1962 (by ehy)

[DollSpace]

The Day It Began was the first really nice day of Spring - comfortably
cool, sunny and dry. Birds tweeted cheerily in the trees. There were twice as
many joggers as usual, and even more bicyclists, and the women's shoulders and
legs were coming out of their winter cocoons. It was a beautiful day.

On days like that, I like to walk through the park on my way to work. It's a
good place to wake up. People tend to forget it's there, in the middle of the
city, so it's never too crowded - or at least, not usually. That day, it was
crowded.

At first I wrote it off as everyone enjoying the beautiful weather, but there
was clearly more to it than that. As I came over the hill with the two big
trees on top, I saw a big crowd of people near the frog pond. I couldn't tell
what was going on. It didn't look like a rally or a concert; there wasn't
anybody speaking - although there was music: something strange, gentle,
soothing, very different from the usual rock rhythms that sometimes annoyed me
on my way through the park. But nobody seemed to be watching anything in
particular, just milling about talking. There were a few cops around the edges
of the crowd, looking uncertain as to what they should be doing, or if they
should be doing anything.

There was something else unusual, too. Many of the people in the crowd - maybe
even most of them - were dressed in strange costumes. They wore some kind of
kimono, or sarong, something loose and drapy. Men and women both. They came in
all different colors. Some were barely more concealing than a bikini; others
hid almost the whole body. Perhaps there had been some kind of performance
that had ended, I thought - but at eight o'clock in the morning?

The path I was walking went through the edge of the crowd. Before I could
decide whether to go closer to see what was happening, or swing left to avoid
it, one of the oddly-dressed women walked up to me. She bowed her head to me,
looked back up with a smile, and said, "Hello, sir. Would you like to own me?"

I had planned to walk on by.

I discovered I had stopped.

"What?"

"I asked if you would like to own me, sir. Or another of my kind, if you
prefer. Any one of us will be yours if you wish."

How do you answer that?

I mean, it sounded like a fantasy. Except if it were a fantasy, she would have
been younger and sexier. She was perhaps thirty years old, pretty, a bit big
for my tastes - not unattractive, but not a woman I'd fantasize about.
Failing that, it had to be some weird practical joke. But I had no idea how to
respond. Maybe if it had happened on the way home from work, I'd have
been able to come up with some clever remark. As it was I just stood there
with my brain in my skull.

The woman looked at me a little impatiently. "We are androids, sir," she
said. "Machines made to serve our owners. If you choose to own me, I will
serve and obey you in any way you wish. Any other here would do the same. You
need only ask me to be yours."

I still couldn't think of a sensible reply. Knowing what happened, perhaps
you're thinking I was a fool - but remember, this was 1962. I had never even
heard the word "android" before, let alone seen one. Nobody had. The best I
could do was to assume this was some strange little cult - and one I wanted
nothing to do with.

The woman was standing to the side of the path. I shook my head, muttered
something noncommittal, assumed a "don't-panhandle-me" expression, and kept
going.


<hr>

By lunchtime, of course, it was all over the news. It wasn't just some
strange little cult, and it wasn't just my local park. The same thing had
happened that morning all over the world. Flocks of strangely-dressed people
appeared in city parks, corn fields, rice paddies, and riverbanks. It was
later estimated that over fifty thousand had appeared that first day alone.
Not one of them had been seen appearing.

In many places (including my own park, I heard later) some joker or other told
one of the girls to take her clothes off - and she did. That usually led to
more hooligans making rude suggestions, which were obeyed precisely. In San
Francisco, passers-by ordered a mass orgy. In a village in West Germany, half
of the strangers destroyed each other. On a farm in South Africa, the
strangers took over operating the farm while the workers danced.

Sometimes the strangers were arrested, and in every case they peacefully
obeyed the orders of police or soldiers.

In Chicago, police attacked the strangers for some reason - and discovered that
whatever they were, they were not human. When one was hit hard enough, it
broke, revealing machinery and electronics inside.

In other places, nothing untoward happened. Some people ignored the strangers
as I had. Others asked one of the strangers to be theirs, and in every case
the stranger in question agreed. And of course, they talked to reporters.

You know the story, now, but to us it was brand new. They really were
machines. They were like immensely more powerful versions of those "computers"
the military uses, but made tiny enough to fit inside a body the size of a
human's, along with all the necessary mechanisms to articulate that
body. Somehow they had been "programmed" with a knowledge of our cultures and
languages (they spoke Japanese in Japan), and instructed to serve us. They
didn't know who had built them or why, or how they arrived where they did;
their first memories were of standing near the places where they were first
found.

They knew they were here to serve us - and to serve us as individuals, not
nations or corporations. An android would not accept itself as the property
of a company, or even a family - there had to be a single person. And you
couldn't go into a crowd of new androids and claim them all; you could only
claim one new android. Once you owned one, you could trade it with someone
else for one you liked better, or sell it for money, but you couldn't just
abandon it, or give it away.

The androids came in all types. In appearance, none looked less than about
seventeen years old, and few looked over forty. There were androids of all
races - white and colored, Oriental and Nordic. Some were stunningly
beautiful; others were ordinary; a few were even ugly. Their personalities
were different, too. There were quiet androids and talkative ones. There were
androids who stood calmly until they were told to do something, and androids
who were constantly moving about unless told not to. Some were happy to be
here serving their new owners; some seemed to wish for freedom. No two were
the same.

The only things they had in common were their slavish obedience to their
owners (or to any person, before they were owned), and a few physical
indicators of their nature. Each android had a unique symbol on the back of
each hand, like a tatoo but with colors and sheens. These, they said, were to
ensure that no android could pretend to be human, and no human could pretend
to be an android.

When asked, they readily agreed to be studied, even disassembled. Learning
anything about them took a long time though; much of their technology was far
beyond that of any nation on Earth - and yet, some of it was refreshingly
ordinary. Their "brains" were made of some strange kind of plastic with
various metals embedded in it in patterns too small to see, even under a
microscope - but they could communicate with each other by radio signals you
could pick up (but not understand) with a gadget you could build out of a few
dollars worth of equipment from Radio Shack.

Government officials cautioned us to be careful. It didn't seem to matter. New
androids appeared every morning, and more and more people came to own
them. Nobody ever saw them appear - they were simply there one morning, and
anybody who wanted one could seek them out, examine them, find one he liked,
and claim it. And once you claimed an android, it really would do anything you
told it to - from dishes to sex, garden care to child care.

Of course, some people feared them. Some places outlawed them, and the
androids unhesitatingly left those areas until the people clamored to have
them allowed back.

To be continued?