can androids pray: conversation as prayer

If you Google “What is prayer?” you’ll find evangelical websites describing it as a direct hotline to god or promising to help you unlock the secrets to prayer. Perhaps this is true, but in its sensationalism I think this represents only a narrow sliver of what prayer looks like. I may be a lapsed Catholic now, but the thought of prayer conjures something far less flashy and more intimate. Rather, it’s the most basic act of faith, to ask something of the universe and trust that some greater power or being is out there to hear it.

This intimacy is captured beautifully in Can Androids Pray, a sitcom-length existential nightmare of a video game. The story is about two mech soldiers, Cortney and Beatrice, who have crashed during what should have been a routine mission. At some point, Cort’s severed fuel line is going to explode, or they’ll succumb to Earth’s corrosive, unbreathable atmosphere. They’re going to die—it’s not a matter of if but when, and the only thing they can do until it happens is talk to one another. The crux of the situation is that there’s only a slim chance either of them are human. Most soldiers are AI-controlled mechs; only seven in every 1,000 soldiers deployed are human. There’s no way for Bea or Cort to know for certain which they are, which is what brings us back to the question the title asks. Can androids pray?

When we acknowledge prayer as trusting that something is out there listening, we acknowledge it as a conversation, even if it’s one-sided. The conversation between Bea and Cort becomes its own kind of prayer once Bea asks Cort whether she has ever thought about god. Responding as Cort, the player mostly listens as Bea lays bare her fears: that god is out there, and that he really does see everything. The joyful sinful messy emotional parts, all of her. Bea isn’t searching for validation or for Cort to answer in definites. She’s just choosing to trust—to have faith—that Cort will in some way understand, even if she doesn’t believe in god.

And yet...androids are machines who do what what they’re programmed to do. Anything can recite a prayer, but to mean it, to expose yourself and your feelings to judgement, is closer to the act of praying. During the time it took me to play the game, I found myself thinking more about what makes us human, because Bea and Cort’s speech is familiar regardless of whether they’re human or AI soldiers. Bea’s dialogue reads like a desperate confessional, because it is. 

Can Androids Pray isn’t really concerned with whether androids can, in fact, pray. Instead, I think it asks the player to consider what prayer is and its many functions outside of the traditional religious setting. The result is a messy and existential conversation, but it’s also intimate and emotional. In other words, it’s very human.