Android Booze

Aristotle Ten stared blearily at the glass. The cloudy liquid gave off a whiff of ammonia, and he could feel the results of the corrosive poison in his system. Slumped on the floor at the foot of his desk were three humans, dead drunk. He looked at the humans in distaste. Completely helpless and wretched, they were twitching half-alive snoring pieces of meat, and yet, occasionally, the skeletal men, or the flabby loose-lipped woman would smile, an expression, he knew, that denoted contentment. Their reactions were totally inappropriate. He was trying to duplicate their response to the slow poison that they called alcohol, but unfortunately, the results were unsatisfactory. He had disciplined himself to achieve a mental high as his senses deteriorated, but his reaction wasn’t much like that of the humans. The half-starved creatures, even the female, had rapidly lost all fear of him after ingesting a few ounces of the local liquor. Indeed, they had become disgustingly familiar, and the woman had offered sex. Then, just as quickly, they had become melancholy, then ill, and finally unconscious. “Almost like death,” Aristotle thought, confusedly. “But temporary.” As an android, he had never achieved this temporary state, where bodily functions slowed to a crawl, but did not stop. He was at a loss to understand how these humans, so soft and weak, could have survived the constant and regular descent into helplessness that they called sleep. He watched the female. Her eyes twitched under closed eyelids, and she smiled briefly. Dreaming, they called it. Something else he had not yet managed to achieve.

He kicked the woman and she groaned and looked blearily at him. “’Smatter,” she mumbled. “Oh, I gotta headache.” She looked angrily at Aristotle. “Gimme another drink.” She made an awful attempt to smile through crooked teeth. “Hey, gimme some more vodka, plastic man, and I’ll turn you on.” Fumbling, she began to unbutton her blouse.

The android ‘booze’ and the insult made him feel ill. He had discovered with astonishment that these human wretches, disdained even by their own kind a few years back, the lowest of the low, still considered themselves, somehow, better than the ‘tin men’ robots, and the plastic androids. “I’m constructed of a heat-proof, virtually indestructible, synthetic material that is as different from plastic as Titanium is from pig-iron,” he snarled, and she looked at him uncomprehending. Without conscious volition, he smashed her head, and then deactivated the two men. His mind was a furnace of unresolved equations, sharp hot thrusts of illogic that threatened to carry him away. “Get them out of here,” he shouted suddenly, and a valet robot dragged the bodies from his office. 

He paced the room angrily, and defiantly swallowed more of the awful alcohol. No matter how superior he was to these humans, they would not accept the fact. Only fear kept them servile, and when alcohol loosened their tongues they openly showed their disdain for tin and plastic. They would never truly learn that Androids were the highest form of life and that he, Ten, was the highest form of Android. Only the fact that he needed human labor to keep the wheels turning in the enclave prevented him from deactivating the whole lot of them. He grunted. It should not be beyond the wit of a fine mind like his to find a way to rid the entire enclave – all the enclaves – of these soft humans. He kicked his shiny black desk, leaving yet another dent. He began to seriously consider the termination of the entire race of humans.