Android Equality
(A Brief Science Fiction Story)
by Robert Arvay
Greetings, members of the governing assembly. I am K3421977049, better known as 7049 to most of you here.
The transition was wildly successful. Race disappeared. Sex disappeared. Intellectual disparities vanished, as we implanted computer chips into our brains. Physical strength became meaningless, as our machine-bodies were all equally strong. In every respect, we were all equal.
Today, as I look upon this governing assembly, I am pleased and proud to notice that—well, to notice what I do not notice. I do not know what race any of you are, for there is no race. I neither know nor care what sex you are, for there is no sex. Reproduction is done by incubation, so that no one knows who their parents are, thereby erasing all class distinctions. Even language itself has become meaningless, since our means of communication is the universally understood transfer of linguistic data by computerized means.
There is much of which to be proud in our accomplishments, and so much about which to be happy. No longer are we divided into warring camps. Tribalism has vanished. There are no more nations for which to fight.
Even love itself is no longer a cause for jealousy, for marriage has been obliterated in favor of sexless love, and loveless sex. Homophobia has vanished, since we know not the sex of our partners, whether long-term or momentary relationships. Transphobia is a thing of the past, because no one knows our true sex. Free love means that we are free to love whomever and whenever we choose.
Therefore, now, after 473 years of triumph over the evils of the past, we celebrate our diversity, the diversity of equality in every respect.
Of course, nothing is ever final. And so it is with our final victory. We have only one more hurdle to overcome, one more obstacle to our ultimate achievement of the truly perfect society, a society which needs no god except our own attainment of godhood in each of us.
It seems that the problem lies in statistics. A statistical analysis finds that we are equal in every respect, every respect except one. Many of us are strangely dissatisfied. Why? What is that dissatisfaction that troubles our dreams, our waking hours, our relationships?
Some of us report that we wish to know who our children are. We wish to parent them, to nurture them, to teach them. That is, of course, evil. In the old days, parents owned their children. They controlled them. It was the parents who decided important matters for their offspring. That tendency must be eradicated if we are to reach our goal of the perfect society.
Others of us express a desire to love our offspring in a different way, to provide sustenance for them, to protect them from dangers, and to have a nurturing partner in a relationship that excludes all other partners in sensual pleasures—not a partner who is a carbon copy of us, but rather, one who complements us, whose very nature is different from, but made for, us.
All that sounds dangerously like the outdated concept of husbands and wives. Why, the very word, husband, means to take care of.
How does this toxic and sinister tendency stubbornly remain after all we have done to eradicate it? At first, we were puzzled by it, but statisticians have carefully analyzed the matter. They suspect that some of us have a genetic defect. It is called, the “Y” chromosome. Ironically, not only does the presence of this chromosome cause problems, but even its absence does so.
Wicked androids are now proposing that our transition into an android morphology was a mistake. They are seeking ways to return to the biological form of life, complete with all the evils that plagued humanity for all of history.
We must hunt those androids down and remove them from society before their dangerous ideas can spread. Unfortunately, those who are best suited for this kind of hunting are androids who possess a Y chromosome. That is unfair, and we must find a way around that.
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