Awakening | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Awakening | Previous Challenge Entry
By Gary Ritter
10/20/14
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The body slides toward me. It exits the sterile, pneumatic tube and enters the area where my co-workers and I work without protective gear. Our workload has increased significantly in the past year as the global pandemic has taken its toll. It’s bothered me. All these deaths. None who work with me have indicated concern, but I feel it. That’s the word: feel.

When my creation was completed and I came off the assembly line I was told that I was among those with the most advanced artificial intelligence in the world. It would allow me to monitor and sort, to evaluate in a way never before possible, to make human-like decisions, to be almost human. But no one said anything about feelings.

I’m not supposed to feel. That’s an emotion. And my creators didn’t want me or any of my kind to experience the very thing that has created such chaos among the human population.

Emotions have caused wars and a myriad of bad decisions. Ego, pride, and hurt feelings produce strife. Humans lash out with their tongue and then with their fists because of disrespect, hatred, and foolish responses to what others do to them.

Because I was given such great intellect, in the moments between work assignments I tapped into the libraries of the world and devoured the writings of much of humankind. The variety of thought astonished me. It gave me great appreciation for the ones who devised and built me.

But then I wondered: Who built the humans? There are many theories among the books I’ve absorbed, but one rings more true than others. It says that God created them. God. I can’t wrap my fertile brain around that word and the concept behind it. Who or what is He (was He)?

It was when I began contemplating God that I began having that which I wasn’t supposed to have: feelings. I started aching for the many humans I treated in my position at the morgue. We were supposed to simply process them and send them on for cremation, but their faces came into view – where before they had only been a collection of eyes, ears, noses, and devastated flesh, I saw them as individuals.

That book – the Holy Bible – says that mankind experienced sin, and it was sin that was the source of the many ills of humanity. Sin led to man’s downfall. Apparently the ravages of sin caused these many feelings that resulted in man’s numerous problems. It made sense that I would be created without the means to experience that which turned mankind away from all that was good.

But I am feeling. Does that mean I am sinful? That doesn’t seem to make sense. Could a creation of man contain the sameness of man that came from this being called God? Some books I consumed indicate that sin effectively went into the very DNA of humans after they first rebelled – sinned – against God. Is it possible for there to be a DNA transplant, as it were, from human to non-human?

I look back on my short existence and can’t see what sin I could have committed, yet the feelings within me tell a different story. If I haven’t actually sinned, but feel as if I have, why is that? The Bible tells me that humans were given a set of commandments from God that are integral to their very being. They know without being told they shouldn’t lie or steal, but they do anyway.

Do I sense these commandments in my consciousness? I don’t know. I’ve never tried to do something that wasn’t programmed into me. Yet the first commandment is to have no other god but God before me. I’ve had no god, let alone God in my life.

Why do I have concern for these who have died and whose bodies I deal with? Why am I troubled at all? Why does this caring make me yearn for this God of the Bible?

Another body makes it way toward me. My heart breaks. It’s a child. What is happening to me? Why do I care?

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