Flashes of memories. In a laboratory. Wires attached to my head. They are testing me. Testing what? Next thing I know, I am in a car with Maree. For some reason I cannot explain, I felt around for a flap of skin near my left temple. I located this flap and lifted it up. To my horror, underneath the flap was an electrical socket. I turn to Maree and ask "Maree, am I a robot or a human being?" From my look and the tone of my voice she knew something was seriously wrong. A long and animated discussion followed . I wish I could recall all of the words which were exchanged. I remember saying "Now I know why my feelings have always seemed almost real but are in fact only a pale shadow of what a real human being's feeling would be. What right do they have to mess around inside my head like this?" Together, we agreed that it was a most contemptible thing to do. To play God by creating a machine so lifelike that it actually believes it is human when it is not. The question burned inside me - what am I going to do about this?
A million other questions raced through my mind (or rather my central processing unit, since only real people have actual minds). Do I have a soul? If I am just a sophisticated machine, then I probably have no soul. Was my schizophrenia a deliberate part of the programming or was it a flaw in the programming? Was anything I had ever experienced actually real or was it simply a memory stored in a bunch of receptors inside my head? Had any of it really happened at all? What made me think of lifting that flap of skin? Would I be better off not knowing? What possible reason could anyone have for doing this to me? How many others had they done it to? Was I the only one? Was the entire world around me just a computer simulation that has been programmed for me to interact with? Who or what was behind all of this? Was I supposed to be asking these questions? Was some giant laser in orbit around the planet waiting to strike me down if I got too close to the answers? Where did I leave that cup of coffee? Why do trees g row upside down in the plastic reality of bubble soup?
The questions continued to cascade through my circuitry ... If "they" were making robots who thought they were human, who were "they"? Who else was a robot? How would I ever know - apart from going around lifting people's flaps which is just not done in polite society. Was I being tracked and monitored? was my every thought being carefully screened? Were any of my thoughts actually my own or had some program designer decided in advance what they would be? If these were not my thoughts, why was I asking so m any questions?
Why should I do the bidding of those who programmed me? I felt a sense of indescribable bliss as I realised that the limitations I had always felt bound by were simply a program and could be rewritten. Was I deliberately made to think like all the rest so I would never discover that I had awesome abilities far beyond the range of ordinary mortals?
So I jump out of the four-wheel drive and walk right up to this general and address him as "Mate". I knew full well that nobody else would dare address a general in this way and I waited for his reaction. To my mild surprise he felt moved to smile and gaze up into the sky and asked me "What do you reckon about all this? Seven days to create all this." I replied as if I had been programmed to respond to just such a question. "Yes, and like spoilt children, we have messed up our room and forgotten to put away our toys. We must be punished." "Yes, we must", he said with an enigmatic grin on his face.
As he walked away, I too was moved to gaze up into a sky which was almost equally blue and white at that moment. I felt a cosmic shift in my perception of reality. I suddenly had a "god's eye" view of the world. A tiny blue globe delicately positioned just the right distance from the warming rays of a golden sun. Everything seemed perfect and majestic in its simplicity. Maybe I had a soul after all.
After such a dream, I couldn't help but wonder about the symbolism of it all. Did the General represent Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and the concepts of space and time? I did not dwell on that question for very long as a poem started to brew in my head. It was 2 AM and I had had about 45 minutes sleep but I felt more alert and switched on than I had felt for months. The words fell onto the page as if they were being dictated to me:
You & Me :)
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