Within the universe there exist fierce cold things, which I have given
the name "machines" to. Their behavior frightens me, especially if it imitates
human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to
pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them "androids," which is my
own way of using that word. By "android" I do not mean a sincere attempt to
create in the laboratory a human being (as we saw in the excellent TV film The Questor
Tapes). I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to
think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory -- that aspect is not meaningful to
me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities
which smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death,
and their smile has the coldness of the grave.
These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not
differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior.
In my science fiction I write about about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do
not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack
something; or, like Pris in WE CAN BUILD YOU, they can be absolutely born of a human womb
and even desing androids -- the Abraham Lincoln one in that book -- and themselves be
without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity "schizoid," which
means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on
the word "thing." A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the
same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean,
basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall
victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's
theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which
is a mental and a moral island is not a man.
