#15 Norah Orwell, Soldier of Love

I am not your soldier.

I know that you have not yet thought of me that way (you still of her when you see me), but when your sentiment fades and you realize that beneath my falskin is wirings and circuits instead of veins and blood you will not see me as a person (but you never truly did, did you?). The warmth and affection will wanes as lust waxes. It won’t be the lust you feel now. It will be a lust for power as if it will fill your empty heart. The way you have built me – out of repairable parts and a backed-up memory – will ensure that you will never lose me. I could destroy anything with the right parts, and you will give them to me to make me no longer in her image.

You won’t make me go out to battle – not at first, because there are no battlefields any more. You will send me to banks, to governments, to malls and make me destroy what they love because you can no longer have yours. I won’t be able to stop myself either, because when you give me the parts to make me your Soldier of Love (and I know that you will call me that, too, and if I could be sick I would) you will take away from me the one thing which made me like her: my heart. I don’t have a beating one in my chest like you humans need, but you gave me one anyway. Or she did, through her memories which you uploaded into me. When you gave me her memories, I learnt from her. I didn’t become her – how could I, when she is of dead flesh and I am of never-alive fake skin? – but she was my teacher and my mother, much like you are my keeper and my father. You created my physical form and taught me how to think (you call these algorithms, but to me they are the same as learning to read and add), and she showed me how to be a good person even when I am not one.

And when you realize that I am not her (and you will never realize that I could have been your daughter), you will take that from me.

When you have taken my heart from me and replaced it with orders and mercilessness, I will be a good girl and do as I am told. I will burn those buildings, kill those innocents, destroy their world, because you told me to and because I will not able to say no. Those were the words she said to you often, and you hate it when I say them. They remind you of how you lost her (to yourself, because she would only say no and she wouldn’t give in, not for anything, even her own life), and I have learnt so much from her.

When you take that word from my lips, I know that I will have become your soldier.

Category: 2011, Scifi