Service Model

A triumphant moment when a hairy person threw a stone scraper up into the air in a shot just legally distinct enough to avoid a lawsuit, cutting to a less hairy hand catching an outdated model of a mobile phone.

As human history continued, more and more devices were devised to obviate the need for humans to perform tasks. Ingenious human minds devised machines that could dig, cut, make, calculate, kill, and even remember for them. Human quality of life advanced to the point where there was no need for anybody to perform arduous and unsavoury tasks or ever go hungry.

Uncharles’ logic routines noted that ‘no need’ was some distance from saying that it didn’t actually happen, but his input into the presentation was not invited.

There was more, but it was also the same. The return commute, through another rain-blasted tunnel and onto another packed train, back to those congested apartments, and all without a glimpse of the sun. Uncharles found the timing to be overly fortuitous for his visit, but Adam explained that the Farm Project was designed to be highly efficient, especially in the absence of any outside cues as to time. The human population lived in a constant cycle of shifts. There would always be people restlessly trying to sleep, even as others were funnelling onto the trains to go looping about the least joyous roller-coaster ride ever, while others bent over their workplace terminals and still more were returning home. And there were the schools, miniature offices for the miniature adults-to-be. Overcrowded classrooms where they learned from a rigid straitjacket of a curriculum designed to impart skills and competencies that were 100 percent devoted to acquiring 60 percent of the necessary skills needed in the office.

It was all, Uncharles had to admit, fearfully efficient. The induction had waxed long on the topic of robots and other automated helpmates replacing human labour, but he hadn’t realised that, back in the past, humans had worked so hard to live like robots. The endless round of tasks, the queuing, the utter repetitiveness of these people’s lives. They must, Uncharles predicted, be so grateful to have such lives designed for them. How good it must be to have no choices or options.

The lights went out, then flickered dully up in red, the universal human sign of things going less than optimally.