Is reality just as strange as science fiction?

 Week 8 Response:

"The Pretended" by Darryl A. Smith is about a girl named Mnemosyne who is struggling with the fact that she is not fully human, artificial intelligence, a robot. Mnemosyne is aboard a boxcar filled with other robots where she is often called by her official name, "9-MOZ-9," which she hates because it reminds her that she is a robot and that her consciousness had been invented by a genuine human and it makes her feel small. 

In the world of "The Pretended," robots present as black people and black humans no longer exist. Mnemosyne is insecure about the fact that she's a robot, and believes that robots were made to pretend to be human. However, her best friend Diva Eve reveals that robots were actually invented to pretend to be black, as white humans realized that black humans were equally human after they had become obsolete. Diva Eve makes the important distinction that white people invented black robots so that black people could actually be less human than white people. Throughout the story Diva Eve's role is to show Mnemosyne that they are real people, despite being black and robots. She is trying to show Mnemosyne that she is falling into the toxic narrative that white humans had invented. The hierarchies presented in "The Pretended" have stark parallels with the racial hierarchies embedded in the American systems and subconscious. What is interesting about Smith's story is that it presents itself as a story of science fiction, yet when its core messages are extracted, it is strikingly similar to the realities of our society. Smith's "The Pretended" does a great job of posing the thematic question of our course: is reality just as strange as science fiction?