It was the year of 2020 and a dark cloud had surrounded the entire world. The pandemic had taken over the world and the life as humans knew, had changed forever. Mental health was at its lowest and the world saw a surge in the cases of domestic abuse. The government, in order to keep track of the rising cases, had provided every house with a personal robot.
I was supposed to be just a machine. Merely, a compilation of metal and human fed coding programs. I was never meant to “feel” or even know what the word meant.
When I first arrived at the human’s house, I was prepared to stick to the instructions provided to me by the government but just then I became aware of the kind of horrors one human has the capability of inflicting on another.
It was a small family, consisting of a young couple. The man of the house was tall and built, with a bearded face and constant anger in his eyes. The wife was a meek lady, with a petite figure and a sad smile. The lady too had a kind of anger in her eyes, but she managed to hide it well, perhaps to avoid further instigating her abuser. I stayed with the family for about 2 weeks. They had a regular routine, the wife would wake up early in the morning and finish all the chores of the house, all by herself. When the man would wake up, he would constantly order her around, further wearing her out. He would begin drinking in the morning and a couple of hours later the verbal abuse would begin. Words like “whore” and “bitch” were casually thrown around and my system would tell me that these words were sexist slurs. I didn’t understand much of what was going on, this information wasn’t fed into my system.
The physical abuse came much later, at about 8pm. It would begin slow, with just a slight push and loud screaming and then finally the man would raise his hand and leave the wife, lying on the floor with tears in her eyes, with a blueish purple imprint on her cheeks and several bruises all over her body. Like I said earlier, I was never meant to “feel” or even know what the word meant and even though I couldn’t put a name to this emotion but whatever it was, it “felt” wrong.
The robot witnessed the violence, heard the degrading insults, yet the robot struggled to feel; to feel empathetic, to feel anger and most of all, to feel the sheer fear that many humans have to live with every day.
I was supposed to be just a machine. Merely, a compilation of metal and human fed coding programs. I was never meant to “feel” or even know what the word meant.
When I first arrived at the human’s house, I was prepared to stick to the instructions provided to me by the government but just then I became aware of the kind of horrors one human has the capability of inflicting on another.
It was a small family, consisting of a young couple. The man of the house was tall and built, with a bearded face and constant anger in his eyes. The wife was a meek lady, with a petite figure and a sad smile. The lady too had a kind of anger in her eyes, but she managed to hide it well, perhaps to avoid further instigating her abuser. I stayed with the family for about 2 weeks. They had a regular routine, the wife would wake up early in the morning and finish all the chores of the house, all by herself. When the man would wake up, he would constantly order her around, further wearing her out. He would begin drinking in the morning and a couple of hours later the verbal abuse would begin. Words like “whore” and “bitch” were casually thrown around and my system would tell me that these words were sexist slurs. I didn’t understand much of what was going on, this information wasn’t fed into my system.
The physical abuse came much later, at about 8pm. It would begin slow, with just a slight push and loud screaming and then finally the man would raise his hand and leave the wife, lying on the floor with tears in her eyes, with a blueish purple imprint on her cheeks and several bruises all over her body. Like I said earlier, I was never meant to “feel” or even know what the word meant and even though I couldn’t put a name to this emotion but whatever it was, it “felt” wrong.
The robot witnessed the violence, heard the degrading insults, yet the robot struggled to feel; to feel empathetic, to feel anger and most of all, to feel the sheer fear that many humans have to live with every day.
No comments:
Post a Comment