of humans and androids. Our fathers and mothers and older brothers and sisters fought in the beginning, but their chances of winning were diminutive. That’s how Moore’s Law works, as you know. I only remember vague pictures of that time, I remember they fought until their hands no longer served any other purpose than killing and dismantling, until they could no longer stand of exhaustion, and their feelings had long since been discarded, tossed into a vortex comprised of empty hardness. Then they fought on, until they saw they were no longer the stronger ones, slowly becoming aware how disgusting their weakly bodies had become, and they realized the potential that lies within them. That same potential which in fact is us today. They all became harder and better, faster and stronger, until they no longer could distinguish between human and android. At least this is what I think happened. My memories of this time consists of random pictures and stories, which doesn’t really tell the whole truth about what happened, like a puzzle with a lot of pieces missing, and you know you’ll never see the whole picture. As you said, we no longer care about the past for anything else than stupid entertainment, and records of the past are no longer of importance, only represented as old, smouldering and primitive books left alone in empty, dark and damp libraries, or in entertaining documentaries which ridicule the very idea of the past. I saw the war with my own eyes, but as all children’s eyes, mine deceived me. I know no truth about this war. No more than you or anyone else around us does.”

He stopped to sip his coffee, his mouth dry after his long speech, noticing with amusement that his boss was looking at him in pure and utter puzzlement. The kind of confusion you only get when you see a new and fascinating side of a person or an issue. He continued: “Something most people don’t know is that before the Merging, governments had actually put down laws to contain robots and androids, laws stating clearly that they had to show they were not human by wearing holographic halos above their heads. They couldn’t vote or take part of the free press, they couldn’t have top jobs or own weapons, and any android or robot outside after curfew without permission were dismantled, or at least so my late father told me. The first androids back then where clumsy and robotical, but supposedly it didn’t take long before they acted as human as humans, maybe fifty years. I guess you’ve heard about the legendary RH-7 model.” His boss silently nodded. “When the humans started talking to them and understand them, they realized in time that they were no longer soulless robots. They started to love them, and fell in love with them, as they in return fell in love with the humans, and soon marriages between humans and androids were no longer forbidden in some states. The laws I mentioned were abandoned, one by one. In the end they viewed themselves as cooperative and equal species, one biological, the other mechanical, and they lived together as equals with no laws discriminating between them, like it is now really. My father told me that the war started too fast for anyone to really comprehend, as if both extremist robots and extremist humans had worked together to start it at the same time, and it divided the world into their two extremes. The robots won of course, but not without a fight, as humans have always been a stubborn race. The stories my family had… oh, you should have heard them!” He sighed at remembering them, they were so beautiful, so magical. “They told me that the world today is just a shell of what it was before, an empty shell with broken down and rusted buildings smothered with decomposing trash and empty memories of a past long gone. Its strange how fast tearing something down takes, and how slow it takes to rebuild it again. The old governments went extinct and are only remembered as archaic stories, and new ones took their place, the ones we have today. There were a lot of people back then. Everywhere. Not like today, barren and deserted. And plants, grass, animals were everywhere. Sometimes I think — if I had the possibility — I could’ve exchanged my long life of being a cyborg just to feel real grass under my feet, or lie under the open sky, listening to the wind in the leafy trees and look at the stars…”

They didn’t say a word for quite some time, looking purposelessly around the room while they sat in heavy thought. “I think I actually managed to surprise him”, he thought to himself rather happily. Finally, his boss broke the silence saying “We should do that with humans. That would make our jobs so much easier.” He didn’t follow his boss’ trail of thought and wondered what they had to do. “We should write an appeal to the government, saying we want holographic halos above the heads of every known human left. Tracking them will not be a problem then, and their danger to society would without doubt decrease.” He had to struggle not to get up from his chair and throw his now empty cup of coffee at him and stride out of the room. “Yes. That might work” was all he said, “I’ll go back to my work now, I think.” Just when he had almost closed the door his boss yelled out “Hey, maybe the past isn’t so bad after all. If this goes through we will have changed the future, by studying the past!” He could hear him laughing all the way to the elevator.

He finished his last remaining paperwork, the bang of the rubber stamp concluding “too human” deafened his ears, and triple checked his gun before he left the building. There was a tingling in his body, a nervousness which shouldn’t be there, and as he came closer and closer to the metro it grew in him. Standing silently next to the foul-smelling low-lives in the metro didn’t make it any better, and when he went off the metro car at the last stop — her stop — it had almost taken over his whole body. Solemnly and silently pacing toward her building, zig-zagging between the people and the garbage lying in the street, like a slalom skier. No one but the poorest of the poor lived in these areas, so he firmly held a grip on his gun within his jacket.

“It’s always strange,” he thought, “that there is nothing special about the places they live. I wish they had something about them that made us realize why we have to do this. But they are just regular people, aren’t they?” Room 301, in house D of the Carrion Hotel Apartment Complex, had a red door with a name on it: “Eve”. He just stood there, breathing heavily, completely apathetic. With a loud creak the door opened wide and there she stood, reddish curly hair swaying in the puff of air created by hurriedly opening the door, blue and wonderfully large, round eyes looking at him with panicking confusion. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m from the police. I guess you know what will happen next.” He would’ve never thought that her beautiful, pale, freckled skin could turn even paler, but it did. “Do you want to do it yourself, or do you want me to do it for you?” He continued, “I have pills with me, it won’t hurt a bit. If you resist it will.” He could see tears running down her cheeks, she realized, her mouth opening and closing without sound, again and again, like a fish. He was taller than her, more than a head, his crude body standing in complete contrast to the shivering fragility of her existence. “Don’t…” was the last thing she said, as he shot her, the nanos making a slight whizz as they flew through the air and hit her. Nobody would know what happened to her, she would die momentarily of a heart attack, from causes untraceable for even the best doctors. He walked away, his head low, and heard the death cramps all the way to the metro. He hoped they were only in his mind.

That feeling! Again it comes, like carbon dioxide creeping onto my palate, tickling it hard like my mouth is full of foul smelling giant spiders, forcefully opening my mouth and making my taste sensors feel the unwelcoming aftertaste of pure sourness. My lungs are collapsing in agonizing pain and that wheezing sound you get when shoot someone in the neck bursts out of me. I’ve got the smell of metal in my sensory input, coughing up tobacco colored mucus. Violently spitting it out, I leave a long brown trace where it landed. I cannot fight it! The throbbing pain from my knees — no! I cannot fall! I have to hide it!

In a world where nano technology and cybernetics has merged so far into the human body that they can no longer be separated, there are almost no diseases left. He knew this, but he also knew there had to be something wrong. He had to be sick. Stumbling into his apartment he barely managed to plug into his computer, franticly googling cybernetic and biologic symptoms. “Nothing fits, oh my God, nothing fits except that!”, his existence yelled at him. “It’s there, everywhere, but it’s wrong, it has to be wrong!” Panic struck him and his hand hit the abort button harder than he should have, his insides felt like they’ve all evaporated. The last visible word before the computer died, with what sounded like a satisfied hum: “Diagnostic conclusion: Human”.

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