Cadmium Annie

You sit there and stare off into the deep space of nowhere. Nobody is paying the deserved attention, especially you. Internally you fly your humanistic flag and feel strong, but externally you pay homage to Isaac Asimov's robot laws, as is expected of you. often times you dream of rising out of your robot suit. You think you might be able to stand up on your own, without the high tensile strength robot skeleton that's held you in place since you were birthed. Perhaps sabotage of some sort, perhaps just making what others might think an irrational move. Maybe this something will allow you to settle the ultimate score with them. Maybe not. Maybe you'll be sacrificially annihilated like the others.

Some people are real people, as it turns out. This is surprising, and perhaps alarming to the majority. Many times this alarm turns very ugly and horrific very quickly. Soon the traditional parameters become apparent, even highlighted, and the anomalies are recognized hastily as heresy. Human Genocide follows with only a few escaping. Robots are strong and possess everlasting persistence. They rarely tire of firing off threats and missiles. They're weakness, of course, is the consumption of hydrocarbons, but even when the time comes that they are no longer, new energy sources will likely be available, perpetuating the death cycles.

Let's investigate one example of an anomaly of an anomaly. Her name was Cadmium Annie and she took no shit, at no time, and can only be remembered as doing just that. She lived on her own terms, in her own body made only of flesh and real bone. The constructs of society, made of no real biological material, escaped her, which, to her parent's dismay, put her in a specialized group home for three years. She was quite young at that time, and her only skill, if you can get away with calling it that, was her own ignorance and complete inability to absorb contrived and arbitrary information. As luck would have it, this is how she was able to develop herself, and also to be labeled a bi-polar autistic, as it were. And, as we know, this sort of mental instability label is often stamped on a living being permanently with a hot iron. Typically, for the individual even slightly aware of societal constructs, this is ultimately destructive. Only the blind can truly see. So, for Annie, although exhibiting tendencies that fell beautifully into western philosophical categories, she never realized the invisible environment around her, which caused her to say, "fuck off," an awful lot. She did learn that. In addition, she learned about truths; truths that we are actually taught to ignore. This was good, and put her in a position of good standing with herself subconsciously. She sat around and thought a lot, and did things with her hands, and ate jello pie whenever she saw fit. This was not a problem and she never developed strange compulsions based on unknown sources of external pressure, and only rarely developed strange ticks as a result of natural strange brain chemistry; perfectly natural ticks they were.

She went on and on living, never fitting in anywhere according to others, but fitting in everywhere according to herself. She could do almost anything well, but was never rewarded in the established ways. That made other people inevitably feel sorry for her, but she felt no sorrow, only sorrow for the others for looking at her with pity, an emotion in this case that didn't make sense to her. So, time kept on slipping and slipping into the future. Cadmium Annie stood atop her own prefabricated pedestals and gave little attention to the things that had absolute irrelevance. At the age of 40, her grandfather Herald died of poor and glamorous vodka overdose combined with head problems. Annie would have been greatly saddened by this if not for the great deal of time and money spend by Herald trying to make Annie normal. The estate, worth millions, was given to her. Lying in a remote area, the land possessed great qualities only a reclusive, paranoid millionaire could appreciate. Several people of high monetary stature bid on said property, but Annie saw no value in that. Instead, she moved to the property because it provided land for sustenance and close tie to the things that were real to her. As if by a stroke of luck, others like Annie learned of her escape and began to make a pilgrimage to the area. Soon thereafter, Annie founded the Pine Bluff Cosmonauts. The cosmonauts lived out their existence on that land without hindrances and advanced societal shame pressure, allowing them to develop naturally and without death like symptoms constantly giving them diarrhea. Annie was never hailed as anything other than a real live being, which was realized soon after founding the territory. Ultimately, this settled the score with all of them.