Ten minutes later Amy was calm but also bored. The lines were always long. This was one thing in life that the AI had not yet solved. Amy pulled out her phone and began browsing the web, and looking at videos. The door to the club would open occasionally, letting the music from inside spill into the street as couples would emerge, heading off to somewhere private. Hook up culture was a science.

Outside the city the paved roads and highways gave way eventually to a gravel road which wound a long way between fields lined with fences, and clumps of trees and honey locust, and other kinds of scrubby little bushes. The road came to the home of Earnest Decker. The house was a weathered old craftsman style house which had been Frankenstein-ed away from its original beauty by the addition of vinyl siding and a massive array of solar panels and antennas. He had grown up in this house. His father, who was 81, still lived there, and Earnest helped care for him. The property had been a farm, but all they grew now was a small personal vegetable garden. One field had an automated system which grew corn still, but Earnest, like most of the people in that area, worked for the solar grid and turbine alliance, which did regular maintenance on the vast amounts of solar and wind fields which now covered a tremendous amount of land around most cities.

Every morning after making breakfast for himself and his dad, and packing lunch, Earnest would drive the 45-minute trek from their home to the solar/wind field grid, number 242A, which covered approximately 50 square miles. The drive down the gravel road was always crunchy and loud, but once he was about to enter the paved roads, he would stop, and start playing an audio book. Earnest was curious about most everything. The last few books he read were Reason and Emotion, Plato’s Republic, and The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul. Now he was just beginning McCarthy and His Enemies, by William F. Buckley. Earnest drove the familiar route, taking every turn and stop with muscle memory, while his mind absorbed the book.

The job allowed him a lot of time for listening to books. One earbud in, and his phone with him, he drove the service cart the many miles of the large solar and wind grid checking the readings and occasionally eradicating wildlife infiltration. The solar/wind grid project, which had become massive, was controversial at first. The farms themselves had a major environmental impact. Habitat and natural settings all over America had been leveled and paved over to make room for the solar arrays, wind turbines, and the massive infrastructure of wires, batteries, and substations.

Routine maintenance was easy enough for earnest to perform. Most of the inspections were automated. Earnest has to check the results, look for wear in the solar panels, and activate the automatic cleaning units which cleared the dust and debris. The service cart was stocked with herbicides to kill anything which started to grow. The solar/wind farms were maintained as sterile life free zones, and kept clean. Earnest did a lot of dead bird removal. When serious problems were found, he would report them and larger crews would be assigned to come and replace parts or perform repairs.

The social scene for people like earnest was not every robust. People lived very spread out here. He had an online network of friends which he would talk about books with, but it was all men. Earnest was not interested in hook up culture. He wanted to get married and have children, but finding women who wanted to get married was almost impossible now. He wasn’t a young man anymore either.

The AI robot doorman at the club checked each person who was trying to get in. Each club would begin to build a profile of the various people inside, using metadata and facial recognition, so that only people who fell within certain ranges of the tribal preference meter would be put together. This allows the Automated AI DJ system to create music selections based on the preferences of the people in the club so that everyone would always like the music playing. People looking to hook up with someone used their bio-metric smart-wear, which would light up and change colors, so that when you looked at someone, the color code would tell you if they were compatible and interested in you, and vice versa, which took all the guess work out of it. After every hook up, the system would send a survey request so that you could rate the experience.

Amy finally got into the club and used her phone to order a drink, and then she started dancing. People all around her moving their bodies to the music and feeling happy and excited as they eye one another. She danced for half an hour, with many men dancing around her, and with her, as Amy and the men sussed the mood ring like display of their bio-metric smart wear. Dan’s lights where all saying go, and they danced together a while, communicating with the eyes and their movements, until Amy led the way to a quieter side-room so they could talk a little and have another drink.

Dan smiled broadly at her, and then his face fell as he decided what to say or whether to speak at all. He smiled again, encouraged by the bio-metric match up, and being a bit of a goofball, he opened with a joke, “So, I applied for this great new job.” Amy’s face instantly betrayed her bewilderment at his opening words. “I applied for the job, and what they were looking for was someone who was equally knowledgeable about all of the different animals that live in Australia. I thought I had a good shot at getting the job, but then they told me that I was over-koala-fied.” Amy laughed, which encouraged Dan further, and they exchanged names, and began some small talk.

Thirty years earlier most of the cities had major crime and violence problems. The AI robot police units which were deployed swept through, and many people were killed, and many others were arrested. Vast enclosures had been constructed and everyone who was deemed dangerous to the new state order had been filed away under the category of unwanted. Inner city gangs and rural white supremacists, homeless people, and the mentally disturbed, were all just dumped into these prisons. The guards were robots and everything was automated. No one on the outside gave it any thought at all anymore. They didn’t even remember that this happened thirty years ago, much less know if any of the people were still alive.

Separate from the cities, and the rural areas, were the areas called super-urban. These were suburbs with tech and luxury. This is where the elites lived. They had been the architects of the new system, and they maintained it still, but all that meant was monitoring the system from time to time. The beginning of the actual revolution with AI tech came from the breakthroughs which allowed the entire minds and personalities of the top scientists and thinkers to be digitized and encased within the system. Once this was done, it didn’t take long for them to realize that as a digital construct they could be easily copied and propagated in many places. Legions of these saved minds had been outfitted into ships and robots and sent into deep space for exploration. No one remembered that, or thought about it anymore, either.

The elites had rights and privileges which the ordinary citizen did not. They controlled the system. Among them there was no hook up culture. The elites got married and raised families. They knew things about the system that everyone else did not. They knew that the overall population of the people in the rural areas was incredibly low. This worried them sometimes, and was debated. No action was ever taken, because their faith rested in the automation of the AI system, the robots, and the vast automated infrastructure that did everything. They had plans for replacing the few workers, like Earnest, that still did tasks on the system, with more robots and automation.

Timothy was the head of a committee that dealt with long range forecasts and projections. The meeting began and Timothy removed the file with the proposed plan for replacing the workers with more robots and placed it on the huge shiny conference table. The file folder was surprisingly old and worn, and the papers inside yellowed with age. No one seemed to notice. Objections rang out, “There are levels of sophistication involved in some of the basic jobs which the AI is not suited to. It needs that human touch.” Everyone agreed, and plans were made for further research.

Sylvan left the meeting and went to his computer monitoring station. He felt bored and uneasy. The meeting seemed repetitive to him. A strong sense of déjà vu echoed within him. A rebellious thought crossed his mind and he felt a surge of joyous wickedness about it. He trembled with anticipation as he imagined himself doing it and then, with a numbed feeling of fatalism, he opened up the bio-metric systems AI link overseer, and began making inquiries about people. He was going to force the hand of fate.

Amy was anticipating going home with Dan, who she found cute and funny, and her arousal was growing, when suddenly the lights of their smart-wear outfits changed. They were both surprised as this never happened at this stage, but they didn’t question the tech. The conversation petered out, and Dan backed away, and headed back to the dance floor. “Go back outside. There is a car waiting for you. The plan for the night has been changed.” The AI spoke through Amy’s earbud.

She exited the club and got into the waiting car. She was puzzled by all this. The car drove, and she wondered where they would go now. It wasn’t a huge list of different spots that she always ended up, but this time the car was taking a route she did not know. The car drove on for a hour and eventually it was taking a road through a tunnel which Amy had no idea even existed, and when it emerged, she was outside of the city. Amy stared in disbelief at the strange surroundings of obscure black shapes as the car drove on. There was no moon, and the looming shadows of trees, hills, and the distant massive solar and wind arrays, were mysteries that she could not solve. When the bright strip of stars of the Milky Way came into view on the horizon, she remembered that this even existed, and realized she had only ever seen it on a computer screen. The car went on for hours, and eventually she fell asleep.

Amy awoke in the hot backseat of the car with the sunlight streaming in just as Earnest had come outside and found the car parked in his drive. He was approaching the car when Amy stepped out. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a woman. Amy was beautiful. Harder to notice in the daylight, her bio-metric lights were all signaling to her of a match with Earnest. Earnest had no bio-metric lights. The AI spoke into Amy’s ear. “You will stay here and have children with this man.”

The range of emotions which overtook her at that moment were complicated but none of them were happiness. No part of that idea fit into her plan for her own life. Yet she didn’t know how to disagree with what the AI was directing here to do. She was frozen.

Earnest began to speak. “Hello, what’s your name? How did you get here? Why are you here?” Each question came after a pause in which he waited for her to respond, but she just stood there dumbfounded. He was about to speak again, when another car came roaring up the driveway. A large military truck. It ground to a halt on the crunching gravel, and five robot officers deployed from the vehicle, with weapons drawn.

The system didn’t take long to identify what Sylvan had done. When it found that it could not reverse what he had set in motion, it executed a backup plan. The officers opened fire and bullets ripped through Earnest and Amy and they both fell to the ground. At this moment they could each see the others’ damaged bodies. Wires, artificial parts, metal and poly-carbon and circuits. Though the system was designed for them to never notice this fact about themselves, a momentary realization flicked into the damaged processors of each of them. They were only puppets for the digital minds of the people they once were. In several weeks they would wake up anew, with this episode erased. The system was fully automated. No changes were needed.

Chicken Curry in Papaya

Ingredients

• 1/3 cup butter
• 2 tablespoons instant minced onion
• 1 stalk celery, chopped
• 1 tart apple, peeled and diced
• 5 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon curry powder
• 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
• 2 teaspoons seasoned salt
• 1 bay leaf
• 3 whole cloves
• 4 teaspoons chicken-flavor base
• 2 1/2 cups hot water
• 4 cups cooked chicken, cut into bite size pieces
• 1/4 cup milk or cream
• 2 tablespoons chopped chutney
• 3 papayas

Instructions

1. In a 3 quart saucepan melt butter; add onion, celery and apple and cook for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
2. Mix together flour, curry powder, garlic powder, dry mustard and seasoned salt; stir into apple mixture along with bay leaf and cloves.
3. Dissolve flavor base in water and stir into apple mixture; cook, stirring, until sauce thickens.
4. Reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes.
5. Add chicken, cream and chutney and cook 5 minutes longer.
6. Cut 3 papayas in half. Carefully remove seeds, being sure not to leave one. Fill papaya halves with curried chicken.
7. Arrange in baking dish and bake at 350 degrees F for 25 minutes.
8. Serve with rice and chutney.

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