Cyborgs I love You, but You’re Bringing Me Down

            Can human beings love cyborgs? Yes. Yes they can. The proof within popular culture is extensive and unarguable. The Sarah Connor Chronicles television series offers an example of this as John Connor seems very much in love with the terminator played by Summer Glau, just as he turned to a cyborg for a loving father figure in Terminator 2 (James Cameron, 1994). Now that he is long through with puberty, he turns to a similar machine for romantic love rather than paternal. In this case, not only is the possibility for love between humans and machines very much a reality, but John Conor borders on fetishizing machines. With her work “The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary,” Jaimie Smith-Windsor makes it evident that not only is maternal love possible when your baby is part machine, but that love between humans and machines is possible outside of fiction.

            Smith-Windsor not only loves her daughter dearly, even when she is part machine, but she simultaneously holds conflicting emotions toward the machines that make that love a possibility for the future. Had Smith-Windsor not acknowledged that she felt her daughter was in fact part machine, it would be of little consequence. However, it is that very acknowledgment that affirms that love between human and machine is entirely possible.

                        “I hold my child for the first time. She is naked, against my chest.

                        Her ventilator curls around my neck, taped to my shoulder, disappears

                        inside her. There are other tubes, too, taped to my other limbs by

                        peach-coloured surgical tape. Beside me, another mother’s baby dies.” (281)

This passage simultaneously accomplishes several things. First, it confirms the child’s cyborg state of being. The ventilator, keeping her alive, literally disappears inside of her. The fact that it is in fact keeping her alive is affirmed through juxtaposition of life and death with the tragic death of a nearby child. Finally, the motherly love and connection is made evident, and the machine is humanized. Although aspects of the passage seem alien and tragic: the ventilator, the death, so too does the passage seem familiar and beautiful. The ventilator curls around her neck, as if a part of her daughter, becoming one with her mother. The fact that it “curls” suggests a softness characteristic of any mother holding her baby daughter, rather than restriction and ‘un-welcomeness.’ The machine is acknowledged as a part of her child, and as a necessity of life, but also as a part of the love that the two share. The ventilator connects them, as they are wrapped around and taped to each other.

            As I said, she’s also somewhat sceptical, if not a tad resentful toward the technology keeping her child alive. “The day I gave birth to a cyborg, I began to understand how every human being had become a collaboration of machinic and biological matter. The human condition is mediated by technology.”(284) Despite acknowledging the fact that this is a current human condition, there is also an imperative in Smith-Windsor’s work to remain cautious of that very technology through which we all live our lives to varying degrees. Of course, she would not have given her daughter up, no matter what. But, the fact that for that period in her daughter’s life, she was literally cyborg is somewhat a cause for alarm. She was conflicted. She loved the biology of her daughter, but wished away the machines. However, acknowledging her daughter as cyborg also affirms that fact that she did, and probably we all have or could love a machine.

            Perhaps similar things are happening with John Connor. Maybe his love for the biology, however shallow it may be, of Summer Glau in the Sarah Connor series is why he lives with her machine aspects. However, the content of the series and of the Terminator films says otherwise. As the future saviour of humanity, John has an intricate, and some may dare say intimate knowledge of the workings of machines. He has an ability with and knowledge of machines akin to James Bond’s flare for the female. He knows how to push their buttons. Furthermore, his relationship with Arnold in Terminator 2 is one where he plays father and son simultaneously. He teaches Arnold’s terminator, using his ability with machines, how to become the perfect object of and for his affection. Similarly, his relationship with Glau’s terminator on the series would have ended if it were not for the love he had for her. He takes life away from her when making a choice for his and thus the world’s safety, and chooses to give it back because of his love for her. His ability to do so indicates his relationship with the machinic qualities within her, and the fact that he does so is indicative of his love for her. A human can love a machine.

            In an era that is increasingly technological, it seems entirely possible that cybogs will eventually be created specifically for the purposes of filling voids in human companionship. Not of a sexual nature, or only of a sexual nature (and it’s important to note that this sort of human on machine love is not only a reality, but also quite common – think vibrators, Fleshlights, and sex dolls), but machines will be created for love. Humans have shown the capacity to love semi-machines already, such as Smith-Windsor did, but also people with pacemakers, prosthetic limbs and the like will sometimes see themselves as cyborgs, and often also be loved. Kevin Warwick’s wife surely still loves him, if she ever did. It’s only a matter of time until one may be able to purchase the first love bot.