Humanoid Central
by Tom Lichtenberg
Copyright 2012 by Tom Lichtenberg
One
Helena Vega had always, always wanted a daughter, and the early stages had been wonderful, but at the current stage, fifteen years old, Bysshe had developed so many strange preoccupations that her mother couldn't help but wonder which of her own many mistakes were at fault. She was almost beginning to wish the family had never been selected for the Leadership Council, which had led to Bysshe being enrolled in Humanoid Central, the new experimental high school where humans and androids were supposed to be learning how to co-exist in mutual respect. It was said to be a great honor to be chosen as one of the Future Leaders of Today. Only a handful of families were singled out for that role and Helena still remembered how happy she and Juan Carlos Enrique had been the day they found out they qualified. A lot can change in a year.
It felt like it had only been a year since her daughter had struggled to escape from her stroller while Helena pushed it around downtown Hoyo, Alaska? It seemed like only last month that Bysshe was a little six year old girl, running around the playground with Robin and Lou, the twins who lived next door, pitching pennies and making dolls out of knee socks, only last week that she was roaming the town with her new best friend, Aidan Alexa, collecting bottle caps and memorizing bus maps. Helena had snapshots of these visions in her mind, memories of a girl who was and was not the same as the one who lately came storming home, slamming doors and locking herself in her room.
Gone were the days when Bysshe would willingly tell her mother about her day. It had been their special ritual. The daughter, arriving home with her backpack full of books, dumping its contents out on the kitchen table in search of that one ragged and smudged piece of paper containing homework due the next day. While the girl sorted through the mess her mother would bring in a glass of warm milk and prod, in her steady mom voice, "so, tell me about your day."
Helena could mark on her calendar the transformation of those homecomings. The early-elementary-school-age Bysshe would begin with "Well, let me see" and with a serious look on her face put together a few sentences that would sum up her day quite nicely. The older-elementary-age Bysshe was already coming up with canned deliveries. "In the morning, and then at recess, and then at lunch, and on the way home," filling in the spaces between those scheduled intervals with obligatory remarks. By middle school Bysshe had narrowed it down to a handful of memorized reports, consisting of what she considered to be suitable variations in order make it seem like she wasn't merely going through the motions.
They were both going through motions by that time, however. Fifteen. Really? Fifteen already? It didn't seem possible. And now Helena couldn't even begin to request any listing of her daughter's diurnal activities. Bysshe barely breezed through the hallway on her way up the stairs, and Helena would have to lie in wait if she wanted to catch a glimpse of what particular shade of blue Bysshe had wrecked her pretty hair with, or to try and find out if her daughter had attempted to stick any more silvery piercings into the side of her head or wherever. She had already blown through her stock of parental and feminine advice, and the girl had no interest in whether her mother might think it appropriate for her to go out with her butt barely covered by fabric. This was the new Bysshe, the self-invented one, the one who had shed all the best of her mother's intentions.
She was not an ungrateful child, or even a really unpleasant one. She could be perfectly nice, if she wanted, and sometimes she did, but rarely at home. She was anxious, which might be the one word best to describe her. She'd always been ready to go, as if there weren't enough ways to burn off the heat that continually boiled inside her. She ran. She ran miles and miles every day, but she wouldn't have been on a track team at school if there was one. She only ran wild. Races and times and goals didn't attract her attention. They weren't the point. Anyone can “win” as long as they're better than somebody else, and she never had any use for comparisons. She also liked riding her bike, especially up in the hills, where she pushed herself hard going up, and coasted, brakes on, coming down. It wasn't about speed. It was all about fuel.
Bysshe felt like she was on fire. At home it was bad, but at school it was worse, having to sit still for those eternally long minutes and hours! She would fidget. She would doodle and chew on the tips of her pencils, tapping her feet to a beat far quicker than thought. Everybody teased her about it, but she didn't mind. She was the first one out of her seat and into the hall when the bell rang. First to the cafeteria line so she could gobble up lunch and get out of there fast. Everyone said she was going to go far but that she'd be totally lost when she got there.
So what if she came home in a huff and rushed up the stairs and locked the door quickly behind her so her mother couldn't come in and bug her? So what if sometimes it seemed like she didn't make sense, and nobody knew what she was talking about? She didn't care, not as long as she knew what she knew, about who she really was, and what was really going on.
Two
The “Future Leaders of Today” was an accelerated program, involving intense group activities and advanced academics. Students were required to attend special sessions daily in what were referred to as 'enhanced integration co-activities'. These sensitivity training courses had become more and more essential as the human world converged on an era of complete assimilation with artificial life forms. The long-held dream of bio-mechanical beings had fallen short after it had been proven conclusively that the human body was simply too weak, and the human mind also not nearly as strong as it needed to be, to support the more highly developed technologies. Critical systems required critical physical strength, and the alloys were far better suited to handle them. The goal of a single planet populated by half-human, half-mechanical creatures had staggered to a bitter end.
Instead, the world had become divided, made up of a diminishing supply of humans and an increasing one of androids. For both sides, it was us versus them. Where the two lived together, they did not get along, and there were fewer and fewer of those places in the world. The two sides had fought, and fought bitterly, where cities and even whole nations were “cleansed” of one or the other, depending on who'd been “victorious”. It was clear that it couldn't continue this way, or one or the other would cease to exist. A new way, a third way, was desperately needed.
To this end a variety of experiments were undertaken. There were androids that didn't know what they were, and it was difficult to tell them apart from humans. They could cry. They could bleed. They had all of the weaknesses built-in. There were multi-dimensional holograms, which were generally referred to as “Sheets”. In the strictest sense, they didn't quite “exist” in the usual definition of the word. They could be seen, but they were projections, and they could be heard, through amplification. They were born and gestated in software. Their life cycle was different. They had evolved from the original concept of hologram until now they had presence, and purpose, and motion and substance. If they touched you, you would feel it. If you put them on a scale they would simulate weight. It was hard to know for a fact what they were. They were “there”. They had color, dimension and vibrancy. These and other types of hybrid humanoids were in the works all over the planet. The goal was to blur if not erase the boundaries, to bring everyone together under a vast cloud of unknowing of who was who, or who was what.
The biggest concern was that sooner or later, androids and humans would figure it out. They'd find flaws, tell-tale signs, and they would know. It was critical, therefore, to educate the people, to drill into them the idea that it didn't really matter in the end. Android or human, hologram or projection, they must all get along. And the best way to educate people was school. After all, the experts declared, children are
always the future. Agreements were made and laws were passed requiring that all life forms, artificial or not, had to be programmed to start young, to grow and develop. The law was made retroactive, back to the beginning of time, binding even to God, so that no one would feel they'd been singled out or discriminated against. The kids, whether human or android, had to go through life's stages together, in the hope they would bond and create a new generation of beings where all that really mattered was who you were, as an individual, not what you looked like or what you were made of.
It was just her bad luck that Bysshe Vega, one of the so-called Future Leaders of Today, was entering high school in midst of this new world order, at the same time as the new, officially sanctioned generation of artificial life forms. As if high school wasn't bad enough by itself!