What am I?

    “You’re going to send a bunch of our men off to get a random doll? When was the last time you got laid, Conried?”

    Two men are in heated discussion in a small room cluttered with papers.

    “It’s not just a doll, Hammond. It could be just what we needed. How else can we deal with our shortage of manpower, without having to comb through all the ex-military personnel? Or would you rather put up billboards asking if anyone wants to join our PMC? Hot weather! Shit pay! You’ll only get shot once! How’d your advertising idea go last time? Huh?”

    “Oh, fuck off! It totally could have worked! You were the one who put them in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere!”

    “That’s all we could afford! Do you have any idea how many MREs we had to eat instead of the good stuff to get the extra cash? You had your chance, man.”

    Suddenly realizing that things were going off topic, and finding a reason to deflect recent troubles away from himself, Hammond clears his throat. His thick brows relaxed a little, and then the rest of his body follows suit.

    “This discussion isn’t about me. What’s so special about this thing, anyway? This looks like a shot in the dark to me.”

    “Alright, lets go over it again. You see the reply to our query to the myRoid tracker database?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Now, you see that number over there? 178872282? See how there’s a bunch of them? One moment she’s over in Italy, the next she’s in Taiwan. And they keep alternating. That ID number is supposed to be unique.”

    “How do you know they didn’t screw it up? How do you know that one is special?”

    “You ever hear of those trials for robots in the military? The US-Japan joint R&D operations with that one Japanese company?”

    “Huh. Wait, now I know what you’re talking about. Did they ever get that right? Why don’t you just buy theirs?”

    “They don’t sell ‘em. And trying to steal whatever they’ve got right now is gonna land us in the slammer. But when I was there, I saw one. I think her name was Lucy or something. She was supposed to be decommissioned and scrapped, but that blonde in the labcoat doing maintenance treated her like a daughter. I bet she had something to do with all this. I don’t think they’ll mind if I take something that they ‘threw out’.”

    “You’re missing the point of my question. How do you know that one is her?”

    “Well, what I do know is that these duplicate entries showed up about a month after she was ‘scrapped’. I think that the doctor made it so that her ID number would change every now and then just in case, but didn’t check existing entries. Sloppy work, I’d say.”

    “That’s still quite a stretch. I can’t agree with this. Anyway, isn’t this a kind of theft?”

    “If it turns out that I’m wrong, we’ll try the advertising thing again. I’ll even let you pick a place to put everything.”

    “No shit? Alright, fine by me.”

    “Oh, you’re doing the briefing. Grab some men after you read this document. It’ll have all the details.”

    He looks at what’s been given to him, then looks back up at Conried.

    “Uh, that’s a magazine on...well, I don’t know. It’s all in Japanese.”

    There’s a cute girl on the cover winking back at the viewer, wearing a racing outfit of some kind. The magazine folds slightly.

    “You sure you’re not doing all this just for the girl?”

    Conried tries to keep his cool, but fails.

    “Ahh, right. My bad.”

    He takes back the magazine, his hands shaking a little.

    “At any rate, I’ll get you the real one. The basic idea is, get two groups of men to the right locations by 200 hours a day from now, and then go in with non-lethal weapons to apprehend the subject. Although we don’t know quite how she looks, it should be easy to check whoever we nab with a metal detector. Don’t underestimate her combat abilities despite...however she might look.”

    “Riiight. I’ll be out soon, the email better be out there by the time I check my computer. Have fun with your magazine, I guess.”

    “Yeah, you too.”

    Hammond gives a funny look for a second, then turns around and walks out.

    Suddenly, it dawns on Conried what he just said. No amount of muscle could hide the awkwardness he felt.

    Ordinarily it would be very hard to pick out a random myRoid from a crowd, but luckily both have entries in relatively remote locations. Team Alpha was assigned to a place near Nantou County in Taiwan, and Team Bravo was assigned near Cala Violina beach in Italy.

    “First one to fall asleep buys our drinks. We can’t use company money for alcohol.”

    “You know, this is actually a pretty nice place to be. I kind of wish we could stay here longer.”

    Another soldier just yawns.

    The soldiers had been staring at a gentle sea, the sunrise, and a small town with little brick houses wake up at a snails pace for at least 5 hours. The houses may have not been important, but someone had probably called them home for hundreds of years. They never seemed to grow tired of this idyllic view, although some of them grew sleepy.

    “Isn’t this just kidnapping? Or at least theft? Man, I feel kinda-”

    “Hey wait, that might be her.”

    A timid looking, mousy girl emerges from one of the houses. Her upper cheek has some freckles, and the hair color is the same kind of brown.

    One of the soldiers activates his walkie talkie with a blip.

    “Possible subject headed your way. Estimated time 30 seconds.”

    “Roger. Pshhh”

    The soldiers pulled out a metal detector. As she walks down the path, there’s a fwooomp. A beanbag with some unusual lumps nails her in the face as she falls over. Suddenly she can’t move, hear, or see anything.

    “Wait, this definitely isn’t it. Don’t worry, she won’t be moving for a couple minutes. Just put her somewhere else.”

    Two more individuals walk by, but none of them were android.

    “You know, I feel kinda bad doing this. I mean, yeah, some of the work we do isn’t that clean because most of it is contracts for whatever the government doesn’t want to get it’s hands dirty on, but who thought this was a good idea-”

    A blonde with green eyes and a loose fitting sundress walks down.

    “Shh! There’s another one!”

    The last thing she can hear before passing out is a fwoomp.

    “You know, at least we’re not like the other guys. Team Bravo has to sit around and wait for people that might not even be the right target.”

    “Yeah, but I still wanted to go to Italy...”

    “This isn’t a vacation, numbnuts.”

    Standing on one of the many hills, they could see both an area of untamed nature, and the bustling city if they just turned around. Unlike the other team, though, they could not sit around and feel the breeze.

    They approached a somewhat open wooden house painted in a brownish-red. A few hand signals and nods later, they’re in. Even though they had to shoot open a lock, they stormed the small building faster than any unprepared persons could ever hope to respond to.

    They found a mostly empty house with just a few sweets and a computer around. The soldiers had occupied the whole building, and didn’t find myRoids or people. The boards of the house creaked a little with every step. Suddenly, one of the boards broke. With senses on high, everyone turned to look at the source of the noise.

    “Sorry about that. Guess this house is just an old piece of shit.”

    One of them pulled a large usb device out of his backpack and put it into the computer. He grabbed the files for the internet history. It contained Wikipedia entries on basic concepts of AI. The most recently accessed pages were articles about myRoids and other robots with some form of intelligence. The later entries pertained specifically to companionship and attachment rate statistics.

    Other things he noticed were documents written by the user. One of them was titled “My Diary”, the other, “Android Manifesto”.

    Unbeknownst to the soldiers in the building and the marksman waiting far away, someone or something had already slinked away before they had even begun setting up, and was thinking of what to do next.

    “Ah, crap. I forgot to wipe the computer and take my stuff with me.”
    She wasn’t sure what was worse, the embarassment from having people read her diary, or having her plans revealed in a document she hadn’t even finished the first draft on.

    “But anyway, these guys mean business. Someone knows I’m alive out there. Do I take them on, or just run away?”

    Day 3 after running away:

    I can’t believe they didn’t give us a built in word processor, so here I am.

    Apparently Myroids can digest cellulose, so I can eat newspapers for energy. They taste like crap, though.

    It’s a bit silly for a robot to keep a diary, because our memories are better than humans, and our storage algorithms are probably more tidy. But I want to do it anyway. Am I programmed to want to act human, or is this a form of behavioral mimicry that wasn’t already baked in? I kind of wish that I could see Doc again and ask her. I liked seeing her. And some of the soldiers were fun to hang around. Some of them. I didn’t want it to end, but I simply wasn’t good enough. At first, I thought that it would be nice to be wanted again. I actually gave a lot of thought to her offer back there, I really did.

    But then I realized, that in the end they are humans, and I’m just a thing. Whoever I got paired up with would be a human, too. One day they’ll throw me away, just like the others wanted to. Even if I told her about it, Doc would still side with her kind. So I played a trick on her. I prepared a Myroid identical to my specifications, from the storage of other Myroids for the tests and put her in there instead. Then I got into a box that was supposed to be shipped anywhere but there. I also copied a patch that gives me access to files Myroids don’t normally get access to. I can change my ID to hide myself. Maybe I could even hide that I’m a Myroid? We are made to act like humans, but we’re not treated quite the same, either.

    She treated me very nicely, but was she really nice? Who would decide to give feelings to something so disposable? Why did she give mere things the capability to feel pain and cry? What am I now? Just a Myroid without a master?