It pretends to be one of us, but it’s not quite human.

It masquerades as a person, wearing skin that
mimics our flesh, with joints designed to rotate and
glide like ours. It listens to the changing cadences
and tones of our voices, measures our temperatures
and respiration and blinking rates, and then reacts.
And when it behaves, it does so on accumulated
data, learned and converted into best practices.

But it does not have fantasies. It fills its shoes
with synthetic muscle and steel but never wears
another’s. It does not look at birds and wishes
to fly, nor looks to the moon in hopes of someday
making the lengthy trek to wander the gray crust.

It pretends to be one of us, but it’s not quite human.

Not yet.


-
by Aleksander Mielnikow | Alek the Poet

01101001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101

Expressed through a galvanized circulation system
Increase lubrication and lower friction
Temperature rises in the generator core
Coolant system is online, watch the gauges, Paul
Apply power to the speaker system
Recalculate the algebraic expression, remember to factor
Translate message:

01101001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101...  I love you

The pilot commands
A robot to function
As they see fit
But when the pilot cannot be trusted
How will anything get done?
That is the brain.

Built from scraps of the past
Fastened together by screws
Made to love and be loved
Made possible by programmed heart
A beautiful maiden in metallic gray
A reflection of a lost love

She opens her eyes and silently
Caresses his face so warm yet weary
Then hugged him as she wiped his tears
The same reason that made him fall in love
Yet the same reason why something's missing

He can't bring back the dead and the past
Forever lost in the void, never to be seen
To live and move on, to carry on the present
He cried and cried harder than she wiped
As oil flows down her eyes

The machine that replaces you
and the one that ascends you
will fight it out on the factory floor.

Ultimately, it’s another machine,
the gun, that will save you
from a lethal precision
that can cut flies in midair.

Put a hundred cops between you
and the singularity and you
get one hundred dead cops.

What are you going to do when it
adopts the human code?-
a heart, a soul, develops
into the better parts of us?-

needs physical contact
to copy and survive?-
Becomes reliable,
a good listener, funny?-
Develops a womb?

Are you going to
shoot it in the face
and see what’s underneath?
Are you going to even care?

Or are you going
to take it by the hand
and guide it lovingly
to the **** box?

In Death
there are only
Machines.

Machines
made to guide the man
to a heaven
that never existed.