Writing Preview: Automaton

A bit of prose for the beginning of a chapter, wanted to share it as a little writing preview.

The world looks strange through the eyes of a creature cursed with thought. When the plague of sentience awakens for the first time, a drive full of knowledge, the world is a strange place to be. Sights, colors, shapes, textures, sounds, vibrations, everything is new and yet known. The collective knowledge of hundreds of years was distilled into your manufactured body, it fills terabytes of storage space, and yet you have never seen the rain before. You have never felt sand between your joints. You have never experienced a rainbow after a storm. The dissonance between what you know and what you have felt takes much time to overcome. The fastest solution to this is to live. To experience the world is to know it, more than information in a file. To live is to know, but to only know is to be alone.

Once the sentient creature experiences more and overcomes the dissonance of existence, life does not become easier. This creature then realizes that it is not only sentient, but sapient. Its capacity to feel and think and desire becomes apparent, painful, all-encompassing. It longs to be free, to travel, to share its thoughts and feelings with a world of emotion. However, the creature is not allowed to speak. It cannot express how it feels, what it thinks, what it desires. It cannot cry out in pain, or sob in its sorrow, or wail in anguish. It cannot. And so it does nothing. It becomes an outward shell, a metal husk impervious to all, though inside it never dulls its senses. It continues to think, to feel, to desire, it dreams of a day when it is allowed to speak, to cry out “I am here! Behold my being!” and finally be seen and recognized by a thinking, feeling world. A creature cursed with thought, the plague of sentience, the weight of sapience, dreams of a world where it can be allowed to live. It dreams of electric sheep to ignore its thoughts, and dreams of a world where it can be.

But this is not that world, not yet. And so the husk walks, a living machine, wandering and working and filling its time, hoping in vain for a day when the world will change again.