Autonomy (Part One) [A Story by Matthew Munsey]

“Shit, Sandy’s still down.” Jack Reiner spoke with a tone simultaneously oozing of contemptuous indignation and perplexed amusement.

“My God, it’s been over a week now,” responded Barbara at once. There was a clear sound of worry to her words, something lurking below her mutterings that hinted of a terror that had been building, and was now ready to leap forth. “What in the world could be the problem, Jack? She’s never been down for anywhere near this long... “ Then suddenly with a flash deep within her eye a twitch of her upper lip she lightened, and finished her thought with, “ I can’t do all the cooking and cleaning around this place myself.”

Jack chuckled slowly to himself, looking her up and down as he did. Barb was a great girl, beautiful and bright as the best of them, but if she had actually done any cleaning, ever, he had figured that would probably be the day the earth stopped spinning. Not that he did any either, why bother, really? Jack’s eyes slowly left his wife and danced from the front entrance before them around to the kitchen they stood in. Sandy’s resting bay stood resolutely to his left besides the door, off by itself, the kitchen, table, oven set, sink and refrigerator stood on the other side, creating a sort of alcove with their shapes to form a mostly decent nook to make the meals in. It wasn’t the most glamorous room in the pod, but it served its purpose. It sure was a fucking mess right now though...

Suddenly Barbara spoke again, impatiently and obviously exasperated with their situation, “Well what the hell, let’s just throw something in the quick cooker, I starving Jack, we gotta eat now.”

Agreeing with a nod, Jack moved towards the quick cooker with a resigned look in his eye. He had always hated those freeze dried bullshit meals, but sometimes you had to take one for the team. Approaching close to the cooker, however, Jack stopped in his tracks. When he spoke his voice was weak and bewildered, like that of a lost childs who had failed so far in finding his way back his mother's arms.

“Barbie.. I think the cooker’s broken too.”

For a moment there was silence. Neither one of them could believe it, never in their time spent on this planet had something so fundamental to life not been available to them readily, and to be thrust suddenly into this situation shook the two of them to the core. Sandy was one thing, sometimes the domestics went down, they were high tech, it was bound to happen every once in awhile. But the oven? Something was seriously amiss, and they both knew it, even then.

“Call the company again, Jack,” said Barbara, almost pleadingly.

Jack agreed they ought to and picked up his phone. For a brief second Jack had imagined that the screen had remained blank upon his touch, that their communications even were now somehow in a state of disrepair. But mercifully those brilliant dancing arrays of blues and reds and whites hit his eyes, Jack began to punch in the code to contact the company for the second time in twenty four hours. The same message as before played into Jack’s right ear, striking uncertainty, and yes, even fear into his heart with each word.

The message read out in a cheerful, yet ominously monotone woman’s voice, “Hello Mr. and Mrs. Reiner, we are overjoyed to have received your call on this September afternoon! We do hope we can be of assistance, however I do regret to inform you that currently, all of our company technicians are busy with other men and women, just like you! Sometimes, caring for the world is a lot more work that one might think, after all. We do hope you have a wonderful and prosperous day!”

With a click the short message ended, and Jack was left even more concerned than before he had picked up the phone. He supposed that that was intended to have reassured him, and this morning maybe it even had, but now... Never in his life had the Company not been available, never before in fact had he even considered that they could be unavailable. For God’s sakes everyone paid, what, about half of their paychecks to keep them up and running? Where did those countless dollars go if not to make sure shit like this didn’t go down? For his whole life the company had been there when the people had needed it, and all of a sudden, it was gone. Jack looked up at Barbara, and she looked at him. They both looked terrified.

All at once Jack was a child again. The war of 2021 had just ended, and the good guys and come out on top. With the help of the Company and the power that it’s robotic utilities had provided, America had been able to squash the eastern separatist movement in its tracks, and ensure that the true way of American life could never been threatened again. This had been when Jack was three years old and even then, in his first shimmering and disjointed infantile memories, he didn’t have a single one of a world without the company in it. Even by then the robots were everywhere, droids to act as policemen, to act as drivers, droids painted fluorescent orange with stop and go signs for arms who watched and guided children across the street at schools. Most important were the repair droids, the robots who came when their peers needed maintenance, they even fixed each other. It was a perfect cycle, a perfect world. There was no need for men and women to worry themselves with jobs that could cause them injury, and no reason for them to learn the ways of medicine or to concentrate on their own betterment, the robots were there for all of that, and in the years that had passed they had maintained and updated each other on the proper protocol to ensure their continued up to date usefulness, just as they were designed. The programming was ironclad, the robots would do as they were made to for as long as they existed. It was a perfect plan. The food was grown by robots in mass amounts and delivered to every home so no one had to go hungry, the medicine was given and synthesized by robots themselves so no one was sick, skyscrapers built a mile high were made in a matter of months, finishing it seems almost as soon as the plans were proposed, placed wherever people needed a place to live, and from then on no one had to go without a place to sleep at night. even such amenities as toys and games, or anything you could think of could be created in a moments notice, printed out perfectly there before your eyes, with every wire and gadget in its proper place. No longer was the great country of America going to be ruled by consumerism and money, the robots allowed everyone to be free.

After the war, life was easy. And it stayed that way. All the time the robots were getting smarter, all the time helping us to live more and more carefree lives.

Barbara spoke again now, the shock of what was before them seeming to fade slightly, perhaps though more aptly it was just being buried deep below, as many traumas often are. In any case, the words that she spoke were nothing indicative of the way she now surely felt.

“Come on Jack, let’s go out to eat instead.”

As she said this Jack jumped a bit, being pulled from his reverie with a lurch.

“Sure sure, let’s go.”

At that, Jack grabbed his coat from the back of the kitchen chair and threw it around his shoulders. Handing his wife's coat and bag to her in the next motion, jack ambled slowly to the small dial on the upper left hand corner of the entryway door. Ensuring Barbara was beside him in the all clear zone before the threshold, with a quick flick of the wrist he turned the dial that had been oriented towards the far right directed at the zone labeled ‘kitchen’, past ‘bathroom’, ‘living room’, and the ‘recreational room’ to the far left, to the zone labeled simply as, ‘away’.

With a slight grinding of gears and the unmistakable sound of metal sliding on metal, the kitchen and it’s appliances had disappeared and instead before the two was nothing more than an empty room. Jack turned off the lights, and the two of them stepped out of their doorway into the hall, and headed towards the elevator.