Watching Robots Cry

"Okay, bad joke." Deckard says in Blade Runner to Rachael. "I made a bad joke. You're not a replicant."

She knows he's lying to her, though, and she stays silent. A tear rolls down her cheek, highlighted by the dusty glow of apartment 9732. After a moment, Harrison Ford's character, a newly ex-retired ex-cop, tells her that he's going to make her a drink.

She watches him go to the bar, still in silence. I pause the movie on a shot of her face and give myself a moment to think.

Blade Runner is a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It's set in a vision of 2019 with flying cars, near-human robots, and off-planet colonization, although coca-cola advertising is still around. It's a familiar touch to a rainy world of strangeness, where things are, at the risk of sounding terribly clichéd, not always what they seem.

Rachael is crying because she has just learned that she is not human, and although Blade Runner and many other works of science fiction challenge us to evaluate what, precisely, makes a human being human, Rachael's revelation is still a terrible shock for her.

Captain Picard addresses an uneasy crew in the episode Datalore in Star Trek: The Next Generation on the subject of Data, their android companion whose origins fall below scrutiny when the Enterprise locates the planet where Data was created. "Legitimate questions about any of this need not be asked apologetically," he tells La Forge and Riker. "If it feels awkward to be reminded that Data is a machine, just remember that we are merely a different variety of machine -- in our case, electro-chemical in nature."

The equivalence of Data the mechanical android and human beings as electro-chemical machines sets Data's crewmates visibly at ease. It's not a comparison that would be very welcome in the world of Blade Runner, where advanced robots, called "replicants," are outlawed on Earth and hunted by blade runners such as Deckard, and it's a concept that is sure to be questioned by philosophy classrooms for years to come. What makes a human being human? Can artificial constructions have this aspect of humanity? Classic sci-fi questions.

I don't think of robots, though, when I see Rachael cry in Blade Runner. I think of questions about myself and people like me. I'm someone who struggles to identify and experience her own emotions, and that part of myself has been a crucial difficulty I feel that I've had with relating to other people for my entire life.

I remember sitting in a circle of students at college and watching each of them cry, and, while sitting there completely dry-eyed, wondering what to do about this situation. It's a scene I could easily picture any number of science fiction androids in. "Query," I could even hear Data say, "what is going on here? And what should I do about it?"

I won't belabor my point. It's easy to see a kinship with almost-human characters in fiction, to find their desire to be human compelling. I have days where I too wish that I was normal. It's enough to question the essence of my own humanity. Are emotions and emotional intelligence what make us "human," as so many people seem to believe? If so, I'l take that drink.

#sciencefiction #mentalillness