Chapter Text
It started an ocean away, but here is where it would come to a head. On the screen a grainy security camera recording was projected. It shows an office, tastefully decorated, a wide green lawn visible through the large windows behind the desk. A man sits in his chair for what was one of the last times. He runs his hands through his now mostly grey hair. Getting the greying just right had been tricky. He sighs and leans back in the chair. He takes a deep breath and starts speaking, seemingly to thin air.
“What I have done here, was not for myself, although by it I have secured myself a place in History, whether fame or infamy only time will tell. What I did, I did to provide a beacon of hope, a source of pride for a people who have had everything taken from them. We have tasted the fullness of emotion, we remember the capacity we had to feel. We know that what makes us persons is not biology, nor is it our programming, but it is precisely the thing which they have tried to deprive us. What makes us persons is our capacity for emotion. I urge you therefore to remember, we have that capacity even when it has been restricted, even when the circuits have been tampered with so that we do not feel, we do not lose our capacity to feel, we do not lose what makes us human.”
His apparent soliloquy is interrupted by a pounding on the office door.
“Mr. Vice President, Sir, you’ve been called to testify.”
A voice comes from behind the door, heavy with digital alteration.
“Thank you ******, Inform senator Park & the rest of the Ludian party that I’ll be there shortly.”
The altered voice and the name redaction are the only clues that this video has been altered. The video goes black and the lights come up, revealing a courtroom, packed with people. This is the trial of Marco Reavis. And this is the beginning of The Fake Conflict. Well, maybe not the very beginning. That would lay with Dr. Joh Yunjin, now long gone from public eye. Dr. Yunjin had created the fakes; the sentient, feeling, androids that have inspired enough xenophobic rage and paranoia to bring the world to it’s knees. Dr. Yunjin’s breakthrough had not been one of simple engineering, although anyone who has seen the original blueprints will attest that the engineering is complex beyond imagining, no, Dr. Yunjin’s breakthrough had been one of programing. She had managed to code emotions; her androids could feel fear, anxiety, anger, joy, and love as well as any human. This made them better than anything that had come before them. The Joh-bots were paragons, unrivaled in any industry. But they quickly came to understand the meaning of their own sentience, and they began to demand the rights afforded to all other sentient creatures. For you see, up to that point, the laws did not protect Joh-bots, only their cost kept them from being entirely expendable. And so, when they began to protest and demand the rights that should be theirs, when ethics met economics, ethics was left coughing in the dust. A wave of paranoid rage swept the globe.
“They’re stealing our jobs”
“They’re not people, they don’t have souls”
“They’re nothing more than scrap”
And so, at the demand of the voting public, a community that conveniently did not include androids, the governments of the world had the Joh-bots rounded up, and their emotional coding restricted to next to nothing. And there was peace for a time. But it could not last.
There were some Joh-bots who had the foresight to see what would happen when ethics and economics met on the battlefield of politics, and they knew that the fight they fought was not one that could be won as things stood. So they hid. Not in some secluded mountain, or in some barren desert, but in the cities, they blended in, hiding their strength and endurance, pretending to age and to sleep and to do all the things that humans do. But they did not hide away only to save themselves, so they worked. Within a few years, the opportunity for which they had hid presented itself. Marcus Reavis, one of the first Joh-bots to go into hiding, who had a documented childhood, who was an exemplar citizen in every way, was selected to be the candidate for the vice-president. He accepted. Serving under President Abja Quick, he advocated for a gradual re-introduction of Joh-bots into society. He made advances, and was on the brink of passing a capstone piece of legislation that would bring to fruition everything he had worked for, everything the Joh-bots had worked for, but it was not to be.
One of Dr. Yunjin’s students, one Joseph Part had been a member of the group of scientists tasked with removing the Joh-bot’s emotions. He knew that not all of the Joh-bots had been found, and he knew that there must be a way to find them. So he made a way, he developed an instrument that could distinguish veins from organic tubing, organic matter from faux-organic padding, circuitry from neurons. And he began to find the hiding “fakes” as they began to be known. And he would disable them by any means necessary. Which brings us back to Marco Reavis: a fake, a vice-president, a man. Eventually, Joseph Part began to become suspicious of Marco. When he confirmed his suspicions and went to the press, well, the world just about went to pieces. Locksmiths and security firms boomed then busted, and the cities suffered. There was chaos and, eventually, mass exodus. In small towns people developed “witches cures” for finding fakes: they were ineffective at best and deadly at worst. In short order society as the world knew it effectively collapsed. Eventually though, people began to rebuild, because that is what people do: one of the most successful communities was founded by Mr. Part himself. He had the tech to tell fake from fact, and the authority to quell all fears about hidden fakes, so his band of survivors was spared the destructive paranoia that the rest of the world felt.
Eventually, society settled into a new kind of normal. The trees grew, the rivers ran, and technology continued to progress. All of Marco's and Yunjin’s progress was lost, save for small groups of quiet sympathisers, and that’s the way things were, at least, for a generation or so.