As I’m staring forward, daydreaming, a great crash erupts from behind me. Monday has officially started.
TWO
As I turn toward the commotion, I expect to see rolling food tubes, and perhaps a bot. Sometimes filth builds up that blocks a servo or wheel. Instead, two grown men are fighting not six steps away from me. I can almost taste the wild hormones floating in the air, and my skin flashes with heat, as if I’m the one getting punched. Every time fist meets skin, I feel the pain of the victim. It’s very different watching a fight in person than it is on the feed.
Agents swarm them from two sides, dressed in tight fitting metallic blue uniforms and wielding their weapon of choice: a black baton known as a shock stick.
The men wrestle to the ground, one of them landing on a tube of cheese product that erupts across the floor. The yellow-orange liquid sticks to anything it touches, including part of my smock and my printed trousers.
The first agent slows his approach. He pulls free the shock stick, and lands a light blow against one of the men’s heads, sending a blue lighting bolt that immediately disables the criminal. The other three take their turn of a single strike against one of the men. I imagine their strikes are more for personal satisfaction than to disable. One jolt is enough, but then again, they rarely get an opportunity like this.
The men cease their fighting and lay shaking and partially paralyzed. A crowd gathers, everyone watching as the men are heaved to their feet and led away from the zone. A little red cleanup bot zips past me, and scrapes up the cheesy orange goo. Quite the reaction time. Well done, little guy. I smile with pride.
Two fights in two days; it’s a thought that follows me to the maintenance shack.
On my left, a desk is bordered by two stools. My station. The pegboard behind it looks in order, but there’s a blank spot on the right with an empty hook above it. I shake my head, and walk toward the back office.
“Paul. Have you seen my torque driver?”
“Oh yeah.” He looks up from his lazy office chair, which whines from the load as he shifts in the seat. “I had to borrow it for a minute. It should be at my station. You have some cleaning to do this morning. Some of the bots got a little roughed up yesterday.”
“Okay, I’m on it.”
He nods. Glasses make interesting optical effects. The light bends through them, showing one eye where his nose should be as he nods. He wears glasses because he’s too cheap to get eye surgery. His boast: that they are only for reading, and there is nothing wrong with his eyes. It’s hard to believe that reading glasses sell well enough to justify their production at an affordable price. If I can afford eye surgery on a student budget, then so can he. Maybe better eyesight would help my torque driver find its way back to the pegboard.
I snatch the sacred tool from his workbench on the way back to my station. The stool under me needs no adjustment. It’s always the same. The desk is smeared with greasy streaks, but the touchscreen still works. I swipe about, double checking my orders for the day. Several bots are ready for maintenance, and I send a signal over the network for them to find their way in.
I scan the aisle cameras in the supermarket, looking for anything out of place. The mess from earlier has interrupted the stocking protocols, so I send a pre-written batch code that wrangles the stockers to search for stray cans, and give them the general location of the spill. They would eventually find it on their own, but I want to make sure they get everything. That out of the way, the first bots that need servicing skate through the bay and park near my station. The stockers, bubble-bots, and occasional shopping cart form as perfect a line as they are capable.
I scoop the first clamshell off the line and flip it over on my desk, where its plastic body skids on the greasy residue. A squeeze of the handle sends the torque driver whirring to life. The driver zips away, removing all of the securing screws, and I pop the guts out of the clamshell housing. The wheels and motors are separated a moment later, and I disassemble the arm into its component pieces.
The people that run the market were smart enough to realize that a quick glance is just as good as one of those expensive servicing machines. If a piece is wearing out, the crack will be easy to spot while wiping the grease off. No breaks on this one. I drop the plastic parts in one bin, metal and rubber parts into others, and slide the bins into the wall of cleaning compartments. The washer starts automatically as a red light illuminates above the each door, and I move on to the next robot.
By the time I finish with the line, I’m feeling a pinch of hunger in my gut. I check the store cameras again to make sure all of the remaining bots are working as expected, and the messes have been swept up.
I scan through the codebase, checking for any errors. It’s mostly committed to memory at this point. I make a few subtle changes in the comments to make certain areas of the code easier to read, and then send it back to the robots as a Wi-Fi update.
I lean back on the stool, peeking into Paul’s office. He’s chattering, either on a call or to himself. If I head out now, he won’t spot me, or ask me to bring anything back for him. I untie my smock, drop it on the desk, and push my way through the double doors. The café is on the other side of the building, next to the main entrance.
“Hi Robert,” says Amanda. Standing behind the counter, her earlier mood has faded. That or she’s just wearing her employee disguise: cheery, but not overly chatty. The highlight of my day is seeing how long I can keep her talking before she returns to the other customers. Luckily, nobody else is in line. “The usual?”
“You know it. You doing a little better than you were this morning?”
Amanda grabs a loaf of pre-made bread from the rack. Fresh ingredients are piled on top, and the slicer whacks the sandwich into two perfect halves. “I guess. Mike dropped Quantum. Won’t be seeing him at school tonight.”
“Why?” My neck cocks back like an animal about to strike. “Physics is easy.”
“He says he can’t do it. He’s going to drop out, and start working in the basement.”
“Doing what?”
“Water treatment, I think. Not the kind of job that will help us get a pregnancy license. Doesn’t matter.”
“Why wouldn’t that matter? I thought you wanted to have a baby someday.”
“Someday, and with the right person.” She shakes her head, and hands the sandwich plate across the counter. Wrinkles form by the corner of her eye as she smirks. “By the way, you’re trying our new bread today.” She winks.
I let out a sigh and take the item. “You pulled a switch on me?”
“Not my fault that you weren’t paying attention. Besides, you need to experiment from time to time, not eat the exact same menu item every day. Keep working around those bots and you’ll turn into one.”
“Yeah, yeah. What is it?”
“It’s wheat. Like, real wheat. We just got it in from a new distributor. There’s a farmer outside of the city selling directly to businesses like ours. No fancy sterilization techniques, the only processing is grinding, fermenting, drying, adding the leavening powder, and liquefaction. I think it’s right up your alley.”
“What about germs?”
She shrugs. “We got a certification. The inspectors said as long as the final product isn’t allowed to sit for more than a day, that it should be okay. You’re always researching about primitive humans. Start living like one. Eat some wheat bread.”
Nice sales pitch.
I stare at the wrapped product for a moment, wondering. This is a taste of the old days, long before food printers, even if it came from one. Don will probably want to hear about this.
Another customer approaches, and steals her attention. I shoot him a dirty look that he fails to notice, and walk to the seating area, my implant pinging into my conscious mind, reminding me that I’ve been charged a few credits for the meal. I grab one half from the plate while walking, and tear off the first bite.
The new bread is amazing. It’s hard to compar
e the real wheat to the processed stuff, but the texture is thicker, stringier, and slightly grainy. It doesn’t immediately melt in saliva, and the coarseness lingers until swallowed, blending and macerating in the other ingredients. It’s an almost fresh food that mixes better with the other vegetables. Now if they could just give meat products some texture.
The environment has changed. The café has been running a Black ‘n Stainless theme for weeks. The same boring black tables with chrome trim, but the walls have been upgraded. They look like windows showcasing a forest theme on the other side. Dense green ferns and palmy shrubs dot the lush landscape, with beams of sunlight raining onto the black soil beneath the canopy. A tiny monkey swings past, grasping at branches as it hops from tree to tree. One plant is covered with builder ants, constructing a condominium out of leafy bits.
I forget for a moment, that just beyond this wall is the real world, a different kind of jungle made of concrete, steel and plastic. The real sun is much brighter than the walls give credit, enough to heat bare skin to a sweaty, sticky mess. The sky usually contains some foggy overcast. Maybe it’s possible that somewhere on the earth, things look different, but I doubt it. If I hadn’t been out there myself, I might suspect that we lived in a tunnel underground, and the concept of outside was just a myth, or some kind of scam, or at least that it was a bit more comfortable.
Some people never leave the confines of the building. There’s no need to. There’s nothing out there except temperature extremes, wind, and sometimes rain. The air isn’t even certified clean. And yet, somewhere, somehow, there’s a farmer right now, growing wheat to make this delicious bread. Even the farmers on the roof spend their time under climate controlled canopies, but on looking into wheat production on the net, a strain has never been produced that can be procured from a smaller field. It takes a lot of plants to make a loaf of bread, printed or not.
At the conclusion of the tasty meal, I return to my station and check my desk for updates on the cleaning baths. Most of the robotic part trays are showing green lights already, and all of the plastic pieces are finished.
This is my quiet time to think as I rebuild the bots. I put on some music, and put an article about bees on the feed. Watching learning material while performing mindless tasks is therapeutic.
Bees in the video rush around huge greenhouses, pollinating and gathering raw ingredients to make their own food, like little insect farmers. On the roof at this very moment, Don is watching his own batch of buzzers toil away in the field. It’s his job to keep them healthy. He works a lot of jobs up there, but his specialty is with these fascinating critters. The official article on the global net is a cold description of an insect he speaks so poetically about.
The video discusses the infestation of Africanized bees invading from the south, escapees of a breeding experiment to increase production from hives. As they continued to spread and become more common, their sting crazy nature was removed by a clever retrovirus that spread through most bee swarms, causing the ordinary females and drones to lose their stingers. The queens resisted the virus somehow, but since queens are rarely seen, they aren’t a threat to humans, and the solution to the problem of killer bees was effectively solved.
The violins, in fact the whole orchestra, drops for a moment. Just a moment, and then the music continues playing, as if the power went out for half a second. An interruption in my show mirrors the glitch. I can remember no time ever, other than taking computers apart as a kid, that such a thing has happened.
“Robert.” Paul shouts.
I drop the driver, and spin on my stool toward him. “Yeah?”
“I need to see you in here for a minute.”
I cut the music.
THREE
I stand up and stretch. The music skips again. I scan my tools to ensure they are all in place, and glance over the desk looking for cracks. Nothing.
Thirty seconds later I’m in Paul’s office. He’s arguing with the display in front of him.
“What’s up?”
“You notice anything funny going on today?”
“I saw a fight earlier. That was a little strange.”
“I don’t mean customers acting like jerks.” He stares me straight in the eye. “My office music has been glitching, and some of these robots aren’t acting right.”
“What?” I squint. “How are they not working? I mean, I had to run a cleanup protocol earlier. Is that what you’re talking about?”
“No, they just––look, it happened again.”
I follow his finger toward the wall display, a layout of the market. Tiny green shapes representing robots move through the boxy black aisle map. My favored bubble-bots are round, the loaders are a type of star, and the cleanup bots are dashes.
“What?”
“One of them went red. Just for a moment. Now it’s back on line. Keep watching.”
After about a minute, I shake my head. “I don’t see anything.” I didn’t realize that old glasses could make colors change.
“Alright, fine.”
“I need to get these cans back together. Can I leave if I finish early?”
“The second you walk out of here, another one is going to flicker. I know it.”
“Paul?”
“Yeah, fine.” His eyes turn to me. “You got school tonight?”
“Always.”
“You finishing today?”
“I think so. I really don’t have that much left. Three modules. I should finish up tonight. Why? Time for me to take over your job?”
“Fat chance, kid. Go on. Finish your bots, do your school stuff. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I return to my station, take up the torque driver, and put all of the remaining bots back together. It’s fun to watch them come to life. One moment they look like a heap of spare parts. The next, they’re back on the ground with all the flashing lights blinking as they check their internal code against the network repository. If they don’t have the latest code base, they download and install it automatically. Then, they zip away to work. They never tire, stopping when they aren’t needed to rest at the recharging station, and they never complain. Without sentience or emotion, no matter how smart they appear, machines will never be conscious. They’ll never think beyond their programming, even the smart ones. They’ll never realize their servitude to the human race, or be proud of how beneficial they are.
I fumble through bot after bot, until all are assembled and back on the floor. A filthy bubble-bot rolls in through the access window near the swinging doors, and straight to my station. They may not feel anything, but my heart bleeds when they have to come in without a procedure call.
“Having a bad day, little guy? Just rest here till tomorrow. I’ll give you the night off and clean you up in the morning.”
The lights signaling communication over the Wi-Fi blink in succession, almost as if the machine is responding to me, or pouting. Working with machines all day, they sometimes appear alive. I’ve found myself defending them against complaints from random customers, or perhaps I was defending the code I worked so hard to tweak and tune. Every once in a while, when the lights line up perfectly with questions or comments, my brain forgets that they aren’t alive.
Through the double doors and toward the lift, I dwell on the concept of machine sentience. On code. On my own soul, caring for synthetic hunks of steel and plastic. At least I’m not working in the basement.
“Roof, please.” Another personal tick: I’m even polite to the lift’s voice circuits.
The steel doors open to a world of vibrant greens and bright flowers dotting some of the plants. The people up here look different. They’re in the sun everyday, even if it’s coming through the plastic covering above, and they wear bright white suits to keep themselves cool in the direct lighting. Some use hand tools to rake and turn soil, and each of them is topped with a type of straw hat that looks just like the old pictures on the network.
The heat of the sun burns my skin, and loo
king up, I notice that the plastic tarp normally covering the whole structure is missing. Even though the synthetic covering is clear, ghostly reflections are visible over most of the canopy, especially around the structural piping.
I step out of the lift, turning onto the long path around the perimeter, as I do every afternoon. The sky is deep blue, like some kind of cosmic ocean, with wisps of white suspended from it, frozen in place, yet marching slowly across the heavens.
I catch a glint from the heavens, and it disappears as soon as I focus on it. Possibly a reflection from the space station. Against the bright background, it’s hard to make out. If it were a little darker, I could track it across the sky. Sometimes it’s shaped like a long needle, and other times like a tiny glowing rectangle.
My gaze falls to the delicate yellow flowers of the tomato plants. I’ve learned to differentiate them from the others. When partially open, they look like miniature corn cobs poking out of peeling sun-fire husks.
Up ahead, the bovines graze on feed from a long white trough that runs the length of the building. Every opening but their noses and mouths are attached to some kind of tubing. Don said that the hoses run all the way down to the belly of the building, where milk and fertilizer are processed.
The babies fascinate me. Some of them were born only weeks ago, and they’ve already been plugged in to our supermarket food supply. “Welcome to life, little guys.”
And what a life. The first time I saw them, I didn’t understand. I only saw helpless creatures, chained, drugged, and suckling on synthetic tubing, unable to move. I was charged with a non-conformance when I tried to pull the plug on a baby calf. Something like one in thirty kids try it at some point. I remember my teacher and mother both explaining to me that they couldn’t move around, and needed the external support. Their legs were so short that if they tried to run, they would just skid on their bubble shaped bodies, scratching at the ground with their stubby hooves. They looked like giant worms with an cow head sticking out of the front and vestigial limbs poking from underneath, always folded in a resting position. The pictures of ancient cows from the net were quite different.
Viral Spark Page 2