All the Lonely People

An aging society will have to make hard choices.

Photo by Jeremy Wong on Unsplash

The autocar dropped me off at the Sunny Days Elderly Residence. It shot off to pick up its next ride so fast I could feel the breeze against my legs.

I looked over the residents sitting in the sun. None of them were walking. One was being carried back inside by its geriatric care robot. This place went with the ‘Egyptian god’ motif for its bots. Human shaped bodies with animal heads. Not realistic animals. They were more like cartoon characters or children’s toys.

It was supposed to be more relaxing for the residents. No being startled by human-looking bots entering the uncanny valley, or scared by pure metal ones. I’d never noticed a difference in how the residents acted. Most of them are too far gone to care.

Every resident sitting in the sun had their personal geribot standing by, ready to move them again or provide whatever other care was needed.

I followed the geribot carrying the resident inside.

We went into the ‘rec room.’ There actually was some recreation going on in it for once. A resident was playing chess with his bot. Looked like a real game, too. I heard the man say, “Check.”

I pivoted to the right. One resident was sitting at a table alone. Was there another broken-down bot at this facility?

I relaxed as I saw a geribot come in carrying a tray. It sat at the table and began spoon-feeding the resident. I took a moment to evaluate the performance. Dead on, spoon always in the middle of the mouth, and catching any food spilled. That geribot was performing perfectly.

Stairs took me to the second floor. I rang the bell for room 207.

“Yes?” A strong voice. This must be one of the younger residents.

“Mrs. Sturgis, I’m Zebbie, the repairman.”

The door slid open. It was a normal room. Bed, toilet, sink, netscreen. “Oh, thank goodness. I’ve been so worried.”

“Got here as fast as I could, ma’am. Can you tell me what happened?”

I studied the geribot. Looked like the same model as the rest here. The head was a cartoon dog with ears hanging past the shoulders. It was standing in a slumped pose.

“I really don’t know, young man. I’d asked for a drink of water. When it didn’t bring it to me I turned around, and it was just like that.” She sounded completely coherent. Must be a good day. Her file said she’d been fired from her last remote work job because of intermittent episodes of dementia.

“Did someone else mess with it?”

“Oh, no, no one ever comes into my room but my bot.”

“I see. Well, I’ll check it out and see what the matter is.”

Step one is plugging my diagnoser into the hip socket and checking the stored telemetry. Nothing from central. The peripheral processers were all fine until the system crash.

“Your voice is lovely, Zebbie. It’s nice to have a visitor here. There’s just us fifty here and no one else talks.”

I switched the structural scanner and checked for any flaws in the support members. Not likely to cause a total system crash, but it’s part of the checks I’m supposed to do on every repair. I said, “I heard the guy playing chess say something.”

“Oh, Mr. Jacobson. I used to play games with him. He’d chat with me while we played back then. But now all he’ll say is ‘check’ or ‘mate’ or ‘I resign.’ Hardly ever that last one. He’s still good at chess, though he’s lost everything else.”

“I guess aging can be funny like that.” Checking the power system found no problems. The batteries were at 97%.

“It’s a shame, though. He had so many interesting stories when he still talked.”

“There’s lots of stories on the net, ma’am.” Thermal control was fine. No signs of overheating.

“It’s not the same. Reading the net, or watching vids, or even chatting with someone on the screen, it leaves the monkey-brain feeling lonely. Doesn’t it feel different for you, talking to someone in person?”

“I guess it does, ma’am, but talking isn’t my job.” Next subsystem. No issues.

“Of course. Thank you for talking to me anyway. There was a sweet girl who’d come here twice a week and talk to us all. She was paid for it. But then she got pregnant. Quit the job like that. Guess having that apartment and the kitchen bot and laundry bot and diaper bot assigned to her mattered more than what she was paid for the job.”

“The world needs babies, ma’am.”

That drew a sniff from Mrs. Sturgis. She didn’t have children. She wouldn’t be here if she did. “They’re practically bribing girls to have babies these days.”

No practically about it. With three quarters of the world’s population too decrepit to work, we were just trying to hold things together until the next generation could start picking up the load. And we needed that generation to be as big as it could be. But I’d learned to not argue politics with the residents.

“She said she’d call me sometime. She never did. Why would she break such an easy promise?”

“Well, ma’am, I can’t speak for her, but morning sickness can be very rough.”

What I didn’t say was, ‘If you wanted someone to call you, you should’ve had kids.’ The phrase did come to mind because of the company memo announcing one of my fellow techs had been fired for saying just that to a resident. I didn’t want to get fired. Not that the money was an issue, there was more work in the world than there were people to do it. But geribot repairmen also worked on other kinds of bots. And if a diaperbot broke down, I’d fix it, and then happily chat with the mother who was starved for . . . adult conversation.

Another sniff from Mrs. Sturgis. “You’d think there’d be a cure for that, with everything else being cured. My bones were crumbling, now I have a pill that makes them almost good as new.”

“They’re trying, ma’am.” I bit back a comment about trying to find cures that turned elderly residents into workers. We needed all the workers we could get.

Enough procrastinating. I’d known what the problem probably was when I walked into the room. I just kept hoping I’d find a different problem so I wouldn’t have to have The Talk with Mrs. Sturgis.

The furry neck of the dog head lay like a blanket over the back of the geribot’s torso. I pulled up the neck fur to expose the innards. There it was. A severed data cable to the central processor. The cut had a curve in it matching the toe nail clipper on Mrs. Sturgis’ sink.

“Ma’am, you sabotaged your geribot,” I said, pointed to the cut cable.

“I never did!”

“It’s not frayed, the internal diagnostics didn’t detect any wear, and it’s pinched from a cutter. You didn’t hear anyone come into your room. So you did it.”

“I did not!”

I glared at her. She, amazingly, didn’t say anything. I waited a few moments to see if she’d break.

Nope.

I hated when The Talk went this way. “Mrs. Sturgis, if you don’t admit you cut that cable, I’ll file an accusation of Destruction of Publicly Provided Property. The court can override the privacy protections on the cameras in your room. If they see you cut that cable, you’ll be denied all public support.”

“That’s murder! You’d be murdering me over—over a robot!”

It’s a hell of a thing when your life gets to where you respond to an accusation of murder with a shrug. “That’s the law, ma’am.”

“Young people’s law. Elderly people used to be able to vote, you know. The politicians took care of us. Then you took our votes away!”

“I was just a kid then, Mrs. Sturgis. It was all settled before I got a vote.” I’d been ten years old during the Strike. My parents made me a sign to carry saying ‘Don’t Give Seed Corn to Useless Mouths.’ Not that I understood it all then. But I understood it now. And we could only afford to give so much.

“But you’re saying you’ll condemn me to death, just because I wanted to talk to somebody? How is that right?”

She wanted the blunt version of The Talk. Or did she know all this and was just making me go through it to get more conversation? Well, if she wanted human connection that bad I’d give it to her.

“It’s right, because if we allow it, we’re allowing you to take up all the resources you want. You’d find more things to break to get a conversation, or better food, or whatever else tickles your fancy. We have to draw the line somewhere. It’s here. You get a geribot, you get a residence, you get food and medicine, you get net access. You don’t get more unless someone decides to give it to you. Because we can’t afford to give you more. There’s just not enough people working and too many consuming.”

Mrs. Sturgis rocked back in her chair. My speech couldn’t be new to her. People were saying that decades before the Strike. Maybe no one had ever said it to her face.

I softened my voice. “Now, if you’ll admit you cut the cable, I won’t go to the police. We’ll just make a note on your file. And if you sabotage your geribot again, we won’t fix it.”

“That’s still murder. You’d be killing me.”

“No. You’d be committing suicide. So think carefully before you pick up those toe clippers again.”

She glared at me. Then her expression crumpled. “Okay. Yes, I cut it. I just wanted to hear someone’s voice in person again, you know?”

The ice in my chest melted. She wasn’t going to make me call the police. Another repairman told me once about testifying in one of those trials. I didn’t want to go through that. “Well. That’s settled then. I’ll put a replacement cable in and your geribot will be all set.”

While I did the repair I told Mrs. Sturgis about watching my niece play with her puppy last weekend. She hung on every word. I worked a little slowly.

“And that’s it. Good luck to you, Mrs. Sturgis.”

“Thank you, Zebbie. And I’m sorry I lied to you.”

I gave her a nod and went out. In the rec room Mr. Jacobson and his bot were in endgame. Looked to be pretty close. I wondered how much of a handicap the bot gave him.

As I stepped outside, an autocar pulled up to take me to the next repair assignment. When I was inside I made a call. “Hi, Dad. No, nothing special, just wanted to check in. I’m having one of those days at work. How are you?”

More stories by Karl K. Gallagher are on Amazon and Audible.