Waking up to obnoxiously loud beeping from Linda, was just how my mornings would start. She usually had my morning breakfast and vitamin medications but today She stood tall and held a screen with" happy 18! " written in big bold letters. It's surprising how she does remember every bit about me in that tiny micro chip of hers, she even reminded my mom it was my birthday. It's strange for a human to say this, but she was the closest thing to a real friend I had in this world. I got out of my bed to go down stairs, and Linda started reading out my schedule for the day. I mean Linda! It's 8 am in the morning! No human senses are functioning that early! For a robot who is half my size with no legs, she moves faster that a bullet train. Birthdays are the only occasions we sit together as a family to have a meal. It's generally very awkward because we are so consumed in our own spaces. I remember when my grandpa used to tell me stories from his generation, about how grandma and him would talk for hours regarding work, anything that happened in the day etc. With plenty of time in our hands you would expect us to socialize, but we have talked about everything on the surface, it's more like there is nothing new happening.
Just like Linda, my parents and my elder brother too had their own personal robot. Every single person in the entire globe did. I met my family at the dining hall, just like any other meal. We ate and left, of course they just wished me this time. I walked outside to stretch myself. We had a beautiful garden, but I never really connected to them. As a little girl, my grandpa and I would seed a plant, water them, nourish them, watch them grow, just like how our bond grew and in return the beauty of the flowers bloomed our happiness. How did time slip through my hands? There was nobody on the streets, robots walking dogs, picking the mail, driving cars with people inside glued into their phones, who knew 10 years later I would witness a world so different.
There was nothing that Linda did not know, from question about earth to stitching my forehead when I fell down the stairs, she knew everything except, I couldn't talk to her about my feelings as she never respond the way you would want her to react or about how sad or angry I was at my parents not remembering my birthday for instance or how I felt about the cute boy I met at e- crag. Talking about E- crags, they were like work stations for humans, just that you take your robots to charge them or repair every once a week. Since people don't really work anymore and AI robots did, that was the only "work" we had. There was so much time time in hands. And people work on spaces and finding empty voids. There was nothing to learn as any question we had, our AI robots had answers to and any task they got it done.
For now the only concern was our health, mentally and physically, we consume and had blocked our human outlet of emotions in this world of metal and screws. We consume without thinking about the one thing true here, our bodies. Looking back, my life feels like the time my grandad retired in his 80s, but today I just turned 18.
by Janaki Vinod Nair
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