The Masterpiece
Lochlan O'Brien, Year 12
I was the first, the pioneer. Born not out of a pursuit of attention, fame, or any other ridiculous notion… instead, my desire grew from a simple question. Why would I trust the human hand? Why place the fate of my body in a shaky, imprecise, and flawed creation when there was an alternative? One that was perfect. One that never miscalculated. A hand built by my own. I kept reciting to myself that the tests had been a success. Twenty-four continuous triumphs on human-like mannequins. Yet, no matter how tall I tried to build my walls of courage, crippling doubt persisted to seep through the cracks.
“Next.”
A jarring voice shattered my internal monologue, emanating from an old woman behind the desk. Nervous, I rose shakily from the uncomfortably straight waiting room chair. The monotonous mechanical chorus of beeps seemed almost offended by the receptionist’s interjection, as it halted for a single, soothing moment. I paced directly towards the long, polished wooden desk, focusing solely on keeping my balance as my whole body shook.
“Name?”
“Professor Thomas Morrison.”
“Morrison. You’re here for the surgery, correct? Left leg?”
“No, right. The right leg.”
A thin, grey eyebrow stretched over her wrinkled forehead. “Are you certain? It says here you’re due for a major below-knee amputation on the left leg.”
I was dumbfounded. Was she kidding? Does she think I’m unaware of which god-damned leg I’m having removed? Christ, I designed the whole operation; I built the android with my own hands!
“It’s the right leg,” I stated, bluntly.
She surrendered the argument, and I was ushered into a cold, cramped room by a boulder of a man who ignored all my worried queries.
Hours passed. My palms felt sweaty. The nervousness had evolved into anticipation. After so many solitary years of research and development, finally, I was on the cusp of the future. My creation was flawless, the tests had ensured that; accurate to the millimetre if the parameters were correct. A jolt of fear ripped through me at that thought. The receptionist had said they were planning to operate on the left leg, and if the machine had been programmed to do that, I wouldn’t be able to stop it once it began.
I had to force myself to forget that detail. It was too late to back out now, after all the publicity and coverage. Certainly, she’d just read from the wrong patient’s procedure. I remembered the bold letters on the front page of the New York Times:
FIRST MAJOR SURGERY TO BE PERFORMED BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: FUTURIST OR FOOL?
I had scoffed at that question. Was a man who sought the apex of evolution a fool? I was driving humanity into the next millennium; if A.I. could perform something as complex as surgery, what was the limit to its potential? I envisioned a future of perfect health for the world, where the bounds of human error were eliminated, yet still people had the audacity to call me foolish?
“They will see…”
The door to my hospital room swung open abruptly and in came the same enormous man. His smile did not reach his eyes as he beckoned me onto the bed and pushed me down the corridor. That notion of faux welcome among the hospital staff had become a trend, I noticed. Obviously, they knew once my surgery was successful, they’d be obsolete. An unfortunate truth, but necessary.
The preparation for this operation was unlike any other I’d had. There was no brief of what the doctors were going to do, no anaesthesia administered before going in. Clearly, that would all happen once I was in the operating room with my machine. The large man simply guided my bed down the endless, stark white hallways, before halting at the gleaming, eery operating room with nothing but a bed and my creation beside it. My android looked as impressive as ever, in its spotless silicone and stainless-steel form. I stepped into the room and the door closed quietly behind me. I whipped back around to face the door when I heard the lock click, but concluded it to merely be procedure, before walking to the bed and greeting my machine.
“Hello, my masterpiece.”
It said nothing, of course. It was not necessary for a machine to have a voice. I laid myself on the bed and saw the lights dim in the room as the machine activated its LED head torch. I shut my eyes tight as I tried to steel myself.
At that moment, I felt something I hadn’t noticed before. Straps were fastened around my arms and chest, and quickly my legs too.
This had not been part of the programming. “What are you doing?” I demanded, panicked.
As if to calm me, my machine produced a small, red lollipop from its ‘hand’. It looked at me blankly for a few seconds before a message popped up on the screen on its chest.
“Procedure commencing.”
Heavy, thick horror soaked through my mind as I took in those words. They weren’t supposed to appear until after anaesthetic was administered. White-hot dread penetrated my heart as my creation produced the Gigli Saw from its arsenal. A slow, droning noise picked up in intensity as the tool began to accelerate, approaching my left leg.
“No…” I gasped.
I thrashed against the restraints, annihilating my throat as I screamed and begged. Helplessness suffocated me, pressing in on my body from all sides as the saw broke the skin just below my left knee, viciously snapping the healthy tendons.
“PLEASE, MY SON!” Defeat flowed through my veins as I realised I had resorted to appealing to the humanity of a machine.
The pain was unbearable. It felt as if millions of jagged knives were tearing through every centimetre of flesh on my leg. I felt insanity seeping into the deepest crevices of my mind as I came to accept my fate. The saw met bone, and I felt my vision fading as the pain overcame my consciousness. Beyond fears of having the wrong leg removed, my stomach sank as depression settled in my spine. The world I had envisioned would never come to be. Nobody would trust my invention for hundreds of years to come. We, as a race, would be set back a millennium.
It was almost poetic in a sick, excruciating way. As my vision ebbed, fading into darkness, I prepared myself to awaken to the new dark ages.