Bicentennial Man

(Bicentennial Man)

Year 2005. In this beginning of 21st century, technological progress have generalized. Family Martin acquire a robot for domestic usage NDR-114 created by M.A. Robotics. This new machine is soon named Andrew.

As time passes, Andrew makes proof of creativity and feelings - a strange behavior for a machine. For the President of M.A. Robotics, its new feelings would come from a bug. Refusing to leave it to be dismantled by the company so as to to study it, Martin decide then to process it as a human being, so as to allow it to develop this particularity. Little by little the android learns to better know the human beings and to better serve them. It understands humor, sexuality and throws in the learning of jokes.

Year after year, the Martin family his getting older and Andrew remains always the same. It asks to obtain its liberty, an idea revealed by the reading of hundred of books. When its master dies, some thirty years later, Andrew, that desires more than anyone to become human, throws in search of its destiny. At the end of a ten years trip and thousands of kilometers, Andrew finds no trace of other MDR-114 robot. Nevertheless it makes the knowledge of Rupert Burns, ancient programmer at M.A. Robotics, the son of the one who created expressions for robots. Burns has realized some new robotics feats but nobody has ever financed his researches.

Andrew, that has since so many years amassed a real fortune building clocks, proposes then to finance him for its own interest. Rupper manufactures it the body and the face of a 40 years old man. Feeling a bit more human, it returns to visit the Martins after 20 years. It meets Portia whoom it falls in love with. With the assistance of Rupper, it conceives a nervous system similar to the humans and integrates it to its body. But she makes it understand that it is an impossible love ; Andrew is and will always remain a machine…

 Spoiler ! the end of the story is revealed below…

Nevertheless, by dint of persuasion and physical modifications as well as mental, Andrew becomes a real man who eats and feels everything. He wishes that one takes him for a human being and that one allows him to marry another human being. Only his immortality prevents him from demonstrating his complete humanity. Many years later, Portia is now 75 years old. She knows that she'll have to leave this world and Andrew knows that he won't be able to live without her. He makes implant blood that will deteriorate little by little his organism. Andrew Martin can now die. Ahead the world parliament, he explains the fundamental engine of his existence by telling that he prefers to die as a human rather than to live for the eternity as a machine. Andrew Martin, after 200 years of existence becomes the oldest man of the history of humanity. His marriage with Portia is now possible to the dawn of her announced death.