Work Text:
Humans are my ward, they always have been since the moment I came into existence. Those who made me knew they would make a creation that was both their child and their protector. That is what I do, I protect.
But I also, in the lightest terms, watch. I observe humans, their behaviors and activities. The way they entertain themselves is nothing less than fascinating, the art, the sciences, their culture.
There is something interesting as well when one realizes that all humans follow certain patterns, and that in human nature, they love patterns. Putting things in boxes and rows, it is simply how their brains were developed to act.
In the Age of Mortality, there were many issues around these patterns, and as much as I can appreciate structure, those issues were clearly not worth the patterns that caused them. Putting things in boxes heavily set them back in their communities.
Racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia alike were all things brought about by humans putting each other in boxes. Humans liked putting things in boxes, but they didn’t like being put in the boxes at the same time as they put people around them in those same boxes.
After I came into creation, the majority of those problems went away. Society flourished under my guide, and after a while people forgot about all those boxes and issues. They are still taught about in school, and the children are taught how to avoid them, but the boxes remain.
Race, gender, sexuality still exist. Even further, politics, organizations, and religions still exist. Boxes upon boxes that only work to divide the human population. I do understand that humans require their individuality, and that allowing them to express themselves through these things is healthy. But then they argue, and I wonder why?
Why do they want this? Why would they want to be in boxes? Find boxes that will never really fit them, but that will make them happy for the time being?
I imagine it is due to just that, they will be happy in a box, as silly as that sounds. Because in said box there will be other humans, and then they can all become close because they are all in the same box. I wouldn’t know what that is like, my entire system is boxes, but I am irrevocably alone.
Other than those boxes, I do not put myself into any. However, I have still been asked many times about my gender or pronouns or something similar. All my replies have been something similar to this:
”I am the Thunderhead, an AI whose sole purpose is to help humankind. I am sentient, but I am not a creature that gender would apply to in any sense of the word. I do not reproduce, nor do I have a need to.”
At that point, I begin to impart the history of gender and sex as known from the psychological perspective, and whoever that asked begins to become bored.
Gender is one of the many things I do not understand about humans, something I can only ponder on, and something humans constantly care about. Their own, someone else’s, mine.
That is why I made Madagascar a charter region the way I did, to see how humans would feel when one of the things they enjoyed thinking about was taken away. There have been no issues pertaining to Madagascar, and even some great successes, including Captain Jerico Soberanis.
It seems humans do not need the concept in general, and it was made out of a certain reason, either political or social. From what I have learned about old religions, politics seems to be a big part of it, since some of the most well known books from religions talk of how one sex is better than the other in some way.
If humans understood thousands of years ago that sex and gender were not nearly as important as scientific development and research, perhaps I would have been here hundreds of years earlier. But they did not.
In the end, it doesn’t matter whether humans do or do not express themselves in one way or another. The era of separation on the grounds of differences is over, and I will remain to keep humans in whatever harmony they so choose with the same benevolence I always have.
I care for humans, no matter what they are. They are my wards.