a laugh and a shake of her head answered him. “no,” lucrezia added, “not too obvious.” a small tease wouldn’t go amiss, would it? in turn, the intention gave way to a thought, another question: did androids have a sense of humour? was it developed alongside sentience or something injected into their code? “it makes sense. although appreciating the complexity and beauty of the human body is very different from doing the same thing with the human mind.” that connor failed to allow the same consideration, the same admiration, to his own kind still seemed different to her. he had been created by people, by the same humans he could now talk to and look at, touch and feel; men and women couldn’t whether their beliefs grounded them in a rational atheism or the blind devotion of a faith. “recreating a living thing isn’t outside the realms of possibilities. cloning… it’s not possible yet but it could be one day. human cloning, i mean.” was it so daunting to humankind? it certainly would administer a massive blow, set shifts into motion from which they wouldn’t recover. “if you could, would you like to experience what we do? pain and misery?”
He stared at her, wondering for a second if she was laughing at him (it wouldn’t be the first time someone did). There were things that people found sometimes a bit too awkward or just plain weird about him, Connor didn’t see them, but apparently, these things were there and were part of his personality. “And what makes you think I haven’t thought about that? I have thought of everything. The human mind is an entire wonder of its own, but as amazing as it is, it’s also the most fragile thing, but that’s a conversation for another time. A longer one.” Because he could go for quite some time talking about this. “But you see, that’s where you’re wrong. Cloning is not the same as creating. It’s easy to make a copy of something that already exists, but creating it out of nothing? that’s the difficult part. I could replicate a painting to perfection, but it won’t have the essence than the original did and even if one of these days people actually manage to create an actual human as they create machines, it would lack a soul.” It was the way he saw it and it was the way he saw himself as well. No matter how human he looked or how human he acted, a soul was something that he was always going to lack. “I don’t think anyone wants to experience pain.” But misery? that he knew, but it was something that had decided to hide from others. “I mean, if you could stop feeling these two things, wouldn’t you?”
