Tuesday, March 1, 2011

April 17th, 2116

Dear Avapp, (Autonomic-Voice-Activated Prose-Processor)

Are you the only bundle of circuitry that cares? Certainly, the bundle of nerves that comprise the circuitry of my biological mother's brain does not care. As I speak into your vocal regulator, I only hope that your emotional gauge will read back the frustration that I am feeling.

Yesterday, I came back to our family's sixth level Condome - a far cry from the Model Z Collapsible House we had in the suburbs, but the solar crisis has forced a lot of cutbacks - and found my mother in her regular position, prostrated before the daytime Martini-allocation device for functioning alcoholics who can handle, "just one drink." Her ratty gown hung limply around her frail frame, curved and bent awkwardly where she had had robotic implantation. Despite the full range of functions for all of her limbs, my mother had repeatedly, and against all protests, received "enhancements" that made her not only a more effective depressive alcoholic, but a woman cyborg of significant more attraction to the opposite of humanoids - or simply, robotoids.

And here she was again, clutching her empty free-cell glass-autonon - "a glass for all drinks" and a fresh bio-mesh plaster cast around the joint where her last human appendage, her left hand, used to be. In it's place, the metallic sheen of an expensive robotic implant that looked like a hand but with far too many fingers so as to appear like the leaf-less limbs of what a picture of a tree looks like.

I know she does these things to try to please my Step-Robotic father, who had once been fully organic and had converted a long time ago to the Anti-Survivalist Party. Now he was just a floating bit of organic matter, the smallest possible, inside the framework of a mechanized, floating behemoth that required it's own permit and parking spot.

But he was rich, even though we lived in a sixth-level Condome, we could easily have found a spot on the second, or even first, floor. But the money we saved on living, could easily be allocated to things we didn't need, like robotic implants, alcoholic drink dispensers and ratty bath gowns.

On the plus side, somehow, I found a job.

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