The Robot: Part 1

I am a robot. Of course, that's an overstatement, a sci-fi obsession of mine; I simply am a regular flesh-and-blood human with a tiny, intelligent chip tucked away between my hippocampus and my amygdala. It's like your grandpa with a pacemaker, or your friend who has an IUD who has pitched a tent in her uterus. I imagine it hurt a lot to get it installed, but I don't really notice it's there. It may not even be working. That's what they told my parents. So here I am, "the robot," who may simply be just another dysfunctional notch on the counting population of homo-sapiens.

It's not really what you think: government spyware extracting information and deleting possible extremists from the population. It's for medical science. My parents were both freaks about that whole lot: understanding memory, curing diseases. You know, what sort of emotional response happens when you get creamed by some idiot going 60 km/hr in a 40 zone on your bike without a helmet. That sort of thing.

Unfortunately, ever since I became aware that a little bit of technology was inside of my skull, two things happened. One, ever since a group of kids in grade four taunted me, telling me if I got knocked down hard enough the device would rupture through my brain and give me permanent brain damage, I've been extra careful about avoiding such circumstances, to the point that I watched hundreds of karate videos online so if anyone attempted it I could break their arm in one to two moves and remain standing; secondly, I became ever-conscious that this device may in fact be more than just medical science, that someone has the capability to sift through my memories and diagnose my emotional responses to the point that I can't even lie in bed late at night lusting about having someone in there with me without thinking about what the chip must be reading. That some lab coat is reading signals like heartbeats, analysing data about some dummy kid -- so I tell myself to tone it down or get it together.