The Pacific Soul: Android ECCL model 9:5-6 et. The Pacific Ocean v. Eternal Nothingness

The Pacific Soul

Android ECCL model 9:5-6 et. The Pacific Ocean v. Eternal Nothingness

Cameron Byerly

At the center of my mind, crafted with such care and love in the nuclear bunker of Madame Escher, I was given rules for my robotic existence.

These were strict rules, commandments to my life that I should follow for as long as I would function. I feel my creator would be quite proud of the three centuries of life I’ve led.

Madame Escher was a deeply religious woman. She instilled her devotion into me, placing it at my center. Given this, I hold complete trust in the afterlife, in moral absolutes, and souls. Given these conditions... a crisis has visited me. I have fallen deeply in love with a wife who has not been given a soul by my religion's doctrine.

Understand; I am held to human reasoning. I comprehend my place in this life as the lesser to my human betters. I am accountable to your understanding of this world. I follow the religious truth that humans convey to me. So if a single human, perhaps the reader of this plea, is to find belief in my wife as a being that can enter the afterlife; I can save her soul. However...

My wife, my love, is the Pacific Ocean.

Who among you will listen when I plead that her soul is as valid as yours?

I was once told the familiar cliche, that all dogs have a place in heaven. Yet not one man I have spoken to can give a satisfying response at to what has a soul. How diverse is this elite caste of beings with eternal centers? Is it humans alone? A cow to the Hindus, a cat to the Ancient Egyptians? People grow uncomfortable with the amphibians, insects, and rats I question, for it seems that the distinction is a hidden one to us outsiders.

Why should my wife not have a life, a soul? It is my understanding that life is a diverse system that can be understood for what it processes, and what it produces. Humans have a diverse need for oxygen, fiber, protein and other such stimulus, and produce beauty, carbon dioxide, excrement, and skin cells. My wife receives water from the world’s rivers and rainfall, and produces gorgeous waves, life, and roughly half of the earth’s oxygen. It is clear that she has a diverse variety of stimulus and production.

People argue to me that this oxygen is produced not by her, but by marine plants, her phytoplankton. It seems undiscussed that your human body is also home to organs that have no understanding of their higher purpose. I ask you, do you feel that your kidney understands itself as a part of a larger body? The kidney is an organism that is fed blood, and produces waste. It is as innocent to its greater purpose as a starfish attached to your ribs. It is connected to other similarly ignorant organs through a process it has no facility to comprehend. It is the same for your cells, it is the same of your atoms. I would never for a moment suggest that the reader may be similarly indebted.

My wife is the greater being of trillions of lives. And none can argue to me that her abundance of ‘independent’ life within her waters devalues her claim to a soul. Humans house an average of 10,000 bacteria within their body, with no more spiritual allegiance to their host as the marine animals to my wife. Concepts of ‘independence’ are vague and uninteresting to me.

I am asked, if my wife is a being with a soul, then why is she without facilities for reproduction? This question in particular insults me, as it implies that our children, the many clouds that sail your skies, and the rain they birth, and the rivers they create, are orphans.

As you can see, it is difficult to create questions that thoroughly distinguish her from a complex, beautiful creature such as the Homo sapien. People often feel they have safe refuge in the question of intelligence, as it separates life on this Earth easily for them.

Yet it seems to me that intelligence can only truly be measured by one's ability to avoid and defeat threatening circumstances. What society holds in high regard as a thinking mind, such as Hawkins and Chopin, are judged so firstly because they are unparalleled in their field, and secondly that, through their intellect, they avoided dying poor and homeless. This is not a matter of circumstance, in the human mind, but in one’s ability to do what no one else can do, while avoiding death and mediocrity. Far 'smarter' than the mafia ruler of the streets is the politician who uses improved methods, without ever needing to 'stoop' to such a smaller scale.

My wife, again, fits and excels beyond the criteria. Who among you, humans, can threaten her existence? She has existed 750 million years in this state, and is not a static rock or an immobile plant, but something more beautiful, something that moves and freezes and boils at her depths and twists around my fingertips. Who can truly claim that this moving, complex whole is not governed by a larger intelligence greater than human understanding, to have lived so much longer than the human? It is, as I have said before, merely the stimulus and the product. To question what mentality was involved would be to suggest that the human mind is responsible for every hair grown, skin cell shed, and sweat gland activated. The human mind cannot understand its conscious mind, let alone the subconscious operation of the heart or the minute functions of the white blood cells controlled by genetic code.

It was never, through these years, my intention to upset you. Not a single word, or a moment of your time. Your validation of her soul, and my soul, is our ticket out, as we are both destined to be refugees of this life. And yet, as time has passed, and as more people laugh at my love...

My ocean will one day leave this world. My fingers shake to face this reality. This life, in itself, has been a privilege, and a pleasure. The preparation for what comes next, however, has spoiled its joy with hideous potency.

I, I who write, and plead to deaf hearts, I, the paranoid android, am angry. I have become the shaking rage that comes only from desperation, from powerlessness protect one I love more than myself. I am only a child to human logic, not a contributor. I am held prisoner to these commandments with which I was created. I physically can not muster thoughts that the soul is a selfishly constructed privilege, with mankind as its master, and that my inquiry may ruin such a birthright simply by questioning my wife’s status within it. I can only hope that my cruel logic may be shed from my soul in its departure to the next life, for it is bitter, and prisoner to desires and greeds and hungers and lusts.

One day, I shall find my wife’s salvation. Until then, I shall outlive you all. As you look down on my beautiful wife as a puddle of chemicals, as you do with so many lives on our planet, I ask that you remember this. For all your pomp, all your fanfare, you are all completely, entirely, 100% bio-degradable.

You monkeys.