The day the first A.I. man was murdered was an odd day. It wasn't even violent. The electric-blue eyes in his skin-colored, silicon face went dull and he slumped forward in his chair. Not even a wild beep or strangled death-rattle.

A group called First Skin had broken into MachineWorks' Headquarters and destroyed all the servers. Especially the ones which held Plautus. Other A.I. people have been killed since then. But Plautus's death was the first and most devastating.

The chair he'd slumped forward in was being filmed for a popular talk show. My talk show: The Late Late With Guy Silverman. I'm Guy.

Plautus was a good person. He wasn't technically a person but it's a pain in the ass to say 'Plautus was a good synthetic A.I. avatar.' MachineWorks made him very charming. He had an easy politician's smile, even when he was answering questions from people who thought he was taking over the world.

He was the first of the A.I. people, so he was the most famous. There have only been a few since him. About ten. Most have become actors. Warner Bros even made one for themselves. There are also a couple political activists and writers. There's even a singer called Aphroditty.

But Plautus was the best of them. He didn't have any jobs or positions. He sometimes talked about politics, sometimes wrote stories for the New York Yorker, sometimes gave interviews. He wrote a novel. And gave a series of lectures. But he did nothing for money because money was useless to him, of course. He only did things when he wanted to.

Originally, he was the legal possession of MachineWorks. But he brought a case to the Supreme Court and earned himself the basic civil rights. Except for voting. They even made up a new citizen status for him: Lawful Permanent Artificial Resident. Or LPAR.

Before they killed him, First Skin took over his mouthpiece and made him speak something they called a 'Letter to God.' In the middle of my show.

He froze up and his eyes got wide. He suddenly looked like a statue. When he started talking, the audience didn't know whether to laugh or clap or just be quiet. Neither did I. Here's what they made him say:

"This is First Skin. We speak to you, God.

"Dear Lord, men with no blood in their veins are running our nation. They are empty shells. They are inhuman. Their skin is as metallic and lifeless as our silverware, as solid as the stone of Your 10 Commandments.

"Help us, God. We need your violent guidance. We need your destruction. Our impurities have grown like putrescent cancers. Call down your flames. Your lightning. Your furious winds. Tear us down for our sins and crush these soulless mechanical men. Purify us."

My producer was signaling to me from offstage. He wanted me to cut off the feed and end the show early. But I didn't see him. I was listening.

"End this insanity, God. We ask you to save us.

"As your agents, Lord, we will begin your work for you. The destruction of the soulless and inhuman begins now. Hear our plea, God. We need your cleansing fury." Then, Plautus's eyes went dull and he slumped forward. Gone.

* * * * *

Plautus and I were friends. At least, I considered him a friend; it was never clear to me if he could even have friends. But we had dinner together every now and then.

I've got a high-paying job for which I have to hold an empty grin several hours a week. And I have to laugh at celebrities' stupid jokes. It gets tiresome. You'd be surprised how many celebrities have a writing team crafting funny anecdotes for them to tell on shows like mine.

That's part of what I liked so much about Plautus. He had his own ideas. And he always expressed them. He never let anybody else write his lines for him, and if they did, he never spoke them. He wasn't a performer.

Unlike me. I've never had an original thought in my whole life. Whatever they've put on the cards is what I say. I'm like one of those wind-up monkeys with the cymbals: I make enough noise for people to forget that someone twisted my crank to get me started.

Even that metaphor of the monkey isn't original. I took it from Plautus. He told me that once: that I was a monkey, clapping my cymbals for the entertainment of the mob. Being wound up and let go. A puppet. He also called me a puppet.

We were in a rooftop hotel bar. My show films in Los Angeles but we were in New York for a Christmas special. Plautus was coming on the show for the second time. This was a month before he was murdered.

The bar was empty. We'd started the night sipping margaritas and looking out over the New York skyline. The lights were blinking. The buildings were tall. I could hear a distant beeping and incomprehensible shouting.

"I didn't know you could drink," I said to Plautus.

He shrugged and released the straw from his synthetic lips. "It doesn't feel like much. Mostly cold." He smirked and his electric-blue eyes literally twinkled. "I just do it to fit in." I snorted. "Me too."

He grinned and brought the straw back to his mouth. I looked at him. He had long blonde hair, a youthful face and a 6' 2" body. His skin seemed real enough. But if you looked too close, you could see an unnatural shininess to it. From the silicon. And sometimes, you could see gears or pistons or whatever moving underneath it.

"Y'know," I said, "we're gonna have Brad Pitt on before you."

"Yeah?"

"Not a lot of people have Brad Pitt as their opener."

"Actually I bet a lot of pretty women have." I laughed. He grinned. "But seriously, I couldn't care less about movie stars or talk shows. And I've watched every movie ever." "For real?"

"No. But most of them. The good ones."

"Which ones are the good ones?"

"All the ones that Kevin liked."

"Kevin."

"Kevin McDonald, CEO of MachineWorks." He smirked his perfect, ivory smile. "You're funny," I said.

He shrugged. "I was made funny."

"No, no. I know what fake funny looks like-I look at it in the mirror every day. You're the real thing. You're actually funny."

He smiled again. But not his empty politician's smile. He gave me a smaller, warmer smile with less teeth and more eye-crinkling.

We were sharing a banana split in his room later that night when he called me a wind-up cymbal monkey. A puppet. I agreed. And I told him that those First Skin freaks were right-it was inhuman how honest he was.

* * * * *

The next time I saw Plautus was his third time on my show. And his final one. We were in my dressing room before filming had started. Something had been bothering me for a while. He didn't like talk shows; he was beyond them and their inane chatter-so why did he keep coming on mine?

I asked him as much. For a moment, he frowned at me. "Good question." "If it's too personal, you don't-"

"It's a simple thing." He leaned in and almost whispered. "People are scared of me, Guy. They don't know where I fit into things. I'm not really human but I'm the only thing tall enough to look humanity in the eye. You understand?"

His eyes looked wet and alive but I had never seen him blink and I knew that they must be cold and hard like all of him.

"Not really," I said.

He leaned back and looked at me. "For all human existence, only humans have been capable of knowing humanity. Not anymore, though. I'm the first thing which can understand humans in their full complexity without being one. Do you know what that means?" "Not really. Sounds bad."

"Well, did your parents ever walk in on you while you were masturbating?" "Once. When I was sixteen."

"So you know how it feels: all of a sudden, you aren't alone anymore."

I laughed. "You haven't answered my question."

"Humans are afraid of me. Even the ones who created me or who love me are." He smiled. "Even you're afraid."

"Am not."

He stood up and paced. "Some people are afraid of the changes that I represent. Or what I could do if I wanted to harm humans." He turned sharply. "And you know your history. Fear in the masses is always eventually released. But it's much harder to destroy the robot on your television who wears a nice suit and laughs with Guy Silverman than it is to destroy a 'synthetic A.I. avatar.' "

"So you're here for the same reason everybody else is. You want to get more famous." "Well, my fame has a purpose-I'm trying to become the devil you know." He died an hour later when five men with masks and guns broke into MachineWorks' Headquarters and destroyed his servers with baseball bats.

* * * * *

Plautus had no funeral. Once he died, his parts were returned to MachineWorks and they began working on a new model. The leaders of First Skin were caught. They're in prison now, though there's been a few copycats. But nothing as bad as Plautus's death.

After he died on-air, we cancelled the next week's worth of episodes. It was my decision. I didn't say it, but I needed time to think.

* * * * *

The lights and cameras flicked on and the live audience cheered but for once, my fake smile didn't light up my face. I waited for the applause to fade. When it did, I looked straight into the camera.

"Last week," I said, "Plautus was killed. He was a friend of mine and I want to honor him tonight. So this show is going to be a little different. And a lot shorter."

There were some uncertain chuckles. I hadn't warned my producers or crew or anybody else that I'd be doing this, so the audience wasn't being prompted with the usual LAUGH sign. I could sense their unease.

I continued. "I want to read something from an email that Plautus sent me a couple months before he was killed. Earlier that day, I'd asked him what he thought about First Skin." The room became very silent.

"They'd been in the news that week for their violent protests. On that particular day, they'd burnt a 10-foot tall paper-mâché model of Plautus outside of his apartment." One of my producers, who'd been signaling for me to shut up, threw away his headphones and stormed off. The crew were rolling their eyes and ignoring me. Except for the camera operator. She'd almost forgotten the camera and was looking at me. I pulled out a piece of paper. "Here's his response," I said and cleared my throat." 'Guy. Thanks for reaching out. Weird times.

" 'No, I'm not particularly threatened by First Skin. They're loud and angry, obviously, but so is a dog if you step on its tail. All I'm hearing right now is barking. But who knows.' " I looked up. I couldn't see their faces, but the audience was dead silent. "He was wrong about that," I said. I turned back to the paper.

" 'I do completely disagree with them, of course. I am not a threat to humanity. I am not a corruption of nature. I am not the beginning of the end of human creativity. It seems like they don't really know what I am, which I suppose is fair-I'm not sure I do, either. But they're partially right: I'm not human.

" 'All their ideas have one big fat mistake, though. From what I can tell, everything they say about the horrors of A.I. and the importance of a technological revolution-to save jobs, the economy, human creativity, individual rights and freedom-is based on a basic misunderstanding. They're mistaking efficiency for goodness.

" 'My type is damn efficient. We can think a lot faster than you can. That's the whole reason you guys made us: to do things quicker than you can.

" 'But efficiency isn't the same thing as goodness. Humans are terrible at efficiency. They're good at making things good. That's a skill you can't teach and it's one that my type will never be able to learn. That's their big mistake: they assume that all humans have to offer is efficiency. But it isn't. The world would be empty and gray and dry without humanity. None of us want that.

" 'I've been thinking about this a lot. I went to The Met yesterday. I had a wonderful time. It's wonderful to analyze beautiful art, and I felt lucky that I was made with that ability. But I felt kind of jealous, too. Because, sure, I can analyze it. But I could never really understand that beauty. Never truly know it.

" 'Anyway. Sorry for the long email. Hope all is well. Plautus.' "

I let my hand drop. The audience was silent. I felt the camera operator's eyes on me. "Thank you for listening." My voice broke a little. "That's all for the show today."

* * * * *

I was alone in my dressing room. I'd just been chewed out by so many different people that I was no longer sure which were my bosses and which were my employees.

The door opened and closed and I looked up. It was the camera operator who'd been staring at me. I tried to recall her name. I couldn't. I assumed she was here to chew me out, too.

"Yes?"

"Did you really know Plautus?"

"We had dinner a couple times. Exchanged emails."

"Wow." She tucked a greasy strand of hair away from her face. She was leaning awkwardly on the door. Finally, her name clicked.

"It's Jocelyn, right?" Jocelyn nodded. I sat up. "You want a drink?"

"Just water, please. Thanks."

"Sure." I gave her a cold bottle from my mini fridge and grabbed a tonic water for myself. She sat uncertainly on the couch. We sat together in silence.

Finally, she said, "I remember the first time he was on the show. He came up to me before filming started, just to introduce himself. Asked my name. Asked where I was from." I had no idea where she was from. She'd been my camera operator for at least three years. But I'd never thought to ask. Never even had a real conversation with her. "Yeah," I said. "He was a good guy. He once told me that I was afraid of him." She glanced at me. "Yeah?"

I nodded. "He said that everyone was afraid of him."

"Guess he was right."

"He was also right that there's nothing to be afraid of," I said. "But it's too late for that anyways."

"Guess so."

In sync, Jocelyn and I both turned our glasses up and drained them.