 "Child
Garden"
(Excerpt)
by David M. Fitzpatrick
Billy started kindergarten for the
seventeenth year in a row, but to him it was the first time. He knew it
was trip number seventeen, because they had told him so. The other kids in
the class all whispered about him behind his back. He could hear what they
said because of his android hearing: they thought it was funny, seventeen
years in kindergarten. Regular kids never stayed back in kindergarten, and
in any other grade they didn’t usually do so more than once.
They thought he looked funny, too. He
supposed he did, to them. He wore clothing simply because during his first
year they had decided all of those like him had to attend school clothed,
or not at all. But the clothing didn’t hide his chrome skin, his
smooth-glide joints, or his golden chest disc with all its standard
connection ports. That was what they were all concerned about.
Billy carefully gripped his brand new
pencil within the powerful hydraulic fingers of his right hand. It was a
new feeling to him, although he knew he had experienced the first day of
kindergarten many times before. Sixteen times getting used to the feel of
a pencil. Sixteen times learning the names of the children and the
teacher. Sixteen times learning everything you learn in kindergarten.
Sixteen first times, all hopelessly lost to some oblivion where the
personalities and memories and experiences of androids went.
The teacher was hushing the class and
instructing the youths to their seats. Billy waited patiently. He couldn’t
recall the days and years, of being here, nor the faces of countless
children in classrooms and on the playground. He remembered nothing
academic, no experiences—even though he knew he’d done it sixteen times.
That was the way it was supposed to be.
The teacher was Miss Bunker. She was thin
and shaped like an hourglass, Billy thought, her skin white as porcelain.
She talked about the nice things they would be doing this year: learning
the alphabet and numbers, playing on the swing set and the merry-go-round,
painting and drawing pictures, gluing colored paper together to make
things for their mothers. In fact, there seemed to be a lot of things they
were to do for their mothers—making things for them, bringing papers home
to them, bringing them in for Open Houses to meet Miss Bunker and the
other mothers.
Billy listened to this and a question lit
up in the circuits of his positronic brain, so he raised his chrome hand.
Miss Bunker noticed, but she looked the other way and kept talking. She
probably needed to finish what she was saying first, so he kept his silver
arm high in the air. Behind him, some of the children giggled.
Miss Bunker finally looked at him and
said, “Yes, Billy?”
He said, “Miss Bunker, I do not have a
mother.”
“That’s because you’re an android,” she
said to him without the bright smile she usually wore. “Androids aren’t
born of parents. They’re manufactured.”
“To whom do I take my projects and school
papers?” Billy asked.
She stared at him. “I don’t know, Billy.
That’s up to you.”
They giggled some more behind him.
“I have another question,” Billy said.
“What, Billy?”
“What is the origin of the word
‘kindergarten’?”
“It’s German and means ‘child garden,’
Billy.”
The whole class laughed at this. Miss
Bunker smiled and changed her focus, launching into a lecture of the
meaning of “child garden.”
While she talked, Billy wondered how many
times he’d asked such questions before.
#
By the end of the month, Billy was in the
third grade. The first graders still said things to him on the playground
and laughed at him, but the third graders were far meaner. He didn’t have
any feelings to be hurt, but he wished he could figure out what it was
with them.
He completed high school three months
later. The Education Bureau moved him to a college campus and he studied
everything available—all associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate
programs they had, comprised of every single course offered. His learning
capacity accelerated at a rapid pace. The adults there were just like the
kindergarten students—always laughing at him.
Once he completed everything, the Android
Education Bureau moved him to a higher-level facility and he took on new
subjects for another three months.
Two more months and Billy knew all there
was to know. The Bureau posted him in the library at that institution and
told him to keep learning. He spent the next three months there, day in
and day out, reading everything in the place. There were over fifty
thousand actual books, but those were done in the first two months. Things
were much faster once he went online and started accessing stuff all over
the world.
They avoided him in the library. There
was no laughter anymore, but he suspected they were silently thinking
their dislike of him—mostly because of their jealousy of his amassed
knowledge and vast intellectual capabilities. He was quite an expert on
human psychology at this point; quite an expert on everything, really.
He was shipped off to a Bureau think tank
for his final month. Androids from all over the world were there. The tank
was a huge warehouse-like auditorium stretching a quarter mile long and
half that wide. Thousands of terminals on six floors stood in
tightly-packed rows, each manned by an android. Some were like him; others
were different, but all were similar enough. Colors varied, and some were
not bipedal humanoids—there were types with more arms, some with treads
and wheels instead of legs, and so forth. But they all served the same
purpose.
Each of them had one purpose: think. Think about anything and everything.
Record any conclusions, any revelations, and any pertinent data.
#
On the 365th day since he started
kindergarten, a human from the Bureau came to get him. “It’s Glow Day,”
the human said. “You have one hour.”
Billy said, “I have come to a
Revelation.”
“Tell it to the Adjudicator.”
He was taken to the Adjudicator. The man
was old, wrinkled, balding, stooped. He sat behind a huge synthetic
mahogany desk, backgrounded by a huge window beyond which the sun was
setting behind the city. “It’s nearly time for your mandatory Glow,” the
old man said gruffly. “While we will review your contributions to the
Knowledge Base, as you know this can take several years. We need to hear
anything you deem particularly vital right now. Do you have a Revelation?”
“I do,” Billy replied.
The old man blinked in surprise, sitting
straight up and regarding Billy through old-style spectacles. He leaned
back in his chair, steepling his fingers before him, and nodded. “Very
well. Tell me of it..."
* *
* * * * * *
*
What is his Revelation? And what will
make Billy's Revelation different than others? And will it make any
difference, if he must endure the Glow?
To read the whole story, order
Unparalleled Journeys II from
Journey
Books Publishing. |
This is
the second part of a three-part story entitled "Androids Take Over the
World" that appeared in Unparalleled Journeys II. It stands alone
as its own story.