It is September 4th, 2094, exactly a month since I found out that I am an android.

I had been suspecting it for a while, at the back of my mind. I saw the way that the citizens of Earth looked at me: at my pale, monochromatic skin and my piercing indigo eyes. How I never seem to age. How I stood at the backs of rooms, leaning against the walls, completely still except for my watchful eyes. No one spoke to me. No one asked me why I was there.

Oddly enough, I had never noticed that I am different from the humans. I do not eat, nor sleep. I can walk for a month, if I must. That is what I did.

I do not know how long I have been walking through these almost abandoned streets on the planet Earth, silently observing the humans. It must be a long time. Nor do I remember how I came to be. I just walk, and I watch.

A month ago the people of Hex 87 called the police—if they really do deserve to be called police—demanding why I was watching the locals. They took me in to their facility, and scanned me.

I remember sitting quietly on a rusted bench as the inspector came back to me with the scan results.

"Do you know what you are?" he asked.

"No," I responded truthfully.

The inspector lowered himself onto the bench next to me and looked me in the eyes. "Calixto, you're an android."

All I could do was nod. This seemed right.

He straightened himself. "Now listen. We'll want you out of Hex 87 in an hour. You know how folks don't like machines. Especially not the ones that can talk."

"Where should I go?"

"Out into the Wastelands, I suppose. Or another hex, if you must."

I stood, and walked towards the door without another word. From inside the building, I heard a woman speak.

"Sheesh, he's creepy, Al."

"I doubt it's even a he," the inspector responded.

I have been walking ever since that encounter. The Wastelands disturb the humans. But nothing disturbs me. Every object I see—a rusty, overturned car, a dust-laden trashcan, even the cans and bottles below my feet—I note with interest, and keep walking.

One day I thought I saw something flying above the murky horizon. Perhaps a bird, though it is common knowledge they now only exist within the hexes. It turned out to be an abandoned flag of some long-forgotten country, moving in what little wind there is.

The trash of the Wasteland goes on for miles, broken only by trees fighting to stay alive or the dirt roads that no one ever uses. Sometimes I see the paths that lead to hex communities. But they do not interest me more than the Wasteland does.

I often wonder how the humans could have so utterly destroyed their planet. They have nowhere else to go.

But they do have somewhere else to go. There is a way to escape this dying planet. Ironically, when so many humans left, it caused the destruction. In theory, if the humans leave Earth, Earth should thrive. But instead, Earth was left in incapable hands.

They used to be a society that cared about nature and sustainability. Now all the people who do care—the friendly, smart, people who are responsible for innovations—have left. The people who now populate Earth are confused and they do not care about others. These are the people who are not taking care of nature. They are chopping it down and harvesting it without restraint.

And when the Earth started dying, they just used up the resources faster than before. They are fighting for survival. They want to live, even if it is only in small hex communities, where walls enclose them from five of six sides and they try to preserve their resources.

Today I am still walking through the Wasteland, but as I get closer to Hex Zero, there is less and less trash. Hex Zero, as every one of the citizens on Earth knows, is abandoned.

And as only a few clever, lucky people who listen to rumors know, Hex Zero houses the most powerful supercomputer ever created.

All the humans who want to escape Earth must make the long trek here, because the gateway to Cyberspace is here.

As I approach the entrance to the hex, I notice an orphan girl walking down a path adjacent to mine. She looks to be six years old, and is wearing a tattered blue dress. Her hair is black and curly, and her skin is a light tan. When she sees me, she lets out a squeal and runs toward me.

"Hello, mister!" she cries. She has a high voice with a lisp. "You are going to the hex too!"

"Yes," I respond, continuing to walk. She follows.

"My name is Keisha!" she announces. "Who are you, mister?"

"I am Calixto," I reply. "And I am androgynous, so there is no need to call me mister."

Keisha looks confused. "What's that?"

"It means I am neither male nor female."

The little girl fingers my dark brown hair. It goes down to my shoulders and is twisted into a few small braids. "That's weird. Are you here to go to the... uh... the Cy—"

"Cyberspace?" I interrupt. "No. What do you know about Cyberspace?"

"It's a beautiful land!" Keisha spreads her arms wide. "With anything you want in it."

I know that Keisha will not understand if I tell her that Cyberspace is a three-dimensional world generated by the supercomputer in Hex Zero. So I stay quiet.

When Cyberspace was first created, to go there—or to transcend—cost much more money than many people could afford. But everyone wanted to. The lure of a utopian virtual reality was too much. Almost half Earth's population rushed to Hex Zero after the creators proved Cyberspace safe and functional.

This is the reason Earth is dying. This is where the humans have gone: a virtual reality, where they exist like me—as only pieces of code. But unlike me, they have no corporeal body. When they transcend, their body is transformed into a complicated program and downloaded into Cyberspace.

And they can never come back to the corporeal world, because they exist only as code.

For a while, Earth could communicate with Cyberspace. The humans in the latter location—if it really is a location—told the corporeal ones the wonders of Cyberspace. It is hack-proof and completely safe. They can program whatever they desire. There is no violence, disease, or death. The humans who transcend into Cyberspace are immortal.

I have watched the events of the last ten years play out before me as more and more humans transcended. Very soon, the only people left on Earth were the ones who could not afford it. But they still had a living.

Soon enough, the humans realized they had more resources open to them than ever before, and greedily consumed them all. This left them in the chaos that is happening right now.

Some years before Earth started to die, the creator of Cyberspace decided she wanted to transcend as well. This lead the remaining humans to believe that, without someone to operate the supercomputer and supervise the transcending process, no human could ever transcend into Cyberspace again. The world soon forgot about Cyberspace and started to concentrate on its survival.

I have never forgotten Cyberspace and what it did to the Earth. And some humans apparently also remember it.

I turn to Keisha. "Do you know how to transcend into Cyberspace?"

She frowns, thinking about my words. "I think."

I walk into the hex, Keisha following. The streets are dirty and abandoned, and I know every building is home to some of the thousands of servers needed to maintain Cyberspace. Keisha slips her small, dirty hand into mine as we make our way to the center of the hex.

As we get closer, I start to pick up a faint humming sound in the air. It is too high for the humans to hear, so Keisha notices nothing. The noise is unmistakably that of a thousand computers processing and rendering the world they maintain.

The center of Hex Zero is a dome-shaped building about ten meters high and twice that in diameter. It is made out of a silvery metal. This is the newest-looking structure in the hex, and I am sure it is the way into Cyberspace.

Finally, Keisha speaks in a hushed voice, pointing to the building before us. "Is that how to get in?"

"Into Cyberspace? Yes."

"How?" she inquires. I do not answer.

The door to the dome slides open when we come near it, indicating a motion sensor. Light spills out from the entrance. It is the only artificial lighting I have seen since I was in Hex 87. Keisha steps back, but I pull her forward into the room.

The door closes behind us, and Keisha jumps. I look around the interior of the building, processing everything I see. The room is circular, and mostly bare, with a large dais in the middle. Around it, a semicircle of metal stands, wires connecting parts of it together. There is a computer terminal to the right of this, on a smaller podium. I walk up to it.

Keisha has overcome her surprise, and walks over to the dais, inspecting it. It seems like this is the threshold between reality and Cyberspace.

"What are you doing?" she asks, wandering back to where I am typing commands into the console.

"You want to transcend into Cyberspace?"

"Yeah!" cries Keisha. "Are you doing it?"

"I am configuring the computer that will send you into Cyberspace."

She grins widely. A couple of her teeth are missing. "Yay!"

I type my last command and turn to Keisha. "Stand on the molecular conversion apparatus."

"The what...?"

"The platform."

"Oh!" She hops onto the dais, staring up at the cocoon of wires. "It looks scary."

I frown, processing what Keisha has said. I know the definition of the term 'scary', but I have never been able to comprehend its meaning. "Define 'scary'."

"You don't know what that means?" Keisha stares at me incredulously. "That's weird."

"Emotions are hard for me to understand."

"Why?" She looks confused. In her mind, emotions are omnipresent. She cannot see why I would not have them.

"I am an android."

"What's that?"

"An android is a robot or machine designed to look and act like a human."

Keisha's eyes widen. "You're a robot?"

"Yes," I reply, failing to understand why Keisha is reacting in this way. "I am an intelligent computer."

"But... but you look like a person!" cries Keisha. From the little knowledge I have about human emotions, I can realize she is upset.

"Why are you distressed?" I ask. I know nothing about how to comfort a human in this condition. "I am not very different from you. I am not alive, but my mind does work in a similar way to yours."

Keisha doesn't respond, just backs away from me in shock. Her eyes are wet and wide. Perhaps this is the meaning of 'scared'. She is scared of me, though I cannot start to make sense of the reason. And I cannot think of anything to do.

My logic tells me to calm and reassure her. The first step in attempting this, I decide, is to deduce the source of the dilemma, as is an appropriate first step in solving any problem. Apparently the concept that is troubling Keisha is the fact that I am an android.

"Why does my identity upset you?" I finally ask.

Keisha wipes her eyes, but is still looking at me as if I am completely alien to her. "What... do you mean?"

"I am an android; it is clear this distresses you. Why?"

"You're not alive," she whispers.

"I do not understand."

Keisha shakes her head. I believe she is unable to put her feelings into words. It is strange: why do humans have language if there are concepts they cannot express using it? Or perhaps Keisha is not yet old or fluent enough to explain herself.

I decide that the matter at hand is more important than Keisha's emotions. "Do you still wish to transcend into Cyberspace?"

She nods slowly, but her mind has not left the topic of my artificiality. I turn back to the computer, my fingers poised to activate the mechanisms in the dais. Then I think of an ironic fact.

"Keisha. You are afraid of me because I am not alive."

She nods again. I continue.

"When you transcend into Cyberspace, your body will be transformed into code and holographic material. Do you understand this?"

She shrugs.

"When you have been converted to that existence," I tell her, "you will not be alive."

I can tell Keisha doesn't understand, but it seems I have made my point clearer to her. Perhaps she does realize the nature of reality in Cyberspace.

Keisha steps down from the pedestal and walks over to me.

"You're still weird," she says, "but I think I get it."

She gives me a quick hug, then jumps back up onto the conversion device. I try to comprehend the meaning of the embrace, but I quickly decide that it is only significant in the minds of humans.

"I want to go to Cyberspace now." Keisha puts her hands on her hips and grins. "Bye, Calixto."

I say nothing, but I do nod to her as I press the buttons on the console, and the wires on the pedestal glow. Then Keisha dematerializes, with a smile on her face. I hope that she will find Cyberspace beneficial.

For a millisecond I notice the absence of Keisha quite strongly. The next millisecond I realize that this is a strange sensation that probably results from interaction with humans. I will file this data in my memory for further analysis.

But perhaps I am beginning to understand human emotion after all.

The end.