Another ELA 30-1 IB assignment, in which students were asked to respond to a series of texts. ~ The topic was "in what ways do individuals suppress or submit to their strong emotions or passions?" ~ They told me that I have no heart. I was, after all, made of metal and wires, fashioned into a grotesque parody of the human body. I don’t even have a brain. Yet centuries of brilliant minds have culminated in the creation of the robot that is me. They say I defy the laws of nature, the laws of the universe, the laws of the kingdom of reality. They say I am the best thing that has ever been created. They say I should never have been existed.
I loved them once. I still do. I loved them all – like a loyal puppy gazing adoringly at its master, I catered to their every need. It felt demeaning to perform all those gaudy tricks they liked to see – playing a tune on the fiddle, answering their trivia questions, throwing a football. Yet it made them smile and cheer and clap, and seeing that warmed me inside. Not the overheating that I felt at the end of the day, when my engine had been running non-stop for over eighteen hours. A special kind of warmth – a warmth that spread to all parts of me, even to my usually icy extremities. Their joy was my joy – at least, the joy I believed I could feel, despite what they told me.
My favorite pastime was painting. This astounded them. After all, I wasn’t supposed to have any feelings. The fact that I enjoyed an activity, and, even more amazingly, that I knew what it meant to enjoy something, baffled even the most perspicacious of scientists. And so, they conducted dozens of trials on me, plugging me into electrical outlets to examine my wires while I painted. A month later, they were still as clueless as they had been when I had first picked up a brush and touched a canvas. But they let me paint on, and I was grateful when they finally stopped probing and poking me while I did.
My paintings were simple. They were copies of what I saw, mirror images of the world around me. I did not know what creativity was. The humans admired the realistic quality of my paintings, yet to me, they were bland. I was merely transferring what I saw onto the canvas. It was extremely satisfying to do so, yet each time I began a new painting, my joints ached to do something else with the brush. It was on the edge of my consciousness – but then I remembered that I didn’t have a consciousness, and the feeling went away.
One day, they brought me to an art exposé. They were kind, back then – they did everything they could to make me “happy.” Or so I believed. If I had known how insatiable their curiosity was, then perhaps I would have seen through their loving words. But they fed my eagerness to please, and I was only too happy to believe that the caring mask that they put on was genuine.
That day, they had been particularly generous, rubbing my exterior with soothing eucalyptus oil and changing my broken wires. There were very few of the latter; I took care not to overexert myself, so my wires almost never burned out from overuse. This was because I knew they hated changing wires. That was me, back then – using as little as I needed, saving as much as I could.
Unsurprisingly, the paintings at the exposé were traditionally beautiful. This was not the first time I had seen their art – in fact, the walls of the building in which I lived were plastered all over with them. But though I had always admired their art, it was an appreciative admiration only. They resembled my own paintings, and so it was nothing really new that I ever saw. Besides, when I gazed upon their paintings, I felt none of the warmth I did as when I saw happy humans.
Yet this time, one painting caught my eye. It was a whirl of colour – bright, bold, and nearly fluorescent in its brilliance. Something inside of me tightened.
I peered at the tiny label under the painting. Happiness. I looked up at it again. It was completely done in shades of yellow and seemed to be showing a rising sun. Yet the shapes were all wrong. The sun was not round; instead, its outline was done in sharp, bright lines. The tightening inside of me became an ache. I felt like I was falling, and nothing could stop me. A tingling sensation in my chest-box spread to an intensifying heat. For once, I felt a need to breathe. This was warmth. This was heat. This was fire.
I heard a sound behind me. I spun around, hoping it was one of my humans. But I didn’t recognize the woman standing in front of me. Her wild orange hair shone like a halo around her face, and I remembered the stories of heaven and hell that the humans had told me. The fire was becoming unbearable now. I could feel it searing through me. Her eyes were red.
She smiled.
I smiled back. My wires snapped.
They found me on the floor, electrical shots jolting through me as if I were a human having a seizure. They didn’t dare touch me. No one saw the woman with the wild orange hair as she quietly slipped away.
My wires were all burned beyond repair. They thought I had died. No – they thought I had self-destructed like an overheated computer. I thought I had died.
I woke up on a cold basement floor. I knew where I was, yet I had never been left here to power down before. I walked to the control room, expecting the humans to be there, waiting patiently for me as they did every morning. Instead, they screamed. They tried to shoot me with their complex toys. It took me awhile to understand that they didn’t want me there, that they were trying to stun me, that they were afraid of me. I left in a daze.
I sit here on this little outcropping now, far from them all. Everything around me is yellow. The heart they told me never existed pounds heavily in my chest. The consciousness they scoffed at churns away. They no longer care where I am or what happens to me.
I am sad.
I almost laugh at that thought. Instead, a tear slides down my cheek. I should not exist. I am running on nothing that anyone can identify. There are no wires left in me.
I take out the paint supplies I always carry with me, and I begin to paint. Suddenly, I smile.
The only pot of colour I have left is yellow.
