Lily starts work
Lily doesn’t have any friends at the moment. Her choice. Her old friends couldn’t talk about much more than their pleasure pursuits. They’d share their new virtuals and what happened during their recent psy-experiences.
At first, having friends was nice. Talking and laughing was nice. People wanting you to be around them was nice. Hearing the same repeated conversations quickly became boring. Wanting to belong couldn’t outweigh the growing tedium. Lily didn’t share her feeling with her friends. Instead she stopped responding to messages and invites. Then the messages and invites stopped. A sad relief.
Lily wanted more than pleasure. She wanted to be like her great-grandmother, Julia. Julia had worked with other people to build things. Lily wanted to build things too. There weren’t a lot of opportunities for people to build outside hobbies. Arts and crafts. Nothing meaningful. Lily wanted to build something meaningful.
Julia built the early machines as they started to free people from menial tasks. Lily couldn’t imagine a world without the machines. Julia couldn’t imagine a world without electricity or ultra-fast broadband.
Tomorrow Lily started her emulation of her great-grandmother. It was her first day working with other people and machines. She will monitor machines as a human-in-the-loop supervisor. Machine safety meant supervisors were largely unnecessary. It was the only way for anyone to get into work with other people to advance humanity. Tomorrow Lily might not be so alone. She lay awake thinking about the possibilities. Endless.