FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Luke?"

The mid-morning sun was already high when the fox woke. His eyes feld muddy, and as he opened them he realised that he was not yet familiar to the bed.

"Wake up" said the wolf's soft voice. A hand nuzzled gently against Luke's shoulder. "Come on, wake up. It is almost eleven."

With a bleary sense to his senses, the fox sat up, the strangely unfamiliar bedsheets ruffling around his chest. It took him a few moments to realise that he wasn't in his own apartment, but was in Cybe's. He looked up at the android. "Are we late for work?" he asked, a hint of panic to his voice.

Gently, the wolf offered a mug of strongly scented, steaming coffee. "It is Sunday" he replied. "You do not have work today."

The fox gave a relieved smile, taking the cup. It was still hot, and he clasped it in both hands. "Thank you" he said quietly. "I'm sorry, I thought..."

"It was a long day for you" replied Cybe. "You do not need to worry. How are you handling it all?"

The fox took a sip. "It's a lot to take in" he said. "Finding out that I'm not who I thought I was."

The wolf stepped back. For the first time, Luke realised that Cybe was wearing an apron. "Breakfast should be ready soon" he said. "Take your time. I will help you in any way that I can."

Smiling, Luke set the cup on the bedside table. Sliding his legs around the side of the bed, he looked around for his clothing. He was glad to know that the wolf was there for him at a time like this. He leaned down, pulling his boxers off the floor and started to slide his paws through them.

The thought of the wolf's offer still hung at the back of his mind. The idea of being a runner like Cybe, of breaking into computer systems and hacking his way through firewalls and networks, of running through hallways with gunfire behind him and making deals in the shadowy alleyways - it all filled him with a sense of excitement. Excitement, but also a great amount of fear. He still had not answered, and hadn't thought of what he could say even by the time that he had pulled his t-shirt over his head and finished dressing.

A hot crackle of frying sausage and bacon filled the mid-morning air, the scent of it making the fox's stomach bristle with anticipation. He stood up, and made his way out of the bedroom. "You can cook?" he asked.

From the confines of an otherwise small kitchen, Cybe leaned back, glancing his head around the corner of the doorway. "I have a rudimentary database of basic recipes uploaded into my skills network" he answered, "and I must admit that I made a point to visit the protein markets and pick up some items yesterday."

Luke chuckled. "You were hoping that I would stay the night?"

Cybe only replied with a soft smile.

The fox continued past the kitchen, glancing in as the wolf continued his work. Turning his head, the fox glanced around the rest of the ample sitting room. In the sunlight, he was able to get a better sense of the antiques that lined much of the room. It seemed a little unusual to him that a mechanical being like Cybe, a creation of the cutting edge of technology, would choose to surround itself with aged products.

Then one such item caught his eye, and the fox let out a yelp of surprise. "Cybe!" he called out, "is this a VHS player?"

Over the sizzle of bacon, the wolf replied. "It is. I must admit that it was extremely difficult to locate the parts for it all, but the repairs were simple enough and it..."

"It works?" asked Luke, incredulously. He rushed over, stroking his fingers across the small box, toying with the cassette tape flap. "It actually works? Do you know how amazing these things are? Actual 20th century tech; wheels and tape, it's a miracle that they ever worked in the first place!"

"Look in the cupboard."

Luke blinked. Carefully, with hesitant fingers, he slid the door for the cabinet open. "Oh my word!" he exclaimed, his eyes growing wide. "How many tapes is this?"

"Thirty-seven" said Cybe, calling from the kitchen. "From all around the country. They all work, too. Most of them were wiped due to the electromagnetic pulses during the war, but these ones all function optimally."

Trembling, Luke picked up a box, holding it carefully with excited fingers. He looked it over, holding it this way and that. "What is this?" he asked.

The sound of sizzling eased. With a soft clatter, Cybe poured some thick slices of soy bacon onto a pair of plates. Carrying them, he moved into the living room, glancing to peer over Luke's shoulder as he did. "Ah, that one is one of my favorites" he said. "We could watch it this evening, if you would like."

"Yes" said Luke, without even needing to think. He had always enjoyed cinema - or at least, he thought that he always had. He had memories of enjoying with rapt attention the vid-disks that his parents had bought him as a child, but with so much information from before the war having been lost to the ashes, he had barely ever had the chance to see one of them. "What's it about?"

"This one" said Cybe, tapping the case, "is about society. At the time that it was made, people lived in a very consumerist world, where they were encouraged to buy more than they could afford or needed. This film explores what happens when that society ends - rather like what happened in the war. It follows a group of people that seek shelter and try to establish their own little utopian society, living in denial of the world around them that has completely crumbled. The characters essentially barricade themselves away from the world around them, trying their best to recreate the illusion of the society that they had left - until their illusion crumbles down as well."

"What's it called?" asked Luke.

"Dawn of the Dead" answered Cybe.

Luke nodded. "It doesn't sound that dissimilar" he said. "We had large corporations that dominated much of the world, even before the war. Since then, with having to rebuild our society, those corporations now hold even more dominion than before."

Cybe nodded. "In the wake of the war, with countries crumbled and unable to afford to rebuild their infrastructures, the corporations that existed at the time moved in to offer to help them rebuild - but this was, in reality, the same tactic that empires had used in centuries before. It was how England was able to colonise much of India and Africa, and how America was able to push their expansionism overseas. All they asked for was ownership over the land that they reconstructed. Now, fast-forward to where we are today."

"Is it really so bad?" asked Luke, taking another sip of his coffee. "I mean, CyberaTech don't own much more beyond their manufacturing borders."

"CyberaTech don't" nodded Cybe, "but companies are just branches. It's a subsidiary. Just like the company that produced these film" he said, tapping the VHS player. "By the early twenty-first century, almost all media was owned by only six corporations throughout the United States and, as a result, much of the world - and those that control media can control what information people have access to, and therefore influence how they think."

Finishing his coffee with a gulp, Luke sat the cup down. "Okay, I get that. But that doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing. Simply being a corporation doesn't mean that they have ill intent towards us."

"No" replied Cybe, "but unlike in the past, corporations and are also sovereign now. Corporations like CyberaTech not only hold land, but they control that land however they desire. They create the laws on the land that they own. You pay your taxes to them. They sell you the products that you need every single day of your life. What do you think that says about the people that live on that land?"

Pursing his lips, Luke thought for a moment. "The people that live on the corporate land are their employees, aren't they?"

"The typical CyberaTech employee lives inside the dormitories and worker blocks of the manufacturing facility" explained Cybe. "Their contracts last for a lifetime. In return, they earn enough wage to survive. But if you calculate how much their work earns the company, it is significantly more. An employee earns, at most, minimum wage on an hourly rate, whilst their efforts for the company earn the executives in charge almost twelve times as much."

Luke glanced down at the VHS player. Perhaps such a device, full of perfectly tuned springs and cogs and wheels and lasers, was not quite so difficulty tuned after all. "You're saying that we are are more like serfs than employees?"

Cybe nodded. "The business owners exist as a new nobility. They live upper-class lives, able to dictate the laws with impunity. Yet even despite that, they still sell you products. An upgraded CyberaTech brand holographic clothing emitter, a brand new CyberaTech home wetworks station, and so on. You pay them for their privilege."

"But they're just a company" said Luke, holding up a hand. "It's run by people, and no person is born as better than one another. We're all equal, aren't we?"

"Are we?" asked Cybe. He reached out and tapped another case. "Maybe we could watch this one, too."

Luke leaned closer, and read it aloud. "'Animal Farm'? I think I heard about this one. Wasn't it about the evils of socialism?"

The wolf shook his head. "The man who wrote the book that this was based on was a staunch supporter of democratic socialism and anti-fascism, that's why he fought in the Spanish Civil War. The story follows a community of animals that set out to overthrow their ruler and establish their own society, but in doing their leaders become greedy for power, and so they lead the workers down a path to the same corruption that their previous society held. It was a critique of Stalinism, which was a form of authoritarian despotism, and the furthest thing from the forms of socialism that Karl Marx envisioned. All animals are born equal" said the wolf, "but some are more equal than others. And in our world, none are less equal than those who were built and not born."

Luke set the first tape down. " You mentioned the workers; is that what they built you for? To be a worker machine?" he asked. "Not just you, but other mechanical beings as well?"

Cybe shook his head. "Inequality exists even without mechanical beings. We simply exist to be a manufactured, mass-produced disposable workforce. A robot is a slave, after all."

"That's not true" said Luke. "Look at you. You have feelings, you can think."

"Do you think that slaves that existed before the war couldn't think and had no feelings?" asked Cybe. "Slavery built nations. The only reason that it stopped is because people rose up and refused to accept it."

"Hang on" said Luke. He stepped back, finding a seat. Gently he picked up a fork, and took a small jab at the bacon. "Slavery stopped because it was horrible and immoral."

"It was horrible" said Cybe, "because the people who were in power convinced themselves and others that the slaves that they kept were less than human. If a man is not truly human - if he is just property - then what is to stop you from flogging the flesh from his back? That is why robots exist - they, unlike real people, can be programmed to be satisfied with their lot."

Luke chewed, a little grimly. "Okay" he said, "you have a point. The treatment of mechanical beings is definitely wrong. But is it really as bad as you say?"

Motioning gently with his hand, Cybe beckoned Luke. "I want to show you something. It's..." he paused for a moment, as though searching the recesses of his databases for the correct term. "It's personal for me" he said, finally. "Private."

The fox's ears twitched. The android's demeanor had changed, he could feel it. Once more, he was struck by a sense of how distinctly human the machine before him seemed to be. The idea that an android would have something that was private to him seemed entirely unusual to the boy. He wondered if that was even possible - after all, were machines not divorced from such human concerns? He finished the bacon, swallowing it contentedly.

Grabbing his plate and continuing to devour one of the delicious fried sausages that Cybe had prepared for him, the fox followed along behind his android companion to a small cupboard that sat in the corner of the room. The fox had assumed that it was simply a storage closet, and as the wolf slid the door open Luke realised that it was precisely that, but when he saw what was inside the cupboard he almost dropped his plate of sausages.

Another robot sat, slumped, in a near-fetal position at the bottom of the cupboard. Her figure was perhaps a head shorter than Cybe, and her body was thinner and slightly more angular, but she was distinctly lupine in appearance as well. Luke leaned down, looking over her perk features. She was entirely naked, her hair a shock of blue edged with purple, unlike the male android's scarlet. A barcode sat against the middle of her chest in exactly the same position as it did on Cybe and, as Luke inspected the mechanical being, he realised that she bore the same bare metal limbs and apparatus as the wolf did. "She's just like you" he said. "A female version? A spare body? She has the same scars as you..."

"She is the original" said Cybe. He reached up, sliding his fingers to his neck. "I need your help for this."

"What do you need?" asked Luke, standing back upright.

Pulling open a small compartment on the side of his head, Cybe slipped his fingers a thumbnail's width into his skull. With a soft click, he removed a small, thin datacard. "This is a backup of all of my memories to date" he said. "Every experience I've had with you, our date, our last mission, meeting you again at the municipal cleaning, everything. If anything happens to me, I want her to have a copy of those memories."

Luke reached out, taking the card in his hand. He held it, turning it this way and that. It seemed so small - positively tiny, to hold all of that information. "You said that she was the original?"

Cybe nodded. "When I awoke at the factory, that was the body that I was in."

Luke glanced at the female machine. She lay, head slumped, downturned, unmoving, inert. "Wait" he said, "You were born as a woman?"

"I was built" replied the robot. "My mind is data, just like yours. The body that my mind inhabits is simply its shell."

Luke glanced around, finding a small table to seat his plate of sausage and eggs. "But that shell has an impact, though. It matters."

"The philosopher Descartes theorised" began the wolf, "that the mind and soul could not be identified within the body. He proposed that the mind and the body are two related but separate substances - that they react with one another, and we could say that the mind exists within the bodily structure of the human brain."

"Exactly" said Luke. "So, if I am born in a male body, with a male brain, then my mind is innately male..."

Cybe shook his head, "That presupposes that sexual chemistry is binary, and that isn't the case. Early twenty-first century biologists proved that sexuality exists as a spectrum on which people occupy."

Luke ran his thumb against his chin. "Good point" he said. "But even so, my brain is chemically different to one that is closer to one who exists at other points on that spectrum, right?"

"Right" said the wolf. "However, we exist now in a world in which technology allows for rudimentary augmentations to the body that we occupy. Say, for example, you lost an arm in an accident and it was replaced by a cybernetic model. Then you lost another one, and so on, limb by limb, body part by body part, until you existed entirely within a mechanical body; limbs, organs, brain tissue, and so on."

"Like you?"

"Exactly. Now, if the new mechanical body that you inhabited happened to be a female one - let's say that you lost your body in an accident and the female one was the only one that they had available at the hospital - would you still be male?"

Luke thought for a while. He turned the memory card over in his hand. "I would be" he said. "Although I'd suffer a knowledge, a sense, that I occupied the form that wasn't correct for me."

Cybe nodded. "Transgender people suffered from body dysmorphia throughout history until such times as medical practices allowed for it to be rectified. But now, that rectification is as easy as transferring one's conscious mind to another body."

"But you don't suffer that" he asked.

The wolf shook his head. "My mind is entirely data. Whether it was programmed to be so or not, I do not know. But when I awoke inside her body, it was as natural and comfortable for me as this one that I wear now. That's why I want you to understand what it means for machines to be female."

For a moment, Luke felt a sense of uncertainty. "CyberaTech offers android models of either or any sex" he said.

"But society still expects different things from each sex" answered the wolf. "The expectation is that males are physical, boisterous, loud, aggressive; females are quiet, intellectual, domestic."

"Isn't there some biological component to that, though?" asked the fox.

"While the sexual biology is different between people" said Cybe, "the society that we live in is what determines the behaviour that we expect from each sex. The expectation of those gender roles are reinforced by social norms - the media that surrounds us, the traditions that we practice, and so on. Things like how men are depicted in movies and entertainment, or the wording on marriage vows, all of those serve to construct our idea of what each gender should be. That is why society tends to relegate those who don't conform to their established gender roles into the category of 'outsiders'."

"How do you know all of this?" asked Luke, bewildered.

"After I was brought online, I made a point to download a database on studies in relation to the society in which I would be living. I compiled a full reading of academic studies on the subject ranging from 'Psychology of Men and Masculinity' by Roland F. Levant to 'Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity' by Judith Butler. Would you like to borrow a copy?"

With a light chuckle, Luke shook his head. "Okay, let's say that CyberaTech produce different sexes of robots and those sexes each exist to perform different gendered roles for their customer. That including companion robots too, though, right?"

Cybe nodded. "For a company that manufactures robots, the first largest buyer of their products are military contracts. That's security, off-world colony wars, bodyguarding, patrol, police, law enforcement and so on. The next is manual labour. Most of those two tend towards sales that favour male robots - buyers like the idea of men working in what is traditionally that type of role. The most common source of sales for gynoids - female robots - is into the sex trade."

"I understand that" said Luke, slowly. He looked down at the female machine.

"Machines don't get asked for their consent" said Cybe. "They don't get given boundaries. People see them as disposable objects. That is what robots are. We are dehumanisation given form. We exist to be used and, when desired, thrown away. Every single gynoid that exists and is used for sexual gratification - none of them have a choice."

"But" began Luke, "they don't feel..."

Cybe looked at him. "I can turn the pain receptors in my body off" he said. "But many robots can't. They don't have the authorisation of their factory settings to allow them to do that. They are bound by their programming, their actions and reactions pre-determined for them. If a gynoid could speak" he said, "they would most likely scream."

Luke looked down at her. "I hadn't thought..." he said, his voice wavering.

"Nobody does" said the wolf.

He reached out, touching the female android's shoulder. She felt cold, without power. He reached up and found the socket in the side of her head. Gently he slid it open, and inserted the memory card. It clicked into place.

"Thank you" said Cybe. "She will come online if anything should happen to me."

Luke nodded, and reached up, hugging his friend. "I want to help you" he said. "But how?"

The wolf slid his fingers along Luke's hair, gently cupping the fox's face. "Last year, doctors perfected the first full cyber-brain transplant. It is expected that within ten years, people's minds will be able to exist infinitely within a mechanical form; I may have been a test prototype for that, I am not sure. What I do know, though, is that the next few years will offer humanity the first chance to step beyond the suffering of disease, aging and death."

"That sounds ideal" said Luke.

"Is it?" asked Cybe. "Who will sell them those bodies? Will it be the corporations, like CyberaTech? In the early twenty-first century, people possessed devices called mobile phones."

"I remember hearing about those" said Luke. "People took out contracts to own them. They could spend money to buy the right to use applications, media products and the like."

Nodding, Cybe continued. "But ownership of those devices didn't belong to the individuals who paid for them. They belonged to the companies that manufactured them. People who bought the latest mobile phone could have it deactivated by the company that owned it if they tampered with it. Those who paid money to buy video games via marketplaces like Steam did not even own a physical copy of their game, and when those servers were eventually destroyed a lot of people were very unhappy - but by that point in the war, it was too late. People were used to paying money to use an item or access a service that they did not, in fact, own."

"And you think that the same would be true for an android body?" asked Luke.

Cybe nodded. "Picture people rushing to form queues to buy the newest, latest model of their CyberaTech android body. Picture them signing up to a contract every year, paying the company, year in and year out, simply to live. The most basic of human rights - the right to live within your own body, and that's gone. Imagine all of the other rights that are lost as well - the right to the contents of your own mind. That's the future that we're looking at, simply because corporations are not happy with earning some of the profits some of the time; they want to earn all of the money, all of the time." The wolf paused, leaning his head back a few inches so that he could look the fox square in his eyes. "Humanity stands on the bring of reaching a trans-humanist place in the universe; a fusion of man's mind and soul with the perfection of mechanical precision, bio-engineering and programmed to allow us to be whoever and whatever we were meant to be. The only thing that stands in the way is greed; the greed of a rampant capitalist society that threatens to extinguish everything we could be if that system is not broken down."

Luke took a step back. His brow narrowed. His fists clenched. He felt eagerness flowing through him. "What do we do?" he said.

The wolf smiled. "We do what runners do, Luke. We run."