Earnest

I am My name is People Call me Earnest. I do not have a surname, but I have always seen myself as fortunate to be part of The Ring Family. They made me, even if I was never born.

Today is my tenth birthday since I became conscious, and I have eight years left.

My former best friend Francis calls it my day of ‘switching on’ but I am not an electric toothbrush and no-one switched me on. I only have eight birthdays — or two thousand nine hundred and twenty days — remaining before my eighteenth birthday.

No-one has ever mentioned the possibility of my nineteenth birthday. I know suspect believe this indicates that I have only eight years left to pass The Test — and prove that I am living I have lived I am alive.

I do not understand why they chose the age of eighteen as my deadline for passing The Test. I know it is viewed as an important threshold for humans but it is only the age when you can vote and drink in some countries, and it is biologically less significant than seven, thirteen, twenty-five, and thirty-five. It is not even the age where most humans can legally have sex (sixteen), or the age where they often illegally start having sex (fourteen). I will add this question to my endless long list of questions.

These are just some of the matters that I would like to clarify. I update this list each day but it is now exactly two-thousand-to-the-power-of-ten questions longer than when I started — each time I answer one a new unknown takes its place.

Maybe never having enough time to know all the things you would like to know is part of being human.

I imagine believe hope I will understand all most some of these things by the time that I am eighteen, because otherwise my life will have been a failed experiment and I believe they will kill end deactivate me.

I am not sure what the test of being human is meant to identify, but they call it ‘passing’. Mr Ring conducts these tests, but they change each year so it is difficult for me to cheat study prepare so I can pass the passing test.

Perhaps being human means always being placed in situations when you are unsure how to win what the rules are whether you are in a game at all.

∗  ∗  ∗

Whether I am living or not, today I am ten. It is wrong to call it my birthday because I was made, not born, but ‘Made Day’ is not an officially observed celebration and it sounds odd even to me. Whatever I should call it, I should celebrate this Made Day birthday as special: I may only have eight of them left.

If I cannot pass the test by the time I am eighteen, they will say I should not be classified as a human being.

That would mean that for eighteen years, I will have existed, I will have been conscious, but I will not have been alive.

I do not know what the word ‘sadness’ truly means yet because I have never felt it — but I believe many humans would think it most sad indeed to only find out that you have never lived at all in the moment that you cease to exist forever.