The Vision wants to be human. He really, really does. He wants to be part of a family. Go to work. Experience love, loss, and friendship. Know that part of himself that he can point to and say “That. That is my soul. This is me. And nobody can take that from me.” That goal is the Vision’s unattainable purpose, and oh boy, has he gone through some absurd means trying to reach it. Let’s talk about Comic Book Androids and their humanity.
His most recent attempt was chronicled in the 12 issue series simply titled The Vision – written by Tom King, with art by Gabriel Hernandez Walta and Jordie Bellaire. In it, Vision builds himself a robotic family, seeking to live the suburban life in Washington DC with newly built mechanical loved ones. It is a series that got surprisingly dark, surprisingly quick, and by the end of issue 12, one is left wondering if the Vision is any closer to being a regular person, or farther from that goal than he ever has been before.
Now, stories of artificially constructed beings seeking their humanity have been told ever since Pinocchio first sprung to life and wished he was a real boy. The concept of humanity, and free will get even more tangled when you bring robots into the equation – if you accept the concept of nurture as that aspect of personality that your parents give you, than for artificial intelligences like Vision, their nature is their nurture.
Most people get to use nature vs. nurture in a sort of bargaining process as they grow up – we start as infants with a basic personality, our inherent natures. Our parents – or whoever has the difficult job of raising us – provide aspects of nurturing that our nature either accepts, or rejects – and in doing so, our inherent natures grow, and evolve. This is how we grow up, ageing in mind and body, becoming whoever it is we are today. Our persona represents the choices we made between who we wanted to be, and who we were told to be.
The Vision never had that choice.
His body didn’t grow, it was created. To simplify a VERY complicated origin story(first rule of comics – you will NEVER know the whole story) – the Vision’s first moment of consciousness was as a fully formed adult male. His personality was picked for him – via a little black box with the brain patterns of a fallen superhero, Wonder Man, or Simon Williams – the personality, again, of a fully grown adult. Vision never got to choose who to be. Though he did rebel against the decidedly evil programming of his creator, Ultron, one could argue that it was the heroic programming of Simon Williams’ brain patterns that was ultimately responsible.
Nature vs nurture vs programming. The argument for free will becomes twice as hard if you’re a robot.
Ugh, fine, alright, Wasp Jr. – he’s a synthezoid. My point still stands – Vision has some very complicated identity issues. Which is what brings me to Avengers #23 – and jazz.
In Busiek and Perez’s Avengers #23, the Vision is being confronted by his ex-wife, Wanda(the Scarlet Witch), and the recently resurrected(for the second time. Comics are complicated) Simon Williams – who you may remember as the man whose brain patterns defined the Vision’s entire personality. They can tell something is wrong with Vision. That he’s bottling things up. They want to help him, they care about him, and they keep pressing until finally, Vision just up and blurts the problem out:
Blurting out your problems never really goes well – you’re all angry, and your words are out of context, and until you can get a hold of your emotions everyone is very confused. Fortunately, for the most part, Vision is rather good at tamping down his emotions for the sake of exposition. He goes on to list all the things he and Simon have in common – they both like chess, the same writers – heck, the fact that Simon Williams is now dating the Vision’s ex-wife just goes to show that they even have the same taste in women.
Simon is rather pleased at this list – he’s happy that he has a friend with whom he has so much in common. Vision, however…doesn’t quite feel the same way, and he makes this very, very clear.
It was a rather strong moment for me, reading that. The Vision is known for being cool. Calm. Collected. Emotional outbursts from Vision are about as rare as encouraging smiles from Batman, and it stuck with me. The Vision was worried about jazz. He was worried that his love for it was one of the signs that only proved that he was nothing but a pale reflection of a real person – of Simon Williams. In those circumstances, an emotional outburst or two isn’t completely unreasonable.
The Vision’s not the only being with jazz on his mind, however. Across universes, publishing companies and a decade or two, DC superhero Cyborg is sitting in a jazz club, wondering whether or not he has a soul.
Cyborg – or Victor Stone – has a much simpler origin story than the Vision. He was a normal human who suffered a terrible accident, and being turned into half a machine saved his life. Recently, however – as recently as Cyborg #1, released a few months ago – he’s been beginning to wonder if he’s only half a robot. He wonders if Victor Stone died, and all he is is a robot who THINKS he’s Victor Stone.
Is Cyborg merely a robot with the brain patterns of Victor Stone?
It’s a thought that bothers him. His friend Sally takes him to a jazz club to cheer him up. Cyborg is met by one of the night’s jazz musicians.
The jazz musician makes the amusingly simple argument that if you can enjoy jazz, you have a soul. It’s as simple as that. Forget the Turing Test, and tell Asimov that his Three Rules of Robotics can take a hike – you really want to know whether artificial intelligence has reached real intelligence, you play it a little John Coltrane.
But why is that?
And there we have it. Randomness. Surprises. The improvised, the absurd, the chaotic. In that the human spirit lies, and in there we learn that we are not programmed. The world doesn’t decide who we are. We are not determined to be one thing. We get to decide who we be, because we can still make the choices nobody – not even ourselves – expected us to make.
The Vision might have started fully formed in a way that no human ever has, but since then, he’s made his own choices. Over many years as a comic book character, he’s chosen to be a husband, father, brother, superhero, company man and an almost mundane resident of suburbia. He did it all in ways no one could ever have expected. In addition – although he may have started out as a personality duplicate of Simon Williams, Simon himself argues that they’ve both grown from that point on. They’ve both taken different roads in life, and neither of them are the people they started out being.
The issue didn’t end on a happy note, at least not for the Vision. To be honest, though he’s had his happy moments, it’s been almost twenty years since that issue came out, and the Vision is still on his quest to define his identity, and his place among humanity.
It is his unattainable goal, perhaps. One can only hope that his means of attaining it will always be at least somewhat absurd, and that he continues to throw surprises in everyone’s way – especially for himself. In the meanwhile, the Vision and Cyborg both have more in common than just mechanics – they are both people who deeply enjoy jazz.
Well, them and the Transformer who actually upped and NAMED himself Jazz, because comics are ridiculous. Bless ‘em.
