It was only by seeing the old janitor of this ancient building that I realised that it wasn’t just couples and children that were missing in The City, but also the elderly. Why had I never made that simple observation in all my years? How had I lived in this city with only grey generic adults for all of my adult life without ever questioning why there were no kids or elderly people? What spell had I been under all this time?
Velia was a very nice lady, who indeed served us a tea from fresh mint leaves. As Evelith had predicted, it was like nothing I’d tasted before. With the exception of this morning’s cress I hadn’t ever in my life tasted anything but processed and factory-made food, composed molecule by molecule in the foodfactories of The City. Whatever it was that we still called ‘mint tea’ in The City for traditional reasons was made instantly by machines from water and some weird powder of uncertain origin. This was another world altogether, even just looking at the green plants in her pots was an unanticipated shock for me.
I was still looking around in amazement. Both Velia and her apartment looked as if they had been materialised straight out of a historical documentary. I had always thought my old sweater to be exceedingly rare, but this woman here had nothing but antique clothes. Everything in her room seemed to be made from metal, ceramic, ancient plastics or even wood which must have been almost prehistorical, and the usual simple modern neo-plastic products of the city were nowhere to see.
“Welcome young man. I’m glad that young Ev has been able to bring you in.”
She took me in with very lively eyes. “We need new blood, and I myself am not going to be able to hold on much longer. It will be up to you youngsters to bring the Life back to this world.” She sipped from her cup and nodded at the potted mint plants. “And to grow my heirloom mint and share it with others. Is the tea okay, young man?”
I stared at her, trying to make sense of her words. “The tea is okay. But what are you saying? What do you expect from me? Bring Life back? How? And who is ‘we’ here?” She smiled. “The first thing I expect for you is just to care, and to stay alive. To simply keep on living in the first place. And then maybe to organise people that want to live again, spread the fire of life. It is time for that. Didn’t you see the birds return?” I nodded while she proceeded. “This whole society is an empty shell running on auto-pilot. It has been like that for quite a while now. Someone needs to take the stirring wheel again before we fall into a black hole.” I heard and ignored a beep from my screenphone that indicated a message from some cyber-AI that had ‘missed’ me all day, and tried to find words for the old woman.
“That’s a lot of responsibility if you say it like that. But do you really think that there are so few actual human people left? Ev also said something like that earlier this morning. I’m not convinced.” She turned her head around sadly. “Look at this whole cursed light district, where the oldest profession of humanity is practised, and where usually real humans of a certain would flock to in a big city. Robots don’t need sex… Everything is so empty even here! We hardly have a few people left here that still care, even including young Ev here, and young Les and now you, young Adamam. Most people don’t care at all anymore.
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Most humans are here in the light district for a short time, just for the easy distractions before the curtain falls, they don’t care at all for their own life nor for that of their species. We’ve tried to reach them to no avail. And we’ve already lost most of them to the nirvana of non-being in the Thanatoria throughout the years. Few have remained. This whole world is a ghost town now!”
I felt like something was missing in her story. Something big, like the government that was supposed to keep society running. “What about the president?” I asked. “What about him?” She asked back, a bit puzzled. “Have you heard anything from him lately then. Has he done anything at all recently?” I took it for granted that he was still there, doing his updates, but my memory was blank. I struggled to find words. “Are you implying that there is no government left either?” She nodded. “And that there is nothing that keeps us enslaved but our own apathy?” I iprovised on my own train of thoughts. She sighed.
“We don’t know. The president seems to have disappeared years ago, since all broadcasts are very old reruns. This City probably isn’t ran by anyone at the moment. There hardly is any force of policebots left either. Feral fighterbots can be dangerous sometimes but they don’t really seem organised at this point. Nothing of this guarantees that there isn’t someone or something that will actively try to stop us if we step out and try to change things. But we’ll have to take that chance.” My head was still dazzling a bit, but I seemed to have adjusted a lot already to all the new things.
“So, what now?”
Evelith was the first to speak. “Find all the real humans that are left that we can find and unite them. Find out what’s happening inside of the big buildings, the temples, the banks, the ministry,… And finally find out what happened to the president.” She paused, and Velia picked up from her. “And we need to ascertain whether there indeed is no-one that will try stop us, and if so, find a way to fight them. Afterwards we can try to build up something again. But it’s a longterm plan, for today you better just go to work.”
I stared from my tea to Evelith to the old woman and back. Yesterday I had been working with robots, hardly being aware what it was to be human. And now I was instructed to save humanity. Things were going way too fast for my poor and still slightly hungover brains…