Tevun-Krus #103 - Androids

Jake's Bad Day - A Story by @DavidGibbs6

Jake's Bad Day

by David Gibbs / DavidGibbs6

Jake stared at the waitress as she poured his coffee, her body youthful but kind of frumpy. It sickened him. They could have made her perfect but instead she was made to look like a real person. She spoke like a real person too, pined about what could be real things and sometimes looked a little exasperated when things got busy.

The whole cafe was full of fake people, synthetic people doing a bunch of fake stuff, pretending to be human. It made Jake angry, and the more he looked and thought about it the madder he got. He remembered feeling excited about the new androids, back when he was a child. They were new and exciting, something to marvel at. Then they were just part of the day to day life. Now you couldn't escape them, they were everywhere, in every workplace and in almost every home.

At first they had done the jobs that no one else wanted to do. Then little by little they had started doing all the jobs, even the jobs that were for humans, even the thinking jobs. It hadn't bothered Jake that much until his boss was one. The memory of that day was burned into his mind, he thought about it a lot, playing it back inside his head, each replay more vivid and more infuriating.

Jake had stopped caring at work after that, he came late and left early. His work performance dropped because it didn't matter, he was surrounded by more and more android workers. How was he supposed to keep up with a machine? And to top it off they were programmed to make mistakes. Nothing major, they never actually fucked things up completely like a real person would, they just made qwerky stupid errors. Jake was convinced it was to make them more human and therefore likable, to him it just made them more annoying.

Of course his boss played the part perfectly. First, asking if he was okay? Was there a problem? Could he help with something? Then it was minor disciplinary actions before escalating to mandated psychology sessions. Jake wished he could just leave, but jobs were not easy to come by and were harder to lose than they used to be. Besides where would he go? Every job was filled with synthetic workers.

Psychology actually helped in the beginning. Just having someone to talk to about it without having to put in a filter, it felt like a weight was lifting. She listened in a non judgemental way, made him feel like his feelings were valid while challenging some of his thinking. When he finished one of his tirades against the android population in his last session she had asked him if it really mattered if the boss was mechanical or not. That question had sat with him for days. She had explained that the androids only took jobs where there were human shortages and that if he worked on it she was sure he could work his way up and take the boss's position.

This had felt like this had been a turning point and the next few weeks looked brighter. He still felt that bitterness when they made silly mistakes or did things that got under his skin, but their very existence didn't seem to hurt him the way it used to. It didn't put him under that dark cloud anymore. The boss started to feel like just another boss, he wasn't that different to the last one and now Jake thought about it, he never liked that guy either when he looked back on it. He took the time to stop and think on it, he considered himself a smart guy, he certainly wasn't stupid.

That was where the trouble started. Instead of letting his anger boil up in self defeating ways, Jake took the time to read more, learn and think about it more deeply.

It was during one of his research sessions when he discovered something truly frightening. It was listed under services that the newer models offered. The sales pitch was all standard stuff, increase in cognitive ability and more lifelike than ever, a real companion as well as a worker. And there it was, psychological ability to help with mental health and well-being. He spent a long time looking at the picture of the latest model, it was a spitting image of his psychologist. Not a copy but close enough that it could be her in a different style.