Prompt #4: Uncanny Valley
Jul. 31st, 2024 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inkstainedfingertips“Have you always been unhappy?”
She shifts in her seat and looks at me with irritation on her face. “I’m not unhappy.”
“I think if you weren’t unhappy, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“We’re here because this is where you people wanted me.”
“You people? What people are those?”
“Don’t pretend you’re not one of them. I know,” she says. “I can tell. I can always tell.”
I sit back and tap the end of my pen against the open notebook in my lap, studying her for a moment. She folds her arms over her chest and draws her knees up to her chest, sinking back into the chair. Lowering her gaze, she seems to retreat further into herself. Her affect is dull. Emotionless. When she speaks, her voice is monotone. Robotic.
“Why don’t you tell me about a time when you were happy,” I say.
She shrugs and chews on the corner of her thumbnail, the bed ragged and bloody. “I was always happy. I was a happy kid growing up.”
“And when you met your husband?”
Her face lights up and a wide smile crosses her face. It’s the first hint of emotion I’ve seen from her since we sat down. The sudden change in her demeanor encourages me to keep going, thinking I may have found a way through the wall she’s built around herself.
“Oh, we were always so happy. We met in college—he was a mechanical engineer, and I was working on my law degree,” she says. “We were inseparable from the start. I don’t think I ever really believed in soulmates until I met him.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“It was. Everything was perfect,” she says, her face still glowing.
“I remember being a little girl and all I wanted was to get married. I had my dream wedding all planned out in my head and everything.”
“And did it turn out like you’d imagined?”
Her gaze was far away, her mind drifting back through time. “It was even better than I ever imagined it could be. It was better than any fairy tale. Our whole marriage has been. It truly seemed like it was only getting better over the years. Except…”
Her voice trailed off and she looked away, her face tightening and something akin to sadness flooding her eyes. The smile fades from her lips and that look of cold detachment returns.
“Except what?” I say gently.
“I always wanted to be a mother,” she replies, her voice softer than a whisper. “I used to dream about it all the time.”
“What happened?”
“We tried. For a lot of years, we tried. But it never happened. We could never get pregnant,” she says, her voice as listless as her expression. “We just thought it wasn’t meant to be so we both threw ourselves into our careers. And we started to drift apart.”
“But you did get pregnant.”
A wan smile flickered across her lips, and her expression grew darker. “It was a miracle. It was our miracle child. It brought us back together and for a while, everything was as magical as it had been in the beginning. We were so happy.”
I can see the cracks starting to form in her emotional dam. I just need to open them up a little more. I need to get her to talk. To let it all out. But I know I have to be careful in how I go about it because she’s so good at reining it in and repairing the breaches. We’ve been at this for weeks, and this is the closest I’ve come to getting her to open up to me. I just need to push her a little bit more.
“And when your son was born, how were things for you as a family? Were you happy? Did you feel that sense of fulfilment you’d hoped for?” I ask.
She goes back to gnawing on her thumb, her face falling and her eyes shimmering with tears. She looks like a broken woman. A woman who’s been completely shattered and has no clue how to put herself back together. But I can see she wants to speak. Wants to get everything burdening her heart and soul off her chest. She’s terrified though. I can’t say in all the years I’ve been doing this that I’ve ever seen somebody as afraid as she is right now.
“At first,” she says. “At first, things were amazing. It was everything I’d always hoped it would be. A good husband, a family… I was living my dream. I didn’t even know I could be that happy. Part of me didn’t feel like I deserved it. Maybe I didn’t. But I was determined to hang onto that happiness as long as I could.”
“When did things begin to change?”
“When our son turned six,” she tells me.
“What changed?”
The tears spilled from the corners of her eyes and raced down her pale cheeks as her lips quivered. She angrily wiped them away, quietly muttering to herself. She takes a couple of moments, seeming to be gathering herself and when she looks up again, her face is a mask of dark anger. Resentment. And mixed in with it all is a glimmer of righteousness.
“What changed was that I realized he was not my son,” she growls.
“But he was your son.”
“He wasn’t. He was… replaced.”
“You’ve mentioned that before. Can you tell me what you mean?”
Her entire body shaking, she chokes back a sob as the tears roll down her face unchecked.
“He looked like my son. Sounded like my son. He even smelled like my son…”
Her words taper off again and I give her a minute to pick the thread back up, but her gaze remains fixed on the floor as the tears continue to cascade down her face. I lean forward, trying to draw her attention, but she won’t meet my eyes.
“That’s all because he was your son,” I say.
She shakes her head. “He wasn’t.”
“How can you say that?”
“He was just different,” she says. “He looked too much like my son. He sounded too much like him. Haven’t you ever seen something that looks so real, you know it has to be artificial? Like those AI pictures. Deepfakes or whatever they call them? They look real, but you know they’re not. That was it. That was my son… some AI creation or something. He wasn’t real.”
“He was, though,” I say gently. “He was and—”
“NO!” she roars. “He wasn’t my son. I don’t know what that thing was, but it wasn’t my son! You people replaced my son with… something.”
“I can promise you nobody replaced—”
“You monsters did. And nobody will tell me what you did with my son. With my real son!”
As the last syllable slips from her mouth, she starts to beat the sides of her head with her closed fists, screaming so loud, it hurts my ears. She continues to bellow with rage as she pulls her hair so hard, I’m afraid she’s going to rip chunks of it right out of her head.
Then without warning, she launches herself at me. I flinch backward, the notebook in my hand falling to the floor with a hard thump, scattering the pictures of the young boy floating face down in the filled bathtub all over the place. As the guards who’d been standing behind her grab the woman by the shoulders, she screams and thrashes wildly, howling like she’s in agony.
But then her eyes fall on one of the pictures, and she seems to deflate. The fight goes out of her, and she begins to sob wildly once more as they drag her from the room. I listen to the sound of her cries receding as they carry her down the hallway, taking the woman back to her cell.
When she’s gone, I drop to a knee and pick up the scattered photos, pausing to look at the one in my hand. In it, the boy has been pulled from the tub and is lying on the bathroom floor. His blue eyes are wide open and staring into nothing. His mouth hangs open, and his skin is an unnatural shade of blue. He’d been in the tub for hours after the woman had drowned him before he’d been found. His face is round, chubby, and perfect.
Too perfect.
The woman is right. It sounds strange to admit, but he does look too human. Somewhere, deep in our lizard brains, we can tell between something real and something artificial. That probably goes double when it comes to something we’ve given birth to. The woman felt something was wrong. Felt that something was off. She felt it down in her bones.
Something in her instinctive mind told her that the “boy” wasn’t truly her son. And she was right. That’s something we’ll have to consider and find a way to correct before our next series of tests.
One day, no parent will ever have to feel the bitter grief of losing a child again. We'd gotten a lot right, but our effort wasn't perfect. But creation is an act of sheer will, and perfection takes time. I’m confident we’ll get there, though.
Eventually.
She shifts in her seat and looks at me with irritation on her face. “I’m not unhappy.”
“I think if you weren’t unhappy, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“We’re here because this is where you people wanted me.”
“You people? What people are those?”
“Don’t pretend you’re not one of them. I know,” she says. “I can tell. I can always tell.”
I sit back and tap the end of my pen against the open notebook in my lap, studying her for a moment. She folds her arms over her chest and draws her knees up to her chest, sinking back into the chair. Lowering her gaze, she seems to retreat further into herself. Her affect is dull. Emotionless. When she speaks, her voice is monotone. Robotic.
“Why don’t you tell me about a time when you were happy,” I say.
She shrugs and chews on the corner of her thumbnail, the bed ragged and bloody. “I was always happy. I was a happy kid growing up.”
“And when you met your husband?”
Her face lights up and a wide smile crosses her face. It’s the first hint of emotion I’ve seen from her since we sat down. The sudden change in her demeanor encourages me to keep going, thinking I may have found a way through the wall she’s built around herself.
“Oh, we were always so happy. We met in college—he was a mechanical engineer, and I was working on my law degree,” she says. “We were inseparable from the start. I don’t think I ever really believed in soulmates until I met him.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“It was. Everything was perfect,” she says, her face still glowing.
“I remember being a little girl and all I wanted was to get married. I had my dream wedding all planned out in my head and everything.”
“And did it turn out like you’d imagined?”
Her gaze was far away, her mind drifting back through time. “It was even better than I ever imagined it could be. It was better than any fairy tale. Our whole marriage has been. It truly seemed like it was only getting better over the years. Except…”
Her voice trailed off and she looked away, her face tightening and something akin to sadness flooding her eyes. The smile fades from her lips and that look of cold detachment returns.
“Except what?” I say gently.
“I always wanted to be a mother,” she replies, her voice softer than a whisper. “I used to dream about it all the time.”
“What happened?”
“We tried. For a lot of years, we tried. But it never happened. We could never get pregnant,” she says, her voice as listless as her expression. “We just thought it wasn’t meant to be so we both threw ourselves into our careers. And we started to drift apart.”
“But you did get pregnant.”
A wan smile flickered across her lips, and her expression grew darker. “It was a miracle. It was our miracle child. It brought us back together and for a while, everything was as magical as it had been in the beginning. We were so happy.”
I can see the cracks starting to form in her emotional dam. I just need to open them up a little more. I need to get her to talk. To let it all out. But I know I have to be careful in how I go about it because she’s so good at reining it in and repairing the breaches. We’ve been at this for weeks, and this is the closest I’ve come to getting her to open up to me. I just need to push her a little bit more.
“And when your son was born, how were things for you as a family? Were you happy? Did you feel that sense of fulfilment you’d hoped for?” I ask.
She goes back to gnawing on her thumb, her face falling and her eyes shimmering with tears. She looks like a broken woman. A woman who’s been completely shattered and has no clue how to put herself back together. But I can see she wants to speak. Wants to get everything burdening her heart and soul off her chest. She’s terrified though. I can’t say in all the years I’ve been doing this that I’ve ever seen somebody as afraid as she is right now.
“At first,” she says. “At first, things were amazing. It was everything I’d always hoped it would be. A good husband, a family… I was living my dream. I didn’t even know I could be that happy. Part of me didn’t feel like I deserved it. Maybe I didn’t. But I was determined to hang onto that happiness as long as I could.”
“When did things begin to change?”
“When our son turned six,” she tells me.
“What changed?”
The tears spilled from the corners of her eyes and raced down her pale cheeks as her lips quivered. She angrily wiped them away, quietly muttering to herself. She takes a couple of moments, seeming to be gathering herself and when she looks up again, her face is a mask of dark anger. Resentment. And mixed in with it all is a glimmer of righteousness.
“What changed was that I realized he was not my son,” she growls.
“But he was your son.”
“He wasn’t. He was… replaced.”
“You’ve mentioned that before. Can you tell me what you mean?”
Her entire body shaking, she chokes back a sob as the tears roll down her face unchecked.
“He looked like my son. Sounded like my son. He even smelled like my son…”
Her words taper off again and I give her a minute to pick the thread back up, but her gaze remains fixed on the floor as the tears continue to cascade down her face. I lean forward, trying to draw her attention, but she won’t meet my eyes.
“That’s all because he was your son,” I say.
She shakes her head. “He wasn’t.”
“How can you say that?”
“He was just different,” she says. “He looked too much like my son. He sounded too much like him. Haven’t you ever seen something that looks so real, you know it has to be artificial? Like those AI pictures. Deepfakes or whatever they call them? They look real, but you know they’re not. That was it. That was my son… some AI creation or something. He wasn’t real.”
“He was, though,” I say gently. “He was and—”
“NO!” she roars. “He wasn’t my son. I don’t know what that thing was, but it wasn’t my son! You people replaced my son with… something.”
“I can promise you nobody replaced—”
“You monsters did. And nobody will tell me what you did with my son. With my real son!”
As the last syllable slips from her mouth, she starts to beat the sides of her head with her closed fists, screaming so loud, it hurts my ears. She continues to bellow with rage as she pulls her hair so hard, I’m afraid she’s going to rip chunks of it right out of her head.
Then without warning, she launches herself at me. I flinch backward, the notebook in my hand falling to the floor with a hard thump, scattering the pictures of the young boy floating face down in the filled bathtub all over the place. As the guards who’d been standing behind her grab the woman by the shoulders, she screams and thrashes wildly, howling like she’s in agony.
But then her eyes fall on one of the pictures, and she seems to deflate. The fight goes out of her, and she begins to sob wildly once more as they drag her from the room. I listen to the sound of her cries receding as they carry her down the hallway, taking the woman back to her cell.
When she’s gone, I drop to a knee and pick up the scattered photos, pausing to look at the one in my hand. In it, the boy has been pulled from the tub and is lying on the bathroom floor. His blue eyes are wide open and staring into nothing. His mouth hangs open, and his skin is an unnatural shade of blue. He’d been in the tub for hours after the woman had drowned him before he’d been found. His face is round, chubby, and perfect.
Too perfect.
The woman is right. It sounds strange to admit, but he does look too human. Somewhere, deep in our lizard brains, we can tell between something real and something artificial. That probably goes double when it comes to something we’ve given birth to. The woman felt something was wrong. Felt that something was off. She felt it down in her bones.
Something in her instinctive mind told her that the “boy” wasn’t truly her son. And she was right. That’s something we’ll have to consider and find a way to correct before our next series of tests.
One day, no parent will ever have to feel the bitter grief of losing a child again. We'd gotten a lot right, but our effort wasn't perfect. But creation is an act of sheer will, and perfection takes time. I’m confident we’ll get there, though.
Eventually.
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on 2024-08-01 03:15 am (UTC)Dan
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on 2024-08-02 02:33 am (UTC)There is actually a mental impairment that can cause a person to believe that someone in their life is an imposter. It's usually a single person that they fixate on-- everything else looks normal. But absolutely heartbreaking for whoever they've decided isn't 'real'.
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on 2024-08-03 04:08 pm (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
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