It was really getting late. The evening had passed much quicker that I could have imagined. I had been talking with Evelith for hours, and for a while with Leste too, watching the old projections and completely ignoring the dance and strip acts in between. It seemed that I had made two friends, and a bit of an enemy too in Yelati, although I wasn’t sure what I had done to her. People were hard to deal with, and I was exhausted now.
The current holographic video clip contained an over-the-to wedding scene from centuries ago, when such things still existed. A man and a woman in weird black and white clothes, some kind of priest from an ancient religion, and very mellow music in the background. There was something very alien about the whole scene, something unreal. Yes, evidently I knew marriage and families and coupes and such were part of being human, but that was only theory to me. I couldn’t remember any actual wedding in my active memory, I didn’t know any people who were in families or even relationships. It seemed that I wasn’t the only one to be triggered by the video: In Evelith it brought out the question that she probably would have asked anyway, even though she seemed to know the answer already:
“So you really don’t have a woman in your life? A lover? Not even a robowife?”
I must have looked at her as if she came from another planet with that last word, but it was scary how she could read me. “Yuck, what an idea. No, I’ve been alone since I left home. Never could keep an actual relationship. And then work happened and I turned into an asexual half-robot as your friend says. I’m extremely boring. And you?” It was not entirely true, but I had told myself this version of my life story for so long that it had become truth long ago. She seemed to hesitate herself.
“I already guessed that anyway,” she said, looking at the couple on the screen, who were doing some kind of dance. “Couples are a thing of the past, a luxury we’ve lost as a species in the twilight of our being… And that will be the end of our species too. This is the last generation…” She added darkly, and said nothing for a while.
The music video faded into another one, and took a sip from her beer. “But I once had a boyfriend, tears ago. I think he planned to propose even, but then he got religion.”
The painful pause after the last word said enough.
“I’m sorry.” I mumbled understandingly. “He got an initiation in the church of Acosmia, and because the universe is an illusion anyway, and not existing is the only way to not live a lie, he made an appointment with the Thanathorium and was gone altogether. So suddenly. All in just a few days. I don’t think I ever recovered of that.” I nodded. I knew what she meant. Many people I had known had disappeared from my life in the same way over the years. Well, mostly in the early years of my adulthood that is. It might have been part of the reason why I had ‘disappeared’ into my job with robots, away from humans that would only dissolve into nothingness if I’d get too attached to them.
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Self-determination up to the point of choosing death freely was very important in the ideology of The City. It always was voluntary, but even though no-one was ever pushed pushed to do it, it seemed like a lot of people in The City had been choosing euthanasia over the hardships of life very easily. That’s why we had the Thanatoria anyway.
We didn’t say much for a while, and I felt I was getting tired. I wondered how it was to live a life working with humans. I wasn’t sure if I ever would be able to live with humans again, but it seems like she had woken something up in me, and that I couldn’t return to the life that I’d still had had a few hours ago. It wasn’t much of a life anyway. So maybe having some people like her and Leste to help me get adjusted to my own species again wouldn’t be that bad. What future did I have anyway? Working with robots and overseeing machines that did what they did with or without me anyway, and then when I’d get too old and tired for it go to the Thanatorium myself. Would that have been my life then?
For the first time since I could remember I hoped that there might be more.
Suddenly she looked at the digiclock on the wall, stood up without saying anything and ran to the bar to get something. I couldn’t see what it was, but she brought it to the ancient robot, whose lights had dimmed, and she started doing something to its head. She seemed to replace some kind of battery. The robot became alive again with lights an movement, and gave her a hand as an old ritual of thankfulness. When she had put the old battery away somewhere behind a door that I hadn’t noticed yet she rejoined me at my table.
“Once in a week at midnight we have to replace the battery in Ol-H1-AZ. It’s an ancient chassis that needs a lot of energy.”
I looked at her, and at the robot, and back at her. In a shock he sad meaning of the scene that I had been witnessing dawned on me. She, the human barmaid, had completely outdone me in my own job as a robo-operator. The simple but important thing she had done for the robot was something it really needed, something its life depended on even. Her job mattered, while I had just been a paid form of human decoration in all my years of ‘overseeing’ my part of the factory. I wasn’t needed and I never would be needed at all, the whole damned thing ran well enough on autopilot without me. I as a human worker was just tolerated for historical reasons, but I was completely disposable. If I’d go they’d just do the same thing on and on without me. Wasn’t this what was happening already in most of the factory? Did I even have a one human colleague left doing the same job during the other shifts, or in the other departments of the factory? And why oh why hadn’t I even wondered about that?
“One more beer?” she asked.