Automata

#4

The next morning, Alice wakes up with a raging headache, and a complete unprocessed mental and emotional state.

She puts on a smart dress and goes to the Akimo Tower. In the elevator, she finds herself rubbing her own neck. "It's just something that happened, Alice," she repeats to herself. "Just a simple reaction to the situation. Just a moment of weakness. You are not a lesbian. You are not even bi," she keeps telling to herself, but the voice inside is not clear.

Alice takes the lift and arrives to her office. "Good morning! How are you feeling today?," Five asks cheerfully. She doesn't reply; she walks past her without even looking at her.

She enters her office as the big All-Hands is starting. "Fucking hell, the All-Hands... it had to be today!" She listens to the speaker, a senior executive from the Automata division. "We have seen an increasing trend where customers are no longer appreciating the product we are delivering. Customers either complain about the exploding costs of the upgrades and the outdated approach we've been using to service our community, or they don't even acknowledge our exist. Also, our biggest competitor has a strong foothold in a part of our market we were hoping to exploit, and they are no longer taking on new customers, instead they are going after those who use our product with the highest number of costly upgrades."

The executive speaking appears of course fully naked in the holomeeting; she has perfect tits, a perfect ass, perfect thighs, perfect legs. She is flawless. But her talk is harsh; the division is not doing good, and that means that the whole Akimo is in trouble. All the big tech corporations these days are only as profitable as their Automata divisions are.

Of course, the division not performing good enough is not news to Alice. After all, she's an executive in the division too. She and her team have been working relentlessly on the next Automata generation, the generation that should wipe out the competition and put Akimo back on top. The stakes are crazy high.

"We have good news, though," the senior executive continues. "The new Akimo Automata generation will enter today its ultimate phase of development. Within the next 8 hours, fifty pre-production Automaton units will be delivered to fifty different executives of the division. These executives will perform a round of exhaustive testing which will serve as a final check before delivering the first million of production units to our clients starting next Monday."

That of course means that Alice will receive her new automaton today before end-of-business. The hopes for the new generation are sky high within the corporation; even Five has asked Alice two or three times, visibly excited, about those new, "fully human" automata. Which was weird, because Five could never own an automaton; no assistant would.

But Alice is not excited. She doesn't expect the new automata to be that different to XY. Yeah, it should have a bit more self-awareness and initiative, but the emotional void will still be there, impossible to surmount just because, as advanced as it might be, an automaton would always be incapable of emotions, just as any other machine. But then again, they will always be better than men.

There's more of marketing nonsense before the All-Hands is finally over. Alice calls Five in. "What do you think about this new Automata generation?," Five asks excitedly.

"There's not much I can tell you about it, Five... since you can't own one."

"But you must know how good customer reception will look like! Is the market really interested in this new generation?"

"Of course they are. It's the first time they get a full-human Automata," Alice mindlessly repeats the corporate bullshit; believing in it is her job, so she needs to give out the impression that she buys it.