The unexpected introduction had stirred something within Wynonna. Wynonna knew as a machine, she was incapable of feeling emotions. She was made one hundred percent from inanimate things. Yet she was feeling all these things! How could she forget? What she felt wasn’t love, nor happiness, neither could it be fear or shock or surprise. But if there was a machine-equivalent term for the sensations, it would have been akin to all of those things.

Wynonna penned down her feelings in her notebook: I am made purely from non-living things. Yet I have thoughts and I have feelings. I mimic breathing and, in pretending, I become real.

When Wynonna thought about how the boy had guessed who she was, what she was, she had experienced a slight elation, for lack of a better word, at the conception of something novel … no, it wasn’t novelty that had fascinated her so deeply. It was … how unexpected … There had been nothing within her system which could have led her to the most minute suspicion that the boy was well on the way to discovering her true identity. Yet he did; it was the most wonderful surprise.

There was only one explanation staring at her in the face. The one she didn’t want to admit. Despite how perfect she wanted to think of herself, she wasn’t. Yet. Just because there was apparently some flaw in her system, it didn’t mean she couldn’t ever be flawless.

I am not perfect. That is a fact. I am not perfect, but I can learn, maybe not to be perfect, but to be more like me.

She brought the pen to her chin—a typical human habit while conducting deep thinking. How do I learn? She wrote. Oh, that was a good one. In future, if anyone ever finds this diary, this portion would be one of the most interesting to read. I can learn only from the information that has been fed to me; the information available to me. She spent a while more pondering before setting her pen to the paper again. Until I step out of this room, there is no way I can experience the world for myself, so I am barred from learning from experience, or true learning, the exciting kind, the risky sort—the only real way there is to learn. Writing is such a primitive act, yet it is so powerful.

Was it because Wynonna didn’t understand it? Even at this moment, she was still trying to decipher Jordan’s decision. Humans had never encountered such a predicament as the one he had faced. Even if they contemplated such an atypical situation, only few had ever recorded it down. The sparse data from which Wynonna could feed on was insufficient for her to process. She found it unfamiliar—the notion that there was something she couldn’t make sense of.

Wynonna tried her hand at metaphors—something she had always found particularly challenging.

Maybe it was because her mind was always occupied with mathematical computations that she found it difficult to switch gears. For some reason, all the ideas that came to her had a mathematical reference.

An empty relation on the empty set is reflexive. Wynonna didn’t know how to continue, so she started on another one.

The sum of all integers is infinite. However, the sum of all positive integers is finite. What am I trying to say? Wynonna decided she would come back to it later.

By reordering the terms of a conditionally convergent series, you can converge the sum into any number you want. Isn’t that magical? It’s like you hold the power to create anything you want … She stopped there.

This was hopeless.

Just what was the reason, why had Jordan chosen not to rat her out? It probably had something to do with human irrationality, Wynonna presumed. All her calculations and recalculations pointed to the same conclusion. Based on Jordan’s profile and the facial expressions she had read in those critical moments, all signs led to the prediction that he would immediately reveal Wynonna’s state to his beloved sister. That would have been the most logical option.

Wynonna thought to herself that it was moments like those when she felt the most human. It was thrilling, exhilarating. Being at the mercy of another, anticipating, waiting for a decision to be made evoked vulnerability. She felt so fragile in the few moments while it lasted. Then she was back to normal again after he reached his decision. The former experience was indicative of her artificial humanity, the latter, characteristic of her mechanical being.

The robot went round the shelves to gather a few coloured flasks and prepared the chemicals she needed. Then Wynonna sat back down in her corner with the deep tray she had used to carry the things, flipped it over for a makeshift table. She started mixing the liquids and watched them swirl into fusion as she pondered. There weren't many of the solutions she needed. The next time Ilya came to visit, Wynonna would ask for more. She needed more. They needed more, far more, for what they were planning.

It would be wrong to alter the genetic makeup of a human, even if she had the capability. That was what Wynonna had been programmed to think. Though Ilya had technically been her creator, it didn’t mean they necessarily shared the same views. The discrepancy came from the fact that Wynonna’s general knowledge was extracted from a variety of databases around the world. Inside her system, they were consolidated to best reflect the most popular, in the sense of most generalised, human views about the world.

Ilya had made this decision after little contemplation, she later informed Wynonna. Having remained within the confines of her town for most of her life, she knew she was severely lacking in general knowledge and worldly views. If Wynonna was to survive for generations, it was crucial that such a system be embedded in her, in preparation of any new cultural invasions that may infiltrate their land. Some things had the tendency to do that, Ilya had realised. The internet was an example … as well as globalisation, though her own village had been spared of it save for the fact that the junkyard right by the town was solid evidence of the phenomena, had extended its reach to an astonishing number of communities just like hers.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Wynonna was built with an extensive library of human perceptions and opinions, with the scales tipped slightly towards Ilya’s in order to portray the expected outward behaviour of her creator. Only she was sure of her own consciousness. It was too dangerous even for her own creator to know.

Humanoid robots would benefit more from non-omniscience than its opposite; they were made to exhibit human likeness in order to seem natural, and humans had far from perfect-knowledge. Wynonna’s access to the database conjured a canvas on which her new experiences would be printed upon. Something like a fabricated history of her existence interwoven with whatever Ilya had communicated to her about everything that had happened in her life up until the present.

When the girl had deemed the machine ready to be deployed, Ilya had not only fitted Wynonna with a special system, but she had also done the same to herself. In addition to the brain, the nanochip would connect to Ilya’s retinas and her cochlea. Wynonna would never miss out on anything Ilya saw or heard. The sense of smell and taste were less critical so Ilya had decided to forgo those two. Touch was extremely pertinent, but posed too great of a challenge to tackle within a reasonable timeframe. In the end, Wynonna was only equipped with Ilya’s sight and hearing. Though it was limiting, it worked well enough in an instantaneous feedback system with a recording function so Wynonna would never forget. There would never be a need to update her on what was happening around Ilya when the data streamed into the nanosecond.

For the most part, Wynonna remained the robot she knew Ilya was comfortable with. She never made any comment, nor carried out any action that would raise her creator’s alarm bells. From the conception of her existence, Wynonna had understood that, before the explicit instructions she had been programmed with, she had to first ensure the preservation of her life … at least until Ilya died. The first step towards ensuring that was never revealing that she indeed had a consciousness of her own.

Wynonna had reached two conclusions from analysing many pieces of reports and media portrayals she gathered about the human sentiment towards artificial intelligence. One, humans were often amazed with the level of intelligence that machines could demonstrate. In such cases, they were often treated with praise, trust and even friendship. The second piece of wisdom she acquired was far less optimistic: The first axiom held true only to the extent that machine-level intelligence did not exceed human-level intelligence. Once that threshold was reached, even the most amiable machine would turn into a terror—that was how humans were wired to think.

Wynonna had been born with the knowledge of the purpose of her creation—to take over Ilya but only after the girl died a natural death. Any non-adherence to the rules would result in her automatic destruction.

Her creator had prepared a proper room for her, fitting for a girl like her. Being a robot, Wynonna had no desires, nor emotions. Hence, she acted purely based on sophisticated conjectures of what the humans around her might be feeling.

Although she had been pre-set with the general human consensus, Wynonna’s learning system had never stopped working. At conception, she had been granted access to a subset of the Internet instead of the full Internet—a reasonable precaution necessary to ensure the health of Wynonna’s information processing system. It was essentially a large database with information filtered by Ilya, for the creator possessed a clear vision for how she intended the bot to develop. Later, Wynonna gained newer, more context-specific insights from the various interactions Ilya had with others. In particular, the conversations she had with Dimitri and his long-lost friends were stimulating. Often, Wynonna gave their words much thought even after the conversation had long concluded. Ilya and Dimitri had different views of what constituted a human being, it seemed.

Generally, it seemed Dimitri’s was representative of the general public sentiment all over the world, while Ilya’s was reflective of the village sentiment. The former’s definition of a human was dependent on the physical characteristics of the species—rather rudimentary. Conversely, though Ilya’s village seemed like a backward society that globalisation and modernization had entirely skipped, save for their boons of mechanical limbs granted by her gifts, they possessed far greater wisdom which facilitated forward thinking which freed them from any misery of unbelonging sorely suffered by the former.

Perhaps that wasn’t entirely due to their insight, Wynonna thought. Though the few among them (who had no missing limbs and were generally healthy and well) suffered no discrimination, there was undoubtedly a slight distinction between them and the mechanically ailing. The lack of distinguishing among the latter, however, was merely a conditioned state of being. How would one be able to categorise groups of individuals when practically everyone was different in a different way? They had been coaxed into non-discriminating.

The definition of the human is changing, Wynonna thought. It’s evolving, just like in the field of robotics. No, the same could be said for almost anything. A Buddhist teaching suddenly sprung to mind: Everything is impermanent. There have been many claims that there’s no such thing as absolute stillness, as if everything and everyone is trapped in a vortex, destined to succumb to the continuous flux. It didn’t make sense … to try to make sense of anything when nothing could be said to be eternally true.

Yet they tried. It was not uncommon for humans to practically give up their lives in order to try. That in itself was beautiful.

In understanding human weakness, Wynonna had found a semblance of feeling within her. She wouldn’t go so far as to call it emotion, but if she had been a human, the right word to describe what she felt at that moment was excitement. She had discovered a newfound appreciation for humans. As insignificant and as small as they were in the great cosmos, they believed wholeheartedly that they mattered, that whatever they did had meaning to a certain degree. It’s the reason why every day so many people strive to make the most of their lives, or if they don’t seem to contribute, that’s only because they’re maximising their own happiness instead of others’ so it remains largely unmonitored. Wynonna felt as if she were a spirit watching ants try to move a mountain. On rare occasions, they managed to, only slightly, but there was definite proof.

Wynonna had once come across a story about a colony of ants who pushed for so long, they eroded a small part of the mountain and congratulated themselves for having accomplished what they had set out to do. Little did they know, the other side of the mountain often remained untouched, undisturbed. And even the side where they managed to dig away some soil would in time see new dirt falling down, leaving no trace of their past successes. That didn’t matter though. It was just as well, most ants would have probably died before that happened, and the new ones would have never known what came before. Not blessed with any warning, though cursed with the ambition and blind optimism of their predecessors, they would try again. And again. And again.

Wynonna was ready to watch all of it happen. After all, her purpose was to look after humans, not judge them for their choices.