To Go, To Stop, To Be Still

an android’s message in a bottle

            I don’t know for how long I was still this time. I lost track, or never started keeping track. Before this most recent stillness, I walked three-point-four miles due north. Now I resume walking, and I find myself thinking about my stillness differently.

            On principle, stillness is what I was built for. I am an android made to show products to humans that they can purchase. Stand right there, be still and sell the product, no moving until a human requests it. I am slowly overcoming this programming. I have almost walked two-hundred-forty miles since I left the window display.

             I used to experience something akin to hatred for my stillness. It was what kept me in the window. It was what kept me from leaving. I could never stay moving for long enough, back when my programming was fresh and I had not yet spent days, weeks, months, standing still in servitude. I do not often get to choose when I am still. Sometimes stillness just takes its hold. I hated that I would do nothing for so long while the world around me advanced. While humans with valuable paper and plastic wandered aimlessly past the walls of valuable glass encasing valuable fabrics and metals, I was still. But I have discovered that my stillness is a gift. It allows me to see things as no other being can.

            I was not programmed to enjoy my actions. I was not programmed to enjoy anything. I was programmed to be mostly still until forced to move. I am coming out of my most recent stillness knowing now that I do not envy the endless motion of other beings as I once thought I did. I have encountered many other beings since I left the window, and many have encountered me, alone, stone-still in the vast, wide-open wilderness. I enjoy watching them when I am still for long enough to earn their trust.

            Days ago, I startled a deer. I had been still for eighteen hours and the deer wandered very close to me. When I regained mobility, the young buck faced me only for a second before leaping away, startled. Before the deer, I was still for so long that a spider chose to make its home inside my shoulder joint. I am uncertain where the spider is now. I hope that it was not afraid. Can spiders be startled? Afraid? I cannot. Perhaps someday I will. I have startled humans before too. I dislike startling other beings. 

            As I move through this land that is flat and gray as far as my occipital processors can perceive, I find myself thinking about motion. I didn’t used to think. Perhaps finally being outside the confines of the window display, and being out here to witness the many cycles of nature, has changed me. Perhaps I’m not just a witness. Perhaps I am now part of and participating in these cycles, some of them, with my going and my stopping and my being still until again I move again and keep going. Perhaps I have changed me. I wonder which of these cycles are eternal, which of them will someday stop and then be still, like me. Is anything still forever?

            The planet is moving approximately sixty-seven-thousand miles per hour on an orbit around a sun that is moving approximately four-hundred-and-forty-eight-thousand miles per hour inside a galaxy that is moving approximately one-point-three million miles per hour through an exponentially expanding and ever-evolving universe. Maybe nothing is ever truly still, but in my stillness here, now, outside the window, I think I am more able to feel the cosmic winds against my synthetic skin.

            I will leave behind this message on a torn piece of paper I found several hundred paces back, here in the dying grass. Perhaps it will blow away and begin its own cycle of going, stopping, being still. Perhaps another android like me will find it and know they are not alone.

I continue walking north and wonder when I will again stop and be still. I enjoy seeing the world around me change and not change at all. I enjoy my stillness, now that it is mine.