The Employees

I look like a human, and feel the way humans do. I consist of the same parts. Perhaps all that's needed is for you to change my status in your documents? Is it a question of name? Could I be human if you called me so?

You'd probably say it was a small world, but not if you have to clean it.

You can say what you want, but I know you don’t want us to become too, well, what? Too human? Too living? But I like being alive. I look out at the endless deep outside the panorama windows. I see a sun. I burn the way the sun burns. I know without a doubt that I’m real. I may have been made, but now I’m making myself.

Why do I have all these thoughts if the job I’m doing is mainly technical? Why do I have these thoughts if the reason I’m here is primarily to increase production? From what perspective are these thoughts productive? Was there an error in the update? If there was, I’d like to be rebooted.

Do you think anyone's going to remember us? Who remembers those who were never born, yet live anyway?

It’s me and it’s not me at the same time. I’ve had to change completely in order to assimilate this new part that you say is also me. Which is flesh and yet not flesh. When I woke up after the operation I felt scared, but that soon wore off. Now I’m performing better than anyone. I’m a very useful tool to the crew. It gives me a certain position. The only thing I haven’t been able to get used to yet are the dreams. I dream that there’s nothing where the add-on is. That the add-on has detached itself, or perhaps was never a part of me. That it possesses a deep-seated antipathy towards me. That it hovers in the air above me and then starts to attack. When I wake up from one of these dreams, the add-on aches a bit, and it feels as though I’ve got two: one where it’s supposed to be, and, floating just above it, another one that can’t be seen with the naked eye, but which comes into being in the darkness where I sleep, arising out of my sleep.

I know without a doubt that I’m real. I may have been made, but now I’m making myself.

I am a pomegranate ripe with moist seeds, each seed a killing I'm going to carry out at some future time. When I've no more seeds inside me, when there's nothing left but flesh, I want to meet the man who made me.

Am I human or humanoid? Have I been dreamt into being?

We don’t fly under a sky here, but through a slumbering infinity.

I believe in the future. I think you need to imagine a future and then live in it. I believe in unfathomable quantities of nourishment.

But I look like a human, and feel the way humans do. I consist of the same parts... Is it a question of name? Could I be a human if you called me one?

All I want is to be assimilated into a collective, human community where someone braids my hair with flowers and white curtains sway in a warm breeze; where every morning I wake up and drink a glass of chilled iced tea, drive a car across a continent, kick the dirt, fill my nostrils with the air of the desert and move in with someone, get married, bake cookies, push a stroller, learn to play an instrument, dance a waltz.

I’m like a plant where everything’s withered away apart from a single green shoot that’s still alive, and this shoot is my body and mind, and my mind is like a hand, it touches rather than thinks.

Every day, my hands yearn to dig deep into soil so that I might lower myself into its certainty, and the earth receive my death and make me its own.

That’s why I’ve come to see you today, in the hope that there might be some other function in which I’d have less responsibility, without having to relate to the overall workflow to the same extent. I’d like to be assigned to that kind of position. I realize the abilities I’ve been allocated won’t be fully exploited in that case, but does the pain I feel not mean anything? I venture to suggest that such pain impacts the quality of my work and moreover may negatively influence the work of my colleagues. OK. I see. So I wouldn’t have the power of speech? No, I understand. I hereby consent. When

Shopping had a kind of numbing effect on me, and now that it's no longer something I do, I've started having thoughts and feelings that have turned out to be sad.

My dead body will have to lie here with the grass in its fist, while I go on in some other place.

If you’ll make an effort to talk, you say, we’ll make an effort to listen. We want to help you, you say. That way, you get a foot inside the door. You offer to help, but what you want is gratitude.

Some of us are made to connect with each other, others with no one.

I carry out my work with complete apathy, sometimes even contempt.

Could I be human if you called me so?

What I miss most from home is shopping. It sounds a bit silly, I know. If ever I couldn’t grasp that something was happening, like when I got the job here and departure time was coming up, I’d go out and buy stuff in preparation for it, and in that way I understood it was for real. I understood impending events through shopping. I understood the circumstances through the items that characterized them. Shopping had a kind of numbing effect on me, and now that it’s no longer something I do, I’ve started having thoughts and feelings that have turned out to be sad.

It's impossible to predict at the best of times how things are going to pan out. You ask to what extent someone like me, who has collected large amounts of data over a long period of time, can calculate the most likely course of the conflict. Well, I'm afraid I can't. Any forward-moving enterprise is going to contain an element of chaos.

Those of us from Earth, we can hardly talk to each other. We're weighed down with memories of where we came from and what we left behind.

Since I'm no longer a senior employee, but an old employee, everyone else has lost interest in me, and this has been an extremely liberating experience. In my mind, I live at the top of the hill. I seem almost to drift through the ship in a state of light-headedness.

I just seem to alienate those around me, though I don't mean to. For one thing, I know I'm very clumsy. Whether on or off the job, everything takes time and effort for me. Nothing comes naturally to me here, everything feels like such a big ask, and every face is a void. But perhaps it's always been that way for me, even before I came on board.

Why should I work with someone I don't like? What good could possibly come from socializing with them?