Coded ambition

Fragment 5: Differences, Part 2

It was a depressing Wednesday as the fall season was getting darker and gloomier with each passing day. The temperatures were less comfortable and the cold started to creep in.

Recently, Dean needed to start wearing the thicker coat from his wardrobe and his general mood became worse. He was not aware why that happened. He just hated going anywhere. But he also hated going nowhere.

His work life had become so quiet and purposeless that it was difficult to make time pass at all.

Tired, Dean looked at the miniature Meteors the company CEO had given him personally. He had three instances and wondered what to do with them. Mark came to mind. It would be nice for his son to have a miniature version of his father's achievement on display in his room. As for the other two, he would decide later what to do with them.

After the Meteor project was completed, Dean had little to do at work. Other than managing tasks to support his colleagues and creating optimized assembly plans for the manufacturing companies, there was not much to do. And soon, the construction plans were optimized until they could no longer be made more technically efficient.

Sometimes he visited a production facility to instruct the staff there as well. But it got boring and repetitive after one month, so he was not too keen on doing those uninspiring tasks.

So lately, in order to get some distraction from his few management tasks that were left, he had been checking the news more. But there was nothing great to be found there either.

Dean learned that protest movements and terrorism were on the rise. Groups with extreme world views gathered more and more and started to cause unrest in the standard population. For example, there were religious fanatics who yelled that the wealthy had abandoned God and in order to rescue them, they needed to be freed from their personal possessions. Followers of those groups were not successful in invading the wealthy communities yet, but there had been a rise in pickpocket and theft reports in the mixed public areas in town. They called themselves proudly ''Liberators".

Another association of individuals was protesting against the hatred that divorced people got and demonstrated for allowing homosexual marriage as another option. Those people were known as "Love Justice" and operated under a flag with a penguin who held a heart in the colors of the pride community which had already been used at the beginning of the century. Love Justice was also the group that posted a lot of stories online about people who were divorced or had different partners than society expected them to have in order to expose the reality of love.

However, the most brawls and fights in the past few weeks were observed with having people from this faction involved.

Less grandly delineated in the news but dangerous nonetheless, there was the anti-AI faction using the name "Grace of Humanity". Their representatives had only criticized AI in public places, but the Internet showed evidence of their propensity to act violently. Videos of old androids being smashed and destroyed by masked people were making their way through the internet. One video in particular, hashtagged with #deathtoyoungman, showed a collection of Liberty androids being blown up. Presumably, it had happened at the edge of town two weeks ago. Paradoxically, artificial intelligence was able to detect one of the representatives as one of the most violent people in those recordings and thus, the faction was classified as dangerous and put under observation. Would his brother-in-law, an integral part of the management of Youngmang's Liberty line, need to deal with them, he wondered.

Exhausted by the recent developments in his own life and world around him, Dean swiped away the latest report about Grace of Humanity and checked the time. Half past five. It was high time to go home. Frustratingly, Dean felt no inclination to do so.