Essay Questions

Carey is a droid, yet she often displays sentient characteristics. What are some of the ways in which she does this?

Carey yearns for a sense of belonging. This is actually a form of emotion, because she is feeling deeply the void in her life that is due to a lack of connection with anyone. As a droid, she was created in a vacuum, and dropped into the world by the person who created her. She does not have a childhood to look back on, or friends with whom she has grown into an adult. She has no shared experiences, no family unit and as such is completely on her own, both physically and emotionally. The problem with that is that she is not supposed to have emotions because she is not a sentient being.

Carey finds a sense of physical belonging in her life because she in service of others, and lives in close proximity to them. This mitigates her actual physical loneliness. However, she wants to belong in a family in an emotional sense as well. This is something that she finds within Mildred's family.

What do Carey and Mildred have in common?

Despite Carey being a droid and Mildred a human, the two have much in common. Both crave a sense of belonging; Carey, because she has never had one, and Mildred, because she can't always remember that she has ever had this. Neither character has the gift of their own memories. Carey, as a droid, has any memories in her system implanted there by the person who made and programmed her in the first place. Although they are familiar, they are not her own, and she has no emotional attachment to them.

Mildred has a million memories that she has made in her lifetime, but her disease means that she cannot remember them, or access them, or feel any emotional connection to them. She knows that she has emotional connections, but because she cannot find her memories anymore, she doesn't know what these connections are actually connecting her to. Whilst Carey has a range of memories she has no emotional feeling for, Mildred is left with a multitude of emotions but no way of accessing the memory they relate to. Both women show us that memory and emotion are dependent upon each other in order to enable a person to show their true humanity.