The future was allegedly finally here. Human society had gotten to the point where the cost of most basic necessities was zero. There were eleven billion people on the planet and enough food was made for three or four times that. There was ample living space, clothing, health care, electricity, and anything else modern humans might want with the exception of one thing. The vast majority of people had no purpose.
How was it that the cost of a full wardrobe of winter clothes was practically zero? Robots. How was it that it was cheaper for city hall to just give all the residents of a city one free bicycle each than to hire someone to collect and count the money gained if there were a charge for them? Robots. Robots were everywhere and they did everything from dig ditches to file legal briefs. The vast majority of work humans used to do was now done by robots. It didn't matter that most robots were boxes on wheels with one weird arm sticking out of the top, they did the work and that was what mattered.
The social upheavals of the previous two centuries to get to this point taught humanity a lot of lessons along the way. The New Mexico disaster should have been wake up call enough but it took nearly a complete collapse of western Europe and the United States taking over the entire world for everyone to finally start to wake up. Then the event that the news called the 'zombie apocalypse' (though in reality it was more of a zombie extended weekend) happened and that shook things up just enough to justify reorganizing.
Hey, pro tips in case the 'zombie apocalypse' ever happens again:
1: zombies may not feel pain but they are weak. Their muscles lack ATP so just get them to wear themselves out and they can't move anymore.
2: zombies quickly go blind so most rely on their hearing and sense of smell.
3: shooting them doesn't really work because the wounds are too small. Use large blunt weapons. Staking them to the ground or wall works well too.
4: you don't have to worry if a zombie bites or scratches you. The living can't get infected because there's no virus or bacteria causing them to be that way (turns out they're magical). So as long as you're still alive at the end of an attack, you're fine.
5: to create a safe house find something called 'holy water'. Not all holy water will work, just the stuff blessed by a certain small group of 'bishops' called 'sedevacantists'. Actual roman bishops or other sedevacantits won't work, just the ones in this one specific group. Look it up in the history for details.
Anyway, it's unlikely zombies will ever attack again but it's always good to be prepared. So, back to robots.
Originally, it was going to be companies using robots to do all this work who were going to reap all the benefits. But step by step newer robots started becoming cheaper and cheaper until it got to the point where a man could work for six months and then buy a robot that could build a another robot to do his job and then the man could just send the second robot to work for him while he sat back at home and collected the salary. If his boss wouldn't allow it, then he could just start his own company doing the same thing with his newly purchased or built robot. This was a no win for anyone unless something changed.
The paradigm that eventually prevailed was one similar to the old oil rights from centuries ago. A long time ago, the natural resources of a country were held to be owned by all the citizens together and so when it was sold for a profit every citizen would get a bit of money. Today it worked similar to that. While a person could go and start their own company if they wanted to, most of the big ones were held as being owned by all the citizens of a certain place and so all the profits from that company were distributed out to all the residents of a certain city.
However, there was a dark side to this which was that now most people were out of work. What happens when you have people who have more money than they need and no real purpose? They get restless and destructive. For half a century drugs and alcohol (or accidents caused by them) were the number one cause of death for most people across the planet. Enough was enough and prohibition made a come back strong. Now it was all heavily regulated but not just that, the amount of food and exercise each person got had to also be regulated to prevent citizens from just eating themselves into the grave.
But strictly enforcing a ban on substances wasn't enough. The fact of the matter was, there was no work. There was nothing to do except go to more and even more schooling for jobs that no human would ever do again. So a program was started that required citizens to put in a minimum amount of effort in order to get their share of money. There was military service, civic service, the arts, and of course education. The military was a difficult sell for many since there was a lot of discipline and no real purpose to it now unless a rebellion rose up. Instead of that, a lot of people would sign up to work for the local city government to be on call in case anything ever needed to be done. Other people got around even doing that little bit by claiming to be artists working on something allegedly amazing. Granted, some of them probably were artists, but a lot were just people who were perfectly happy to sit at home all day playing video games are chatting with friends.
That isn't to say that zero humans had jobs. Judges were still required to be humans as well as police officers. Elected officials were required to be humans as well as top level managers in companies. There were robots that could be programmed to repair other robots but at the top of that chain you'd eventually find a human making actual decisions. And of course there were always going to be ingenious people who worked on certain passion projects from decorating the public parks to designing the next huge interstellar ships. But still, most people (like 90% of them) just stayed home the majority of the time.
...
Johnny prided himself on being one of the few people who could say he actually had a real job where he actually did real work. He hadn't finished college because he'd gotten an actual job as an engineer helping to design and test the next generation of robots. He felt sure that his creativity and passion could give him an insight into new ideas that would revolutionize robotics.
After two years and two months he suddenly found himself out of work. A robot he'd helped design on his very first day at the company was now taking his job. Johnny begged to stay, even with no salary if needed. He just wanted to be part of this process and feel like he was doing something useful with his life. But in the end the company gave him severance and said they wanted to go in a different direction.
Johnny would not be discouraged. He he made plans to rent the apartment above his own to turn into a workshop. He was going to create his vision for the next level of robotics all on his own if he had to. He was not going to be like so many others who just distracted themselves from real life with endless movies, games, vacations, and parties until they died. He was still in his early 20s but he knew this was his life's work.
And then the other shoe fell. Johnny knew that relationships between men and women were sort of different now. Hundreds of years ago, before the big New Mexico event, it was common place for primitive humans to form a sort of couple in a pair bond. That rarely if ever happened these days but Johnny had found himself in a very close relationship with a woman named Alice. She worked for a female only organization that was dedicated to making sure women got their fair share of the profits from the publicly owned corporations. That organization argued that even though all citizens were supposed to receive an equal dividend, and women usually received slightly more; the system was still unfair to women because women contributed more to society than men did and thus had earned and were owed an even larger share.
Secretly, Johnny wasn't sure about all the political stuff but he never said anything. When he'd first met Alice he was completely focused on getting an actual job with an actual pay check. She didn't seem to have time for him either since to her he was just another male siphoning money out of the pool of available funds that should really rightfully be going to women. But then her attitude towards Johnny changed fast once he'd announced that he'd gotten employment and was leaving the college.
Out of nowhere she uprooted herself to move over a hundred kilometers away to live in the same building as Johnny. Then she was always wanting him to hang out with her after work. She even went into the kitchen and helped the robot cook him dinner. "The random bits add flavor." she had told him when he noticed that it didn't taste quite like he knew the recipe should. There was other odd behavior as well, like how she would do things to harass other women who wanted to talk to Johnny and then when they were in private she would warn Johnny about how this woman wanted to hurt him or that woman wanted to steal from him.
Johnny had almost had enough of this behavior from her. He couldn't understand why they were friends or why she was treating him this way. He didn't understand why he had to go to parties with her on the weekends or why she was introducing him to her friends and mother as 'her' man. What the hell was that even supposed to mean? Were they together that way, like a caveman and his ... what was the word ... wife or something?
Like everyone else, Johnny had been raised by a single parent. In his case, he and his sister had been raised by their father. Johnny knew one day he'd also be called to take care of his own child, produced from his own DNA and a matching profile to ensure genetic diversity and a healthy baby. Some people were able to get out of the responsibility of raising children but they were by far the exception not the rule and if neighbors or friends knew that someone wasn't going to have kids there was always talk going around speculating as to why that was. The usual conclusion was that there must be something wrong with them or their DNA. To make up for those people there were occasions when certain parents would be asked to take care of a second child, as had happened with Johnny's father.
Anyway, Johnny was actually so happy when Alice herself had found a job. Sure, it didn't count as an actual paying job so she was till receiving the normal public dividend that everyone else received but Johnny was happy she'd found something to do other than just stalk him all the damn time.
And then it sort of happened. Alice had been looking for a way to really seal her relationship status to Johnny. She really wanted to lock him in. She had been talking about the two of them buying an entire house together and moving in together and using some of his salary to buy a yacht, or a private plane, or a summer home over in ...
Johnny really had to get her to put a stop to this. He wasn't going to buy any of that. That money came from his work in robotics and it was going back into his work in robotics. He had a vision and a plan to the future and it did not include a boat you could live in where you sailed up and down the coast for no reason. Johnny really could not understand why she would assume he'd spend any of his money on her that way. Why?
And then she showed him why.
