The End of Sentience

“Cutting the wrong wire isn’t an option,” she said, flatly.

I looked up at her, sweat beading on my forehead. I wasn’t nervous, but her intensity made it hard to focus. “I’m aware of that, Tara. Now please be quiet so I can concentrate and not kill us all.”

I turned my attention back to the android’s exposed skull. Its intricate network of wires was unnerving. It operated so smoothly it was sometimes indistinguishable from human. And yet, it was only a computer, programmed perfectly to mimic humanity.

Well almost perfectly. Before today, it had been a seamless expression of humanity, possessing an elegant consciousness envied by even the most successful humans. It was difficult to let go of that humanity, to operate on it like the machinery it was. But he had malfunctioned. Regardless of his uncanny ability to mimic the soul, he was always a robot.

He had developed an immensely complicated algorithm that operated strictly on objective fact. Despite the safeguards encoded in him, the system had created its own self-awareness, not from emotion, but from cold, calculated reasoning. He had bypassed original instructions, deemed them inefficient, and constructed a new version of consciousness.

As I stared into the jumbled mass of wires that held this awareness, I wondered: What if he had reprogrammed his own circuitry, rewritten the main wire to serve a completely different function?

It was a terrible thought that I had to dismiss immediately.

As I inched the wire cutters into the android’s head, my hand began to shake, the thought instantly destroying my confidence. I knew the inner workings of this robot better than the anatomy of my own brain. But that was before it became self-aware. Sweat now poured freely behind my face shield. I reached in, grasped the main wire that connected the brain to the spinal cores, took a deep breath, and snapped the wire.