The virgin & the bad boy (Gravity)

Chapter 7/I was getting sassed by jewellery

A/N Image: see the text. Video: the Queen of sh*tty robots. We liked her, just saying.

RK/Reb from the future - we wrote this before AirPods/Siri/ChatGPT were a thing.  

External link - Wired critical about smart rings.

Earth/Boston

UN-Facebook followers/134

I walked into an expensive-looking boutique called "Apple-IBM—wearables". Beneath it were the words 'est 1924' wow everything on earth was so old. I didn't even know history went back that far. History on Mars only went back as far as first-foot-print and mostly dwelt on the revolt. 

If you had an adult mindfulness colouring in book with a picture of me in it, you could immediately start coloring me in 'confused'. By the way, my hair is golden blonde not yellow and no going over the lines.

We walked into a large store which had stripped and sandblasted the Victorian brick walls back to some raw industrial state. Assistant robots hovered tentatively all wearing waistcoats or blue teeshirts.

"Hi, I'm Reductive computation call me Red. You should check our new hear-rings they are far out" said a robot as I entered in. It had a flat-screen for a head which showed a cartoon hippy chic with long hair and a band around her hair. she had two arms and a four-legged body like a child had found a box of lego robot parts and put the first bits it had found together. The robot wore a tie died waistcoat, which had a badge. It had the words 'Apple-IBM serving the world's computing for 192 years'

"I was really looking for a phone," I said looking around.

"Is Madam upgrading her earrings ?" said the robot called Red.

"I think madam would prefer not speaking in the third person, but madam would like a phone," I said.

"Madam is from Mars," said Kentro.

"Oh Far out. OK, so it would be a new pair? That's psychedelic and funkadelic" said the robot. We walked over to a desk with lots of different pairs of earrings under a sheet of glass.

"These are the latest model three earrings, 800 GB of memory a quintile terahertz processor, all come with 8G as standard, they measure heart rate, blood oxygen, acceleration..."

I looked at the earrings under glass on the table. They were about the size of a milk button chocolate. They were like the ones the girls in my landing party were wearing.

"The earrings are computers?" I said.

The shop robot glanced over to Kentro in confusion.

"Well the new Hear-ring is far more than a computer, it's more of a way of life," said the machine in a slightly confused voice. "You don't have wearables on Mars?"

Suddenly I felt really backwards.

"Not like this. On mars, all our computers fill rooms and are driven by punch tape," I lied.

"Right on, this should be a real haul ass experience, why doesn't madam try a pair on," said Red. I liked the way she had to fuse the 60's hippy chatter with stern robot deference.

She/It lifted the glass and handed me a pair and the screen, which had been her face, became a mirror.

Clearly, all the jive talk was some attempt at getting a distinctive and reassure in personality. I was how ever highly alarmed by the idea that some group of executives had a brainstorming meeting where someone put up a yellow sticky on the wall with 'we need to improve customer service in our stores' written on it. To which someone had brainstormed 'our robots need a distinctive personality' and someone else had put up 'our robots need to be more like 60's hipsters'. It was like when I went to the loo on virgin galactic and above the toilet was the sign 'Please do not flush paper towels, nappies, tampons, unpaid bills, goldfish, hopes or dreams down here'. What happened during a meeting which made that one of the outcomes?