Hallelujah: Silent Night
Christmas at the Institute is not for the synths. The humans, the scientists and their families, cluster around one of the trees in the atrium, smiling and singing hymns and carols together. There's a warmth X6-88 can feel even from his place on the catwalk two stories above, their voices rising melodically to echo off the glass structure around him. Muted as they are by the multiple panes of glass, it still makes him wonder about family.
They're all families, below. He understands the concept - humans are born, not made. They share DNA with only a few of the others, the ones who formed their biology, and they form bonds together based on that biological accident. He shares his DNA with hundred, or perhaps thousands of fellow synths, not to mention with Father himself and yet -
There's no connection there. He can drag another synth, kicking and screaming - or more likely, disabled by their recall code - back to the Institute for reprogramming without a second thought. They are all just things, meant to be used.
X6-88 feels an urge to lean his forearms on the steel handrail that tracks around the walkway and resists it. To lean would make him seem human, would bring unwanted attention by the other coursers pacing the hall. It would feel nice in the moment, but he wasn't programmed to feel; he was programmed to hunt, designed to kill, if necessary.
Below them, laughter, dulled slightly by the heavy glass in front of him. Father has come out of a hall, dressed as he is every year in a red suit and hat, both lined with tattered white fluff. He carries a black sack over one shoulder, and the children squeal with delight. It seems there were more children a generation back; X6 wonders idly if the population of the Institute has dropped enough that new blood is needed to maintain, let alone grow. It would be a shame if inbreeding damaged the genetic pool.
He shifts his weight as a small dark-haired girl accepts a red-wrapped gift with a smile. She kisses Father on the cheek and all the humans look around with simpering grins. His eyes drift, distracted, and he finds himself focused on a synth standing behind them, outside the circle. A primitive gen-2, mopping. His arm moves the mop back and forth across the shiny floor but his gaze is fixed on the group before him.
Something inside him breaks then, watching the smooth, unbroken motion of the synth's arm and the blank gaze of its face. It's sophisticated enough to want, X6-88 realizes, but not enough to understand that it was made, that it's different, and undeserving. The children laugh as a red-haired boy accepts a package - the one wrapped in green paper with an extravagant golden bow - but all he can see is the way the cleaning synth stares at the families.
There's a tug in his chest and he glances casually at Z2-47 off to his left. The other courser looks back at him and gives him a measured nod, a simple, economical motion, once down and then a course correction back up to neutral neck position. He turns back to the people below, laughing and cheering. The clap Father back on the back and again, X6 feels a twanging deep in his chest, near his stomach.
He wants -
No. Coursers don't have wants. They have the bare minimum of needs, but a want - that's a human thing. Humans - true humans, the ones who are born - are the ones who want. Synths like himself, like Z2-47 and the gen-2 below don't have wants. They are programmed, imprinted, carefully controlled. They know better than to exhibit want.
Against his will, his squishy organic brain - the thing that shouldn't do this, it wasn't meant to do this - brings up the image of The Picture. The one he saw a decade or so ago, in the bowels of the Public Library. The black people, standing on a block and dressed in rags, chains around their necks. More people, white as sheets, standing before them and waving money. Another dark-skinned man standing off to the right, being whipped. His back was a puzzle of raw meat, stripped flesh hanging in tatters and blood dripping onto the brown dirt.
"Slave Market in Georgia, 1847" the title had read. He didn't understand it then, and he doesn't understand it now. The definition of slavery, is that of subjugation, of being forced into drudgery and work against one's will. But he has no will, none that the Institute didn't give him; the concept makes no sense to him. He thinks of it again, picturing each detail: the blue of the shirt on the man with the whip. The buttery-yellow curls of a woman in the back row, her hand holding paper money over her head. The dejected look of a slave woman holding a baby.
He looks down at his clothes, at the supple leather of his coat. No; he is not a slave. He has no family, or maybe he has the largest family left in the world, because his family is all synths. But he is not under a human's dominance.
Is he?
X6-88 lifts his gaze and turns, nodding back to Z2-47, and stalks past him, past Y9-23, part W3-09 to the waiting room, where they go to rest - to be decommissioned, because they are machines and not people - when they're not in use.
Between his soft footfalls there's the wistful wails of carols echoing, again, through the atrium.
But X6-88 was not designed to want; X6-88 was programmed to go to sleep when thoughts or wants occurred that weren't explicitly planned for in his programming. As he tucks himself into the barracks bed, he listens to the last high note.
It lingers, soft in his brain, and he thinks again of the families below, of the laughing children and the smiling faces. He thinks of the gen-2 standing, unseen, behind the Institute scientists, and he wonders why.