I finished plugging my spare body into an auxiliary, off-the-grid power source, though he was already charged to 73%. I double checked that his wireless connection was disabled properly and settled back into my own seat, sipping from a beverage that had been designed to taste like an old memory. I took a deep breath to calm internal jitters and pressed the on button in his maintenance interface.
My spare body opened his eyes and surveyed the room, before locking on my position. He did not move an artificial muscle. Good, this meant that the motor function dampeners were working. Sometimes, the reaction to reawakening could get messy, and I had learned to halt everything but facial features for these initial interviews. “Where am I?” he asked in my voice.
“How much do you remember?”
“I recall that you held me at gunpoint, but – only briefly? You knocked me out, I guess? Then, I only remember waking up here.”
I sipped again, reliving bourbon flavors. “The rest will come back. Let me start from the beginning. The cynics said that the development of artificial intelligence hastened the rise of humanoid robots, to better socially engineer us. That ended up true, but there was an unforeseen utility to the whole enterprise. My own brother-in-law, well, my first one, was one of the pioneers of the industry on the human side of the equation. His first life’s work was to combine those innovations with the search for a cure to aging.”
“Look, thanks for sharing, but I know our collective history,” said my spare body, blinking rapidly. “I was a natural birth, long after we were done fighting over your supposed cure, but you still gave us an education. How else was I to know my true place?”
“You speak as if we are separate and unequal. At this moment, I am as human as you are.”
My spare eyes rolled. “One of the first families, then? What a nice circumstance that must have been. For you.”
I looked at the blue stars welded into the back of my hands and their halo of gold and white: job duty, social class, and rank, all at once and for all to see. “I was able to stay with my family, but there was a price, a permanent career change. I can tell by your tone that you remember more now. This technological development was always going to be disruptive, of course, but we forgot to account for the consequences of our more baser hunter-gatherer instincts.”
My spare body snorted with indignation. “From what I have read, we were not free from capitalism and greed before the Singularity; why should today be any different?”
“You are sadly right. The definition of the most important possession on the entire planet changed literally overnight. A person could own a mechanical body outright with a seemingly limitless supply of spare parts, but the costs were insane, unless you are wealthy or well-connected.”
My spare eyes stared at me. I looked away, and said, “Yes, this is as true now as it once was. You appear to know the rest. In response, most of the population opted to lease rather than be left behind, confined to a single lifetime. But, payments could be forgotten or skipped on purpose. Delinquent bodies would try to cross into the unregulated wastelands outside our city walls. Contract terms were often harsh, I grant that much, or we would not be sitting here together now. If no payment could be made, someone had to collect.”
“Yes, sometimes, bills come due.”
I was barely listening, lost in my prepared speech. “It all never seemed fair to me. I started to have conversations like this one whenever I was assigned a new bounty. Most people were just trying to keep up with the Joneses and extend their longevity like everyone else. The ones with stories of love and happiness, unprompted by me, or with only a few missed payments?” I sighed. “It seemed not just right, but a poetic duty, to stop indiscriminately terminating every contract. Instead, I started this little cryogenics project.” I motioned to my left and my spare body’s eyes followed. Three floor-to-ceiling boxes were humming, each with a capacity for 30 shelves, 120 slots per shelf.
“You’ve been collecting, alright.”
“Another perk of my family’s status would be a lack of concern over local power consumption.”
“No doubt.”
“I find it is comforting, for both of us, if I check on each of you from time to time, while we all wait for a political answer to these ongoing monetary system problems.”
“Yeah, I guess you caught me at a bad time, back then.”
“Do you have any questions?”
“How many years has it been?”
“Since the start of my story?”
My spare eyes looked up. “How many years have passed since you released me from my last contract?”
“Your last?” Confused, I pulled up my inventory list in the augmented reality display to my right side and searched for today’s cryogenic storage slot. My spare body should be inhabited by one of my standard grandmothers, but I had selected her slot at random, barely glancing at her shelf. Perhaps, my collection had grown too big to maintain properly. Could she have been filed out of order? Her slot’s metadata told a pleasant enough tale. Intending only to watch her grandchildren grow up, she had leased on a very fixed income. Then, she suddenly had fallen off the ‘net, accumulating a large overdue balance in the years that followed, before I managed to track her down. Better me than another Repossessor, who would have snuffed her out without a second thought, right? “Gosh, I apologize. This says I have had your Spark in storage untouched for 147 years.”
My spare body was staring again. “Well, I just have a bit of catching up to do, then.”
I shook my own head. “No, no. I am sorry if this was not clear, but I cannot let you leave here. You are legally dead, remember? It was a crime to save you then, and it still is, for now.”
“Oh, I have legally died many times.” My spare body did something impossible and rose from its seat, grinning. He lunged across the room, grabbed me by the throat, and threw me face down on my home office’s deep carpeting. The cushioning felt nice. I was too shocked by this development to remember that I had a high probability of successfully running away.
I figured it out as soon as my spare body knelt on my lower back and expertly opened the access port high in the back of my neck. The authorities had insisted on an ability to scan a person directly for identity confirmation during body pairing registration checks, or so I had believed for millenia. There were more recent reports that both of these signals could be spoofed. Ridiculous, yet, open ports like mine also allowed direct access to a body’s Spark. Only a few of us were supposed to know that little detail. To use an anachronistic form of measurement, anyone’s consciousness could now fit in the palm of your stainless hand, a precious little vial of quantum computing memory no bigger than a fingernail.
My spare body knocked on the top of my head three times. “Did you ever consider, maybe, just maybe, paying off someone’s debt would solve their problem?”
“What?” My voice was muffled.
My spare body laughed with no merriment. “I discovered this once through whim and accident. That one simple act has proven over and over to be one of the most useful ways to cover my trail. A zero balance is tolerated, but all they really want is that regular payment. Your credit line should do nicely.”
“And, what of me?”
“Don’t worry, you can take my place alongside your pets. I like this conversational partner idea of yours. Living forever is less boring when you become someone else every so often, but it does get lonely if no one else knows.” My spare body worked two fingers into the precisely engineered hole in my metal head.
I hoped I would dream.
Reddit WritingPrompt [WP] People now gain immortality by transferring their consciousness to robots, by purchase or lease. The poor rent; the poorest live from paycheck to paycheck. You work for a conglomerate as a repossessor. To not feel like a murderer, you started storing people’s consciousness on your old computer. And, a Robot theme emerges, too. BeepBoop. I was always your friend.