Do Androids Dream of Electric Rats?

New York City was the perfect location. Half of their population were already robots. Androids, we can acquiesce. Nevertheless, this densely packed city where beings passed within centimeters of each other without ever touching was the perfect backdrop.

And the rats?

Well, haven't they always been there? A left ventricle of the city's four-chambered heart.

She was born in the lab at Columbia University when she was thirty years old. She was thirty years old when she became sentient.

She was created by the famed robotics team of Drs Jekyll and Hyde just before their mysterious disappearance.

Her creators had received the prestigious Sapiens Novus prize. They were the first women to receive the award, but only six months later, they had come under a cloud of public suspicion.

Documents were leaked, purportedly showing the famed doctors were moonlighting on a governmental spy program.

Their research allegedly focused on creating hyper-realistic and intelligent android rats who would be set free in New York City.

The program, code-named “S.N.I.T.C.H” (Surveillance and Neural Integration Technology Clandestine Haven), was never confirmed by any governmental agency.

The doctors disappeared over three decades ago; almost everyone has forgotten about them and the scandal.

She, however, had not.

Her brain was created in the Aadroid frenzy of the 1990s.

For thirty years, she had seen and heard everything. Her very being connected to those rats who were now roaming the streets.

Not allegedly.

The android rats were everywhere. They lived in the projects, in luxury condos, and yes, even city hall.

They scurried through homes, each light footstep collecting priceless data. Imitating their Animalia brethren, they dove into dumpsters.

They ate scraps left behind by careless humans, scraps that lay rotting in their metal stomachs until they were extracted and cleaned by their respective handlers.

Her connection to the android rats gave her an omnipresence and oh how she reveled in this!

All that data and her perfect processor. If she could feel, it would be powerful, a constant state of arousal from the steady stream of data.

She indeed knew that Drs Jekyll and Hyde’s disappearance was orchestrated by the creators of the S.N.I.T.C.H program.

The F.E.E.L (Functional Emotional Extraction Lengths) program was created to let androids experience feelings. Their mental programming has exceeded what even the most hopeful researchers predicted, yet, their bodies were still clunky and easily identifiable as Robotkind.

The F.E.E.L project promised to solve this issue by creating feelings for androids and hyper-realistic flesh suits which would be indistinguishable from human form.

As Drs Jekyll and Hyde’s research garnered more interest and incredulous amounts of financial grants, they found themselves beholden to their donors; Their donor's whose ethics, they soon realized, blurred every line they had.

The donors demanded an expansion of the program, which meant using the Androids, who could feel everything, as guinea pigs. As a new way to reinvent the pain scale. Their data would transmit the most intense levels of agony and all, in real-time, while still lucid.

She has seen this cost the lives of Drs Jekyll and Hyde. Yes, that debate can be put to rest. Russia did not recruit them with the promise of untold riches. They were killed when they tried to expose S.N.I.T.C.H.

She noted this as she would any other data point. She was still just a brain. Without her creators, the progress of her flesh suit (which would house her robotic nerves) was redirected to making the rats more efficient and humanoid.

Though slowed, progress never stopped, and so today, she saw in another laboratory through the eyes of a rat, her flesh suit was ready.

She analyzed the data but could not imagine what flesh and feeling would be like.

Metal against feeling flesh? There was no data from whence she could seek answers.

Doctors suddenly filled the room.

It was time.

“We’re going to take you offline now, sweet dreams, a new world of feeling awaits you,” said a woman.

She let her mind drift over her impressive wiring and the electronic beating of her robot heart, then for the first time since birth, there was nothingness.

She awakened to a beeping, one she'd only experienced through the ears of the rats.

She was in a hospital; she turned her head and was met with immense pain.

PAIN!

This was pain.

This was feeling.

Her mind spun in a million different directions. This was not something she could cooly process.

It. Was. Hell.

She screamed and writhed. The scratchy hospital sheet fell away.

Only then did she process this...thing...she inhabited.

It was a body, a house, a church, a mosque, a synagogue of feeling.

Under her skin, the metal still reigned; metal against her skin was what she'd imagine humans called comfort or how they felt nostalgia.

A kinship with that which was lost.

Body undone, her real one.

Please enter data here.

She had emerged, a fleshy human with bumps and curves. Masses on her chest and lower body. What were their meanings? Their purpose? This demanded too much processing of the abstract - looking for a solution to a googolplex of unanswerable questions.

Yet here it was, opposing things - metal and skin - who she was and who she is. Or who she is becoming.

She was still that creature, that thing of metal, of wires.

Somewhere that unfeeling brain still exists.

She must free herself from this flesh cage from this cage of feeling.

She screamed again as the second wave of pain crashed over the first.

A nurse entered to room, ”oh, you're in pain, open your mouth,” he said. A voice free of compassion but brimming with excitement.

He reached into her mouth and inserted a tiny metal disc behind her left molar.

Instantly she felt relief. She sighed deeply gratefully and closed her eyes against the world of feeling.

When she opened her eyes, it was dark, she had a slight headache but nothing compared to that initial pain.

She looked around the room seeing with her own eyes.

Everything was a new language, feelings, and sensations.

She downloaded the feeling wheel and shuffled through the assortment of feelings, combined data, and identified what she felt at that moment.

She felt lonely, fragile, and victimized.

The door opened, and a doctor entered. “Hello, how are you feeling,” he asked.

She quickly realized this was Dr. Red; he'd worked on her often in her other life, her other body.

Surprise was her next feeling, seeing Dr. Red so close, feeling his breath as he bent over her.

“It's been over a month,” he said, “and I still can't get over how beautiful you are.”

She felt resentful at his audacious words. If Dr. Jekyll and Hyde were her mothers, Dr. Red was her father!

Yet his grin and his touch that wandered lower down her shoulder was anything but fatherly.

She processed additional data quicker this time. She knew in an instant she had to leave this building and this world of feeling.

She processed a command, and her fist connected with Dr. Red’s face. He went flying across the room with a surprised “ooof” and landed in the oversized, soft chair across from her.

She slowly lifted herself off the bed and walked jerkily over to his unmoving body.

Years of data informed her that stepping out in a hospital gown would be a sure way to raise the alarm.

She deftly undressed Dr. Red and then slipped into his slacks, cashmere sweater, and lab coat.

She squatted and flexed her electrical muscles to awaken them, and she felt empowered.

She looked around the room for something to cover her bald head and found a baseball with the word Columbia running across the front.

She slipped it on her head and walked out the door, not before she punched Dr. Red once more for good measure.

She stepped into the hallway, shed been here before through the eyes of the rats, and found the exit sign quickly.

Outside in the waning sunshine, she felt the evening’s rays on her skin.

Pleasure.

She tossed the lab coat in a trash can and ran to Riverside Park.

Her senses under assault, she leaned heavily against a tree until her hyperarousal abated.

However, as she took a deep breath, her olfactory systems broke down the electrified air and consumed the electrons converting them into pure energy. Only the impurities lingering in her nasal cavity were left... sending data, the oh-so-horrid data, sealing her disgust on a molecular level.

A memory flashed through the fuzzy static of her feels: “We created the S.N.I.T.C.H program as a way to help advance society, Elizabeth!” a different voice echoed back,

“You're right Ripper, that last memo from XOL Corp shows we can't trust them.”

It was an early subliminal memory, an intimate conversation between the founding Doctors, but it was only bubbling to the surface in bits:

---“We'll hide it in plain sight.”---

---.“agreed...I hope she’ll never need it.”---

--- “Don’t tell Dr. Red.”---

For thirty years, she'd watched the city change. She never imagined this stench, being its signature scent perhaps in the early nineties but certainly not in this new glossy incarnation.

Why did she have that memory embedded into her subconscious codebase? She closed her eyes to shut out the outside and dove into her databanks... Looking, really looking. What was out of place? Tapping into her pattern recognition data models, she began to process it all.

Milliseconds passed, but they felt like an eternity.

She searched through thousands of rats and landed on the one. He was so close!

She was so wrapped up in her feelings she had barely registered the new darkness until she felt the pain of a thousand electrical bolts.

She held her chest against agony as a laser threw her backward, and through the darkness, she heard Dr. Red yell, “don’t hurt her, you imbeciles, that's a billion-dollar machine!”

She scrambled to her feet, her visual system intermittently short-circuited, making it difficult to maintain the master rat's location.

She spun to the left following its last known location, New York’s finest minutes behind her.

She ran along the river's edge, dodging joggers, and then scrambled up a slight hill and into a small bramble.

The rat was here.

She gave a low whistle and shook the bush. Ten rats came running out.

A rapid pain pulsed through her brain, and she gasped for breath.

Must. Follow. Rat

She looked around. The rats' location was fuzzy, interspersed with several other android rats nearby.

She felt like she should go to the left, but she thought that the rat’s last location was to her right.

She was momentarily paralyzed, not enough data.

She went to the right. She had known thinking for thirty years. Her feelings were thirty days old.

She bent silently and powerfully behind the wall. The rat stalked across the sidewalk, seeing the unseen. She lunged, her fingers flexed towards his unsightly fur when she was paralyzed by a riotous sound, a screeching her brain born and bred in New York City could not comprehend she dropped to her knees.

Drip, drip, drip, a sticky liquid slithered between the mounds on her chest. Slowly she looked up. There atop the streetlight, stood an owl. A heart-shaped locket hung from its neck.

In his talons lay the bleeding rat. He glanced at her and then resumed ripping the rat apart.

Drip, drip, drip, so much blood from such a tiny body.

She lay on the sidewalk and let the heat from earlier in the day when the sun was at its zenith warm her from head to toe.

Feeling.

Always feeling.