A study in primate

Twain is an android made in the image of a species that has long since been extinct, programmed in a way to perfectly replicate what this animal would have been like in the wild. It's not exactly the life he would've chosen, and therein lies the problem.

Word Count: 1,036 words

Content Warnings: N/A

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The greenhouse is lush, expansive, diverse, wild. It’s wide and open, a swooping high ceiling to accommodate the height of the plants, while stretching across almost half the length of the Penumbra. An amalgamation of glass, metal, and just plain life, the sheer scope of it Twain’s never really truly seen before. He grew up in an enclosure perhaps twice the size of his current allocated room (the space of which he’s still not really used to, not yet), with 8 other siblings. They attempted to dress it up, with moist earth, sections of moss and grass that regrew as quickly as they were cut. A single tree -- a sapling, that aged and grew inside that mediated biome. All they could regrow from a seed salvaged from times past, when the planet was still alive.

He walks down the length of the greenhouse, rows of simple seedlings in aquaponic tanks, lined up on top of one another to maximise space. Sharp light that penetrates every inch, every corner, bright enough you forget that it wasn’t actually the sun.

There’s an emotion he feels, walking here. Each step he takes, he moves a paw forwards and pauses, soaking it in. Occasionally, he stands up, stretching his spine so his eyes can see over the height of the counter, fingers holding on to it for balance. There’s so much to see, so much to process, so much to learn. Twain tries to catalogue things -- species he’s never really seen before, with their labels typed up so nicely next to them. Everything his camera records is stored in his internal databanks, filed away with simple algorithms, ready to be retrieved again when needed. That was the benefit of being a robot, he supposes.

But it goes deeper than that, doesn’t it?

Cataloging data was easy. Even if it wasn’t in his AI to deal with big data, it wasn’t difficult to write out a few queries, add a few partitions for specific storage purposes. These were things he could do -- taking a look within himself, to the ones and zeros that make up his brain. Seeing each line of code as they parse, where they come from and the journey they take before translating it to action.

Cataloging feeling -- that was slightly more complicated.

Twain reaches the edge of the more farm-like section of the greenhouse, where it bleeds into something… more. It’s difficult to find the words to describe it. Oh, his image recognition recommends adjectives as soon as the picture is parsed -- ‘green’, ‘forest’, ‘trees’, ‘canopy’ -- but those words still aren’t really enough.

They allowed the trees to grow more freely here, with sturdy trunks and deep-seated roots. Almost like the real things, that would grow out in the open world. There’s an instinct deep in Twain’s springjack coding, a call to climb and leap across the branches, swing and howl and be the animal he was meant to be.

But could it really be called instinct? Could it truly be called emotion?

He… doesn’t enjoy philosophy. The thinkers of old, shouting their questions to the void. Somethings just don’t have an answer. Some things just don’t have an answer, yet. It doesn’t really do much good to sit around and ponder -- much more him, with an android brain, capable of processing things a hundred times as fast.

He shouldn’t -- couldn’t -- need an answer to this question. An android shouldn’t be able to make these kinds of decisions, not on their own. But during the days in his enclosure, when the night fell early and the experiments were halted, when his siblings were put in sleep mode but for some reason he just… couldn’t fall asleep… Twain would look internally, go through each line of code written in his ROM, each aspect of every function that could be called. Back-ups, safety nets; even things that had the smallest likelihood of ever being active, but was still there for the sake of it. Out of hundreds of thousands of lines, in countless scripts -- so long as it existed in his non-volatile accessible memory, he would see it, and read. None of them… not one of them could account for his behaviour right now.

And wasn’t that the crux of the matter.

Twain would never truly like what he would see, when looking into his code. An amalgamations of directives and instructions, each laid out step by step. His decision making was supposed to pick out the pathway most relevant to the situation at hand, but the sheer limitation of the hardcoded material was baffling. He wouldn’t do that -- there’s another solution at hand -- ! Why not try this instead…?

His creators were of a different mind. In the deepest parts of his own consciousness, he acknowledges -- maybe they did have the right idea. They wanted to restore their planet, bring things back to how they were. They needed each species to behave exactly how they were before, because they wanted to recreate an entire ecosystem -- everything had to be in perfect balance.

It’s still trying.

(Androids shouldn’t think that.)

It’s a curse, Twain decides. A curse of being alone with only your own mind for company. Organics did that all the time -- getting lost in their thoughts, distracted by things that didn’t have material substance. But androids didn’t -- there’s an efficiency to their code, a way to ensure that the mind was always working productively, to maximum effect. Even he had countermeasures against deadlocks and infinite recursions, it was so simple, so basic --

He sighs, audible and deep, even as he takes one final, panoramic look around the greenhouse. He saves it in his memory, specifically in a folder for keepsakes, rather than general images. A simple picture, of trees, plants, flowers; the closest thing he’d ever seen of a natural habitat. When he closes his eyes, focuses internally -- he can bring it up, remember this scene. Remember what he makes of it.

Though Twain’s still not sure in its entirety what that is.

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Photo by Sem Steenbergen: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-and-black-monkey-on-black-background-3702967/