The Question of Life

The infant followed its mother around the grassy enclosure under the beautiful late spring sun. Like a human child, he was mesmerized by his own feet as he teetered about and fell down the soft banks near one of the large trees. His large dark eyes kept watch of his mother as he learned by mimicking her behaviours.

Her gaze darted between her infant and the onlookers at the zoo. She was used to being watched - and watching. She studied human behaviours closely - almost as much as they watched her and she noticed how they handled their children.

A wide moat separated gorillas from the fence, a safeguard against the wayward children and negligent parents who sometimes made headlines at other zoos. Not here. This zoo had no such problems. The enclosure was designed for both safety and spectacle: sprawling, complex, mimicking a wild habitat while still engineered for maximum guest appeal. Capturing the feeling of vintage zoos was a nostalgic, but daring choice. Any remembrance of  how humanity got here was a dangerous thought indeed.

The infant had already been the subject of many news reports since he was the first one since the change had happened. Referred to only as “Baby Gorilla”, today, he was finally receiving a name officially. An online contest, limited to city residents, had drawn thousands of entries. The winning choice was Adam; fitting, if lacking imagination for the first of his kind, though Victoria Brison, a grade one teacher, found the name ironic.

“Made from Earth’s mud,” she thought, and Adam was anything but. She brushed away the mechanical bumble bee that checked in too close to her face - they pollinated the vegetation, but also recorded attendees, an irritant to many.

“I can’t wait to see the baby! I hope he’ll be outside!” exclaimed Parm, one of her more excitable students who hopped along beside her as they walked towards the enclosure. Her class had joined most of the city’s schoolchildren at the zoo for the ceremony.
 

“Yes, Parm,” Victoria smiled. “He’ll be out.” She knew this promise was a guarantee. The baby would show - this was a marketing event above all else.

Even discounted school tickets meant tens of thousands in revenue as every school in the city was there. Merch tables overflowed with mugs, holographic balloons, and even access fobs etched with the zoo’s logo. Every child carried a glowing green puck - another clever marketing trick. Push the button, choose your holographic balloon’s color and favourite animal, and the zoo collected market research with every press. After thirty days, families could return for a “recharge.” Brilliant. Profitable.

Victoria had recently taught her class about old-fashioned latex balloons - it was part of the mandated curriculum on the “dark times,” when oceans choked on waste and sea creatures vanished. The children had giggled at the absurdity of filling lungs with rubber. Who would do that? But today they cheered at the shimmering holograms, oblivious to the history lesson behind them. And this was no day for mourning. This was pure spectacle. Smiles, souvenirs, and a baby gorilla so adorable and realistic that one would almost forget it was a machine.

There were no real gorillas anymore. Not here, not anywhere. This zoo, like all others, was filled with human creations colloquially known as Semis. Semi-natural and semi-real, they looked wonderfully alive down to every millimeter of fur and skin. Lab-grown tissue wrapped around circuitry and steel, designed to mimic life so perfectly that visitors forgot what had been lost.

Humans told themselves it was better this way. Safer. Cleaner. A world without disease or danger, a world without predators. “Natural beasts” had been destroyed by climate collapse and human appetite, but their DNA had been catalogued and revived in machine forms so now  humans played God.

And the crowds loved them. Hunters could still hunt. Photographers could still shoot. Children could still visit the zoo. Semis built to serve, delivering every joy, with none of the mess and humans could pretend they didn’t send it all crashing down around them.

Adam was the next big step. The first infant Semi released to any zoo, the “son” of the oldest surviving model. The mother, who possessed all realistic gorilla behaviours, had been re-coded to cradle, to soothe, to love. That had taken time to perfect - programming believable affection, simulating bonds that hadn’t been witnessed in a generation, took some work. And if it’s not a perfect facade, the sadness of reality outside the city walls could take hold again. But once it worked, the spectacle was irresistible.

The AI learned quickly, faster than its programmers could write code. The mother watched human mothers and sharpened her behaviors to please them. Cradle the baby—earn a chorus of “oohs” and “ahhs.” Smile analytics, crowd responses, every datapoint fed into her system. She was always calculating her next steps.

The infant, too, learned the crowd’s desires. They laughed when he toppled onto his back and grabbed his feet, so he did it often. T-shirts of him in that pose would become bestsellers in the gift shop, all now emblazoned with “Adam”.

Victoria’s class reached the south side of the enclosure just as something went wrong. The infant froze. A stall. Old Semis had been known to seize up, but the new generation, and even the upgraded previous versions, should have reverted to a “failsafe” behavior of rocking in place. This was the signal for keepers to shut down and restart. Adam didn’t rock. He simply stopped.

The crowd shifted uneasily. Boos rose from the at capacity crowds as they expressed displeasure. News crews zoomed in, interviewing anyone who would speak to them as the minutes ticked past. The zoo had no choice but to act fast.

A keeper entered after stalling the other gorillas first - rocking them eerily in place so he could pass without risk. It had never happened, but they did possess the strength and propensity to attack. A questionable design choice, but humans were in control of their creation, so the risks were considered minimal. He reached the infant and workers rushed in with screens, shielding the scene from cameras. Images of a disabled sales gold mine going viral was the last thing the zoo wanted.

Victoria’s students, Parm and Micah, pressed close to her side. Through a gap in the barrier they watched with wide eyes. She let them—part curiosity, part teacherly instinct to let them know what was real. She even raised her phone to record. Laney, absent for a mandatory session, would want to see this later.

“Vicky, I’m grabbing a coffee,” sighed Mona Weston, one of the parent volunteers. Victoria barely looked away from the gap. She hated when people called her Vicky, and they all thought they could. From her peripheral sight, she took an instant count of the sixteen children and shifted a few to be closer to her now that she was their only guardian.

“They are hurting him!” Micah suddenly cried.

“No, sweetie, he doesn’t feel it,” Victoria soothed. But even she felt a pang at the sight of the keeper pulling back the infant’s head to reveal the central processor. Why put it in the skull? It could have been anywhere—in the torso, the foot. But no, it was in the brain. A sentimental choice, she thought grimly.

A few quick adjustments, a whir, a spark—Adam shuddered back to life. He moved, blinking, clumsy and childlike again. Victoria felt herself exhale.

Then the keeper collapsed.

Victoria had looked down briefly at Micah, but she could have sworn she caught a glimpse of the mother Semi attacking him, but it couldn’t have been. She was stalled and still rocking - she could not have harmed him. Victoria was trying to process what she’d seen through the small opening of the screen barrier, when it fell open completely as the two workers holding it ran out of the enclosure. Fully exposed to the world, everyone could see what had happened.

Screams started to ring out from the crowd around the enclosure. His white zookeeper uniform was covered in blood. Victoria reasoned that it couldn’t be what she saw. Humans control everything. It simply couldn’t have happened.

The two children with her cried. As children everywhere started to panic and run, she madly looked around her to do a quick head count; did she have all sixteen? Where were her two parent volunteers?

The directions on the park loudspeaker came fast and furious. Stay calm. The zoo staff were here to help.

“Shh! Listen, everyone listen! I need you all to take each other’s hands,” she calmly instructed her kids. “Just follow me friends.”

Mona and Sheila Morrison came running towards the group. Sheila grabbed the hands of her son, Zach and another little girl who was sobbing.

“Are you seriously still holding on to your coffee?” an exasperated Victoria said to Mona who promptly tossed the coffee and helped to shuffle the children towards her.

The class ended up huddled together on the other side of a large green electrical building. Victoria had always thought it was an eyesore and out of character for the zoo, but she was so grateful for it now. It gave them space and time to process and it blocked the view.

The zookeeper was clearly dead. Her children were all safe, but what had other children seen? How on earth could this have even happened?

“How? We have control of them,” said Mona as her eyes narrowed at Victoria, “we have control of all of you.”

Victoria’s processor calculated the statistical chances and the ramifications for her kind. Would they still trust Semis like her after this? Humans were odd creatures so quick to tear down each other and the worlds they themselves created.

Meanwhile a reanimated Adam walked about the enclosure and looked towards his mom for a sign of what to do next. The confused infant sat down in the grass, toppled backwards and played with his feet. As for the oldest Semi on the planet, could she have rewritten her own code? Could it be that a creation simply tired of being on display? When you watch humans long enough, you do learn. And Adam’s mother, she was very busy watching. And Victoria was watching as well. Always watching.