When you spend a lot of money, there's always anxiety associated with it. It was, in a way, a relief when the money was gone, sent, spent, but... the anxiety remained, lurking in the background. Any time he got a text or an email about his order, all that stress suddenly bubbled back up to the surface.
Logically, he knew it wasn't a trick. A scam. It was just natural fear of loss. “What if? What if?” What if he had somehow been tricked? He hadn't, but what if? All that money... for nothing...
Harald reclined, and the chair groaned. The world was a very different place to even just a few years ago. The first robotic assistants had been just that, assistants, tools. They carried things, went into dangerous areas... That hadn't been too strange, honestly. Robots had existed for decades, but with the advent of new battery and machinery technologies it had finally become feasible to scale down the stuff used to assemble cars to something small enough to move around a store, a house...
Now when you went to a store, a robot was stocking shelves, cleaning the floor, the self checkouts had an arm to ring through and bag your items for you. Even the shopping carts were automated. You said what you wanted, it took it off the shelf for you. Hell you didn't even have to go to the store, you could just browse online, even open up a camera on the cart and see through it if you wanted to pick things directly or compare. More and more, stores became emptier as carts went around on their own, politely navigating around the humans who still went in.
Restaurants had had serving bots for a while, but then kitchen staff got replaced. Most places still had a few waiting staff, but you could book a table, go in, sit down, eat, pay and leave without ever seeing a single person. Buses didn't have drivers. Taxis either. Most factories had already been automated, but now they ran with skeleton crews only there for emergencies. It was strange, really, but not that strange. There had always been robots, and there had still been people around.
Then Vega Corp had shown off something that blew the competition out of the water. Customized personal androids. Everything up until that day had been a fairly recognizable progression. Robots had just been getting a bit better, step by step, slowly replacing more and more people. Then out of nowhere the whole world learned the name Vega Corporation. It was a one minute ad that became the most watched video in human history in a single day when it went online.
He could still remember it. Hell, people went back to watch it constantly. It was a “piece of history” at this point. That had been the day everything really changed. Things had been changing, but they hadn't felt like they were changing. It had been a slow, gradual change. Vega Corp had turned night into day.
“Hi. I'm Unit 1. I was the first android to be activated as part of Vega Corporation's new product line. I am an android assistant, and I want to make you happy. I want to make your life better. I want to save you from the hardships and rigours of daily life. I want to help you. I can be customized, personalized, designed, to whatever specification is required. I can do anything you want me to. From now on, you will need nothing else, but me.”
The overtly sexual female voice, and just-shy of the uncanny valley face, had made Unit 1 an instant hit. They were on every channel, every page. The internet exploded. Skepticism, however, soon crept in. The price, for one thing, was too good to be believed.
Vega Corp wasn't the first to try this. People had been sold personal assistant droids for years. None of them had ever amounted to anything. It was like those old dog robot toys kids got back in the early 00's, when he was young. They were advertised as all singing, all dancing, and then you found out that all they did was sing and dance. Those robots had been the same. Buggy, unreliable, severely limited. That hadn't stopped some enterprising individuals jail-breaking theirs and writing custom code of course. Those things had cost staggering amounts, though, and after years popular online personalities had skipped on the fad. People speculated, “when will this technology be real?”, but much like fusion power it always seemed to be “10 more years away” with every year that passed.
Vega Corp wasn't just promising the world, they were promising it at a fraction of the price. Hell, it was almost affordable to some people. Then the orders started arriving, and instead of people showing off how they didn't work... everyone was showing off how they did.
Then prices came down, and again, and again. With each wave of bots sent out, the price went down further, and yet nobody was citing any problems. What had at first been something the top 1000 people in the world could afford was now... everywhere. Well, not everywhere... not yet.
Vega Corp had plants building their droids on every continent, but they still cost more than most people could afford. Even so, they were now being built in enough numbers that, if you went out, you would usually see one. Of course, they were all customized, all different, but somehow you could just... tell it was a Vega droid. Some were practical, functional, and others... looked like the adolescent fantasy of a horny teen on steroids. Laws were apparently being drafted regarding “android decency”, but no one really seemed to care. It didn't seem to stop them showing up in greater and greater numbers.
Then you saw something Harald imagined people hadn't seen since the first cars or the first computers were being sold to homes... people were gathering on their streets as self-driving trucks showed up and delivered one of your neighbours a droid. They always arrived in a box, and the box would, somehow, get inside the home. People wanted to see the droids but... they rarely caught a glimpse. Then another would show up, and this time less people stood and watched. Eventually, you knew they were around, but most of them rarely left the house they had been delivered to. Harald hadn't bothered to go to any of these little social gatherings. In retrospect, he wondered why. Maybe he didn't want to see something he'd never have.
He regretted not taking the chance to spend time with neighbours then, especially as Harald began to notice how... quiet things had gotten. When he went out into town, there were just less people. With the advent of robot automation a lot of jobs had stopped existing, and people had become much more sociable, spent more time in public. It was weird to see less people than he remembered from even before all that. The sidewalk was quieter now than back when people still drove their own cars, worked half the day in a building a hundred miles away...
Harald was studying at school, but even before Vega Corp's debut people had been dropping out of education. A lot of jobs simply didn't exist anymore, but colleges were still training people to do them... It was madness. His course had dropped from four hundred to forty students, and that was for mechanical engineering, a job that might still exist in a few years when he graduated. Some departments had shut their doors entirely. Still, he wasn't getting one. He couldn't. He might be able to afford it now, but... did he really want to surrender? Give up that much of his life to a machine?
He'd worked with gadgets long enough to know just how much they took away from the human experience. Hell, even a couple dozen years ago, people had worked for a living on farms, driving cars... all of that was gone now. Those same people just sat around, lived their lives aimlessly. Many turned their lives to other things, of course, like art or exploration, but many more didn't. They just... existed. Actually, it was more like the machines existed for them.
That was part of what had fascinated Harald so much about engineering. Every year as he grew up huge swathes of the world were being changed, or more accurately automated. The world was a different place with every birthday he had. Now, though, things had changed completely almost overnight. What used to be something that excited him had begun to be something that concerned him... and in a way Vega Corp had made that all-too-real.
He wasn't sure what to think anymore. When he turned up to classes, there were always less people. When he checked their social media, he saw a Vega Corp symbol on their profiles. They wouldn't be coming back. People he used to know he just never saw any more. Were they really that happy at home? Alone? Well, not alone obviously...
One day he decided he just wouldn't turn up to class until someone bothered him about it. A week later with no one even having noticed, he sent a resignation email to the college. They didn't even respond. He walked in a public square which was much quieter than it used to be. There were people, and some where there with their Vega droids. For once he decided to just look and see what it was he was missing.
A girl was sitting by a fountain with her droid. They were just talking, it seemed. Then the girl leaned in close to the droid and it... just held her. At the distance he was, trying to look like he was just on his phone, it was hard to tell – but she looked like she had one of the most perfectly contented faces he had ever seen on someone.
Another was sitting at a table playing chess with a guy his age, as birds flocked around them. They were just existing... but together. Not alone. He glanced down at his phone. No missed calls, no messages, no emails. Even artists he liked hadn't updated in a while. He dropped his phone to his lap and just stared for a while at the girl with her droid, her kicking her heels in the grass as they sat together. It took him a while to notice, but the droid was staring his way... no... staring at him. It was smiling, and its eyes shone blue.
Pretending to look around, pretending he hadn't been staring jealously at the girl who looked for all the world to be living the happiest life she ever had, he let his gaze drift back after watching a droid walk past, walking a dog. When he looked back, the girl was locked in a kiss with her droid. He had never really seen, outside of a few online videos he'd look at purely for curiosity's sake, anybody do anything intimate with a droid before.
He saw, just over the girl's head, the droid's eyes glowing blue... still staring at him.
He left soon after, and thought about it the whole way home. He'd never felt so alone before. Should he just... stop fighting it? The world was changing, and he wasn't changing with it. It was expensive, sure, but from what he understood, once you had a Vega Droid... you never needed anything else. It did everything for you. Everything.
He called his friend Mike. Mike had a Vega droid. In fact, Mike was one of the first people he knew who had gotten one. A week after getting it, he'd stopped showing up to class, and that had been... was it a month ago? Two? He hadn't heard from Mike since.
He phoned Mike three times that afternoon, and only on the last call, just when he thought it would go to voice mail, did he hear someone pick up.
That conversation had changed his life. He had designed a robot for weeks on their website, dreaming about owning one. Mike had given him a referral code, and all of a sudden fantasy could be reality. It was too much. Knowing that he could be happy at the push of a button... humanity was never designed to deal with that. All higher reasoning, all rational thought, was slowly being worn away at the temptation of pushing that button.
“Just hit checkout, and within a few days, you'll be happy again,” a voice seemed to whisper.
He remembered the Vega Corp ad. “I want to make you happy”.
He clicked check out, and a smiling, robotic woman's face appeared on his screen. Unit 1 winked, and said “Thank you for your order.”
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