Technical Blues

JP’s gaze fell down to the scratched brass twinkling in his iron grip. The way JP handled objects was very precise. One could almost call it mechanical. Since its change in ownership, the heart-shaped locket in JP’s clutches had never been opened. It wasn’t that it couldn’t be opened physically. JP had simply made a pact not to open it, and while he carried the rusted memento wherever he went, he didn’t do it out of sentiment. To him, the locket was a prized artifact of human behavior. It was the source of a greater, unanswered question. You see, JP hadn’t had a family or friends before the Fall, and so the subtleties and complexities of most human emotions were lost on him. Since picking up the locket, JP had dedicated himself wholeheartedly to understanding human emotions. Other survivors he had met had scorned his desire to understand. They wondered why JP hadn’t made his way to one of the AI-built supercities that had thrived since the Fall. Some analytical types even called him dysfunctional, which was quite a serious insult for the times. JP didn’t care. He was wired the way he was, and that was that.

JP had a near photographic memory, and since picking up the locket, he had visited and catalogued exactly twenty thousand and eight viable family homes. Not including, of course, the house he was about to enter. Scanning it methodically from side to side, JP assessed the shabby chain-link fence that lay in front of the semi-detached house. No trinkets to catalog there. JP had discovered two years ago that human lovers liked to etch things on padlocks and lock them on fences. Since then, he always checked fences for similar padlocks to commit to memory. Behind the fence, the roof of this house was caved in at the living room. In JP’s experience, around 54% of photographs and items of sentimental value were kept in the bedrooms and studies of family homes. The rest were kept in the living room. The structure was still a viable family home, but JP was a little let down by the roof collapse. Living rooms often contained what JP called, “Shrines”, which were vital to his research. Shrines (apparently) contained very valuable data and emotional information regarding human relationships. The same locket that had sparked JP’s quest had come from such a Shrine, some twenty thousand and eight home visits ago.

The heart-shaped locket he had found had originally been kept in a simple pine box. It was undoubtedly the centerpiece of the Shrine in question. It lay strewn beside worn-out trinkets and grime-obscured photographs. The table had been caked in layers of radioactive ash, and the surface looked iced, like some sort of grim wedding cake. JP had delicately removed the sediment from that first Shrine to observe the photographs more carefully. That was when he encountered the locket. The first house had also contained the bleach-white skeletons of its original inhabitants. The dead did not alarm JP, but they did frustrate him. If they had only been alive, they could have answered his questions far more effectively than the dilapidated artifacts they left behind. Now, every time JP visited a new house, if the dead were present, he would attempt to match some of the photographs with the bones. He liked to imagine what their animated forms would have looked like when they were alive. It was extrapolation, but it was necessary for the research. One hundred and twenty-eight times, JP found working hardware in the houses, complete with digital video footage. Data-wise, these were worth a hundred Shrines put together. They pitched his research's progress forwards immeasurably.

The twenty thousand and ninth house did not look especially promising, but data was data, and JP was getting ready to move forward and analyze the inside. He had a very stringent set of procedures that he was bound to perform before a home visit. As the wind picked up, JP executed them. He whirred around, and as the noise of the wind died down, the dead trees around the house stood still again. Nothing around, nobody there. As per usual.

It wasn’t that JP was a loner, exactly. He was just passionate about his research. In the survivor cities, very few of the others understood that. They didn’t really get the need to understand emotions to begin with.

Wasn’t it human emotions that created this mess? They would ask him, recoiling with something like disgust.

Why would you want to know what it’s like to be them? They would ask.

The thing was, JP didn’t really want to be, “like them”. For most of his shelf life, JP didn’t really want to be like anything. When his research started, he wasn’t a very sophisticated sentient program. However, the fundamental algorithm that drove his machine learning was so powerful, and so binding, that it wouldn’t release him until he had fulfilled his purpose. It was the big question he had chosen that drove JP, but answering it required more than just data.

As JP entered the twenty thousand and ninth house, the grey light of the gloomy sky refracted through the clouds of dust that plumed up around him as he moved. The clutter in the living room was extensive. Springs from the old couch corkscrewed out in insane directions, and the wooden beams that had supported the upper story had splintered everywhere. JP delicately moved past the refuse and debris, heading to the bedrooms for data collection, when something caught his eye and he froze. In front of him, was a piece of data that he had never seen before.

Lying below, her unravaged flesh coated in powdered drywall, was a female human. From his automated visual analysis, JP knew that she wasn’t older than twenty, and she hadn’t been dead longer than a day. He couldn’t quite believe his luck, data-wise. His visual scanner took in the delicate lips, the soft nose, and the protrusion of her regal chin. The white powder almost made her look cherubic in the low light. JP’s scan reached down to her chest, where her hands lay over a scarf-like bundle. With a mechanical jolt, JP realized that this was no scarf. It was a swaddled baby. A baby human being.

A surge of something traveled through JP’s hardware at the sight. It was not sadness. Nor was it sorrow, nor grief. It was not even the ghost of grief, but it was still something. In his heart, if one could call it that, was the dull and unfamiliar ache of a freshly minted sentiment. Now, the drive to fulfill his algorithm, and frustration when he could not, were the only two feelings JP had ever known. And yet, something else had just borne itself out of the darkness to exist inside him. The unopened locket dropped down between his clamps and buried itself amongst the filth. JP felt the aching feeling again as the locket dropped. It continued to thrum inside him as he scanned for the baby’s heartbeat.

There was none to be found.