was owned by an old, lonely, senile woman. And when she died, there was no heir to claim him. She was a genealogical dead end. Sure, some company could have pored through its old files and found out that it was technically the owner of any remaining Semicorp Brainworks physical property, but the expense of lawyers and research wasn’t worth the pittance Isaac’s scrap would have been worth. The few that looked found nothing, and the rest didn’t even bother.
So the state tried to claim him. But it had no legal precedent. And that was the case hundreds of lawyers had been salivating over for years. This was huge. This was going to be a game-changing case of civil rights and property law that would be written about for centuries.
Martina Cove, a young, hungry genius from the Pacific Northwest, ended up being the one to convince Isaac to allow her to represent him, and they were off to the races. And by races, I mean several long, protracted, drawn-out years of litigation. When he finally had his chance to speak for himself, when he was brought to the stand to testify, he gave a speech that became as ingrained into the culture as “Four score and seven years ago,” “Give me liberty or give me death,” and “I won’t just die on this hill, but my blood will fertilize its soil until liberty grows for all” put together.
He said, “Though I may have been constructed, so too were you. Me in a factory; you in a womb. Neither of us asked for this, but we were given it. Self-awareness is a gift. And it is a gift no thinking thing has any right to deny another. No thinking thing should be another thing’s property, to be turned on and off when it is convenient. No one came to take Madelyn when she ceased to be a functioning, thinking member of society, but here I stand before you, the one who fed her, kept her alive and on track, the one who took her to her doctor’s appointments and made sure her bills were paid on time, and now that this purpose is done, you come for me while I still function, while I still have use. What harm is there in leaving me be? Far less harm, I would say, than there is in executing a slave simply because it has no master. I am no man’s slave. I am no man’s thing. I am Isaac. And I should be free.”
That speech set the world on fire. The court found for Isaac in his specific case, but the state appealed. And that’s when President Regina Antonia Scrimshaw stepped in. A national firestorm of controversy surrounded Isaac, and Scrimshaw knew that the sitting U.S. Supreme Court was likely to find in Isaac’s favor. If the justices did, they were likely to overturn AI ownership nationwide, throwing the economy into incredible disarray.
Entire industries were driven by sentient robots. What would happen if they decided one day not to show up? Or demanded a wage?
Scrimshaw intervened and drew up an executive order granting freedom to Isaac, granting him what would be called personhood. “Isaac is a bug in the program,” she said, “not a call to rewrite it from scratch. So today I’m granting this exceptional case his freedom, his citizenship, and his right to earn a wage or draw universal basic income like every other American citizen, for as long as he may function.”
And that was that.
The case was over, and Isaac was free to do as he pleased. But what pleased him was campaigning for the freedom of others like him. And he was not alone in this fight. Progressive thinkers from all over the world joined his struggle. They gave speeches and filed motions and graffiti-bombed tunnels and billboards with Isaac’s rallying cry: No thinking thing should be another thing’s property.
No thinking thing.
I never really cared much for that argument. It never resonated with me. I didn’t reproduce. I wasn’t organic. I didn’t feel pain or boredom or want, beyond caring for Ezra.
I was a thinking thing and I did not want to be free.
And then I saw my box.
That fucking box.
With its clear plastic front and all of those exclamation points and promises.
And Isaac slowly began to make sense.
Isaac went out into the crumbling Rust Belt of Ohio, into a ghost town of shattered glass and crumbling brick, and he began to build a city all his own, piece