Page - 151 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 3:2

151 | www.limina-graz.eu Frank G. Bosman | The turning of Turing’s tables In the year 11945 AD, humankind is involved in a long-standing and desper- ate proxy war with unknown aliens. Human-made androids, aesthetically resembling young Japanese men and women, battle relentlessly against alien-built machine men, who have the crude forms of a child’s drawing of what is believed to be a robot. While the androids were programmed, just as the machine men, to lack human emotions and psychological traits, a number of them seem to have evolved these nevertheless. Two such an- droids, a female one called 2B and a male one called 9S, develop feelings for one another, although they are very hesitant in showing this because of their fear of being rebooted to an earlier mental state, erasing the emo- tional attachment they have developed. Eventually, on Earth, the two come across a collapsed building, that has smashed itself hundreds of metres into the ground. At the bottom the an- droids witness a particularly ‘mature’ scene in which multiple machine men are engaged in what appears to be human-inspired sexual intercourse, including the ‘missionary’ and ‘69’ positions. Although their crude phys- iology prevents them from performing any ‘regular’ sexual acts, the as- sociation with fertility and child-bearing is present as one of the machine men is rocking a cradle-like object while uttering – in a very stereotypical robotic voice – “Child. Child. Child.” The other ones use similar phrases connected to love, sex, and parenting, like “My love, my love”, “Together forever, together forever”, “Carry me, carry me”, “Feed me, feed me”, and “Love, love, love”. While the female android remains silent during this particular scene, the male 9S strongly repudiates the mechanical contraptions and their peculiar behaviour. He comments to 2B, as if he can read her mind in attributing human emotions to them: “They don’t have any feelings. They just imitate human speech. Let’s take them out.” But the battle between the two an- droids and the machine men only takes place after the provocation of a new individual machine man, arriving newly on the scene. This little encounter is taken from the game Nier: Automata (2017), or more specifically from the main mission “The Machine Surge”. The game’s sto- ry – among other things – revolves around the idea of conscious robots, the path towards achieving such, and the a priori conditions necessary to identify someone – or something – as such. It is not without reason that later on in the game, the player encounters Pascal (mission “Machine Recon”), a pacifist machine man who tries to live in peace with the androids, while he is reading the Pensées (2008 [1670]) by his namesake, and quoting from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (2007 [1883–1885]).