Sinking slowly, the water rose up to my navel, rising higher and it caressed my breast, leaving part of me unexplored, in an attempt to remove the accumulated forest floor from my skin. It had been days since I had bathed, but it felt like weeks, and I was lucky enough to finally find this
place. the bath felt amazing and My mind started to drift and swirl within the warm water, memories
were threatening to come loose, so I quickly change my chain of thought.
The year is 2287, 200 years since the techno boom, and the slide of humanity began. My great-grandmother had told me the horror story of the first robot she had ever seen when she was only 7 years old and sue to the nature if her life, she had never experianced technology to this extent. The year was 2173, and they had no flesh, just faceless bare metal, she had came face-to-face with ECHO.
The year is 2287, 200 years since the techno boom, and the slide of humanity began. My great-grandmother had told me the horror story of the first robot she had ever seen when she was only 7 years old and sue to the nature if her life, she had never experianced technology to this extent. The year was 2173, and they had no flesh, just faceless bare metal, she had came face-to-face with ECHO.
It had taken almost 80 years to perfect a safe, conscious
android, there were just too many issues concerning their consciousness programming
and self-awareness capabilities. It all started in 2091 with the AlphaDroid.
They were released with limited capabilities, clunky and completely programmed,
no self-awareness and had shown no future prospects for its design, the design
was scrapped. Redesigned, here entered Bravo, released in 2099. This android
design had shown the first signs of interactive possibilities; obtaining the ability
to question its owner on tasks and then safely perform them, but sadly had a
short lifespan due to its consciousness design.
There was to be a third droid design, but it was completely scrapped in
2117 following “irreparable faults” during testing.
Then in 2130 the DeltaDroid became the first ever acceptable
design, becoming mass produced and released to society, this was until it
started attacking its owners. The droids were scrapped. Parts were
recommissioned, the design reconstructed, new consciousness programing
installed, and then in 2133, when fully rebuilt, they were released and
subsequently started ‘killing’ themselves. I
smile at myself, ‘It would have been entertaining to watch robots pull
themselves apart’. This is when society gained some respect, as far as my
history reflection is concerned, as they placed the self-aware robotic design
on hiatus, for almost 30 years and put all the effort into research and not
profit.
This is when entered E.C.H.O, in 2170, the droid designed to Emulates Consciousness via Human Observation.
The
ECHO programing was actually simple in design; to imitate. In order to control
and limit the droid’s; personality functions, physical abilities and social
interaction skills, regulations were put into place to allow only certain
people, and certain types of people, to purchase them. This was all done to
forestall or, in the best case scenario, remove the likelihood of a droid going
ape-shit and potentially forcefully removing someone’s spine. The amazing thing
about this was that by the time ECHO was designed and released, humanity had
already attained viable space travel in 2131, and interplanetary re-colonization
to Cerian in 2165. Who would have ever guessed that a conscious robot would
have been so hard to create, you see?
This is my job, to know the history of technology and yet, this is also what has
destroyed my life.
Earth’s population was severely diminished after the
re-colonization, and the majority of the remaining population migrated to the
cities and revelled in all the scientific advancements. This resulted in the
remaining landscape becoming wild, forest regaining control of the land and
only scatterings of the population remaining as its residents. This is where my
family line began, at the cusp of human re-colonization, we moved to the
outskirts of the city and avoided interaction with technology. This was the
view held by those whom removed themselves from the cities; to remain on earth,
to remain untouched, we all receded.
So there you have it, the earth became divided, massive
technologically advanced cities, completely surrounded entirely by overgrown
wilderness. This is the world I grew up in, entirely devoid of technology,
living entirely reliant on nature. But this was not how I wanted to grow up,
completely ignorant of the world around me, I wanted to know and this was where
everything went wrong. My mind was rounding on those thoughts again and I
wasn’t ready to deal with them yet.
In the 80 years since ECHO’s completion you wouldn’t be able
to clearly identify them out in public anymore. The outfitting of the droid no
longer just consisted of imitating the human mind, but to imitate our entire
being. What is that? The echo’s faded from my mind and there was another
knock at the bathroom door, opening my eyes slowly, I watch as he entered the
room. Smiling I question “Hey Mikah, care to join me?” only a chuckle in return.





