Natural Selection (Elijah Kamski x Reader)

CyberLife

Traveling to Detroit...

The opening of CyberLife's Tower had been nothing short of grand.

Where the media had room to stand, they did. Where flashes would normally blind human eyes, they glistened and gleamed along the metal cylinder reaching for the heavens. The mass gathering for the event of cutting the red tape was not for nothing – no, there had been plenty to celebrate.

The building's construction was among the fastest completed from start to finish in the world, a technological marvel – the ivory guardian overlooking Detroit from the seclusion of Belle Island...all thanks to CyberLife's newest, controversial technology.

The whiplash that Amanda had warned you about was very swift, and her concerns were very real, much to your dissatisfaction. The images that'd circulated social media, those of robots performing normally-human-driven tasks caused panic before numerous press releases calmed the nerves. For a short time, life had returned to normal, and people were back to worrying about their favorite celebrities, other than you and your husband.

Months after the bulb in the proverbial spotlight died off, the island, once again, became a pebble in otherwise calm waters; dropped into the river to send ripples of aftermath throughout the city. Detroit's shores were the first hit among the tsunami of economic collapse, the epicenter of unprecedented change.

The cost of living in Detroit skyrocketed as it was declared the official home of the tower that served as the company's main manufacturing plant, headquarters, everything – it was CyberLife embodied. Real estate prices increased rapidly. Residences within the city limits gained a market value of ridiculous margins. A house that once cost $150,000 might be appraised for $1,500,000.

A new version of an otherwise familiar, broken societal structure was put in play. The elite – those who could afford to live in the city. The middle class, who remained the backbone of society; and while the roles within the class changed, they still made just enough to survive with little else to show for it. As for the lower-class citizens, the poverty line moved greatly, and not in their favor. Utility costs would hinder them if the rise in rent didn't. Paired with record high unemployment rates, the suburbs served as a refuge for the city's mass exodus.

The initial civic panic had been justified.

Androids replaced jobs within one industry at a time. Construction, city maintenance, remote IT support – any non-client-facing role was filled by the robots being churned out from the bottom of the building you worked in. But, as Elijah kept saying, all you could make time to worry about was "overcoming your own obstacles."

For you, specifically, working in the tower had been a vast improvement. You welcomed the change of pace, although it'd been an adjustment getting used to living at home again. Becoming acquainted with one time zone, working a normal Monday through Friday, 9-5...sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, with real weekends off? It still felt like you were haphazardly, and very tiredly, stumbling through the Twilight Zone.

You gripped a vending machine with both hands, eyes closed, exhaling calmly as thoughts piled up in your head.

In a few hours, you would be reporting to Humanization alongside Elijah to witness the first human "replica." The first being in existence that would pass the Turing Test, so they said. A real, tried and true artificial intelligence that would be indistinguishable from a human.

And yet, the company that made all this possible – made the entire world panic and threatened the livelihoods of humans across the globe with technology of the century, no, of a lifetime – couldn't get a fucking vending machine fixed.