keyword "eyelashes" title "the price of progress" in misc. flash fiction

In the development of the NSA’s dur-a-sim android series, as body doubles, spies and assassins when the use of a human agent was uncalled for, the sticking point near the end of the process was of all things, the eyelashes. They just couldn’t get the eyelashes right. On close inspection, the test groups always knew there was something wrong from the way the eyelashes looked. The testers may not have suspected the thing standing before them was a mesh of pneumatic tubes and rare-earth-metal wirings but they all could tell that “something” was amiss.

When you’re talking about infiltration and observation, that’s what really matters, that something is off, that something pings in the back of a person’s head to not trust it. When you’re creating an espionage asset, it doesn’t matter if a subconscious twinge is attributed to some insane-if-factual belief that you’re looking at a murder simulacrum or if you just think that it “doesn’t look right”, all that matters is that they won’t take it into full confidence and it won’t get the job done.

You’d think getting it to act human would be the issue, the programming of reactions to stimuli. The famous Turing Test, a conversation where a machine must respond as a human being would for an extended period to pass Turing’s requirements with flying colors.

Luckily for them, the 2010s had happened a few decades before, Twitter had happened before, so lowering the complexity of human discourse that any statements were believable after that. Be it hate-troll absurdities, Russian bots muddying up elections or the well-intentioned but mentally-ill melting down at horrors, on Twitter we all became indistinguishable from the simplest programs. What’s the point of a Turing Test when people have started talking like robots themselves?

Making them act passably human as humanity was defined by 2042, that was damned easy, what was difficult was making eyelashes look real. Turn-by-turn, the entire research-and-development shadow wing of the military-industrial complex was caught up in the task of creating eyelashes that could reasonably pass for human.

In the end, it was a college intern from Raytheon’s El Segundo office that accidentally came to their solution. Most of the time, an intern’s clearance would not be high enough to access the dur-a-sim project, but she was one of the higher-up executives’ daughters so her fresh opinion was asked for as a long shot.

“Why not just put false eyelashes on it?” she asked, “Then they’ll just think it’s some real person who wears obvious falsies for style.” And that was it, all it took. They sent a courier to the CVS down the street, bought out the store’s supply of false eyelashes and world history was written.

By the next week, they’d named all the female dur-a-sims after her, they were The Mindy Series. Within two months, they’d toppled three foreign governments. By the end of the year, World War Four was well underway, thanks to the Mindies. Science, as they say, marches on.