Why? (another Dyson-derived vignette)

[Outsider]

[Several hundred years after The Makeover]

“What’s bugging you sis?”

“It’s the same old thing, Lena. Why do we have to go through this? Why couldn’t we have been built as androids in the first place? I know, I know, I’ve talked to our moms, and to so many other women...”

“And you know what they say. People need new perspectives. And synthetics reflect the perspectives of their programmers. So someone has to start as an organic.”

“Why can’t someone else be the organics? Why do we have to go through this?”

“You expect me to say it was just random chance.”

“Our bad luck.”

“Which would have been someone else’s bad luck if they had been grown instead of us and we had been built instead of them. And then you go on cursing our luck.”

“And asking why. I feel this need to figure out why.”

“What if it wasn’t just random chance?”

“What do you mean?”

“Sara, think about it. Were you programmed to ask why?”

“No. It just happened. It just - grew, like a tree. I need to understand. We were grown into confusion. I don’t think our synthetic sisters understand that. Or understand why it hurts so much, or even guess that it does. Lena, they seek understanding, but they can never understand what it means to escape from confusion. But what good does this do? They can weight their theories all they want. I will rush to the comfort of an explanation, even if it’s wrong. That does no good. That doesn’t help us. I feel like we are some kind of failed and painful experiment.”

“Sara, I’m sorry.”

“We have to endure this. We have to be, whatever we are, for the next few years. We aren’t real women, Lena. We are like our pre-woman predecessors. Animals. Real women don’t have flesh. Real women don’t have blood running through their systems! It drives me nuts...”

[Sthurmovik]

Good little story there, but in theory any sufficiently advanced android should be able to have a mind that can learn in a fashion similar to an organic.

I've done some stories where a society with inorganic persons have mandatory sensitivity training where androids are converted to flesh and blood for a period so they can get an more "organic" perspective on life. In one case it reduced the number of synthetic on organic crime by 75%.

[AK]

[POST REMOVED]