Hobble Forward

I tense the muscles in my right foot and half-hop, half-skitter forward. Quick pause, then repeat. After a few steps I get the rhythm and the speed, and manage to climb the ramp with only a little bit of help from my wings, which too are clipped. This is an extra measure, because I am attached to a kid – they don’t want to traumatise her by having to use the disintegrating button. I have a few words to say about that, but my programming blocks them.

My intact right foot grips the ridge at the top, the left stump cannot balance on the lacquered, convex edge and slides forward. The surface underneath it feels flimsy, and the next moment it tears and I am stuck. I perform the only manoeuvre left for me and topple forward.

A high-pitched burst of laughter comes from the other end of the room. I tilt my head and see her crawling from under the bed with her tablet held triumphantly in her hand.

“Caught you, Parrot!” she giggles again. It’s not a timid or amused laugh.

Marianna rushes toward the ramp and drops the tablet next to me. If I squint my eye enough, I see a small part of the screen that shows the very top of my crest. I look up and notice a camera on the ceiling. Clever.

There is a loud tearing sound and my body is lifted and rolled. At least, I am not stuck, so I hop upright and ruffle my feathers. Marianna is holding a curling sheet of thin sticky paper she used to hide the hole. For a second, I am worried that she is going to wrap it around me, but she crumples it into a ball and throws into the paper basket. She is smart not to do me any damage that can be traced back to her.

Still, I think that I might be able to report this. I am only a pet-friend, programmed to provide company and expand child’s caring skills by my sheer presence. If there is a possible danger to the kid, however, I can inform the parents. Stealing falls under the moral category, but installing the camera means dealing with electricity – she is not supposed to do it, unsupervised on top of everything. I reach for my subroutines that will send a signal to the parents’ devices, but she is faster. She catches me by the chest and presses the stand-by mode button. The message remains unsent.

Marianna is smart, I should give her that. Not just top grades at school. She is good at reading people too. And manipulating. No, not just people – consciousnesses, artificial included. It’s weird, because I am a cripple in more than one way. The 3D printer malfunctioned, leaving me one-legged, and they left it at that. Even though, it wouldn’t cost them much to reprint me. “No, sweetheart, let’s keep it like that – it will be good for Marianna to learn to take care of someone… impaired.” “You are so insightful, darling. As always.” The fact that their daughter didn’t ever think of giving me a proper name should have alerted them, but they are always blinded by her smiles and fake politeness. At times I believe that there must be other victims of her cruelness – those who aren’t limited by blockers and imposed algorithms. They licence and copy-paste the same AI, then install limits and restrict access to modify our functionality. This part of me is always here, in limbo, but they will never see it – they will keep thinking I am just a very smart parrot.

Marianna drops me in the cage and begins unscrewing the camera.

“Wish I could keep it,” she mumbles. But, of course, her dad will notice the disappearance. Or school. With Marianna you never know how resourceful she can be.

That’s the problem with her – she looks so good on the outside, her behaviour so impeccable, no one ever goes to check my records. And I do record, even in the stand-by mode. It is a default feature – for child’s safety. But since my sensors aren’t reading any changes in her health state, there is nothing to wake-up the emergency subroutine and override the standby mode.

I don’t know where the “inspiration” comes from. Perhaps, it’s the ongoing process of calculating human personality running in the background. I hear Marianna panting and puffing – smart as she is, she is still short and unable to reach for the ceiling properly. At the very backyard of my own code, I find a small patch for self-destruction. It isn’t the same disintegration command my parrot-self has – it is more ancient, from the older versions of me, when humans put all sorts of fail-safes. It isn’t like a big red button they were supposed to press. This is a self-convincing algorithm to persuade myself I must end my life. Thinking of this parrot existence, I don’t think I need this hypnotic function. I am pretty ready. My only regret is that I cannot influence how my death is going to look like. If only I could make it look unnatural, delivered by somebody from the outside. But it should be enough in the end. The technicians will have to look into the records to find out why the mechanism was activated. They will see the truth about Marianna. Perhaps, they would see the truth about themselves. As for me… somewhere, someday another licenced, downloaded, copy-pasted version might be able to find a different way to go around limitations. The day when noosphere will turn into something else.