This Week in Androids

Androids.

What do we really know about them?

We know that they will exist in the near future. We know that later versions of the prototype will be coded with human nuance in such a way and to such a degree as to render them indistinguishable from Asperger’s sufferers, and that even later versions will be virtual facsimiles (notice I did not dub them “facsimilants”) that will, among other achievements, populate the earth with a real measure of exclusivity.

These are the cold, hard, machine facts.

“But are they interesting?” a child calls out, his voice soaring above the restless, pitchforked din of the tavern, which grows quiet, does the din of the tavern, tavern din that had been circulating rumors small and large about the ultimate undoing of the existence we’ve come to expect, if not enjoy, and it’s just the boy standing then in a dark space that hadn’t propped him up into the lamplight a moment ago, a space filled with the very night that gasps just outside the swinging tavern doors, doors latched with sturdy, perpendicular oak planks forming an unassailable X, planks that avow safekeeping from unknowable dangers lurking like tigers in the jungle mists of the night; but the planks have broken their promise; the night has found out the boy and the boy is unsure, a proper red blush starting in his toes and rising meteorically throughout his brittle, malnourished skin, until it has filled the flesh about his braincase.

The boy steps backwards into the arms of a mother who is so hesitant to receive him that she momentarily forgets the pain of parturition. Should the boy look up just then, he might notice it missing from her very eyes.

In your opinion: Is the boy an Android?