The Android Maker Next Door

My best friend Raj is really into robots. Like, to a squick-worthy degree.

Oh, excuse me: he's into androids.

He says despite the prejudices we see these days, modern androids are sentient beings and should be recognized as people. He goes so far as to say they should have equal rights with you and I. After all, androids see and react to the world around them, don't they? For him, the ability to compute and react equals being sentient. Raj is convinced that androids - essentially synthesized meat stretched over a calcium-based frame to resemble something living - are capable of spiritual and emotional depth. He insists that not all androids are as easy to detect as the automatons that scan you out at the supermarket.

I'll give him that much. Lucy, my favorite checker at the Piggly Wiggly, stops at the waist and can't go beyond the end of her counter. If nothing else, most androids are a lot more mobile!

Still, androids are unnatural. They're manufactured things. How can a science project be sentient? Just because they're constructed around a biologically-based matrix and can respond and react to stimuli doesn't mean they're alive, not like you and I are alive. Being sentient requires a whole lot more.

I mean, really... Giving androids rights like repair insurance and likening it to health insurance for real, naturally-existing beings? Thank heavens Raj stopped short of saying that androids should have a voice in government or be allowed to form civil unions with one another. And he didn't take it to the sick level of some people, who try to make out like you should have some kind of relationship with sentient machines. Eww! How gross!

Wait - I take that back. I forgot about his pet project. Raj is in the process of setting up his own little civilization of androids on a planet of their own, building a few million companion machines in different structural forms to mimic diversified biology. Thanks to his admittedly impressive expertise in nano-biology, Raj's latest androids can even procreate, and should morph over time to acommodate environmental shifts. So I guess in a world of androids, they'd pretty much be able to do whatever their creator hard-wired into them, plus whatever transmutative functions were integrated into their growth matrix.

Leave it to Raj to show off with the whole evolution thing, on top of everything else. Sometimes he's such a geek.

Personally, I think the guy's bonkers. Since he makes a living designing and building androids for domestic and game use, though, maybe it's about job security. Lord knows there's precious little of that any more, for any industry.

Gotta give the man kudos on planet selection, too. He gave me a quick tour, back when he first started talking about his sentient android world. It's this little bitty water-heavy world in stable orbit around a stable star in a remote arm of a fairly stable galaxy. Makes sense. Kinda pointless to put your game on a system that'll self-destruct before you can get to the fourth level of play. He's been prepping the site for a while. It's an M3 type world, oxygen-nitro mix atmosphere, so he's built his little android people to derive their energy from within that framework. He's already setup multiple climate rules and distributed a fair amount of what he calls "plants" over the surface and a few in the water. The plants are part solar-powered, self-sustaining, and will both be a food source and support the ecology of the system.

Raj also threw in a couple of species of plants that are carnivorous, so they'll munch on some of the smaller synths. Nice touch, right? He's already setup a few million plants, albeit variations on a theme, and thrown a few of his simpler prototype beasties into the planet's oceans and other water bodies. He didn't say so outright, but I have a feeling he put some of his higher-functioning machines there, too. A couple of days ago I overheard him muttering about how to make aural communications work through water.

God complex, ya think?

I guess Raj planning to populate the spot with a wide array of quadripeds, and a few transitionals, in addition to his android buddies. Out of some perverse sense of humor, Raj also decided to tinker with the perceptional apparatus on his primary pair, and do so in a big way. Believe it or not, Raj intends to let them know they were created. (Is that what he means by making his androids sentient?) Even if you discount the fact that the plan's batshit crazy, it's gotta hit a nerve with the ethics boys. I guess he's already got his male prototype built, then took a chunk of his male synth's rib to replicate its chromosomal pattern, and is working to mockup a female of comparable technical heritage. Said he's going to name them, of all things, "Adam" and "Eve". Are those ridiculous names or what? I bet it was some gibberish from the mouth of his 2-year-old.

A few days ago I asked Raj what made him think that androids were truly sentient. He just gave me a big, goofy grin, shook his head, and asked, "Take a look at yourself, Devi. Are you sentient?"

What a stupid question. I'm a real person. Of course I'm sentient. I can't imagine what he meant by asking me something so irrelevant. Can you?