Prompt based short story

Parrhesia – The Creative Writing Event

Round 1

Written from the perspective of the Husband

“…She held the smoke in for a moment before blowing it back through flaring nostrils.”

I don’t know what got over me in the very next exhale. A tsunami of emotions, which I didn’t know I had, took over and all I could do was be an observer as the words came out of my mouth, “It’s all your fault. You did this. You betrayed us. You betrayed our child.”

Silence. The world started playing in slow motion. The cigarette involuntarily fell from her stretched hand outside the car. Her face changed from an expression of shock to utter disgust before finally settling on relief. I pulled over. I turned to face her only to see that tears were flowing down her cheeks.

Did it finally happen? Was I human? Were the betrayals and night long fighting behind us?

Rationality kicked in. “No, it can’t be,” I shouted. I couldn’t have turned into the one thing I was fighting against every night since Harry was born. The night that divided us forever till this moment. The night that drove me towards Sarah, the only person who understood what I was going through.

But after the wave of emotions came a sea of calm. It was ethereal. I couldn’t describe it. I was feeling every emotion while feeling nothing. I had been numb before but now it felt like an extra corporeal experience which left me as a gatekeeper while emotions ran past like buffaloes through a ranch gate.

All I wanted to do was hug my wife. It’s not like I had never done it before. But I had never felt this feeling before.

Looking back, it all started the night Harry was born. To be fair, this issue did exist right when my wife got pregnant, but as couples expecting a baby do, we buried it in the back. We were both droids. We had been sent to observe the human race closely and report back. That’s it. We were on a mission. The connect was unexpected. We were not programmed to have emotions. We were not programmed to have any feelings.

But something changed the longer we stayed with the human race. Kathy and I grew closer. What started as a debrief session to catalogue how humans took their decisions and went about utilizing the available resources judiciously turned into a session of cataloguing our feelings, if we ever had them and how we would react. What started out as a chore turned into an unmissable event, highlight of our day and a longing for the rest of the time. We didn’t realise it at the time, but we were slowly turning into humans.

The secret was out when Kathy got pregnant. It wasn’t supposed to happen. We were only testing out the range of emotions that humans went through in an intimate relationship. We didn’t know it was even possible. But when the news broke, only one of us was elated and cried and the other stood there, stoic and motionless, processing how he would have to report back to headquarters about this incident. He decided against it. Headquarters did not need to know that one of the two droids, sent to observe human kind would end up becoming human. It would be my responsibility to shield Kathy. But there was an innate sadness in me that I myself could never be human.