That afternoon I almost arrived too late at work for new day of mind-numbingly overseeing robots and machines doing their repetitive job. This was what I did on every working day, and had done so for most of my life. And now finally I seemed to have lost interest. It had always been clear they didn’t actually need me, or any human at all, to execute their pre-programmed jobs of assembling office appliances, small household machines and various other consumer goods as they did day in day out, but I had never been bother by that before. And now everything was different since I'd met Evelith and looked at the world with completely different eyes. I couldn’t just stop though, for I on the other hand still needed the funds to live in The City. Coming too late for three days in a row without a good reason would result in a warning already, and I didn’t feel like burning my ties to the main means of survival in The City. With my new friends I made a chance of not ending up in a Thanatorium with no place else to go, but stil... So this useless work would remain an important part of my life for now.
Today was perfectly uneventful again as expected. Everything in the factory was running smoothly and completely predictable, and nothing indicated that an anomaly like yesterdays water vending machine defect had ever happened. It was complete business as always, but inside me everything had changed. Life as I had always known it felt alien and unsettling now, as if I didn’t belong here at all.
As Evelith had predicted, this new Enkidu wasn’t at home any more in this lifeless mechanical jungle where I had no actual friends. And that just after talking to her for one night and sleeping on her couch. The endless rhythm of the machines, the soulless grey robots making useless consumer goods that went to Amaya-knew-where, the high autopilot factor of this place without any sentience or reason… How had I been able to endure it all without questioning?
And then there was my own completely obsolete role of just walking around, watching a lot of processes routinely, filling in lists on the computer, and so on… The semi-sentient machines kept logs themselves, and alarms were installed that would warn the appropriate instances before I’d even be able to notice a problem. I was only an organic alien in this mechanical world, and I was just being tolerated for mainly historical reasons.
There also was the dreadful fact that I really was alone here, and always had been since my last human colleague had disappeared more than 10 years ago. I hadn’t even missed him at the moment, but now I tried in vain to recall his name or face. I couldn’t fool myself any more or distract me with the chatbots on my screenphone. The whole factory was filled with non-sentient beings and processes, none of them bothering with anything outside of their pre-programmed scope. I had never missed human contact before, or even contact with sentient beings, but that had ended with Evelith. The genie wouldn’t get back into the bottle, or what had her words been?
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The only significant thing happening the whole day was a text message from Evelith that said ‘tonight we have a meeting at the bar, be there’. I must have stared at my phone for several minutes when I heard the message signal. It was my first message from an actual human in years, maybe in more than a decade even. Eventually I found myself back and replied that I would be there. What else would I do than to go back to her now? Apart from that everything was the same as always, even though my inside world was completely turbulent. I found myself humming some of the ancient tunes from last night but none of the robots seemed to care. And I still had to focus hard on my work too though, because if I didn’t fill in the reports and didn’t check things on schedule, I would get a report myself and my pay might be in trouble. I didn’t even knew who would decide about that but it would certainly happen. Was there still someone in the central bank, or was the flow of money completely automatised too? Would it only be robots and computers that would fire me if I’d fail to bring in the endless list of useless reports? Was everything indeed running on autopilot without any sentience involved in the decision-making as Velia and Evelith had assumed? Or was there still an actual clerk in an office somewhere, just doing paperwork, not realizing it was human lives he was throwing away?
From this my thoughts went back to Evelith, and her mysterious smile. I had felt at home with her, but she also confused me. I hadn’t been ready at all for the complications of human contact. From her my thoughts went to Leste with his wild hair and antique clothes with 20th or 21th century bandnames and logos on it. Even though they probably were 23th century remakes, they still were remarkably old.
How would it be to have work that actually made sense? To do something that was needed? I couldn’t even imagine stuff like that, and there was too much that needed to sink in already. I wasn’t seeing all the consequences yet of the revelations from the last 24 hours, and it would probably take quite a while.
I did mt job until I almost was back to my usual state of trance, and then signal for the end of the day finally came. The same old twilight filled the streets already when I left the factory, but I didn’t go home this time and went straight to the light district. A few people passed me by, and for the first time I noticed them. I caught myself wondering if it was possible to stop people and ask them if they were human without making a ruckus. It all seemed futile.
When I had walked two streets I was so deep in thought that I bumped into a stranger. We both fell to the ground.