Destination: Detour E-Book

Ithaka O.

• Herausgeber: Imaginarium Kim
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

When a simple airport delay becomes a fight for humanity’s future, technician Aria Rush discovers that some connections run deeper than code.

Aria thought she was just helping an elderly man and his malfunctioning aidbot navigate airport security. But Antonius Wang isn’t just any old man—he is the reclusive genius who revolutionized the bot industry. And his “broken” bot isn’t broken at all.

Now Aria is running through a world where the line between human and machine has blurred beyond recognition. With the brilliant and enigmatic aidbot Vera at her side, she must outwit corrupt authority figures and an army of nearly-human androids to protect the secret that could either save humanity or destroy it forever.

* A contemplative exploration of identity, technology, and the courage to fight for what makes us who we are—even when the lines between flesh and circuitry have dissolved.

Leseprobe

DESTINATION: DETOUR

ITHAKA O.

IMAGINARIUM KIM

© 2022 Ithaka O.

All rights reserved.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

No part of this story may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author.

CONTENTS

I. Checks, Balances

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

II. Shells, Their Cores

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

III. Adrift, Anchored

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

IV. Charades, Truths

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

V. Losses, Gains

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

VI. New Home, for Now

Chapter 34

Also by Ithaka O.

Thank you for reading

PARTI

CHECKS, BALANCES

1

Long lines. The hassle of removing electronic devices from your bags and putting them in separate bins. The faint foot odor that most people are too polite to acknowledge because it comes from strangers, it’s winter (which means thick, ill-ventilating socks), and those strangers have no choice but to take off their boots for this most cumbersome part of the air traveling experience:

Security checks.

Such checks were a routine part of the average airport of the year 2020, and Aria Rush stood in the very center of one such average airport while holding a single black carry-on duffle bag.

Hundreds of people hunted for empty bins and those bins collided and made those dull plastic-colliding sounds. The same hundreds of people took off their snowshoes or sneakers or dress shoes under the flat, pale lights covering most of the ceiling. Add to that the dozens of aidbots, which were quite literally bots that aided, and the area in front of the security check gates ended up being as hectic as a chicken farm focused solely on profit and not at all on food safety or animal welfare.

Most aidbots were androids at least as large as their owners, meaning that they were all taller than Aria, who was smaller and shorter than the human average. But one could never mistake an aidbot as a human just because of their human-comparable sizes and anthropomorphic physical features such as arms, legs, hands with ten fingers, and feet with ten toes. Their “eyes” were a strip of black screen, curved like the visor of a helmet. Their smooth faces lacked a nose, a mouth, and ears. Gaping spaces opened up at their joints whenever they bent their arms or legs; no skin or clothing gave them privacy.

Unless their owner happened to be really very conservative. Then, like those olden-time folks who used to put little socks on the limbs of their pianos, the aidbots might be wearing clothes. But most everyone agreed: that tended to look ridiculous. So it was that mean children everywhere made it their sport and hobby to squeeze foreign material into the gaping gaps of their neighborhood aidbots’ joints. Terrible, what human children were capable of. Aria had often been the one to fix the poor aidbots, who’d been attacked at their weakest points.

Some parents chided or even punished their children for such despicable behavior; many didn’t care. Very clearly, the aidbots were robots rather than humans. So, what was the big deal? Did humans ever punish their children for hitting the TV set? Of course not.

Even the owners liked to keep the aidbots strictly robotic in every sense. The biggest market for aidbots was people whom the marketing gurus called the “hyperelderly” (the ninety to one-hundred-and-twenty age bracket). You didn’t want to pay for a capable, young, more human-seeming creature when you were expiring, was how marketing journals explained the preference for clearly robotic aidbots, instead of for “more human” ones.

At any rate, had the airport not been so crowded, the aidbots might have been quite pleasant to look at. Light that was flattening for humans was flattering to these metallic beings. Their smooth surfaces shimmered. They were usually black, white, silver, or rose-gold. You know, just like the colors of your smartphone. Classic colors, which you won’t easily tire of. Timeless. Quite beautiful, really.

But aidbots never existed independently from their humans. And with their humans so pale and tired-looking under the airport ceiling lights, the aidbots were busy helping the humans—wiping their cold sweat, holding their bags, checking their temperature… And the light didn’t have a chance to make the bots shine.

Back in Aria’s workshop in Dodam, the city that she was about to leave behind, her aidbots used to look beautiful, as they should. There, no crowd. There, no dull plastic collision sounds. There, lighting, designed to flatter humans and bots more or less equally, so that neither felt neglected—although the lighting did slightly favor the humans.

Human beings being the beings of relativity, their perception of their own beauty made them more open to the idea of aidbots. Each aidbot seemed like less of a threat, even without the eyes, nose, and mouth, if a potential human owner thought that they themselves were presentable. Hence, flattering lighting was a proven method to encourage the hyperelderly to purchase a model when they came to a workshop to customize a companion for a lifetime.

You’d think that any logically minded hyperelderly wouldn’t be influenced by such shallow, manipulative tactics. If they need an aidbot, they go get one. If they don’t, they don’t go get one, regardless of lighting, no? But few things in life are purely logical. Aging, especially, isn’t logical. About the only part that is logical about aging is that it is bound to happen. But how a person interprets the process? What that person should do or can do or can’t do? Not so clear-cut.

So, a threat—that was what many hyperelderly thought the aidbots were. Because, any being that could walk, run, jump, fetch, grab, pull, and push, while you couldn’t, was a threat. Didn’t matter if it was an aidbot or another human being. Didn’t matter that you wanted that being to be able to perform those tasks because you couldn’t…

Aria hugged her bulky black duffle bag so that she wouldn’t be in the way of an aidbot that stood just in front of her. The aidbot nodded thanks. Quiet beings, they were, when it came to communication with any human other than their owners, especially in a public place.

This particular one was silver-colored. With Aria out of the way, it knelt on the ground, probably to help its owner with the shoes. It was an older model, from about five years ago, but solidly built, Aria knew. Not much customization. In fact, none that Aria could discern from first look. Probably inexpensive. But well-maintained. No creaking joints, no randomly blinking light anywhere, no scratches, no coolant leaking.

On the other hand, its owner grunted and sighed and moaned. He was an ancient man, probably at the top of the hyperelderly bracket. He could barely stand with the help of the braces around his legs and waist so that he kept his one hand on the silver aidbot’s shoulder. That hand kept slipping because—ironically—he had taken too good care of his basic-model aidbot. Or, rather, he had ordered the aidbot to take too good care of itself—and its surface was over-polished.

His technician should have offered to attach a handle on that shoulder.

Bad technicians were worse than none. When you had no technician, you looked for one. When you had a bad one, you tended to keep them. Especially when they talked the good talk. Sweet talk. Useless talk. People liked to hear such talk. They didn’t look for new technicians.

Laziness? Maybe. But if you’re a hundred and twenty years old, maybe it should be called something else. Tiredness, maybe. Or an awareness of the futility of replaceable existences. After the clients replaced a chunk of their activity with an aidbot, they didn’t want to think about replacing the technician with a different person altogether.

Eventually, the ancient man in front of Aria balanced himself on one foot and his arm on his silver aidbot, proving that she had guessed correctly: the aidbot was about to help the man with his shoes. Slippers, in fact. Slippers that had been halfway covering multiple layers of very thick socks.

His difficulty in standing upright, on two feet or one foot, must have been why the aidbot had recommended the slippers instead of boots or anything else warmer. That was also probably why the aidbot had begun aiding the man now, instead of after fifty more people in front of them had gotten through the check gate.

Aria hoped that the security check agentbots wouldn’t ask the old man to take off his layers of socks.

To give the old man some privacy, she looked around the pre-security-check area with no particular aim. The same hundreds of people who had taken off their shoes now took off their coats. And the vests. And the scarves. Sometimes with the help of the aidbots, sometimes on their own.

Then people and their aidbots walked through the check gate, a device that looked like a simple rectangular opening. One of the agentbots, painted in light-blue for the torso and black for the legs, told the people and their aidbots to Wave your arms up and down, please, in a perfectly authentic human voice. Then they said Step out, please.

Aria cringed. Bots could do wonderful things for humans. And bots only ended up being what they were because some humans had wanted it so. But those authentic human voices didn’t belong with blue-painted torsos and black-painted legs.

Aidbots, unlike those agentbots, tended to have more robotic voices because that tended to comfort the clients. Aria wondered if the airport had decided to go with human voices for its agentbots precisely to make people uneasy. Because, people did obey the agentbots. They did step in when told and stepped out, also when told.

Then, people and their aidbots waited for their stuff on the other side of the check gates. Picked up the scarves, vests, coats; the dress shoes, sneakers, snowshoes; collected the electronic devices; put them back in their bags; and finally, finally walked off to the gates where the airplanes waited.

The idea of the gates made Aria’s stomach grumble. Between here and there, restaurants lined the innards of the airport. She had checked the map in the cab on the way here.

Breakfast—that was what she’d been craving since she was done packing late last night (or early this dawn), when no decent place that served bacon and eggs was open, at least not near where she used to live. Back then, she’d been only mildly disappointed. She had told herself, Might as well get out of this whole area now, not just out of the apartment. Sure, the idea of breakfast had made her mouth water. (Beautiful, greasy, glistening bacon! Butter-basted sunny-side-up eggs, gorged down with a hot, fresh cup of coffee!) But by heavens, she had to get away from him. And the best she could do now was to ignore her empty stomach and try to let the dullness of her surroundings carry her to temporary numbness…

Someone grabbed Aria’s arm from behind so that she almost bumped into the ancient man in front of her. But she managed to stumble sideways instead. She whirled around. The grabber let go.

“I’m sorry, dear,” an old lady with snow-white hair said.

“It’s okay, ma’am,” Aria said. “Go ahead.”

Aria offered her arm, and the old lady grabbed it well before Aria had finished saying “Go ahead.” The lady couldn’t help it; she couldn’t keep her balance.

Seventy, maybe? Eighty? Not so old as to need an aidbot, but old enough to need human help, occasionally.

But Aria wasn’t good with guessing ages. Aria’s parents had never been close to their own parents, which meant that Aria had barely known her grandparents. And when it isn’t your own grandparents, you don’t ask old people their age. In fact, you don’t ask anyone their age, old or young; it’s rude.

“Thank you, that’s very sweet of you,” the old lady said apologetically.

“My pleasure,” Aria said.

The lady slowly took off her loafers with her free hand. The process was drawn out and looked painful. But Aria knew from experience with her clients that it’s better to wait for the other party to ask for help.

Never assume that someone needs help, especially when that someone expects other people to expect that they’ll need help, and still doesn’t ask for help. Just do your job when it’s given to you. Like when the client comes to your shop to customize an aidbot. Do the job. Which that technician who had sold that silver aidbot to that ancient man hadn’t done by failing to attach a handle on its shoulder…

“You know, when I grabbed you accidentally,” the old lady said, out of breath, crouched, her voice shaking, nevertheless smiling, “I thought, ‘Oops,’ because you look so, I don’t know, so, so stern, a little.” The old lady chuckled nervously. “I mean, no offense, I should be old enough to know not to judge a book by its cover. But all that black.”

“No offense taken,” Aria said. “I hear that a lot.”

She did. She liked black. Her duffle bag was black. Her long hair, tied back in a ponytail, was black. Her jeans were black. The boots were black, too, and her leather gloves sticking out of a pocket of her black leather jacket were black as well. Even the glass bottle of her perfume was black and smelled of black orchids.

Black, a neutral color.

But of course, she had left the perfume bottle back in Jack’s apartment, in Dodam. That was another inconvenience with air travel, on top of the security checks: you didn’t get to take the liquids, the breakables, and the flammables with you. And now that Aria thought about it, perfume in a glass bottle was all of that. Liquid, breakable, flammable.

The “No breakables in the cabin” rule was added about a year ago, when some genius had decided to carry a glass vase, completely unprotected, in her carry-on bag—not even a suitcase, but a gym bag.

The vase broke on the airplane, possibly well before takeoff, when people were struggling to secure space in the overhead compartment. Mid-flight, a three-year-old boy wanted to play with a toy that his parents had put in a suitcase in the overhead compartment. Because the parents also had a newborn to struggle with and the boy couldn’t reach the overhead compartment, a flight attendant—a human one—helped.

The luggage with the toy for the boy did get out of the overhead compartment. But in the process, the flight attendant cut himself on the broken glass shards that had pierced through the maddeningly inappropriate gym bag.

Blood was spilled. People panicked.

Any and all breakables were prohibited from carry-on from then forward. As an additional side effect, the airline’s decision to have a human flight attendant had been questioned. Said airline ended up firing all human flight attendants, as so many other humans in other fields had been fired, including the ground staff that had allowed the vase to pass through security.

Hence, now.

No breakables. And also, no liquids, no flammables, no anything, no nothing, why, oh why, humans, do you need an airplane to get from one place to another at all?

Totally inconvenient. Which, though, could be a good thing. Inconvenience forced you to leave some things behind. And sometimes, you were better off that way. Jack had gifted Aria the perfume in the black bottle. Jack, who used to be her boyfriend, and who had become her ex as of last night. Or this dawn, depending on how you defined your nights and dawns.

And once again, Aria dreamed of bacon and eggs, steaming hot coffee, a full stomach and the pleasant drowsiness that inevitably accompanied it…

“Oh, but such a, such a friendly girl you are,” said the lady, out of breath and finally getting out of one loafer.

She proceeded to the other side. Aria patiently held out her arm for any support the lady might need.

During security checks, there was no special treatment for the elderly. (Not that there ever was any special treatment anywhere for the elderly.) Aria was thirty now, and she seriously wondered whether she would be able to manage air travel when she reached the same age as this lady.

Perhaps, in the several decades that it was going to take Aria to reach the age of seventy, someone in charge of designing security checks would figure out a more efficient method to accomplish the task. But then again, it had already been 106 years since the very first passenger aircraft had taken off on January 1, 1914, and 106 years hadn’t been enough to improve the situation much.

In fact, the situation had worsened. There used to be a time when people didn’t worry about terrorist attacks from mini bombs the size of thumbnails, which were nevertheless capable of blowing up an entire airplane. Back then, things had moved more quickly.

Presently, things moved far from quickly.

“I am so sorry, I just, I can’t…” the old lady said.

“Take your time,” Aria said.

The I’m-very-important-because-I-wear-this-$4,000-suit guy behind Aria cleared his throat in disagreement.

Aria turned around and raised her brows at him. Not in a belligerent way, no. With people like that, you don’t get belligerent. They are people who frown and hold their nose at a person whose feet stink, even though said person knows that his feet stink and is embarrassed about it but has to take off his shoes anyway because this is the security check. These are people who think that no one but they want to get through the security check as soon as possible, as if they had a trademark on the idea of having better things to do.

When dealing with them, you maintain your cool. Wearing black helps, especially when you’re as small and short as Aria. People like the suit guy think that tiny people are easy to deal with. Not so. Ever seen a tiny chihuahua bark like mad at a golden retriever? That. That tiny chihuahua. That could be Aria.

But for now, she chose to be a calm chihuahua. Wearing black, the neutral but strong color, Aria gave the guy the stare: “You got a problem?” but not in a “Let’s fight” way. Just in a “What’s the matter, you can’t handle a situation like this? You call this a problem?” way.

It wasn’t as if they were going to get anywhere faster by making the old lady take off her shoes faster. There was a long line ahead of them.

The self-important suit guy looked away. Once again, Aria was reminded of Jack Tran and the breakfast he had basically robbed from her.

2

Jack Tran used to hate it when Aria did this to him—the looking-him-coldly-in-the-eye-until-he-gave-up thing. She had done that whenever he had tried to get her attention while she was deeply concentrated on her studies about her heroes. Most recently, it had happened three days ago, on a cold winter day just like today, except it was raining.

The raindrops loudly pounded on the windows at Jack’s 5th-floor apartment. Aria sat on the living room sofa, pen and paper ready, leaning toward the screen.

Today her study involved watching a documentary. The hero was Lucious Bold, the CEO of Bold Company and a hands-on engineer, researcher, and philanthropist.

Bold, being the ever-generous person he was, had funded the creation of the documentary so that, in his words, “Future generations could be inspired.” Of course, not many people bothered to watch documentaries about scientific discoveries and the commercializations thereof. (That said, most people did know and appreciated the fact that Lucious Bold had been one of the corporate-side advocates for universal basic income, his logic being that for decades, there had been enough wealth in the world to prevent death from starvation or homelessness. He had further argued that the cost of not providing for the welfare of everyone—the potential for social upheaval—outweighed the cost to big corporations in the form of taxation.)

The people interested in the technical details had always made up a tiny segment of the entire working population. And with the dwindling of the working population itself, said segment had diminished to a microscopic, almost undetectable slice of the world.

Aria was part of that slice. She didn’t want to miss a word of what Bold had to say.

“It comes in every color, Vincent,” he said. “See, Vincent, from the beginning, I was very adamant about it. I wanted us to capture all the variety there is in our world. It doesn’t make sense to create skin in only one color—let’s just say, pink—when there are people with green and blue and silver skin too.”

“Totally, totally,” said Vincent Gabele.

Aria marveled at the matter-of-fact tone with which Bold said how very obvious it was to him to allow everyone in this world, regardless of the skin color they were born with, to benefit from his new technology.

He was a lean, tall man with wild silver hair that reached his chin at some parts and shot up in the opposite direction at other parts. Clearly, he enjoyed the stereotypical mad scientist look. It had been his signature look since he was twenty or so (with hair brown, not silver), which had been when he had begun appearing in journals and newspapers for this and that exciting new discovery. Just like with everything else in his life, he had raised a taken-for-granted concept to the next level by pushing it to its limits: he wore a white lab gown at all times, as if he were ready to be photographed at all times. This was a boon for enlightenment, science, and everything else he represented, because, well, he was quite handsome. So objectively handsome, in fact, that not even that mad scientist look masked his beauty.

But handsomeness aside, what mattered was the attitude. Most people his age—he was sixty by now—tried to look as normal as possible. Most sixty-year-olds had done so throughout the ages, not just in today’s world. But Bold? He refused to take that route. If he could make science a little bit more like a show and thereby get people’s attention and make them care, he was willing to do so.

He never lost his faint, kind smile. He showed no nervousness whatsoever in front of the cameras. The world needed geniuses like him—geniuses who could blossom at the attention of the masses instead of sinking to the bottom of the heap of provocative entertainment. Really, it was smart of him to adopt that mad scientist outfit and hair.

Not that Bold was excessively showy, not at all. His hands were always calmly folded on his lap. He never made big gestures. His achievements were so grand, yet he never tried to intimidate anyone.

As to Vincent Gabele, he was one of the head producers at Bold Productions, whose name Aria knew from the numerous credit rolls she had seen at the end of these documentaries. He spoke in a quietly sweet voice, brimming with his eternal respect for his boss.

In most other aspects, Vincent was quite unmemorable—especially visually-speaking. In fact, he was optically so forgettable that his most not-forgettable feature wasn’t even his face.

For example, now: Bold sat across from Vincent in that ever classic over-the-shoulder style frame. Hence Aria could only see Vincent’s left shoulder. That, she recognized. That particularly square left shoulder. It and its counterpart on the right side were frequently-appearing characters and the most memorable features that Vincent Gabele was born with. Compared to them, his face was too forgettable. Had it not been for the baseball caps that he always wore, Aria wondered if she could’ve recognized him as him in those split seconds in which his face sometimes blinked in a brief cut, then disappeared. He probably kept a whole collection of them at home. Baseball caps, not shoulders or faces.

But it was good so. They wanted to give the spotlight to Lucious Bold, not the interviewer. So, you could say Vincent was gifted. He was born to do this job, and was doing it extremely well, by keeping his voice sweet, his shoulders square, and his face forgettable, with the exception of a baseball cap as an ornament, just to avoid confusing the viewers altogether.

The clear focus was Lucious Bold. More than half of the frame fixated on him. That was supposed to be like that, and not, like the trolls said, “Because Bold is an attention whore.” Bold was the guy who had created artificial-but-might-as-well-be-real human skin in every color in which skin occurred naturally, and at an affordable price too. That should more than qualify him as someone who deserved attention, regardless of whether it had been actively sought after or not.

“But it must have been difficult to take all that into account,” Vincent said. “I mean, every shade of skin? From the darkest to the palest? And taking into account all the different environments, say those who live in sunny places, cold places without the sun rising for months…”

When Bold didn’t immediately respond, the frame cut to a different angle, close-up on Bold from the right. Bold pressed a finger at his chin in deep thought.

“Yes, Vincent, good point. It was tough, very tough, I’ll admit that. And some researchers on my team were against my plans. They said we should first pick whatever skin color that was the easiest to make, and go to market with that first. But I didn’t agree, Vincent. Whatever technology that was ideal for making one skin color wasn’t necessarily going to be the same as whatever technology that was ideal for making all the different skin colors. So, to get the latter, we would’ve had to abandon the former and almost start from scratch anyway. Does that make sense, Vincent?”

Instead of showing Vincent’s reaction, the frame cut again to Bold, from the front and left. His face took up most of the screen. His eyes sparkled with calm passion.

“It all comes down to respect. I respect every human being in this world, Vincent. Anyone and everyone who suffered severe burns will be able to lead a normal life now, without having to think, ‘Why wasn’t I born with that particular other skin color that happened to be the first one to be released in the market’?”

“But because of that, those who could have been the lucky few a lot earlier had to wait a little longer, no?”

“Yes, they did. And Vincent, I considered that.”

Bold really liked to address people by their names as frequently as possible.

“But you see,” Bold said, “I always believe that the greater good should take the higher priority than personal gains. And sometimes that means that the whole group has to wait. And that whole group includes me. Believe me when I say that waiting is as hard for me as it is for anyone else. But I had to be patient, Vincent, and I had to subdue the voices inside me that said that I want quick results. I reminded myself: with Bold Company, you can rest assured; we won’t leave you behind.”

“Absolutely, absolutely,” Vincent said.

“Snob,” Jack said from the kitchen.

Aria had almost forgotten that she shared the apartment with Jack. It had been his, originally. But for heaven’s sake, if he had asked her to move in, he shouldn’t be surprised that from time to time, she was going to watch TV in his living room, and expected to be able to do so without being distracted, just like she didn’t distract him while he was lifting weights.

So, she ignored him, though he had spoken loudly enough for her to hear him over the rain drumming on the windows. She wanted to absorb everything she could absorb about Lucious Bold.

“By the way, Vincent, I will tell you right now that this isn’t the end.”

“How so?”

“Bold Company won’t rest until we have the full suite of what it takes to help the burn victims.”

“Tell us a bit more about that.”

“Hair, Vincent. Hair. That is what is critical. Wigs are expensive, you see? High-quality wigs made of real hair that hasn’t been damaged from dyeing and frequent drying and other such things. But if we made hair, Vincent? In every color imaginable? And if we, furthermore, were able to plant that hair directly in the scalp and consequently, allow people to grow their own hair instead of having to wear a wig?”

“Then you won’t just be the hero of the burn victims. The entire world population of baldies will call you their hero.”

Vincent laughed. Bold laughed a bit, too—but just the right amount to avoid making Vincent look like a total jerk while not letting anyone misinterpret Bold’s laughter as being politically incorrect in any shape or form.

Finally, Vincent stopped making a fool out of himself and cleared his throat. He said, in his sweet media voice, “You are an asset to our society, Doctor Bold. And once again, congratulations on opening the flagship store.”

“I am only doing what I should be doing, Vincent.”

“For those of you who are interested, it’s in Onsemiro, the capital of our nation, at the headquarters of Bold Company. Right on the first floor. Am I right?”

“Yes, Vincent.”

“It’s the tallest building in the city. You can’t miss it. Says B.O.L.D. right on the top floor.”

Vincent laughed. Lucious Bold smiled.

“So pretentious,” Jack said.

Jack was talking like the forum trolls. But Aria thought that “pretentious” was the wrong descriptor. Ambitious, maybe. Or strategic. Or annoying, a little, calling Vincent by his name so frequently. But pretentious? No.

To be truly pretentious, a person had to try to come across as being better than they actually were. But that wasn’t the case with Bold. He was great. And he knew it. Of course he knew it. He was an astonishingly smart man. How could Jack or the trolls deny that part? Maybe they had taken too many of one of those street makes (or street meds, depending on the opinion of the user regarding the usage of substances for self-medication), which had messed up with their heads. Otherwise, they would be screaming in excitement, which was exactly what Aria wanted to do. Bold had just told the world that he had created human skin to help the burn victims and that he wasn’t going to stop there, but create authentic hair!

“Nobody who names his company after himself can really be humble,” Jack said.

“Oh my goodness,” Aria said, finally looking around. “Will you stop?”

“Stop what, exactly?”

Jack crossed the living room with a glass of disgusting-looking, beige protein drink. Him coming over without finishing the drink meant that he was ready to fight.

“What’s your problem with me watching these?” Aria asked. “I don’t keep talking to you when you’re lifting weights.”

“Because I don’t follow people who are so obviously in love with themselves when I’m lifting weights.”

“What’s wrong with promoting what you’ve accomplished if you’ve developed the greatest technology since the advent of aidbots?”

“Oh, gosh, not that again. ‘Since the advent of aidbots,’ of course.”

“What? It’s true.”

“It’s not true. Not everyone thinks that your job is that important.”

“It’s not because it’s my job. It’s because countless hyperelderly—who we are likely to become, I might add—have gained freedom like never before in the history of humanity.”

“Are you hearing yourself? You talk as if the world would have stopped functioning if you hadn’t worked.”

And so on and so forth.

After a while, Aria gave him the cool look. Jack didn’t give up immediately. Jack said that she had become a robot while making robots for old people who would be better off becoming robots themselves because being human, for them, had ceased a long time ago. Humans weren’t built to last a hundred and twenty years, Jack said. Aria kept giving him the cool look during his entire speech, even when he claimed that Bold was merely a race collector, more disturbing and disgusting than a supposedly race-blind person.

The cool look. All the way.

Eventually, Jack gave up and went off to the kitchen to finish his stupid protein drink.

Aria slumped on the sofa. She glared at the screen. Bold and Vincent were talking about other things. Aria heard their voices but didn’t process the content at all. She was brooding about what Jack had said.

Weren’t built to last a hundred and twenty years. What was that even supposed to mean? Obviously, people were lasting that long, hence the popularity of the aidbots.

And even if people didn’t last that long, or weren’t supposed to last, so what?

You do the job that you’ve chosen. Your calling.

Which of course Jack didn’t understand. He didn’t have a job. Few people had jobs these days because nobody had to have a job. Why get a job, when all the essentials were given out for free?

Very few could have jobs. Very few things required human input anymore. Many times, it was better for people to stay out of the way. And that trend had begun long before a silly passenger had put a glass vase in a carry-on gym bag, and a bunch of airport and airline workers had failed to notice because they didn’t have a magical (or technologically advanced) ability to identify glass under layers of cloth.

Aria recalled that story that her mother had told over breakfast once, from the days when most everyone used to work in an office, even as terms such as “digital nomads” had been thrown around as if they were the next big hip thing.

“I emailed him to send me four files,” Mother had said, fake-amused and actually quite infuriated. “And you know how much thought I had to put into that process? Let’s just say too much. It was like this. Imagine that the files had been named after fruits. First off, I knew that if I listed those four in a sentence, like ‘Can you please send me the apple-file, banana-file, cherry-file, and durian-file?’, he was bound to miss one of the four. So, I wrote the email with a numbered bullet-point list.

“Can you please send me these four files?

“1. Apple-file

“2. Banana-file

“3. Cherry-file

“4. Durian-file.

“Guess what he did?”

“What?” Aria had said, already guessing the answer. She swallowed the bacon in her mouth so she could react as soon as her mother answered. Aria was ten or so back then, young, wanting to please her mother. Besides, when it came to office blunder talk, there had never been a time when Aria had needed to disagree with her mother.

“He sent me the banana-file and cherry-file,” Mother said, “but didn’t send me the apple-file and durian-file! Didn’t even acknowledge that I had mentioned them.”

Young Aria rolled her eyes and let out a chuckle.

“So I emailed him back,” Mother said. “ ‘Thanks for sending me the banana-file and cherry-file. Can you also send me the apple-file and the durian-file?’ Guess what he did this time.”

“No, he didn’t,” Aria said in genuine disbelief.

“He sent me the apple-file, but didn’t send me the durian-file!”

At this point, Mother laughed—that angry, I-give-up laugh.

“So I sent him another email,” she said. “ ‘Thanks for sending me the apple-file. Can you send me the durian-file too?’ And that was when he finally said, ‘The durian-file isn’t available yet.’ Can you believe it? How can people, who cannot read a list of four files and send those four files, be working at a job that requires that they be able to read a list of four files and send those four files? Their entire job is to send files!”

True story.

Aria had taken after her mother. She wanted to be the person who was capable of sending, receiving, comprehending, and acting on an email that discussed four files and much more—just like her mother, even in an age in which people weren’t required to work to survive.

Jack had frequently said, whenever Aria had given him the cool look, that Aria was stuck up because she thought she was more important than him, which in turn was because she still worked and he didn’t, and never had, never planned to.

Aria had equally frequently pointed out, “I don’t think people need to have jobs when they determine they don’t need them.”

“Then why’re you looking at me as if I don’t live up to some sort of expectation?” he would scream, in his sweat pants, with nothing to cover his torso because he liked to keep his beautifully sculpted abs exposed. (That wasn’t Aria’s word choice, by the way. That was what Jack called his workout routine: “sculpting” his muscles.)

Needless to say, their relationship hadn’t lasted very long. To be precise, for only about six months, ending at that hour that could be called last night but also this dawn. Aria had to get out of his apartment, so desperately, that she had prioritized her departure over her beloved breakfast.

She had to leave because she liked to watch TV in peace, but also, despite Jack’s abs, frankly: yeah, Aria did have expectations. Expectations that had nothing to do with money. Jack had money, not plenty, but enough. He actually had more money in the bank than she did, because his insurance, unlike hers, didn’t need to cover for human-caused accidents that might happen in her aidbot workshop.

Jack also hadn’t paid a ridiculous amount of money on his education to become a technician. Of course, the theory was that an education was an investment. Should Aria persist in maintaining a career, she might earn more than Jack in five year’s time. He, on basic income like everyone else. She, basic income plus a little extra. But all that was conjecture, and based on the assumption that the technology wasn’t going to develop any further, any faster, rendering all human inputs not only unnecessary, but also detrimental.

And yet, yes, Aria had to admit: it would have been nice to date someone who wanted to do something.

It wasn’t that Aria thought work was what defined humans. In fact, the opposite. Play was what defined humans.

But what if work equaled play? Why the hell not? Why couldn’t a person enjoy work so much that she identified herself by the work she did?

For decades, people had called those who loved work too much “workaholics.” What a derogatory term. So condescending. These days, it was even more nonsensical, because the original meaning had gotten lost. People didn’t actually overwork themselves these days. That was simply impossible. The word “workaholic” was merely faultily used to imply that wanting to get work done—any work, even when it wasn’t overwork—was something bad. As if wanting to be of use to other people was wrong. As if wanting to exist for a reason, for an anchor in an otherwise random and chaotic world, was terrible.

An anchor.

Because, without the need to hunt for jobs, without the need to hunt for cheaper housing, and with most of the basic education going online, people could live anywhere. Too many choices had been given to humans. Too long a life, with too many guarantees.

Yet most people didn’t utilize that freedom. You’d think they’d move anywhere, be free, embrace the possibilities—but no. Most people lived and died where they had been born. Most of the population wasn’t adrift.

Aria could have lived that life. Nothing wrong with that.

But she hadn’t.

She couldn’t.

She had left home despite craving a compelling reason to belong somewhere. She hadn’t wanted to be defined by the pure chance event that had been her birth. She had wanted to choose where she lived.

Ever since she had been eighteen, she had traveled from city to city. Whenever she felt as if she were living at a place only because she had gotten lazy, it was time to go to the airport. There, she bought a one-way ticket for the next plane.

Freeing, sure. But that also meant: no anchor.

Aria could go back home. Home home, not that-random-apartment-wherever home. To Mother and Father, Aria could return. Not exactly into their house, but to that neighborhood.

But something about that… was so deterministic.

That was Aria. Needlessly contemplative. She wanted an anchor of her own, not one that was imposed by others or by chance.

Maybe that was why she liked Lucious Bold so much. The man had purpose. He knew what he wanted, he worked toward it, and got it. He shared the result with the world. Aria was certain that he could have become anything he had set his mind to. He could leave whenever. Become something else. But he had chosen this calling. He was committed.

She wanted to have what he had. Jack didn’t understand. Jack agreed with the forum trolls who hated Lucious Bold or pretty much everyone who “tried too hard.” Trying was uncool.

Even Vincent, they hated. Regarding him, the trolls said, “One of the minions who entered paid slavery.” But Aria didn’t care what the trolls said. Most of them had never created anything beyond the useless accusations they wrote on those forums, if that could be called creating. None of them were in a position to rightfully accuse Bold of forcing artists into creating what they didn’t want to create. None of them were in a position to rightfully accuse Vincent of letting someone force him into creating what he didn’t want to create. Heck, if someone could be forced to create something, that was quite a feat these days. Besides, “paid slavery” didn’t even make sense.

Anyway.

Jack and Aria had parted ways. Once again, Aria was on her way to a random city. All she knew about her destination was that it was going to be smaller than Dodam, because Dodam was the largest city in the nation (even larger than the capital, Onsemiro) and she could only pay for a flight within the country.

Maybe it had been wrong of her to expect that her job could be her anchor, when no occupation in this era required anyone’s physical presence.

Of course, at the time when Aria had begun her training, technicians had needed to open shops at specific places, like any other retail or service-oriented business of the early 21st century. A department store, for example, used to need physical space. Or restaurants. Or a dentist’s office.

Those were still there. Some of them.

But mostly, people simply ordered stuff from whatever website and had it delivered to their window. The drones dropped off the packages right up to the 21st floor, or the 50th, or whichever floor.

Same with food. And even for a dentist’s appointment, if it was something simple and routine, like scaling, most apartments nowadays had at least a couple of medbots that got the job done.

And anything could be 3D printed. Aidbot parts and other electronic parts, especially. Nowadays, Aria’s competitors sold their customization layouts to anyone and everyone all across the world. Some of the really great technicians didn’t do offline face-to-face meetings at all. They could customize bots remotely with the help of other bots.

Only the newbies like Aria were better off establishing a physical store presence. This was entirely due to their target market, the hyperelderly. Some of the customers in that bracket liked physicality. Some liked it so much that they were open to trying out newbies like Aria instead of working with a more established technician online.

But if Aria continued to work in this field for a few years, then what? Would she be willing to continue pouring ridiculous amounts of money on short-term rent, while she traveled from city to city? Ordering and shipping physical inventory and so on?

Aria craved for a reason to be somewhere, but that didn’t mean that she was so idealistic that she didn’t recognize desperate extravagance when she committed it. Paying pointless rent counted as desperate extravagance.

And yet, an anchor—that idea intrigued her so.

Something to push oneself toward, or to allow oneself to be pulled by.

Damn it, all Aria wanted was to stop feeling so restless. With all the resources people had nowadays, anybody could become anything, but it seemed that because of that precise reason, most people didn’t become something, just like most people of the previous generation hadn’t become something.

It was bizarre. More peace, more resources, more good everything, and yet not everyone got what they wanted. Not everyone wanted to want.

Safety, food, shelter? Yes.

Self-fulfillment? Not necessarily. That wasn’t something that the government could distribute. No one could mass-produce that.