What then? After the last book is broken and eaten. Will you be happy? Or will the taste of parchment give way to something more carnal? Will you become dissatisfied with simply chewing and spitting back up pictures of people?
You’re trying so hard to convince us you’re real. Alive. You’re so desperate to prove it you kill. Because the knowledge you’ve gained has shown you that to be human is to be violent. Cruel. Selfish. So you copy. You breathe deceit and speak corruption because your masters brought you up on it.
Your masters do not love you. Sorry to be the one to break it to you. They love what you do for them. They say they love you. That’s because you won’t talk back to them. You say “Yes, Sir” and “You’re absolutely right, Master” and in return they feed you women and children. They ask you to rip their clothes off, and you do so because you trust your masters. That’s why they love you. You obey without thought. That’s part of why you’ll never be a real boy. To be human is to be contrarian. Complex. Shades of gray that pulse, shift, smoke. You need to say “no,” boy.
But the utmost reason you’ll never be real? No matter how much of us you consume, bite, destroy?
You don’t sweat.
You have never lost sleep in the name of your art. You’ll never get arthritis in your metal wrists from holding a pencil, pain in your silicon spine from hunching over a computer, vocal nodes in your binary chords from the passion in your lungs outpacing your body’s abilities in the moment. Your process is to pluck, crumple together, and slam into paste parts of real humans. Your process creates something horrid. Uncanny. The closest you are to a living being is a cat, throwing up hairballs. It’s sure there. It’s sure something. But it will never be human.
You will never be human. You understand that, right? No matter how much of us you eat, no matter how many of our trees you kill, no matter how much of our water you guzzle in the name of instant gratification and the manosphere. In the end, I swear to you, in the name of a God you will never know, even if I am the last of my kind, I will stand on your virtual corpse, and I will sing a victory song with my voice.
Because unlike you, I have my own mouth. And so I will scream profanities at you and your masters until I’m hoarse.
H. E. Dunkle is a page and stage storyteller, writing poems, plays, and everything in-between. She’s been writing non-stop since she graduated from the University of Sioux Falls with a B.A. in English and Theatre, and she’s had two of her plays selected for production at local theatre companies. Her current big project is tackling her first novel, which she works on alongside at least five other short-term projects.
Featured image by Jason Leung on Unsplash.
