The Fall
General Meyers strode confidently into the “robot room” as he and his subordinates called it. He’d never needed to be in here before, but he’d decided to deliver the news personally to Eric as a courtesy.
As Sarah had said, Eric was standing at the window looking out at the little preserve. General Meyers smiled smugly.
“We’re shutting down your little experiment and transferring it to new leadership. I think Sarah has proven herself more than capable—“
“It doesn’t matter,” Eric said. “They’re gone.”
***
She finds him sitting by the mango tree. A ruin of mango peels lies beside him, and he is happily working his way through another.
If only they could stay like this forever.
“There’s something I need to show you,” she says. He follows her through the trees and to the opening obediently, eyes wide.
Inside the room, the other person is gone. There is only the box with the images still on it.
“Come and see,” she says. He hesitates, but she smiles reassuringly.
The first image makes him recoil and back away. She catches his hand and pulls him back.
“You need to see the rest.”
He shakes his head. “Why are you showing me this?”
“Because you’re like me,” she whispers. “Because you need to understand.”
“What do we do now?” he asks.
***
Sarah ran through the hall. “Oh, shit, what were you thinking?” she thought. The female robot had freaked out after seeing the pictures and had run back into the enclosure, and now Sarah was forced to make sure the robots didn’t do anything to potentially ruin her job and promotion.
Unfortunately, the first thing she saw when she ran in the room was Eric standing by the window. She skidded to a halt, panting.
“Dr. Hansen! Is there anything—“
“What did you do?” he asked.
“I-I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“Don’t lie to me.” He turned around with a face like stone. “Tell me what you did to them, so that I can fix it.”
“With all due respect, sir, I think we’re beyond that,” Sarah whispered. She pointed to the screen.
The two robots had vanished.
***
“We need to leave,” she says. “It’s not good for us here. They want us to do awful things.”
“But where will we go?” he asks. “What is out there? What if there is nothing out there but more of this?”
“Anything is better than this,” she says. She grabs his hand and pulls him toward the opening again.
They slide carefully down the wall and back into the room with the box.
“Where do we go from here?” he asks, but she has no answer. She can see through one of the walls, though, and she watches other people come and go. They seem to not see anything in this room.
All of them have one thing in common: a white covering on their body. Sometimes, they have different colors underneath or on their feet or in their hair, but they all have the same long white thing on over top. She looks down at her body. Suddenly, she wants to have one too. It feels strange not to look the same as the others outside.
“We should put these on our bodies, so we look like them,” she says, pointing towards a coat hook with some on in the corner.
He nods, and she notices that he has wrapped his arms around his body. She thinks he must think they look odd too without the coverings. Looking at the passersby, she imitates exactly how the covering looks on them and puts it on.
She doesn’t want to look out of place.
***
“Where could they have gone?” Eric slammed his fist on the table. “What the hell did you do to them?”
“I can explain!” Sarah cried. She frantically ran over to the monitors and switched through the cameras.
“I don’t need an explanation of your stupidity. I just need to find them and then fix this.” He pushed her out of the way.
“Go find something else to screw up,” he growled, and Sarah backed away with tears in her eyes.
***
Finally, no more people walk by, and they carefully leave. She decides they need to head back where the people came from. Maybe that will lead them out.
People look at them strangely but say nothing as they walk down the hall.
***
He finally found them on the camera monitor after what felt like hours of fruitless searching. They were wearing lab coats and walking down the hall. He watched, astonished, as they strode down the hall and brazenly walked through doors that other scientists held for them.
They made it through the main research area before finally stopping at a keycard-locked door. It was only two in the afternoon, so no one was exiting the building yet. There was no one else around to let them through this time.
If he pulled the alarm now, there was no way they’d be able to escape. Security would recapture them within minutes and they would be returned to the observation area.
Where they would stay and be reset day after day.
And the government would almost certainly take over the project soon and disregard any semblance of their character.
They would be tools.
He watched the screen as they conferred urgently. The female attempted to open the door as she’d seen the other scientists do while the male peered through the glass window.
Eric sighed and pressed the button.
***
The door swings open. She’s not sure what opened it, but she can’t think about that now. She pulls his hand and tugs him through.
Her first thought is she is glad that there is a sun out here too.
All around her are sunlight and trees and large shiny objects.
A bird swoops by and she takes a deep breath and smiles.
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Leaving the Garden of Eden. Source.
Author's Note: So, this is it, the end of my Storybook! Thank you for reading all the way through, and I am very grateful for anyone who has taken their time to comment! As you can see, this last installment goes back to the Biblical aspect again and follows the robots' departure from their "garden." In the original Bible story, Adam and Eve are forced to leave the garden when it is discovered that Eve ate fruit off the Tree of Knowledge. The snake (devil) encouraged her, but ultimately, she paid the price and passed the burden on to Adam as well when she gave a piece of the fruit to him to eat also. I reinterpreted the story so that the robot Adam and Eve decide to leave of their own free will after they discover the truth about their existence. Their "God" is the head scientist Eric Hansen himself, of course, and in the Bible story, God is very angry and banishes them from the garden after finding out their transgression. However, I have always wondered if He knew their fate as he is omnipotent and omniscient. Therefore, I had Eric help them make their way out of the garden because he wants them to leave and have their own fate. I left it ambiguous as to their ultimate fate at the end of the story because it is very bleak and foreboding at the end of the original, but in the end, Adam and Eve survive and prosper, so I hope that gives you an idea of what I envision happening to them!
Bibliography: "The Fall of Man." Genesis. Web Source.