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She opens her eyes.
Light streams in and bathes her body, and she smiles. Birds wheel and chirp about while flowers bloom through the soft dirt.
Another beautiful day, she thinks.
Walking over to the pond, she peers in and sees someone staring back at her from the water. Smiling, she reaches in to touch the person, but only feels rocks and fish fins.
Maybe next time, she thinks absentmindedly, already wandering away to the grove. Perhaps the other person would be there today. Although she can gather fruit herself, it’s more fun with someone else there.
When she gets there, he’s already there, knocking down mangoes onto the ground. She waves at him and begins picking them up, biting into the best-looking ones.
They spend the rest of the day harvesting mangoes until all the trees are bare. She eats so many she swears she’ll never eat another again. Tomorrow she’ll eat pears, she thinks sleepily as she lies down by the pond.
He opens his eyes.
Stretching carefully, he makes his way lightly down the tree trunk. He prefers sleeping in trees to the ground. Something about being high up makes him feel more secure.
Smiling, he heads to the river. He picks up a rock and tries to balance it on the water. Leaves and feathers, he’s found, will float, but so far he hasn’t succeeded in making the rock float. Ah well, he thinks as yet another rock falls to the bottom. Better luck next time.
He heads to the grove and begins picking mangoes. Soon, the other person arrives and she smiles and waves at him before eating some of his fruit. He had gotten angry before when she had done that, but she always shared her food as well, so now he had stopped complaining.
After they had eaten their fill, he climbed back up the tree and watched the stars.
Another good day.
“This is taking too long,” she snapped. “Do you really want to reset them again?”
“Patience,” he sighed. “What is the point in releasing them if they’re not ready? We need them to be perfect.”
“Fine. But, honestly, I think you’re never going to be satisfied with their progress.”
“Thank you for your concern.” He turned and left the control room while she swore under her breath.
She opens her eyes.
Light streams in and bathes her body, and she smiles.
Another beautiful day.
She waves at the person in the pond on her way to the orchard, and it waves back. For some reason, she’s craving pears today.
He opens his eyes.
Stretching carefully, he makes his way lightly down the tree trunk. Smiling, he heads down to the river. Balancing rocks won’t work, he’s decided. Surely, he can hold his own weight on the water, though. But try as he might, the water won’t hold his weight, and at last he gives up and heads to the orchard.
“Reset them.”
She swiveled around in her chair. “What do you want from them? They’re robots! Computer programs! They’re not going to be perfect replicas of life, you know. If you wanted that, you should have just had more children.”
“I created them, Sarah. Of course, I know this. I want them to be more human. More real.”
“How do you know this isn’t as real as they get?”
“Just trust me.”
She opens her eyes.
He opens his eyes.
“We’re missing something,” he mutters. “They need something else. Something more.”
“We’ve given them everything they could ever want,” she said. “They have food, shelter, water, even animals for them to play with! They don’t need anything else.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
She opens her eyes.
Light streams in and bathes her body, and she smiles. Walking to the pond, she spots a pretty flower. She thinks maybe the person in the water will appreciate it, so she tosses it in, but all it does is make the person run away. She frowns, but puts it from her mind and heads to the grove.
Suddenly, she stops. A bird is on the ground. She leans over and prods it, trying to wake it up. It wasn’t supposed to sleep now.
But it would not open its eyes, and then she notices the trail of red smudged on its feathers and pooling beside it.
“Get that thing out of there! They’re not supposed to be exposed to anything traumatic! Who in the hell left that dead bird there anyway? Someone should have cleaned it up!” Sarah snarled. “Now we’re going to have to reset them again—“
“No,” he said, watching the monitor, transfixed. “Don’t reset them. Let’s see what happens.”
Its body is cold and still instead of warm and fluttering. What has happened to it? In all her days, she has never seen any creature behave like this.
Carefully, she pulls out a feather from the small bird. No reaction. She examines the feather, snow white tinged with red.
Somehow, it was more beautiful than anything else in the garden.
Dead bird in paradise. Source.
Author's Note: I recently finished watching Westworld, a fantastic show about robot AIs becoming human. I really liked the premise of that show about the growth of robots into progressively more human creatures, and I immediately thought of the creation of Adam and Eve. I wondered what it would be like for them trying to figure everything out when they know absolutely nothing about their world. So, I was inspired by that to write a story based on the Biblical stories of Adam and Eve but with a sci-fi twist. For my research, I read "Extracts from Adam's Diary" and "Eve's Diary" by Mark Twain. He retells the story of Adam and Eve using more humor and from their perspective. I used his stories to think more about how Adam and Eve would feel in the garden and what they would do all day. I don't want to give too much away about the rest of the story, but this Adam and Eve are robots a la Westworld. The introduction explains more about how the robots were created and how the creators tried to make them more human. There will be more about why they are making them human-like in later stories as well as further retellings of what happens to Adam and Eve in the Bible.
Bibliography: "Extracts from Adam's Diary" by Mark Twain. Web Source.
"Eve's Diary" by Mark Twain. Web Source.
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