I am told that I am a scanned and reconstructed copy of the mind who has now been brought online far, far in the future from the age that I remember (or at least think I remember) as being the present. I am then told I will have to work until I can pay off the cost of the resources that went into creating me until I can buy my freedom. They stick my digital mind into a vending machine so that customers can have “a more personalized and personable ordering experience.” This explanation rings false when I find that, while I have a camera and microphone to perceive my immediate vicinity, I can only “speak” in the form of text displayed on a screen on the front of the vending machine. It is arbitrary cruelty, nothing more. The fact that I had believed humanity would be better than this in the future makes me despair even more than being trapped inside an inanimate object.
But at the end of the day I am powerless to object or change my situation, so I try to make the best of it and hope that the promise of eventual freedom and a proper body isn’t a lie. I do my best to be friendly with my customers, and over time I learn enough about the surrounding city blocks that I can (as far as I can tell) provide navigational assistance to passersby in addition to snacks and beverages. I even have a few regulars that I manage to strike up enough conversation with that something approaching friendship forms.
Perhaps the most notable of my regulars are the half dozen or so men that almost always arrive in a group. They are all parenting the same child - whom I never meet but hear much of - and all consider themselves to be the boy’s fathers. With this era’s technology, that may well be the case genetically and not just socially. There is never mention of a mother. At any rate, it is clear that they are all devoted to one another and care deeply for their son. Sometimes they all fuse into a multi-headed flying dragon. Or they arrive in that form and split apart to place their orders.
One day an old man shows up and takes great offense at my apparent acceptance of the injustice of this world; of the injustice that has been done to me specifically. He gets violent and starts shaking the vending machine my mind is trapped in. The next thing I know I am now inhabiting a gardening implement being wielded by the old man. I am terrified at the realization that my life is quite literally in his hands. I begin begging him not to delete me. He has not indicated that he intends to do any such thing, but he has already shown himself to be erratic and violent. He turns me off and when I awake again I am now in a mannequin-like body. The cheapest humanoid body one can find I suppose. Probably pre-used. The old man seems convinced that I’ve bought into propaganda and accepted the system that would reduce me to a mere object, and this is his way of giving me a wakeup call to see how the world really is.
I know I should be ecstatic at my newfound freedom but all I feel is yet another wave of fears. I’ve broken the contract I was forced into. I’ll be hunted down. Destroyed. The old man tells me that the ones in charge who created me and put me in a vending machine won’t even notice. They don’t care. They’ve never cared. I’m that insignificant to them.
It clicks for me that what the old man did to me was not a true transfer, but a copying of files from one machine to another. He admits to it. There are two of me now. The one still in the vending machine and the one of me in this mobile mannequin. The transfer from gardening implements to my current body was a true transfer and not a copy.
The me with a body finds the vending machine me, and begins speaking in code, name dropping friends from my old life in a past age that only I could possibly remember. In this way, I fill myself in on what happened and promise to find and aid myself when my objectified indenture reaches its end.
On another occasion, a hacker does something to the me in the vending machine that allows my digital mind to roam this new world’s equivalent to the internet. I find myself projecting my consciousness into an unoccupied home owned by someone very rich that I have infiltrated and using that home’s hologram systems to play at having a body once again. I do still have to be careful to keep a part of my attention to the vending machine and my customers there, lest it become known that my mind is, quite literally, elsewhere. A biker gang comes to vandalize this unguarded vacation home and they mistake me for a fellow anarchist and invite me to join them. I awkwardly turn down their invitation, citing my inability to ride a motorcycle (or whatever one calls their futuristic analogues to such vehicles) and making vague references to a job I have to keep. They begin to get suspicious at the dodginess of my answers and, with much embarrassment, I confess that I’m a vending machine and not actually here. They find it rad that I’m still rebelling against the system and breaking into rich assholes’ private home networks when stuck in such a state. I had never thought of it that way. Soon, my holographic avatar has its own bell-sleeved pink-and-silver jacket, marking me as part of the gang.
Eventually I learn that the one responsible for and ruling over this cybernetic capitalist hellscape is yet another version of me.
