Some Notes on Androids

Androids don’t spend enough time sitting up in bed, listening to the rain, looking at their scars.

Androids love to recreate human drama. An Android will purchase an alkaline battery at a farmers’ market and upon receiving incorrect change (a culturally pervasive running Android joke), say, “Some things in life aren’t allowed to fuck up. Traffic lights, for example. The safety on my Remington Model 5. Your mother doing the garlic bread. Shit gets ruined. But you? You’re allowed a fuck up every now and again.”

At any given time there are a hundred thousand Androids lining the world, shoulder to shoulder on the outer edges of the seven continents, standing knee deep in the sediment of the ocean floor, pushing. Androids desire to push the continents back together. Like how it used to be. Androids love puzzles, and this is the best puzzle.

Contrary to popular mythology, Androids neither dream of, nor have attempted to engineer (except once in an exploration of approximating human irony [see also: drafting the Pax Robota]), electric sheep. Humans had no interest (neither in reverie nor blueprint) in electric sheep, and Android culture, despite the passing of years, still remains intractably rooted in the surviving glyphs of human achievement.

That said, there are some cultural derivations: Android births and Android funerals, for instance, occur in tandem, along with the transference of the central processing insert from fading elder to blooming youngster, an act that’s been ritualized to sacrosanctity. Androids present at these remarkable events, known henceforth as Resettlements, feel obligated to approximate simultaneously the full gamut of emotions that humans experience at births and funerals, an amalgamated accordion folder of grief and joy spanning eons of heartfelt exhibitions. The resulting noise of their trying is akin to the rapid wingbeats of bees.