How to Date an Android

Chapter 5, revised & improved

Chapter 5

About a week later the rioting has stopped but not without damage. A lot of my customers were somehow affected. Some of them lost their house to fires or their kids lost a place to live. Some of them their employer had incurred damages and had to lay people off. There are a lot more beat up mag cars than there used to be when you visit the supermarket too. Some of them look like they'd been broken into and had their paneling bashed up but some of the owners couldn't afford to fix everything all at once.

Supposedly the governments 'Keep People Working' program was supposed to help people with that, but as usual there were so many loopholes to not help people that it wasn't working. One of the problems with that program was that the program only applied if you were working over 34 hours a week for the same employer, otherwise you didn't get any benefits. Most people didn't work full time now for one employer. I'd guess nine out of ten didn't qualify through one rule or another. Most employers gave you 28 or 29 hours a week to avoid benefits thanks to more corporate influence.

It was the age old cheat to get rid of people's benefits that was created about fifty years ago. Taxes and mandatory health insurance were all higher on workers that were over 34 hours and it'd been that way since my dad had been a kid and he was gone now.

I'd just gotten my car full of groceries and was headed over to check my balance at the bank credit chip processor. That's when it happened...

I'm not sure how it occurred, because I was always careful with that sort of thing. I avoided using my credit chip around crowds or anything resembling people that were shady or looked like they might be a potential mugger. Despite all the constant surveillance and technology prevalent in society, the U.S. had the highest crime rate in the world in recent years. And because of the loss of jobs and infrastructure overseas a lot of places that should have security cameras didn't.

Because of it people often hired me to put custom anti-assault caging around their mag car cabin housing. I had the same caging too on my own car, which had become a selling device.

So it surprised me when after I had pulled my credit chit from the ATM processor that I felt a sharp pain in the back of my head, and then several other sharp pains in my back. I was on the ground face forward almost before I even knew what happened. After that, I think I passed out, because everything went black.

"Jack? Jack can you hear me?" A voice said.

Things were blurry. It was like I couldn't feel very well around me. I struggled to get up but the voice called back to me.

"Stay down Jack. Don't move. You've been in an accident. It's really important you don't move your neck and back," the voice said.

Oh shit. Is this for real? I'm tempted to panic, but what she said scared me to even breathe wrong.

Oh fuck am I paralyzed?!

I felt like crying. It wasn't that I hurt physically but the voice saying don't move your neck and back, and the idea that I couldn't feel anything down there scared the shit out of me right now. I didn't want to live like that. It would be...horrific to say the least.

If it was like that I'd be better off if they just let me die here.

I felt a warm hand on my chin and the side of my face. "Don't worry Jack. We're going to get you feeling better. Everything is going to be OK. I'll come check on you again soon, OK?"