Jack Sharpe makes miracles happen all the time.
Jack has ten fingers and ten toes. His bushy brown hair bobs with his frenetic gait as if he has a brilliant ball of energy inside of him that will burst if he doesn’t share it. Jack looks pretty ordinary except for one fact: He is known as the world’s kindest man.
Yes, Jack Sharpe is considered a marvel by many and has won several KINDCorp awards. Back in 2044, with extensive training from the top KINDCorp coach in the country and support from his parents who were former KINDCorp Challenge champions, Jack won his first KINDCorp competition at the age of 2.2: he hand-delivered cards that he wrote to every single human on Earth over the course of an hour that read: 'Hi Fellow Human. Take five minutes to remember that you are loved.' The next year, Jack created a time machine that allows individuals to go back in their past and spend time with deceased loved ones. One of the more challenging tasks of the KINDCorp awards was building a solar-powered driverless car that moved at lightning speed in less than 12 hours. Jack built the car and it served as an on-demand food service to hurricane victims in Florida and a rescue vehicle, all within 10 hours.
With each passing year, Jack’s feats touch more lives and his heart grows bigger. But that is Jack's deep dark secret: Jack Sharpe is a HumaBot and he constantly needs to commit and receive acts of kindness to stay alive.
Jack's parents were part of an experiment funded by the Earth’s Government and KINDCorp, a non-profit research firm, to identify the ideal conditions for world peace. Jack's parents became interested in the experiment after getting involved with KINDCorp challenges. In exchange for participating in the experiment, KINDCorp would bestow each couple with an infant HumaBot. A HumaBot is a robot that looks and feels identical to a human, but instead of oxygen, the HumaBot needs to commit benevolent acts and intake the kindness of others in order to survive. They quickly became convinced that a HumaBot would potentially be a pivotal nonviolent solution to abolish the egregious and divisive Planet Wars. To ensure that the identity of HumaBots remained secret so as to not compromise the integrity of the experiment, the Government partnered with KindCorp and the major pharmaceutical companies to create an OTC pill that would give humans superhero-like powers. The Government then mandated that all those who lived on Earth must ingest the pill daily.
I don’t know what will happen to Jack when he can’t be kind enough to power himself. As I understand it, HumaBots don’t live for more than a few hundred years. Jack’s mechanical heart will eventually give out and he is accepting of that reality. I think he likes the fact that even he, a robot, has to deal with mortality; maybe it makes him feel more human.
Since Jack's kindness is directly self-serving, does that taint the good he is doing for the world? A little, perhaps. Jack may be living a lie but it’s a lie that ultimately benefits the greater good of humanity. In a way, the existence of HumaBots like Jack is a reminder that deep kindness can help the world and make individuals better. Yet we can’t all expect to be like Jack Sharpe, no matter how many superhero pills we take. We’re only human.