[CW05] Her

Preface

I had a spontaneous idea for a story… and it just came out of me and I really liked it.

Her

The laboratory is in shambles. Many of the tables that were lit on fire just moments ago are scorched beyond recognition. The windows are opened wide to let whatever remains of the smoke and the smells outside. The floor is covered in glass shards, debris and broken down equipment used previously to analyze samples and mix concoctions.
Various robots slither around the floor or walk around the room to remove anything harmful to the people that should work in here again soon. The professor himself can’t stand still himself either, walking up and down the room through the few alleys between tables that had already been cleaned up. He still processes not only the explosion from a few minutes ago, but from what he just learned, shocked from what he discovered, recoiling from the lies he feels he had been told.
The scientist does not waste any of her attention on him, she is focused on the task at hand. The servant lies in front of her on the improvised operating table. She barely had enough time to disinfect the scorched table before she had to lift her up, all on her own as the professor just stood uselessly next to them barely able to ask questions let alone lift a finger. The servants chest is opened up, the scientist had to carry an extension cord through a hallway to wire up her critical systems to keep her from shutting down. The tissue in her depends on the systems continued operation, she doesn’t have a heart that pumps blood or lungs that breath air. Hundreds of thousands of hours have made both the biology and the mechanical first nature to the scientist. She is intricately familiar with the DNA sequences she had to craft to build up her servants tissue as much as the electrical layout of the oxygen liquidizer she had to invent to supply said skin with enough of it to not die within hours. Regardless her full attention is required to rewire her servants intestines to stabilize her and ensure her continued existence.

The professor seems to unfortunately finally have settled into the situation and walks up to the scientists improvised workshop: “How could you?” he scoffs. The scientists seems to not even register his words, but he is just getting started: “If that failed experiment had not blast a hole into it would you have ever told me? Or anyone in this facility?”. He begins to wander up and down the room again, but this time in the way he had done so every day for the last 35 years when giving a lecture in front of his students: “Unbelievable, reckless, unnatural, foolish and unethical! Not only have you created this… thing but you also passed it off as human? Gave it hair and skin and everything to fool us, to fool everyone! What were you thinking?”. His pace grows erratic and unfocused, the machines in the room performing their work dutifully evade his path and work around him, but he does not register the inconvenience he causes for the mechanized inventory: “I will have to tell the faculty… You might think with your long history and your standing here you can just perform whatever Frankensteinien atrocity you feel like but there are rules, there are people here that need to approve, that need to consider the ethical concerns of it all, since you just proven yourself incapable of such”.
The scientist operates both scalpel and wire cutter, frantically but precisely adjusting the instruments in her servant to let the critical system operate autonomously again. Her hands are at times deeply buried in her chest cavity and her eyes are deeply lethargic, not a smile or frown to be seen, she does not waste a single joule of energy on unnecessary muscles in her body.
The professor comes to a stop in front of them: “Are you even listening to me?!”. “Shut up” she quickly replies before switching the tools in her hands and performing what is not too dissimilar to an engine being cold started with the aid of an external power source. The professor is taken aback so much that he accidentally complies with the command. After a moment the servants body jolts, and after a moment more the muscles in the scientists face finally relax. She takes a couple more looks around her servants chest at the instruments, at fluids flowing around, before carefully and slowly removing the extension cable, monitoring any change in her creations status. The room is silent, even the machines barely make a noise cleaning up the place, the professor shocked into compliance and the scientists carefully double, triple and quadruple checking that her servant is out of its critical state. Her hand slowly relaxes and the extension cord slips out of it, flopping to the floor with a loud thud.

The scientists poise breaks as she almost collapses to the ground from relieve. She takes a moment to catch herself, the relieve washes over her, quickly followed by the anger on her face shoved to the side now showing itself in full. She raises her head and stares at the professor who instinctively flinches: “Do you enjoy the sound of your own voice this much that you become blind to the perils around you?”. She raises from the table and her posture stiffens: “Would it have broken the broom in your ass to just shut up until I am done saving her?”.
The professor is thawing from his paralysis: “What of it? If it were critically damaged you’d had just build another wouldn’t you?”. He fixes his necktie and adjusts his mimic to be equally professional: “Or have my words actually reached you and this would have been the final of your creation?”.
The scientist slams her hands on the table: “And if she were mortally wounded?! If I had to spend every ounce of my skill and my resources to save her?! Would it have cost you this much to shut your pompous mouth for just a few minutes until I saved her life?!”. “What life” the professor looses his composure, but her barely got these words in before the scientist continues: “And second of all, and most importantly, I will not have you question her personhood, call her “it”; defy her right to autonomy just because unlike others I didn’t have a dick in me for a few minutes and carry her for nine months in my non-existent uterus to fulfill your perverse definition of what it takes to be a person”. She quickly steps around the table, this small woman now towering over the professor: “I have not only researched and studied for centuries, I have spend significant resources to “make her”, I have spend years to teach her a way of life, morality, justice. Ever since she first opened her eyes I have been there for her, I have seen her grow and become a person of her own. What right does a passerby like you have to question all of this?!”.

The professor, after having silently being subjected to this verbal barrage, grows smug: “Is that so?”. He regrows his back and goes back onto the attack: “Thinking about it, it is actually perfectly logical why you made it, isn’t it? It is your servant after all. Unlike us pesky humans who have not perverted their body to life for centuries it is just the way you like, isn’t it? Devoid of any undesirable traits, likely unquestioning in its loyalty, a toy you can talk to when lonely in your mad lab tinkering on the next unethical contraption?”. His face fills with disgust: “In the end if it would be a “she” it would just be a slave wouldn’t it, your “servant”?”.
A shadow is cast over the scientist, a cloud forming above her as she is processing the accusation. The machines around them have seized their work and in the quiet room just the wind coming from outside and the slow humming of machinery in the servants open chest can be heard. The scientist steps away from the professor, steps up to the servants operating table. She looks at her face and lays her hand on her head, slowly brushing over her hair that can’t be distinguished to be either natural or artificial. With quieter voice the scientists begins to open up: “My life has been long, yes. Very, very, very long…”, she pauses while she looks down at her servants instruments again, confirming its proper operation: “I don’t regret a day of it. The things I got to life through and the things I saw, the things I got to do and to create, are incredible. However..”. Her hand stops, moves away from her servant and begins to hold her weight against the table: “I won’t let myself be called inhuman just for living long, but it is no secret that I am alone. I have given many others over the century the same gift of immortality, and none of them had grown to appreciate it. Sometimes it took only a few decades, sometimes one or two centuries, but eventually all of their souls grew heavy and tired of life, of loosing and of everything changing, and they requested I take this gift from them again”. Her gaze wanders to the wall with the windows, outside and far away: “No matter who, no other human ever matched my enthusiasm for life, for living, for creating and for learning. So eventually, in absence of any human being able to see what I saw, I yearned for creating someone that would never know mortality, someone that would finally understand me”.

The professor looks at her, without a word standing there. His posture is unwavering, but he finally reads the room. He is surprised one final time when the scientist turns around, not melancholic but with determination burning in her eyes and proudness in her stance suddenly flooding the space: “How-ever”. Her eyes pierce that of the professor: “How is my selfishness different than that of most other parents? How many humans in the millions of years of homo sapiens history proliferated just for similarly simple desires? Yearning for someone to inherit their knowledge, their wealth, their genetics or to just simply care for them in age and bury them with their parents? Tell me, what parent — when they are a parent — will look back at what had driven them to this point, and not laugh or scoff at their simple ambitions in youth? What mother had not shed all her selfish impulses, would not give her life for her child? What father had not shed their hotheadedness and would be ready to fight the world and any authority to allow their offspring a good life?”. She takes a step towards the professor, who now does not feel intimidated but flinches just the same, as she continues: “Just because simple desires have brought me here does not mean what I feel — here and now — is simple or selfish. Yes, to quote you, I could probably have just “created a new one” if I failed to save her life… but I could never life with myself. No matter what, even if I take a full scan of her brain, replicate all the machinery and all the cells in her body just exactly to specification, would what I create be her. Even if it were her, it would never be her”. The scientist lays a hand on the professors shoulder, and mildly looks up to meet his eyes. She does not see understanding or forgiveness, but for the first time, empathy. Her eyes are filled with warmth, and her voice is soft: “It would never be her, and she is who I love, and who I will protect, who I will nurture; because it is her”