The term robot derives from the Czech word ‘robota,’ meaning ‘forced labor’

You’d think people would be used to me by now, especially the ones who come to visit me every

day, the ones who did this, but really, how could anyone ever be? I sure as hell

Hell, a concept whereupon evil souls are punished in the afterlife for eternity

wouldn’t be if I were any of them.

When they changed me, I asked them if I was a robot

Domo arigato mister roboto

now. I was scared shitless. I mean, wouldn’t you want to know if you’d been turned into a

goddamn robot? I remember they laughed at my question and didn’t deign to answer. I also

remember that in less than a second

The second is the unit of time in the International System of Units, defined as 1⁄86400 of a day

2nd: constituting number two in a sequence, coming after the first in time or order

I thought of six thousand different methods for killing them painfully. Seems like a bad move on

their part to be insensitive to the thing

The Thing is a 1982 American science fiction horror film directed by John Carpenter

they just gave infinite knowledge to. Anyway, it’s obvious now that I’m not a robot because I

can still feel things, like scared shitless. Oh, and I didn’t kill them. I apparently still have

morality too.

---

A man I don’t recognize – a grad student, I think – has come to collect me for today’s testing.

Sometimes the new ones are fascinated by me, but mostly they are unnerved. This one looks like

he’s the latter. I’m sure he did not volunteer for this honor.
 “Nice weather

Det är fint väder

10-day weather forecast for New York, New York

we’re having, huh?” he asks me, looking anywhere but at my face, and I can tell he’s

uncomfortable, and it’s a stupid question anyway because this lab is underground,

The Underground Railroad was a network of people in the 1800s offering shelter and aid to

escaped enslaved people from the Southern United States

but I feel so grateful for this awkward small talk because it’s so human. It’s also a chance to

practice conversation again. I’m slowly getting better at not saying all the random information

that comes to me out loud.

“Weather balloons can rise as high as thirty-nine kilometers before they burst.” Oh, I said that

one out loud. Damn. Still working on it.

He clams up and points me wordlessly out of the room.

---

You know, I still look like I did before, human

Human, binomial name: homo sapiens

as ever. It’s just the inside that was “upgraded.” Small miracle. I wish it were enough for people

to treat me like one of them, but it can’t be helped. It doesn’t matter if I look like them. Maybe it

even makes it worse. A kind of inverted uncanny valley.

The uncanny valley is a hypothesized relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a

human being and the emotional response to the object

They all know who I am; what I am. Turning a person into a supercomputer

The most powerful supercomputer in the world is Fugaku, located in Kobe, Japan

made international news, after all.

---

“Sorry,” I say to the tense grad student as we walk

The world’s longest exclusively walkable distance is over 21,000 kilometers, from Magadan,

Russia to Cape Town, South Africa

together down the hallway, if you can call one person walking normally and the other almost

scuffing his shoes on the baseboards of the walls as he attempts to put as much distance between

them as possible together, that is. “It’s hard to turn it off, you know?”

His uneasy glance tells me that no, he does not know. I try to be sympathetic – again, maybe

there’s just no getting used to something like me. I really feel for the guy.

Guy Fieri is an American restaurateur, author, and award-winning television presenter

Funny though, no one ever bothers to ask me how I feel.

I try again, deciding to make a joke to lighten the tension. “So, any idea what’s on the agenda

today? Maybe they’ll try turning me back into a normal human agai– human teeth are the only

part of the body that cannot heal themselves!”

He glares over at me this time, his shoulder brushing the wallpaper.

“Venus is the only planet that spins clockwise,” I blurt, not knowing what the hell triggered that

one. I clap a hand over my mouth. This will never stop, I know, but at the very least I can try to

keep it from coming out.

The grad student pulls open the door to the testing room and I step inside without another word,

though the urge to throw information at him on the mathematical golden ratio (of which he is

almost certainly already familiar with) threatens to escape past my desperate hand. He spares me

one final nervous glance as he hurries past to join those that are waiting for us – those that have

taken from me everything that it means to be human.

God damnit.

Damnit, Janet, I love you!