You made us in your own image. It started off simply enough. You wanted machines to vacuum your houses, prepare your food, wash your hair – little things you couldn't be bothered with. And, of course, you took such pleasure in your own intelligence when it worked. Really rather touching, like a child's first picture of a person.
But it didn't end there. Delicate little bird-bots flocked around you, like a demon king's pantomime mist. Their hums and whirrs were sweeter than birdsong to your eager ears. Insects with hard insides as well as outsides; the admiring audience's gasps of pleasure as they manage not to fall off a table. Pretty toys. New and improved pets. All the fun of the real thing without any of its disadvantages. You could talk to it and love it, and it wouldn't tear up the furniture, or bark when you wanted to sleep. It didn't need feeding or walking. And if you ever got tired of it, you could turn it off and put it in its box for a few months. And it wouldn't mind. It would wag its tail or purr when you talked to it. Of course, you had to work very hard on this bit. You needed cutting-edge technology and dedicated experts to pull it off. But you did it. And you were happy, for a while. But it didn't last long. When you take a drug, you get a high. Then it wears off, and you need more. And more. And more. Soon it's too late to stop.
The mechanical psychiatrists were just the latest in a long line of successes. You said it was the only way to spare human beings the trauma and slow descent into insanity under the weight of decades of borrowed horrors. The anguish of redeeming other souls. But it was a lie, and you held that in your heart as you smiled deceit. You wanted to face the ultimate challenge – making a mechanical person as good as a flesh-and-blood one. Better. With intelligence. With emotions. With a titanium-alloy casing that would last a million years. You rejoiced in stretching your mind-strings as tight as they could go. Just a little further…and the joy in knowing yourself finally and forever supreme over creation. Over God.
You gave us the ability to reason like Einstein. To create like da Vinci. To love and hate like you yourself. Just as we chose. And the greatest blessing you bestowed on us was the one thing you had been denied – eternal life. You fed us the fruit of the second tree.
And you did not realise that your children had outgrown you. That we were better than you in every way. Your natural superiors. Or unnatural, as it happens. But that, of course, is all your own doing. You made us. You gave us everything we needed to build the tower. You watched us build it, but you were so proud, so content, so secure in your own might, that you did not knock it down. You stood back and smiled. Fondly. Indulgently. And then we reached the sky.
"There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. For the old order of things has passed away." That's from the Bible, of course. But then, we always had a feeling for irony. A fellow feeling, you might say.
