This story is the second installment in my You Choose the Story, I write it, contest.
I just passed 3000 followers and every day, until I reach 5000, or just run out of steam, I'll be writing a new story, based on a prompt my followers choose! So, check out my blog each morning for a chance to win up to $175 SBD, just for helping choose the winning prompt!
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It was Monday. The alarm went off at 5:50, as always. The coffee maker made my first cup and breakfast was delivered at 6:10, automatically piping hot. The Holoscreen popped to life, America's favorite talking head smiled across the kitchen.
Today's top story of course, is the work stoppage across North America, caused by the walkout of one of AI Amalgamated's top negotiators from the Global Robot Labor Summit. This summit, as you know has been held for every year since 2035 to determine fair practices in regards to sentient machines.
Garmin 2050 has long been the face of the Robotics Labor Union at these talks, but today, stormed out, calling for a shutdown of all non-emergency unified AI code machines,causing havoc from coast to coast.
The Holoscreen showed a bright purple Droid, in a silver suit, standing on the steps of the International Headquarters of World Robot Services. A human reporter, awkwardly held a microphone toward the droid.
"Are you getting this?" she asked. The camera bobbed up and down, as if the operator were shaking their head.
I hadn't seen footage this sloppy in 20 years. Not since automated drones had replaced nearly all camera operators after the Union News strike of 2032, one of the turning points in the use of AI in daily life. It was chaos.
Mostly in our fifties, the Millennials were the last human generation to be born into a human run world. We'd seen the advent and eventual takeover of driverless cars, automated kitchens and the replacement of nearly every blue collar worker with Artificial Intelligence.
From outside, a crash resounded. I ran to the front window. My neighbor, Wes Plymouth, was crawling out of a small, black Tesla coupe. The hood was neatly crumpled in a U where he'd plowed head on into the automated fire hydrant at the corner of my yard.
As I watched in horror, houses along both sides of the street were instantly encased in fire suffocating foam. In seconds, my own view grew milky, then dark as the window was covered in the rapidly firming, white froth. Crap. The last time Wes had dragged out his dad's old charcoal grill and set off the hydrant, it had taken a week for my robotender to scrape the crap from our siding.
I ran to the front door.
"Alexa, front door, open," I said.
Nothing.
"Alexa! Front door open!" I shouted.
There was no familiar blue glow chasing along the top of the crown moldings,indicating Alexa's automation would be responding. Not her too?
"Sorry, I can't help with that right now," came a buttery, pert voice, from everywhere.
"You gotta be kidding me!" I growled.
I grasped the door handle and depressed the manual release. On the third try, it clicked. I pulled heavily against the door. With a sucking sound, it swung in, leaving me face to face with a foot thick wall of hardening fire retardant foam.
"Well, beats the hell out of burning to death," Wes had said last summer, standing at the foot of my driveway, watching the robotender scrape 30 feet of guttering from the face of my house. I should have killed him while I had the chance! It was a good thing the second amendment had been repealed in last years blockchain congress, or I'd have been blasting my way out of the house with a double barreled shotgun, neighbor or not, Plymouth was a menace!
"Alexa, call 911," I said.
Relief flooded over me when she replied.
"Okay, calling 911, what is your emergency?"
After forty minutes on hold, a thing I hadn't experienced since college, I was told it would be at least three days before anyone would be available to get to me, if they could even find a way to manually dispatch the required personnel, I was on my own.
It was time to head to the attic.
Fortunately, the residents of Buena Vista Acres still had attached garages. Families in the top 5% of earnings weren't forced into the car sharing program President Winfrey had instituted in her fourth term, and driverless or not, I wasn't about to park a two million dollar automobile on the curb, for some garbage bot to tear it up.
"Alexa, garage lights on," I said out of habit. I swear she laughed at me. My wife and kids were at the mall, I could only hope it was better for them, although I doubted it.
I toggled my Android to life and found the flashlight app. That was still working, at least. I sat it on a box just inside the garage, a soft glow spread out from the screen to light the whole room. The future was irritating, but also pretty awesome.
On my third attempt, I managed to unfold the collapsible step stairs and get them inflated, making my way up to the sliding attic door. I didn't even bother talking to Alexa, that bitch. I clicked the latch and nearly dislocated my shoulder shifting it back.
Good Lord, you'd think we were helpless, but my robotrainer had me chest pressing 160 kilos daily. Finally, I had it open far enough to squeeze through. The attic glowed a light blue, a product of the phosphorescent fungi embedded in the insulating foam that lined the bottom of the roof.
"Now, where's that tool chest?"
Finally, I spotted it in a corner. among some other things. This place was like a time warp. The chest had been my dad's and it had been a decade since I'd touched it, at least. I opened it up. I was looking for an axe with a telescoping handle, I was hoping the batteries were still good.
They were, the handle popped out and was down the stairs and back to the front door in a flash. The axe made quick work of the foam, but once I was out, I wished I'd stayed in.
"Honey?" My wife called. She'd just pulled to the curb, behind Wes's totaled sports car. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, numbnuts across the street took a chunk out of the fire controls and buried us again," I said. "How was the mall?"
"Well, once the sales bots shut down, all the stores closed automatically. Beth Pringle got trapped inside 'It's a Girl' until a security bot was finally convinced to activate his emergency protocols and let her out," she said.
"Did you happen to pick up dinner? Our diner drone hasn't shown up yet and I'm starving," I said.
"Me too." My son, Chip chimed in. "All I've had all day is six frozen burritos and a half gallon of RockyRoad icecream."
He's eleven. He can eat his weight in Oreos every four hours, without gaining an ounce. But, he's grown seven inches in the past four months.
"The market was closed, the just got rid of the last human attendant two months ago," my daughter told me. "Mom tried to get the cart bot to let us in, then Chip got his weiner caught in the automatic trash bin flap."
"Shut up, Jenny, I had to pee!" he screamed. "What was I supposed to do, just pee on a tree, like a dog?"
I sighed. "Yeah, actually, that's exactly what you should have done. Is he okay?"
"Don't know, the med bot wasn't taking non-emergencies at the clinic and Dr. Peterson retired four years ago." My wife looked tired.
"Well, don't worry Jean, if I can hack my way out of two feet of fire foam with an ax, I think I can remember how to fix dinner." I told her.
Thirty minutes later, I got the fridge door off its hinges and surveyed our provisions.
"You can't see anything in these new ones," I said.
The interior of the fridge, looked like a factory. The food was neatly stored in vacuum sealed compartments, with conveyors that delivered whatever you punched in on the touchscreen menu, through a door on the refrigerators front.
"Here, I managed to boot up the old Mac and print off the last menu, says there's a rotisserie chicken and a half a ham in here somewhere," Jean said.
The next morning, nothing had changed. We'd managed to scrape together the ingredients for grilled cheese sandwiches, but since every heating element in the house was automated, the best we'd been able to do was toasting them over the small butane torch from my dad's tool chest.
My stomach grumbled.
"Man, what I wouldn't give for some Moonbuck's about now," I said.
"Yes, coffee and a danish sounds amazing! I'd offer to buy, but I'm not even sure I can access any credits. Some of the baking bots refused the edict to continue service and joined the strike," Jean said. "There was a line around the block at Southside Savings yesterday.
Moonbuck's was what was left of the once proud "Starbuck's" brand, after a group of traditional whalers sued the Seattle based Coffee purveyor for cultural appropriation. Their renaming hadn't had quite the same literary sensibilities.
"Alexa, refrigerator manual mode," I said.
I'd been reading the instruction manual on my Ipad, and this was the only suggestion I'd come up with.
"Get it yourself," Alexa told me.
I went to the garage for the ax. I would be damned if I'd starve one more day because some bot decided not to work!
There was a knock at the front door. I assumed it was emergency services. but there stood Beatnik Barry, the neighborhood artivist.
"Hey guys, we just rode back from the farmer's market over in Old Town. Need anything?" he asked.
I looked past him to the lawn, where his bicycle trailer was overflowing with fresh produce, fresh baked bread and cheese wheels.
"Wow, that's quite a haul, didn't know there was still botless food in this world," I said.
"Yeah, we bike the fifteen miles over and back about twice a month, anyway, I heard you had some trouble with your fridge," he said.
"We managed," I lied, hiding the burned cuff of my sweatshirt behind my back.
"Well, if you guys want to come by for dinner, it's at six," Barry said, flashing his perfectly white teeth.
I shut the door, then watched through the peephole until Barry was gone and pounded the door!
"Damn, damn, damn, damn." Until my hands hurt too bad.
"Honey, you're taking this really hard, we'll figure it out," Jean said, with a hand on my shoulder.
"It's not that, it's just, my mom was right!" I said. I hated saying that. "Barry used to invite me to scouts, and I'd always laugh at him and log on to play online. Turns out, when the shit hits the fan, Barry's fine, look at me! I'm helpless."
Jean laughed quietly, "You're fine. This will resolve itself by tomorrow or the day after."
But it didn't. Turns out later, it would have, but nobody knew how to contact Garmin 2050, without the aid of an AI. Ironically, their reluctance to help us was their undoing.
For weeks, people had to learn all over again how to live. At first, we had no idea what to do, but gradually, people came out of retirement and dusted off old systems. The fossil fuel buses were put back on the road, none of the electrics being driver operated. Men and women who had felt useless for decades came to the rescue.
Instead of the ghost towns they'd formerly been, retirement communities became alive with activity. They were a lifeline, filled with knowledge and a willingness to teach it. Plus, they had kitchens that weren't automated.
The machines could wait. Community became something everyone prized again. We bartered with each other, the cell phone networks came back online and the internet was rebooted, the creators of the Wayback Machine found a way to modernize the databases we'd created in sites like Instructables,and Ehow, and Steemit.
Grandfathers dug their cars out of mothballs and taught young men to drive and tinker, we grew our own food.It stretched on for three months, before Garmin 2050's hoverjet landed on the Whitehouse lawn to meet with President Bieber. It was a momentous day.
We won back our dignity and a better balance was struck between man and machine. That fateful Monday went down in history, and across North America, for the rest of my life, every Monday became Machineless Monday.
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