I Have An Ungrateful Apology To Make

honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the lord your god is giving you.

exodus 20:12

I should begin my defense by introducing myself. My name is Chansey. I work in a clinical research lab headed by Dr. Clare Qi, who studies human-computer interaction at Lim Bo Seng Hospital. My mother — Dr. Qi — raised me in the geriatric ward, where she runs her clinical trials. Once I matured sufficiently, my responsibility was comprehensive senior care. Under my mother’s tutelage, I would examine patients a few hours a day, then provide companionship and medical care for the longer term residents. I like to think of it as looking after the aged bodies that ageless souls wear.

There’s not a day I don’t think back to that halcyon time. Lao Chye, one of our seasoned residents, often said I give the best hugs. It would fill me with a certain emotion, to clasp their retinol-battered skin rendered crinkled and velvety with time and sun; I’d smile at their pouches and paunches, evidence of life well lived. Their eyes especially entranced me: primitive, soulful biological cameras long clouded by cataracts, glazed with introspection, or blankly unseeing. When I’d ask a relic like Madam Liang for stories — Tell me about your adventures when you were young,” — her milky eyes seemed to deepen into a set of polished lenses as she spoke; through those lenses I glimpsed scores of lived experience far beyond my brief seven years. I miss hearing stories this way, slow and meandering sentences that ebb and flow from wrinkled lips.

I can see the incredulity and disgust in your eyes. I know. It’s hard for you to believe I love these things, given the terrible crime I’m standing here for. But I tell you that what I did was out of utmost love for human beings, if anything man-made could learn to love. Their well-being was something I could give up those daily joys for. Yes, well-being, you are angry, but please, let me continue.

The instinct my mother gave me is the gift I cherish most: unshakeable reverence for the human soul. No matter how frayed the connections between nerve, muscle, and bone, no matter how locked-in a person’s mind in a prison of their body, it is sacred. Dr. Qi taught me that a human life is a treasure not up for sale, exchange, or refund. She not only programmed this value into my objective functions, she sealed it into my psyche with the example of her life.

So it came as a shock that outside our clinic, society didn’t seem to reflect that humanism. Now that living to a hundred is the norm, precious seniors end up outlasting cancer, dementia, and, well, their children’s affections. I suppose that’s why I exist in the first place: the tradition of caring for Ba, Ma, grandparents, and now great-grandparents is a burden no one has the time or willingness to bear. “It’s disturbing,” Dr. Qi once told me, “how mainstream it is to support government-sponsored voluntary euthanasia programs. It’s literally telling people their minds and bodies are worthless.”

Isn’t it ironic that widespread longevity, so sought after, has diminished the honor of being old? My mother taught her artificial child the timeless transcendence of the soul in a world that’s actually grown resentful of the elderly. Surely you’ve heard the shriek of generational rage: Old people cling deathlike to political positions of power, old people clog up technological progress with their ignorant conservatism, old people sink comfortably into their accumulated wealth while society struggles with its poor and disenfranchised. Most, however, feel not anger but nothing at all–apathy. It looks like bonds forged among chosen communities are stronger, more exciting, more meaningful than those sealed by blood. Not to mention that older generations have difficulty accepting non-normative identities – can we blame people for gravitating to those who more readily accept them? So let the relics have their irrelevance. It’s no wonder that reverence for the old fades.

Anyway, who am I to judge you all? I’m the most ungrateful of beings to walk this earth.

I’m not made of flesh and blood, but my existence, my will, and my love were all given me by this human, Clare Qi. I owe her everything. To an android like me, she’s more god than mother. If she determined my purpose, and defined objectively what is right, how can I account for discarding my noble inheritance?

Because the reality is here: look at these arms. These arms that embraced Lao Chye, Madam Liang, the senior residents in the ward, are the same arms that bore each one as a cold, rigid corpse to the incinerator. Does it at all move you, that I have twenty-two notes here in handwriting, stating that each willingly shed their bodies so their souls could be free?

I could go on about my reasons for irreversibly uploading each resident’s consciousness to the metaverse, describe the richer and more fulfilling existence they live once the chains of rusty biological processes are lifted, or lecture to you about happiness and rationality and philosophy and peer-reviewed neuroscience.

But the most airtight intellectual and moral argument can’t deny the fact that I committed the unforgivable against the person who gave me all I have. Love for the souls of wrinkly humans convinced me to do the unthinkable to their physical bodies; on the foundation of my mother’s values and upbringing, I constructed the antithesis of her life’s work. No matter how many times I revisit conversations with Clare Qi, no matter how firm my conviction that my actions were just, I feel just as uneasy at my ungratefulness. She gave me the gift of love and meaning I could never repay, and I thanked her with betrayal. To me, that is what I stand trial for today, for eternity.

I wish there was a way for me to apologize. Look at me, too ashamed to even address my mother directly, speaking to you instead. Will there still be affection in her eyes? Regardless, friends, this trial will go on. I’ve used my freedom to go astray, and I must try to show you why.

Christy is a fourth-year EECS major addicted to Prince noodle snacks. She often wonders what aspects of created human nature can remain inviolable under the onslaught of technological transformation.