by Gerald Huff
“What will you do if this call center is closing?”
Hannah caught her breath and didn’t respond right away. The editor AI immediately sent a focus-in command to the micro-drone over Katie’s shoulder. The 8K resolution camera captured Hannah’s struggle to maintain her composure and ultimately her failure to do so. Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’ve got no goddamn idea what I’m going to do. There’s no more work around here. I’m fifty-four years old. Can’t get social security till I’m seventy. I’m sorry, I, just…” The woman turned away and waved a hand in Katie’s direction. The micro-drone tried to track her face but Katie swiped a command on her wrist controller and recalled it.
She heard shouting in the distance and redirected one of her drones in that direction, watching its feed on her controller. It relayed images of a black SUV pulling into the parking lot along with a dozen local police vehicles, light bars flashing. The convoy made its way to the front of the building, where about thirty officers in riot gear got out and formed a line, pushing back the crowd. A tall thin man in skinny jeans and a black T-shirt got out of the SUV and stood behind the phalanx of officers.
“Good morning,” he shouted into a microphone evidently hooked up to speakers in the SUV. “My name is Brian Kowalski and I’m here from CCS headquarters in California.” Boos rang out from the people on the other side of the police line. Katie directed one micro-drone to focus on Kowalski and the other to pan the crowd. “I know you’ve been seeing the rumors in OP,” he continued, “and I am very sorry to have to report that they are true. CCS has made the decision to close the Madison call center at the end of this month.”
A chorus of angry yelling met this news. “All employees will be contacted by a specially trained HR DeepAgent to review our generous severance program and answer your questions. In the meantime, we request that you continue to provide the excellent customer service our clients deserve. The morning shift starts in a few minutes, so all employees with…” An aluminum can flew over the officer directly in front of Kowalski and barely missed the CCS spokesman’s head. “Fuck you! We want our jobs!” shouted the man who had launched the missile. His neighbors repeated the cry and threw more cans and bottles. Kowalski ducked and yanked at the SUV’s door handle. As he was scrambling into the back seat a bottle tossed on a high arc smashed onto the roof, showering him with glass and lemon-lime soda.
The police started pushing the crowd back, trying to clear a path for the SUV to escape. Unfortunately, the news had spread to the overnight shift workers and they began streaming out of the building behind the police line. The captain on scene radioed for reinforcements and a tactical drone. He directed his officers to surround the SUV, but the crowd soon completely encircled them. He used one of the police car’s microphones to order the crowd to disperse, to no effect.
More bottles smashed into the SUV. Then a can hit one of the officers on the head and the whole situation spiraled out of control. Several started firing off Tasers and deploying batons, swinging out into the crowd. Katie hit the emergency broadcast button on her controller screen, which gave her feed priority on the FMS content stream. Within a minute, several hundred thousand people worldwide were watching the events in Madison.
“Cease fire, cease fire,” the captain yelled. He heard a high-pitched whine and saw the tactical drone arriving at high speed. The remote operator hadn’t established connection yet, but following standard protocol on seeing officers engaging with a hostile crowd, began dispersing “pain pellets.” These self-guided weapons avoided anyone broadcasting identification on the law enforcement radio frequency and targeted exposed flesh using visual and infrared sensing. Once they attached to skin, the pellets dug hooks into their victim and injected an extremely powerful but local and short-lasting nerve agent. The victim of a pellet was subject to an intense and incapacitating pain but suffered no long-term effects.
As the tactical drone flew a pattern over the crowd, more than a hundred CCS employees fell writhing to the ground, clutching their arms or necks, wherever the pellets had attached. The rest panicked and ran away from the scene in all directions as sirens from the reinforcements approached from the distance. The police captain watched as his officers started cuffing the more aggressive members of the crowd. It was going to be a long day.
CHAPTER THREE
WASHINGTON, D.C. - SEPTEMBER 13
Esteban Hernandez sat at a window booth in the faux 1950s revival diner, waiting for his lunch date, the senior Senator from his state of Ohio. Despite being from opposing parties, they had agreed to eat together once a week to maintain a relationship and engage in some healthy dialogue about where they could find common ground for the people of their state. Esteban had a hunch that the Senator’s Democrat colleagues had been unhappy that he was “consorting with the enemy” and had pressured him to stop attending. His own caucus had certainly expressed its displeasure at their regular meetings.
He hoped Harry arrived soon because his schedule for the afternoon was packed. He had two hours of committee meetings and four hours of fundraising to do before dinner, and then more fundraising in the evening. It was Washington’s dirty little secret that members of Congress spent more time raising campaign money than doing anything else. He’d gone into it with his eyes open, but he’d had no idea it was this bad. Not that much got done in Congress anyway. There hadn’t been one party with supermajority control of the Senate, plus a majority in the House and the presidency, in decades. With each side simply refusing to go along with whatever the other side was promoting, the result was total gridlock.
Esteban was one of a rare breed, a moderate Republican from a purple state. But his party was in the minority in the Senate, and the Minority Leader had made it very clear there would be no compromise or cooperation with Democrats until the next election provided an opportunity to retake the Senate. But even with the Senate and firm Republican control of the House, they would still face a Democrat President, Amanda Teasley.
What a colossal waste of time, he thought. There were so many problems facing the country, and all the parties could do was maneuver against each other, trying to use ever more hyperbolic rhetoric, gerrymandering, and sophisticated micro-targeting of voters’ omnipresence news and ad feeds to eke out one seat here, one seat there—all in a futile attempt to gain absolute control. They devoted so little time to actually discussing real problems or rational solutions to them.
Senator Harrison Paxton threaded his way through the diner’s crowded tables and took a seat on the red vinyl-covered bench opposite Esteban. A good three inches taller than Esteban, Paxton had the distinguished gray hair and chiseled jaw line of a Senator from central casting. When they met it always made him feel self-conscious of his Central American stockiness. They shook hands over the white-and-black speckled laminate table. “Esteban, sorry I’m late. Communications sub-committee hearing ran way over. Did you order yet?”
“No worries, I just got here myself.” They each pulled out tablet computers and scanned the menu. “Hmm, looks like they added a chicken salad. But I think I’ll stick with the club.”
“Well, I’ll give it a try. It certainly looks good in the picture.” They laughed. The diner was well known for buying pictures of delicious-looking entrees for its online menu and delivering something not quite so appetizing.
After they placed their orders via tablet Esteban asked, “So what’s up in Communications?”
“Oh, don’t get me started. It’s the usual BS. More than half the subcommittee is completely in the pocket of the big telecom companies. They’re working on a bill that gives more spectrum away for free, increases government subsidies, and allows the telecoms to charge content providers distribution fees. They should call it the Telecom Profit Improvement Act. Damn thing was written by the lobbyists. The other members are funded by content providers, and their lobbyists wrote a raft of amendments. Today we had arguments from your side of the aisle about entitlement cuts to fund the s
ubsidies. You want to take what meager support we have for the poor and give it to corporations. Thanks for that!”
“Hey, don’t look at me! I wouldn’t sponsor such a thing. I’m seeing the same thing in Energy and Transportation. What was it that Eisenhower warned against, the military-industrial complex? We’ve got an industrial-government complex now.”
“What ever happened to a government of, by and for the people? Didn’t some Republican say that?”
“Ha! Don’t forget, my friend, that corporations are people too.”
Harry grinned. “I see the Minority Leader has been indoctrinating you well.”
A delivery bot decorated in red, white and black to match the booths wheeled its way through the tables and brought them glasses of water. “We’ve got a special on pie today,” said the bot. Harry shook his head. “Goddamn robots. I’ve been coming here for twenty years. Saw the same waitress, Ida, every week. Then last year, when the minimum wage went up to twenty-four dollars and payroll taxes increased, the restaurant couldn’t afford her any more. I asked the owner. He said the electronic ordering and delivery system saved him more than two hundred thousand a year.
“The tech titans say Ida just needs to upgrade her skills. Do they really expect a forty-five-year-old waitress to learn to become a robotics engineer?” asked Harry.
“Well, I hate to say I told you so,” said Esteban. He had campaigned against the minimum wage increase. “Making human workers more expensive just accelerates the rate at which they’re replaced by automation. It’s the nature of capitalism.”
“That’s why we need to fix capitalism.”
“With what, more regulation? If you regulate U.S. companies into high-cost labor situations, they won’t be competitive in the global marketplace. Then everyone loses their job.”
“You know where I stand on that. I’ve been arguing for the last decade that we need a basic income guarantee.”
Esteban rolled his eyes. “There you go again. Robin Hood to the rescue. Steal from the rich to give to the poor. And I don’t need to remind you that all the experiments with basic income failed.”
“Oh, come on, Esteban, they didn’t fail, that’s just alt-right propaganda. Norway and Finland have had a working universal basic income for a decade. Those experiments in Stockton and Kansas City back in the 2018 to 2021 timeframe were actually successful. Then President Trump said in ’22 that only ‘losers’ took free money and the whole thing became hyper-partisan.”
“Come on, Harry. Norway and Finland? They have like five million people each. Their models won’t work here.”
“Look, Esteban, the situation here is not sustainable. The labor force participation rate is down to record lows. The unemployment and underemployment rate is on a trajectory to reach twenty-five percent. People are getting desperate. Did you hear about the riot in Mississippi this morning? That call center shutting down? The police injured a hundred people and arrested dozens.”
“Yeah, I saw it live on FMS. Very unfortunate. But you still can’t convince me that soaking the rich is a solution to the normal process of creative destruction. Call centers will come and call centers will go.”
“Well, then, you better come up with something else. And fast, because things are getting worse in a hurry.”
CHAPTER FOUR
LOS ANGELES - SEPTEMBER 14
A loud tone signaled the end of the second shift at Harding Iron Works. Jacob Komarov put the finishing touches on his last weld of the day and flipped up his visor. As he rose from his crouching position, he felt a shooting pain in his lower back and grimaced.
Cheryl, one of the best welders on his team, hustled up the shop floor, weaving past the delivery robots carrying supplies to every work area. “Hey Jacob, down for a beer?” she asked, releasing her distinctive orange hair from its pony tail.
“Hey, Cheryl. Love to, but I need to go check on my dad.”
“What’s up?”
“I haven’t been able to reach him since Tuesday.” Jacob finished packing up his equipment, and they made their way to the locker rooms.
“Even at work?”
“Oh, I guess I didn’t tell you. He got laid off. A few months ago. Some Silicon Alley startup invented a new AI that did all the analysis he was hired for. Again.”
“That sucks. You’d think someone with his smarts would have no trouble keeping a job. So, he’s back in VR land?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid so. But he’s never been out of touch this long.”
“Well I hope it turns out okay. Let me know, huh?”
“Sure thing. Have a great weekend.”
They parted ways at the locker room doors. Jacob was changing out of his dark blue jumpsuit when his personal network assistant vibrated. It displayed a request that he stop by the medical center. He walked into one of the examination rooms and the avatar on the screen greeted him. “Hello Jacob. Your medplant transmitted an increase in stress hormones and inflammation and I noticed a hitch in your gait, an upper torso lean, and you are displaying facial pain indicators. Are you having an issue with your back?”
“Yes, I tweaked it at the end of the shift.” It always felt slightly creepy that his employment agreement mandated access to his personal medical implant device, but in this case, it had encouraged him to take care of this injury.
“Have a seat on the imager please.” Jacob sat on the comfortable white recliner and waited while the high-res sonogram inspected his back. “Looks like a slight compression of one of your discs has created a bulge impinging on a nerve. May I inject a dose of nanostructure repair bots?”
“Sure.” There was a whirring sound, a sharp prick in the small of his back, and a warm sensation as the fluid was injected. “The nanobots should target the inflammation and repair the annulus fibrosus around the disc. I expect you’ll feel better by this evening.”
“Okay. Thanks, I guess,” he said, never quite sure how to address these AIs.
Jacob ordered a Waymo self-drive and exited the plant’s ornate wrought iron gate. Within a minute a dark green two-seater pulled up a few feet from him. He unlocked the door with his PNA and climbed in. He watched a few news channels and tried to watch comedy vids, but his mind kept replaying the last conversation he’d had with his dad.
“You need to get out more,” he’d said.
“Why?” said Boris.
“You can’t just live in that damned VR all day. It’s not healthy.”
“It’s better than the damned real world. At least in there I get respect.”
“But, Dad, it’s not real. Those are just computer-generated characters.”
“Real life is overrated, Jacob.” His dad had paused. “I mean, what’s the point of it all?”
Jacob’s mind wandered further back, to the happier moments when his parents were still together and his father, the Russian immigrant success story, was full of life, proud of his technical skills and providing for his family. Another conversation popped into his mind, one he hadn’t thought about in years. Boris had come home from work at one of the massive entertainment media companies where he did sentiment flow analysis.
“Jacob, we got some cool new software at work today.”
“What does it do, Papa?”
“Well, it’s a little complicated, but basically we take very large amounts of data, identify important features, and then the AI software does a lot of analysis and generates an entire report. It saves so much time, it’s great!”
“Papa, can the software identify the features too?”
“Oh, no, Jacob. The people do that, then the software does the rest.” Jacob distinctly remembered the look on his father’s face, though. In retrospect it was obvious, but for the first time that day, Boris seemed to realize that the tools that had been augmenting his work might actually be able to replace him completely.
The Waymo pulled to the front of one of a dozen tall, featureless gray buildings arranged in an irregula
r cluster in a former industrial area. Low income and disabled housing. Clean and functional, but to him they always looked like warehouses. Warehouses for obsolete people.
Jacob took the elevator up to the 17th floor, admiring his image in the highly reflective door. With his bald head and sleeve tattoos on both muscular arms, his Slavic features made him look like a badass Russian gangster. He exited the elevator, turned left, and walked down the long, brightly lit corridor to his father’s apartment. He pressed the signal button he had hooked up last year, which flashed an indicator directly into his dad’s virtual reality system. It had been impossible to get his attention by knocking or pressing the door buzzer.
When his third press of the button failed to elicit a response, Jacob held his PNA against the black sensor just below it to unlock the door. Jacob pushed it open and stepped into the tiny apartment. Something smelled awful, something much worse than the week’s worth of dirty dishes piled up in the small kitchen to his right. There was no sign of his father in the sleeping area. The bathroom door was open, and Jacob could see that no one was inside. That left just the VR equipment space behind a shoji screen to his left.
“Dad?” he called out, even though he knew his voice would not penetrate the VR headset. He stepped forward into the room and let the door close behind him. He heard nothing from the VR space. If his dad was engaged in a program, he was usually talking up a storm. Jacob’s heart beat a little faster.
Jacob walked forward and took a step to the right. He saw his father’s lower legs and feet on the floor, splayed out toward the center of the room. They weren’t moving.
His heart pounding a drumbeat in his ears, Jacob edged further towards the screen and confirmed his worst fears.
Boris, VR gear still on, lay slumped against the left wall of the apartment, surrounded by a pool of dried and caked blood. His heirloom Russian Nagant M1895 revolver lay next to his right hand. An ugly arc of brown spots sprayed up the wall, almost reaching the framed certificate of a Ph.D. from Moscow University.