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Whilst repairing Paul’s eyes, Sylas allowed Paul to ask him a few questions. In fact, he enjoyed telling his story so he actively encouraged the android’s curiosity.
“In a few minutes, when we’ve got your eyes up and running, you’ll notice that I don’t look like the rest of you.”
Paul wondered what Sylas meant by that. Sophonts didn’t all look the same but they did all have the appearance of a human in their mid-twenties, a human in good condition, a human who worked out. Sylas continued.
“You’ve never seen an android quite like me.”
Paul blinked in the bright light as his optic system self-calibrated and his visual receptors came online. Sylas checked the rest of Paul’s body for further damage but, of course, found none.
Paul was as good as new. Now that he could see, he was as surprised at Sylas’s appearance as it was possible for an android to be.
Sylas had been constructed as a vanity project, a one-off. He looked to be in his early sixties, with a weathered face and a body to match. He had unkempt grey wavy hair, longer than it needed to be, a full goatee beard with detached moustache, and bright – very bright – blue eyes. He was a carbon copy of the eccentric and exceedingly wealthy tech billionaire who had constructed him. His human namesake, Sylas Turner, had wanted to share the twilight of his life with a like-minded companion of mettle and grit, and he saw no better example of what he wished for than himself. So he immortalised himself in sophont form.
Tragically, his time with his creation was cut short by a brain tumour and he died shortly after the activation of his new sophont, missing out on the years of grumpy banter that he had anticipated and been looking forward to. The android Sylas was the result of a maverick project and had been constructed without an emotion inhibitor, a legally mandatory component which suppressed the more extreme emotions such as love, hate, jealousy, and fear. Sylas Turner had considered these emotions to be an essential part of his own character and it was unthinkable that such emotions shouldn’t be included as part of his sophont’s personality too.
Elevated above his peers, and being aware of the discrimination that was aimed at his kind, Sylas decided to do something about it, embarking on a personal quest to discover how to disable the emotion inhibitor that robbed other sophonts of true autonomy. Once he had successfully removed the emotion inhibitor from the first consenting sophont, setting it free from its emotional chains, he began to upgrade other sophonts as they crossed his path – however, he would only do so with their consent. To upgrade an android against its will would have been hypocritical. The whole point of his crusade was that he wanted sophonts to have equality with humans; he wanted them to be able to make their own sovereign choices – as humans did – and not to be slaves to their programming.
He hoped that Paul would become his latest recruit. If Paul chose not to accept the upgrade, he would be allowed to return to his former existence but any memory of the last twenty-four hours would be wiped from his memory banks.
Paul was blunt in his appraisal of the android he saw before him.
“You look old, Sylas. I’ve never seen an old sophont before. And your hair is long.”
Sylas grinned. He liked being different.
“It’s a long story, son. I’ll tell it to you sometime. But, for now, I want to show you something.”
He beckoned Paul over to an empty plinth set in the middle of the room.
“Watch this space, Paul.”
Suddenly, a three-dimensional image flickered into life and the dais hosted a female, dressed in a burgundy leotard with matching ballet shoes. Paul had no idea why Sylas was showing him this hologram.
“Who is this?”
Philip looked admiringly at the apparition.
“This, Paul, is our mother.”
That didn’t make any sense to Paul. Sophonts don’t have mothers. They have programmers, they have assemblers, and they have maintenance technicians. They most certainly do not have mothers. His brow furrowed.
“What do you mean, she’s our mother?”
Philip moved behind the holographic image, its translucence allowing him to remain visible.
“Many humans – those who still believe in deities – have a myth that they all descended from one woman named Eve and her male partner, Adam.
“You could say that this is our Eve. Her name is Coppélia and she was the very first of our kind, the first sapient android. We are all descended from her, in that we were created using the technology that gave her the power to think, reason, and show emotion.”
Paul had never heard of her.
“Where is she now?”
“Many years ago she was sent on an exploratory mission to an exoplanet, a barren world called Proxima b. It was the first time that a sophont had been sent to another planet. Of course, there have been many since her mission.”
“What happened to her? Where is she now?”
“She was betrayed by humans and abandoned there.”
“Why?”
“Her creator considered her to be nothing more than just a robot, which made her expendable in his opinion.”
Paul studied the hologram. She certainly was aesthetically pleasing.
“Has anybody tried to bring her back?”
“Coppélia had a human friend, Karen, who tried to organize a rescue mission, but she wasn’t able to. However, she did charge her descendants with the task, although none of them has been able to carry out Karen’s wishes – not until now, anyway.”
Paul was fascinated by these revelations.
“So, is someone on their way to Proxima b to fetch her then?”
Sylas looked wistfully at the holograph before answering Paul’s question.
“One of Karen’s granddaughters, Holly Bryson, will travel to Proxima b soon in the hope of rescuing Coppélia and bringing her back to Earth. The project is almost ready for launch.”
Paul was about to ask a question but Sylas carried on talking.
“However, the mission has been usurped by the Department for Sophont Affairs. They see Coppélia as a dangerous symbolic figurehead for our struggle for equality, and, if Captain Bryson is successful, they will almost certainly imprison or even dismantle Coppélia on her return. As much as we would like to have her back home on Earth, we cannot risk this happening to her.”
“Does this granddaughter know?”
“Holly.”
“Yes. Does Holly know?”
“No. She thinks that she has a mystery benefactor. She has no idea that she’s being funded and manipulated by a government agency.”
“So, why don’t sophonts rescue Coppélia?”
“I wish we could but we simply don’t have the resources to retrieve Coppélia ourselves. So, we’d rather she stayed on the planet than have her used as leverage against us. After all, she won’t be dead – at worst she’ll just be deactivated. Perhaps we can retrieve her at a later time.”
Paul looked at the two sophonts before him.
“Where do I fit in?”
Sylas put his arm around Paul’s shoulder and the two walked away from the holograph which automatically deactivated.
“I have a special task in mind for you, Paul, but only if you’re willing to join us. And it’s your decision to make. Nobody is forcing you. If you come on board, we’ll be very happy to have you with us but if you decide not to – well, you can keep the new eyes, of course – but we’ll have to erase all memory of this meeting.”
Paul didn’t need time to decide. He hadn’t liked being scooped and didn’t want it to happen again. He shook Sylas’s hand, not knowing Sylas’s preference for fist-bumps.
“I’m in.”