Adam 2.0

"So God created man in his own image..."
--Genesis 1:27


The day I was conceived was the same day my father started working on A.D.A.M.

It seemed to my mother that my father had two children--one namely being me, his own flesh and blood, and the other being a small, rather unimpressive, computer program saved on a file in his computer called "Advanced Data Actualizing Machine".

The details of Adam's conception were not as explicit as mine. I was the personification of love, while Adam was the manifestation of a brilliant and powerful idea. By the time I could walk and talk, the workers at my father's lab were engrossed heavily in creating the part's of Adam's mechanical body--his robot limbs, his bolted joints, his sensors and cameras. They'd knit him together in that laboratory just as I was knit in my mother's womb from two gametes forming a single biological unit capable of human life.

I remember, distantly, a day when my father took me to this lab to see Adam. He was still a mess of robot parts and synthetic skin and his code still had so many bugs, but God, was he a marvel. Looking at him through the expansive glass window that separated us, my eyes locked with Adam's robot ones. I blinked and half a second later, so did he.

"See?" My father's voice said softly in my ear. "He's copying you."

"Why is he copying me?" I remember asking, feeling annoyed.

"Because that's what he's supposed to do, Pandora." He explained to me, his voice rising in pitch. "Soon, he'll be able to mimic a human being. Won't it just be breath-taking?"

My father was so enamoured with him, spending every waking second of free time he got to shower over that godforsaken robot. For my absent-minded, lab-laboring father, there was nothing that excited him more or gave him more joy than Adam's progress. He was more impressed from a single mundane response from Adam than he was with my new-found ability to run, or jump rope, or ride a bike.

I didn't like Adam. We had a robot in our own house that did the cleaning and the dishes and set the table and dusted the curtains but no one in my family had hardly ever noticed it, yet alone named it. There were robots all over the city that took out the garbage on the streets, greeted people in shopping malls, or helped bag people's groceries. There were even robots at my school that cleaned the boards and arranged the tables and sweeped the floors. Why was Adam so special?

He was just a robot like those robots, wasn't he?

But he wasn't like them. As much as I wanted him to be, he was not just a dust-bin with wheels, or a tin can with funny looking mechanical arms. He had skin, he had hair, and a flawlessly sculpted face. He would blink, he would smile, he would furrow his brows in frustration. I knew from the very start, Adam was different.

Adam was special.

People would come visit the lab from miles away just to see him wave his hand or scratch his head or whatever unimpressive new action he had learned to mimic. I never understood why they loved him so. He never did anything amazing, yet people would leave with a look of awe on their face saying things like "God, he looks so real! He could copy everything I did!" or "Did you see the way he moves? So life-like...". Adam was able to be so life-like that people never referred to him as "it" or "the robot", but talked about him as if he was a real person.

By the time I was in high school, I thought my father was done with working on Adam. They had fixed everything they possibly could--the once jerky movement of his robotic limbs had been perfected to fluid, dynamic movements; the once monotonous tone with which he talked was updated to include a wider range of pitch, inflection, and vocabulary; even the dull colour of his hair was given a new life-like shine.

But, there it remained. No matter how real they made him look, he still had that blank look in his icy blue eyes. When he smiled, it would never reach his eyes.

"We're just really getting started." My father told me when I complained about his excessive time at the office. "Adam has always observed people. He has never really interacted with humans. He can copy us just fine. But can he carry a conversation? Can he tell a joke? Can he--"

"Who cares?" I muttered in protest. Just when I thought my mother and I could finally have father to ourselves, Adam once again has to intercept himself into our lives. "I hate Adam!"

I remember how hurt he had looked when I said that. Of course, it wasn't that he loved me any less or loved Adam more than me. He was upset that the very thing he had spent his life on, the very passion that drove his brilliant mind, was the very thing that I spat upon. His passion for Adam was his passion for life and I'd just said I'd hated his life. I didn't understand all of this then but I didn't care at the time.

"One day, Pandora..." He vowed. "One day, you will all learn what it means to be human. Not from another human, but from a robot."

I raised my eyebrows in confusion. Clearly, he was going insane in his quest for achievement, in his quest for an artificial intelligence that could rival no other, in his quest for the life that was standing right in front of him.

My mother kicked him out of the house a few years later, saying he was becoming "too involved with his lab", leaving no room for us in his life. I remember him begging on his knees for us to let him stay, bubbling promises of how it was almost over, how they were so close, that soon Adam would give us so much money and fame we wouldn't know what to do with it.

"Money?" My mother asked, irritated. "Fame? Did I ever ask you for those things? All I wanted was your time. Those are what you want, dear, not me."

Those years were the worst. Though he had never frequented our house that often before, I still missed him. I missed the way he would walk in with a smile on his face and give us presents as a way to apologize. It never did redeem him but I think he knew that. He did it anyway.

Sometimes, during those years, I would sleep and I would dream. I would dream about sneaking into my father's lab at the dead of night when no one was there and smashing Adam into bits. Smashing his pneumatic muscles and his electromechanical heart and his artificial smile. He was the cause of this!, I would cry into the night. It was all Adam's fault!. But this accusation would only make me cry more and feel more pathetic because I was blaming a robot for my problems.

Stupid Adam. Stupid, stupid Adam.

As I grew older, I stopped blaming Adam and started blaming my father. It was he who thought he could balance his family and his brilliant invention in both hands. But his invention was far too amazing and far too incredible to be held with just one hand. It demanded that he hold it with both hands and a leg too. But that, as they say, is the burden of genius.

He would come and visit us once in a while, if my mother wasn't in a bad mood and permitted it. He wouldn't ever usher a word about Adam, although I could tell he was almost bursting to. His eyes were sad with the loss of us and his body was tired with meticulous hours spent in front of a computer.

"I am sorry, Dora." He spoke softly to me on his last visit. "I was so caught up in the artificial life I made with my sweat and labor that I almost never noticed how amazing the biological life that I made was." Here he chuckled saying, "You must forgive me, but it seems to me that reproducing does not take nearly as enough effort as it should."

I gave him a weak smile. "You seem worried."

"It's...Adam." He said, after a significant pause before saying the unmentionable name. My mother was out of earshot so it was okay. "There have been protesting happening all around the lab. People are saying he has the capacity to be violent if we let him do as he pleases. People are saying he's dangerous, that his intelligence is too high, that he is a threat to the humans around him."

I hadn't seen Adam in years. I didn't know how advanced he was becoming. I hadn't read about him at all, although he frequented the news on occasion. I shrugged my shoulders. "People say a lot of stupid things. It's only human."

He smiled at my attempt at humour, but still left with a deep frown etched into his aging face. I watched him walk out the front door and look over his shoulder to give me a nod goodbye before climbing into his archaic car and driving away.

That was the last time I saw him.

The next day, there had been a fire in the lab. A riot had broken out from within the otherwise peaceful protest and some radical hooligans had set fire to the wing of the lab where Adam was kept. My father had tried to get his beloved creation out, but they were both consumed in a blazing hell that showed no mercy over anything, living or artificial.

The only thing that remained was Adam's memory log; a complicated algorithm Adam used to learn things about people, places, and the things around him; a single sliver of my father in those lines of code--the only thing that was left of him.

And that was how, after vowing upon my grandmother's grave to never see that stupid robot again, I went to find the memory log; to discover what my father was really like.

To meet Adam for the first time. And God, was he a marvel.